A Taste of the 'Affair'

So I am beginning to get a little discouraged that we'll never find a publisher willing to take on my book. Millions of books go unpublished every year so it's not like I had my hopes too high anyway. But that is the beauty of the internet - you can publish anything you want anytime for all to see. I decided I'd start making installments with snippets of each chapter of my book to hopefully spur some interest and perhaps encourage a publishing of my memoir "A Foreign Affair". I don't plan on "giving away the entire farm", but enough to hopefully peek interest in any reader who stumbles upon my blog.

So, without further ado, here is Snippet #1 - enjoy.

“Sometimes, right in the middle of an ordinary life,

love gives us a fairytale.”

- Anonymous

You live only once. You breathe in. You breathe out. The days go by, each seeming like a replica of the one before, but it isn't. You will never see the day you just lived again. It is gone forever - a speck of dust thrown upon the mounting sands of time. The sun rises each morning, but it's not the same dawn as the one you witnessed the day before. It sets each evening, but it kisses the ground in a different way each dusk. You are not the person today that you were yesterday, nor are you the person you will be tomorrow. At some point in everyone’s life they begin to realize this. They “wake up” and begin to see the world in a whole new light. The veil lifts and the rose tinted glasses come off. Some refer to it as a rebirth or finding the meaning of life. Others say it’s simply growing up. You realize your mortality and you are able to embrace the beauty of life and the world around you. On the flip side you are also more aware of the evils and darkness that also exist in the world. But for every ‘good’ there must be an ‘evil’. Everything must have an opposite. The Universe tends to balance itself out. For most people it takes some kind of significant earth shattering event to bring about their “awakening”. Oftentimes it’s a death or a tragedy of some sort. It can be a natural disaster like a hurricane, an earthquake, or a tsunami. Or a social disaster like the collapse of an economy, or a war – whether you’re an active participant in one or simply find yourself involuntarily in the middle of a hostile conflict. But it can also be brought about by a shock of beauty, perhaps the birth of a child. I consider myself one of the most fortunate. I voluntarily chased my answer to the meaning of life into the jaws of a brutal war. My awakening could have easily been brought about by tragedy. By death. By bloodshed. But that’s what I was expecting. I was poised for battle. I was ready to fight. I had hate and prejudice built up inside me. I knew what I was getting into. I’d coached my mind to be prepared for horrible sights, awful scenes. But as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. I was armed and ready to slit throats when fate decided to wake me up with a love story.  

I’m never going to love you the way you want me to. Those were the words I heard my boyfriend Shawn say several times while we were dating. After two and a half years of this I knew it was time to cut my losses and end the relationship. But that’s a difficult thing to do when you live two miles apart and you have to see each other at work every day. Shawn was enlisted in the Air Force and I was enlisted in the Navy. We were both Russian linguists stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland where we worked at the National Security Agency. (Yes, the infamous NSA.) The NSA is often misrepresented in Hollywood spy movies like “Enemy of the State” as the evil communications spy agency listening in on every American’s phone conversations and monitoring all internet traffic. In reality it’s a lot of overpaid government cronies who show up to work in sweatpants with no underwear and spend their time counting down the days until their retirement. Granted, there are a few hardworking dedicated individuals sprinkled in here and there too who carry the load for everyone – got to give credit where credit’s due.

In early 2005 I was 22 years old and I’d been in the military for nearly five years - three of them spent at the agency - and my boyfriend Shawn was working on year number seven in the Air Force. It was a mind-numbing job. The Cold War ended when I was in grade school and what was left of the Eastern Block was a minimal military threat by this time, so there really wasn’t too much use for us as Russian linguists. All the action was happening in the Middle East where the war in Iraq (the second one) kicked off two years earlier in March of 2003.

I felt like I had contributed very little to my country in my five years of military service, considering I spent the first two years learning a foreign language and then nearly three years sitting in the basement of the NSA basically twiddling my thumbs. I’d never even left U.S. soil, but hey, it beat living at home and the money was decent so I just rolled with it. Most people in the military would be thrilled to have a desk job in D.C., but I was young and dumb and getting bored; bored with my job, bored with my life, and bored with my emotionally empty relationship.

Shawn was never the best boyfriend but I thought I was in love. He was older and more mature, and I followed him around like a puppy even though he treated me like crap a lot of the time. After two years together the most thoughtful gift he’d given me was a tank-top picked up in an airport gift shop on his way back from a trip to Las Vegas with his buddies. I wasn’t even worth an entire t-shirt. I knew I had to get away from Shawn but I didn’t have the willpower to be able to stick to a breakup while having to see him every day at work. I knew I had to put some distance between us and I was desperate for some excitement and adventure.

The agency was constantly posting internal advertisements looking for volunteers to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan for three or four months at a time to serve in general intelligence roles in support of the war on terrorism. Even though I was a Russian translator, (yeah – not a lot of Russian being spoken in Iraq) I still held a Top-Secret security clearance, meaning, if nothing else, I could be a classified paper pusher at an embassy. I figured a few months in Baghdad or Kabul would be an amazing life experience and I felt good about doing something to contribute more directly to our military efforts in the Middle East. It was also great fodder to put on my military resume that would be useful when promotion time rolled around. Since I already worked in the agency I had all the security clearances required and simply had to pass a medical screening. I was a little leery of volunteering to go to a war zone, but basic statistics stated that my chances of being killed in a car accident on the interstate were higher than being killed in Iraq. I also believe in fate and figured if I was slated to die at a young age I’d rather do it serving my country.

Since it was already March, I tried my best to find a deployment to Afghanistan where at least they had some mountains and greenery and the summers weren’t as stifling hot as Iraq’s. But alas, there was nothing leaving for Afghanistan until the fall. So I perused the list of open positions and picked the one that sounded the most interesting on paper and submitted my application. The mission was a 120-day agency deployment to Baghdad, Iraq working as a SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) analyst and Foreign Relations Liaison Officer for the Foreign Affairs Directorate. Obviously they were quite desperate for volunteers because they were asking for officers, upper enlisted members or experienced civilians but I, a lowly E5, was asked to interview and subsequently offered the position merely two days after submitting my application. I was stunned when they offered me the job and I immediately began to have doubts about the commitment I made when I accepted. Holy crap, did I seriously just VOLUNTEER to spend 120 days in hell?

My deployment date was set for May 16^th meaning I had less than two months to prepare to go to war. Even though I was active duty military, I was still a desk nerd and had to attend a week of weapons qualifications before I could go over and play with the other soldiers in Iraq. I qualified on the Beretta 9 mm pistol and the M-4 rifle, which is just a smaller scale version of the infamous M-16. I did just well enough to pass – which pretty much means I could load the bullets into the gun and pull the trigger. 

TO BE CONTINUED...