Yesterday, the terror code shifted from yellow to orange. I went to lunch and had Virginia spots. Traffic at the shopping mall was steady. Talk around the water coolers centered on how Mario Lemieux had racked up 29 minutes in penalties for fighting on the ice.
Somewhere, along the Kuwait-Iraq border, a young man climbed out of a cot before daybreak, ate a breakfast of cereal and poorly cooked eggs, then tapped out an e-mail that, seconds later, reached Jim Joseph at his home in Mt. Lebanon. The note, from an old Marine buddy, is by and large a schedule.
"Our day begins with the lights coming on at 5:30 in a big tent about 60 x 20 feet made by Pakistan. The floor is plywood and we sleep on cots, not too bad. No heat tho ... pretty cold at night, but that will change in a few months, but for now I sleep in my long johns."
The Marine shaves, brushes his teeth, hits the chow hall. The bacon is good, the sausage "nasty" and the scrambled eggs are watery. Everything in his life just now is from somewhere else.
"Interesting, in a foreign country, eating Washington apples, peanut butter from New Jersey, Rice Krispies or some Nestle cereal, Danish butter, jam from Holland. That's about as multinational as the force is getting right now I guess."
The Marine's note is a catalog of grinding details that consume the lives of the men and women we train beyond their own dreams of fitness and then place in harm's way to wait.
Days are spent servicing military vehicles and setting up the staging areas from which tanks and troops will, given the word, launch into Iraq. Some troops were given smallpox shots. A few of Joseph's friends wrote to tell him they were flat on their backs with fevers after the injections.
Our Marine was luckier. What he got from the medical end of the military was a boon.
"The Med-Logistic & Supply guys in the Staff tent with me brought a Proxima (which is a projector for computers) and we plug a DVD movie into one of the available laptops and project a movie on the tent wall and relax for a couple of hours," he writes. After that, he's tired. He goes to bed. Sometimes he reads. Right now he's working on a biography of Dale Earnhardt Jr. "Then usually the lights are out by 10 p.m. This getting ready for war stuff will wear you out."
Anyone familiar with "Henry V" will recall the painful wait for dawn to reach Agincourt. A trio of English soldiers, unaware that they sit with the King in disguise, mull over their chances of seeing another dawn after the one coming.
"I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle," a young soldier tells Henry. "For how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?"
Soon, blood will be in our argument with Saddam Hussein. There is no king to walk among these soldiers to take the measure of their hearts. Instead, they walk among us, in words, in lists, sent at the speed of thought to people who will go to the theater, play with the children, click past the news channels to find a good movie. They affright the air with messages that could be their last, with stories of lives in a sandy vacuum just this side of battle.
Soldiers do not start the wars. They go to the field and wait, the way the young Marine in the e-mail in front of me has gone, and waits -- willingly and without romanticizing what lies ahead. He trusts the leaders who have sent him there, but in his account of hour-by-hour life there near the border, I keep hearing the echo of the young soldier who is unaware he is speaking to the man who sent him there.
"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place. '"
Let us pray our cause be good as morning comes to Agincourt.
Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1965.
E-mail this story 
