Incoming
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JUSTIN HUDNALL, HOST:
Welcome to Incoming, the show that features stories from the lives of American veterans told in their own words, directly from their own mouths. I’m Justin Hudnall. For the full version of this episode, go to KPBS.org, but for now, I’m just going to turn it over to Lieutenant Commander Liam Corley putting to poetry the experience of wanting to go home while stuck at a USO in Afghanistan.
LIAM CORLEY: Hi, I’m Liam Corley, and the name of my piece is Getting the Good News.
Etched on a wooden table, the number of the Edwards A.F.B. telephone exchange waits to serve an unprepared traveler collapsing sweaty and unkempt in the reupholstered Lazy Boy implausibly sent from Muskegon to the southwest corner of the U.S.O. lounge adjacent to the PAX terminal at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. Clean, bright, and efficiently organized, the U.S.O. reeks of a panting desire to please, the
mindless exuberance of a dog capering at dawn when its keeper comes to rebuke its barking.
The movie looping on the wall is either the superhero saga du jour or a commando film composed of erotically gleeful scenes where the fitfully socialized anti-hero straps on a variety of armaments and an improbable amount of ammunition, though even ten times the amount depicted would be necessary to sustain the soundtrack of staccato blasts that lurch the film from conflict to conclusion.
Over all this waste drones the emptiness of waiting. The absence of a soldier between transports cannot be explained by comparisons to wastelands of rock and sheer precipices, nor to outer reaches of space defined more by unending cold than astronomical location. The soul is frigid, the mind supine, the senses
alert and morbid, drowsy and yet longing for a reason to move.
The roar of departing flights is a mockery of escape. The only things flying today are F/A-18s "bringing the good news" to embattled Taliban caught some valleys away in a compound with someone else's women and children.
As news of successive flight cancellations spreads, those assembled disperse in shock waves of embittered expectation. Only the most experienced make the quarter-mile trek in which every step declares surrender.
Deafening fans blast out all thought. Day and night merge within the corona of light leaking through tent seams and door-flaps. The soul goes numb. High in the sky, the keening of Rolls Royce jet turbines reminds the ear that even objects of steel and destruction know how to mourn a people cut off before the advent of a rosy-fingered and resplendent dawn.
