CONWAY — I can’t always tell when it’s gonna happen - these moments, these hours of unwanted refl ection.
The anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is a pretty good bet.
Memorial Day is another.
July Fourth is another, not because it has a military signifi cance but because of the fi reworks.
The celebratory explosions sound quite similar to the mortars and kaytusha rockets that targeted our base in southern Iraq. But sometimes it’s a song or a smell, maybe a voice.
For a long time, I didn’t know what it meant. I think I know now. It’s my mind trying to claw back what it lost in Iraq.
When I was a kid in high school, I thought I had a strong core. In basketball practice, I’d put my mind on cruise control and lap the other guys in our timed runs.
On the baseball fi eld, I’d hit ball after ball into the fence, shutting out everything but the sound of the ball clanging against the metal.
Years later I found myself on a C-130 battlelanding in Iraq, onelast time checking my magazine to make sure I had every live round possible in my rifl e as we landed in a country I assumed consisted only of people who wanted to kill me.
And my mind wasn’t mine to control anymore.
The first time kaytusha rockets came raining out of the sky, I thought my number was up.
It wasn’t until the third one exploded that I even knew what was happening. By then, there wasn’t time to put on my body armor or dive under the bunk or anything.
I sat there resolved that I was gonna die in that desert.
I didn’t, but from then on, every time I heard arocket or mortar incoming, I couldn’t help but think it was coming for me.
That’s why they call it terrorism.
Then there was Tampa.
Main Supply Route Tampa was the road we traveled from the southern part of Iraq to Baghdad and points northward.
The threats included bombs and ambushes. I made more than a dozen missions on that highway.
On most, we got stopped at some point because of a bomb or what somebody thought was a bomb.
It wasn’t what we found that worried me. It was what we weren’t gonna see that played on my mind during all those overnight hours.
But then there was themorning we rumbled upon the ambush ahead of us just outside Baghdad.
Enemy troops attacked a convoy just ahead of us.
If we hadn’t been held up earlier that morning by an IED search, we might have been that convoy.
And if it wasn’t the dangers on the road to keep a watch on, it was the potential threats on base.
I was guarding Iraqi nationals one day, and they took me to a place on the base that I didn’t know existed.
They jumped out of the truck and started looking under tires and trash. I thought they were retrieving weapons. I did the only thing I could think of. I charged my rifl e. Hard. It’s an unmistakable sound.
I have no idea how much English they understood, but the tone of my voice and the barrel of my rifl e provided the gist of what I wanted them to do.
Before I went to Iraq, I had no idea how someone could live in a place where the next second might be the last.
Two weeks into my tour there, I understood perfectly.
You turn your mind off .
It’s only after you come home that you try to turn it back on again.
You hope it comes back the way it was.
For some of us, it doesn’t.
RICK FAHR IS PUBLISHER OF THE LOG CABIN DEMOCRAT IN CONWAY.
Opinion, Pages 15 on 03/11/2012