The Art of War

Pressure in my stomach is so hard it feels like I’m going to tear my flesh apart in some horrid and gruesome violent act. My hands and fingers shake while I try to put my boots on so that I can shamble off to the bathroom. Desperation hits me when I realize that I need a ‘Battle Buddy”, someone to keep me company while I walk around the base, even to just use the bathroom. I can’t find the top to my jacket and for a second I contemplate urinating in an empty bottle on the floor. All this, because I needed to stay awake.

One of the last methods of forcing oneself to remain awake these days is to chug water like it’s going out of style. I don’t drink coffee and couldn’t find tea earlier, so for me it’s water. It just so happens that earlier today, tonight really, since I’m sitting around guarding inanimate objects in the early hours of the morning, I had a few extremely boring classes. Lectures really, though lectures usually involve some sense of interest on the part of the listener. But what I was forced to sit through today was dry enough to put me to sleep – it didn’t help that I’ve been lying uncomfortably every night in a tent full of 40 others.

So I had my few classes, and to keep myself awake I drank a lot of water. A lot. I’d love to say it helped, but it didn’t really. Instead I just managed to build up enough urine in my bladder to pop a button on my pants and force me to run to the bathroom every couple hours while I tried to sleep. But its fine, since hitting up the wondrous portable bathrooms affords me the opportunity to read graffiti from the past few years.

Really, urinal graffiti is the only distinguishing characteristic of Kuwait thus far. With every tent, and every structure looking exactly the same, the only method left for showing direction is natural landmarks. So in a place where everything is flat, well, there is no way to give direction. When we first arrived here the welcome party-if they could be called that-informed us that when we are lost on this post, walk towards the water tower and fix it from there. What I didn’t know was that the water tower looks nothing like a water tower and most likely has no water.

But as long as I take a left at “If you are reading this then welcome to the biggest mistake of your life” and keep going past the crudely drawn bent-over woman with uneven breasts I’ll be okay. Because if I hit “Penis is awesome!” then I’ve gone too far. I mean really, its right next to “I was stop lossed and can’t see my family and I’m going to kill myself”. You can find anything here easily; all you need to do is look in the toilet.