Gray and reading books; I'm boring

My life has been pretty boring lately. Haven’t been on a mission outside of the wire in a week now and it’s killing me. I’ve been sitting behind a desk, acting as a sub par desk jockey. Editing. Writing. Critiquing photography. Ah, how I want to go out with the infantry again. It’s like an itch, you can’t stop scratching… just one more time and that’s it, mom, I promise.

The lack of mission time has given me the opportunity to catch up on some reading. God, I am boring. I am writing about reading books on my blog, which is supposed to be about my jam-packed, action-filled adventures in a war zone. The next thing you know I’ll be writing about how I haven’t clipped my fingernails in a week and they’re starting to irritate me. I lost my fingernail clippers.

Just to fill those of you in who don’t know, I work in the palace in Mosul, where I have a desk that sits on a marble floor. I sometimes wonder what Saddam did in this room or the conversations his sons had. Oday, “Hey, dad, do you think I could curl your back hairs today?” “No,” Ussay would demand, “you did it last week. I want to touch the great one again. Anybody who could gas thousands of innocent people is my hero.”

Well, my desk is now decorated with hair salon products. No matter where you are, Americans have a sense of humor. My first sergeant gets a kick out of making fun of my youthful gray hairs, which I have like two, and puts combs, shampoo and my favorite, “Toasted-Almond hair coloring” on my desk. I just play along and think of something conniving to pull on him. The difference with my pranks in the military and the civilian world is that I can be dropped, or ordered to do push ups, for something that seems to be funny.