I’m sitting in a C130 plane on the military runway in Kuwait, breathing heavily against the weight of the 30-pound Kevler vest I was ordered to wear. The ever -increasing gasoline fumes; from the warming of the plane’s four engines fill my lungs. I breathe it in slowly “yoga like” in order to help calm myself against the rising wave of nausea I feel. I gnash nervously at the sugar free flavored bubble gum I’ve just bummed from someone else. The chewing itself echoes up against the military issued ear plugs which plug my ears precariously.
I look up and down the rows of young soldiers sitting in the plane “Battle Droid Style.” Some of them in deep thought for what is about to be. Some mouthing lyrics silently along with their IPods. IPods, given to them by loved ones or maybe that they themselves bought with the meager sums they earn. One even has his laptop open and balancing on his knee. I imagine more for the purpose of comfort then the actual searching for an appropriate playlist in which to take his mind off the fact that he is about to deploy for the first time to Baghdad, Iraq. These young men are from a unit out of Wiesbaden Germany. Badges sewn onto their uniforms read “Old Ironside.”
Their M16 weapons are propped up against their legs. Perhaps, just a few years earlier, baseball bats and teenaged girls where the props of choice that leaned up against them instead. Some sit quietly resigned to their fate, a few wearing their bravado on their sleeves, but most already asleep in their head to toe “Battle Rattle,” their relaxed faces remind me of my two sons, eight and ten years old.
I look the young soldiers over from head to toe. Various high school rings adorn their fingers, their names on their uniforms bespeaking their heritage – Ellis, Genrich, Langston etc… etc…
And then there is us. Stand Up comics, whose names have been bastardized years earlier in order to fall with ease from a public that we so desperately seek to please and perhaps will never truly know. We sit here posturing in our own ways with sarcasm, supposed wit and flabby bodies. Our “left-over” helmets fall sloppily over our heads, making us appear like a sad co-star in a Hogan’s Hero episodes. The opener looks like the inept bumbling Master Sergeant, George Schultz. I myself look like some French underground groupie after a twenty year drinking spree.
I’m so thankful at this moment these young men.
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