When you live your life like this it hits you that you're really not living a life at all

My last day in the city wasn't particularly different from all the other days I had spent out there. Everything becomes so repetitive, bland, and so indistinguishable from the previous day. Time and any sense of progression loses its effect on you entirely. You don't feel like your moving forward in life towards any particular moment, certain date or anything really at all. Everything becomes so patterned from one day to the next. At times you get reminders, of how much time has passed. it comes in the form of the simple and mundane things that occur, in fleeting moments, such as thinking about the last time you took a shower, looking through a case of movies and seeing ones that you have already watched previously or it being hamburger-hot-dog night again with no buns or bread to eat it with.



And then the day finally comes and you find yourself leaving and moving on to something else, but you find its nothing new, its all the same. The only thing that really changed is the way in which you do it. Now I am taking a shower everyday and eating three meals but these days end up all become part of the previous pattern. I am eating with the same people and waking up next to the same people. Even when I am on the internet or phone I have the same people sitting next to me. None of it is any different then before. The sights, sounds and smells all remain the same. Its just now I am doing it in a different bed, on a different schedule, and at a different base.



I think of having been out here for six months and it shocks me, if people stopped counting the days, I would surely lose all track of them out here.



When you live your life like this it hits you that you're really not living a life at all. Where am I going....What am I doing...I ask myself this constantly....



On the last evening I was loaded into a truck with 15 other guys from the company. We had just been out that day at a checkpoint for five hours and immediately following our return, we went right back out again. It was quiet on the ride back. For the most part, you could see, the Marines sitting next to me felt relieved. They were getting all their contempt out for the Iraq people by throwing their arms out the truck and flipping people off, yelling "fuck you" indiscriminately to the people we passed by on the street below. I turned around and saw other Marines waving to little kids out the other side, some were taking pictures. I over heard one Marine talking to another about how sorry he felt for him because he didn't get any combat experience during his deployment. He wished him luck in finding it in his next one. I hope he finds what he's searching for.