Eat Letters, Shit Words

Personally, this one was probably the worst day I had while in Afghanistan. One of the worst days of my life if the recurring nightmares mean anything. Now, this happened back in 2012, and it still crosses my mind often. It rarely pops up in my dreams, but damned if a week goes by where I don't think of it. This is a little story about Travis "BotBot" Botkin. We were on a fairly routine kind of mission. Basically just be a military presence in our local area so that the Taliban knew we were still active and patrolling, as well as show the locals that we were still there and getting shit done.We did happen to take a new route, which lead us past some new farming fields we hadn't had a chance to visit previously. For most of this patrol things were pretty tame. I was up front with the minesweeper, my shitty place of honour. Dill was behind me, then SGT Krisch (our team leader), behind him was Purk carrying the Thor (Metal box with electronics capable of jamming wirele...

Told this story to a coworker the other day, and it put me in the mood to share it on here. It's a short story of how I lost my knife. So, right when I got to FOB PK (Forward Operating Base Pain-Kalay) I found a SOG folding knife left behind by the guys in 10th Mountain Division, whom we replaced. I wore it on my vest for much of my deployment in the beginning. It was a nice knife, used it for random shit like cutting line and other random shit. Became attached to it if only for the reason that I carried it everywhere and it was handy. Fast forward to later on in our deployment, we were on a somewhat large scale mission to clear Route Chilliwac and some of  the villages along it so that it'd be safe for American/Friendly forces to use the road. It was something like day two or three of the mission, and we had moved into a larger village area right alongside the road. The ANA (Afghan National Army) troops accompanied by local militia/police spread out ahead of us since they ...

So, I had a strange dream last night, and I'll go ahead and jot down all that I can remember from it. Myself, Figo, Ellie, Sami, Tyler and Garrett were all hanging out, and we were extremely bored, so we went on an impromptu vacation to some random third world country in southeast Asia. The flight was normal, but the real adventure started in the airport when we landed there. We wandered around the airport until we found someone with a cart hitched to the back of of a golf cart, offered to take us into the city for $500. Our dreamselves thought it was pretty cool, and loaded up. After about a 15 minute ride they stopped and let us off, we never actually paid. That was awesome, and we started walking into the city to look for a hotel to stay at. While we walked we hit a bunch of shops and malls that we saw along the way. It was really weird, because there were people actually living there, and whenever we entered a room full of people they just kind of stared at us like we were do...

I always thought my life was weird, but never Fictional Spaceship and Fantasy World weird, but then again, here I am doing front flips off the side of a warship with Achilles... After a normally boring day of work I had dinner with a buddy at an authentic German diner, then upon getting back to my room I promptly fell asleep for a short nap. I really needed to clean my room... But when I woke up, I was in the TARDIS with a buddy of mine, Ritchie. I just kind of took this surprise in stride instead of doing a fangirl shriek about being in the most badass ship of all SciFi. Our trip, however was really short, since the very same ship decided to dump us on the coast of what I assume to have been Greece. Along the beach was forest that was partially in flames, and a rather odd group of people, dressed in an assortment of ancient clothes and armour that I could only assume was from Ancient Greece. There were about eight of them, three women, five men. Two of the women wore common robes of...

So it was the ass end of February, and Your Humble Narrator was deploying to Afghanistan! What a momentous moment! Of course, it wasn't too exciting at first. Gathered my bags, got in line, put my bags in a pile, got on a giant scale so the pilots would know how heavy the load would be on their 747, and eventually got on the bird for a long ass flight over the puddle..I mean, Atlantic Ocean, to land in Shannon, Ireland. The flight was cool. They had movie screens all over the place, TV on the back of the chair in front of you so you could watch cheap programming. It was the bombdiggity, and I slept through all of it. Absolutely wonderful! The plane landed, we shuffled through security, leaving our rifles on the plane, naturally, and were told we had a whole eight hours to kill! Well, Shannon Airport was small, and we were not allowed outside of it. Awesome. Managed to kill an hour eating some kind of delicious beef sandwhich, while completely mesmerized by the waitresses accent (...

So, this morning, for the first time in a long time I had a nightmare. It wasn't as crazy as most people's nightmares, and thankfully not deployment related, but Holy shit, I was one unhappy camper when I woke up. Note: Some of the finer details are gone from my memory, but considering how damn vivid it was, I still remember the majority of it, quite well. So it started out like any other dream. Me doing random shit in a random place with random people. The usual. Trying to race people but can't move fast to save my life. A bad omen. When I returned to my room from my adventure and running debacle, I open my door to see... My room covered in spiderwebs, and IN the spiders webs a bunch of good sized and fully functional beehives and hornet/wasp nests. Naturally, I freaked the fuck out. especially when I noticed that most of the bees/wasps/hornets were the size of my thumb, a few bigger, a few smaller. The spiders ranged anywhere from tiny to tarantula, all kinds, shapes ...

So, I think I may know why I have insomnia. At least, I partially know why. Partly I think it's my need to be doing something. Even when I'm being a lazy do-nothing, I'm still getting something done. Planning something. Talking to someone. Usually several someone's. Reading.  Something mildly productive. Well, not always. But usually. I'm just restless. During the day I'm always trying to be getting something done. My weekend's are thoroughly planned out by Thursday, even if those plans will continue to change, even after they happened... But to bring this back to insomnia, all the time I spend sleeping is time I spend not doing pretty much anything else in the world I could possibly be doing. It's lost time. I don't do it on purpose. When I lay down to try and sleep my mind just gets overloaded with everything else I could be doing at that moment, what I'd be doing the next day. Week. Month. Year. Lifetime. What death would feel like (a real...