April 12th - Easter Sunday

It's Easter Sunday. They gave us the day off which was, you know, swell of them. I spent the morning sleeping in for 12 hours. Glorious. It's the Sabbath right? (Some dog show is on in the back ground and there's a miniature poodle being shown. What the fuck is up with the ball of hair on the ass? Seriously? It's a tuft of fur in the shape of a ball on their hips? Who decided this was haut couture? Ugh. That's not a dog!) So not much to report other than we've been shooting and waiting. I'm now officially numb to the waiting. At this point, I can see how POWs managed to while away the hours. You just have to either have a REALLY long book (Tolstoy War and Peace for example) or a really vivid and active imagination. Since my pockets are already bursting at the seams with other gear like, you know, food, there's no room for books. My mind is wandering in weird directions these days. An interesting thing about the situation here is meeting the people that are going through this with me. Many (most?) are activated reservists that have a wide variety of occupations on the outside. There are the obvious for the medical, law enforcement, and legal folks but there are also some others. For example, there's the LT that stands in front of me in formation that used to work at a bar at one time and a HOnda dealership at another. Can't remember what his current occupation is but it has nothing to do with the SWO pin on his uniform. There's the guy that's a college professor. The woman from Puerto Rico who's a medical administrator (didn't knwo the Navy had them but apprently so). And a myriad of other things. Hearing their stories is interesting. I tell them I'm full-on active duty and an F14 RIO to boot and I get some weird looks (like, "WTF are you doing HERE?"). The one real downer so far that I haven't written about is the first aid class we had last week. It involved a power point slide that showed pictures of real soldiers with wounds from the battle field. This is depressing. As I told one person, "As someone looking for peace in this world, that's something I didn't want to see." It's just very sad to see real evidence of the violence that we do to one another. There were pictures of enemy soldiers as well and it wasn't any easier to see. I know they've done bad things to us but in the end, they're still human beings without legs and arms or missing half their skull on an operating table (the pictures we saw were straight from the OR - no bandages, no hiding the gore). I hope I never have to be exposed to this; call me a coward... Well, it's 1800 and there's a 0400 wake up tomorrow morning. I"m off to finish up some stuff before ending this day. 11 days to go and counting.