Do you have friends? I have some. Most of them are like me: hot, really cool, hanging around the beach, complaining about Charleston's terrible radio stations, bitching about car taxes and debating The Sopranos ending. Even the ones with kids aren't too different from me. Sure, they change diapers, but we're still in the same circle doing the same sorts of things.

And then there are two of my friends who are very unlike me. At least they are doing things that are far removed from my world of Moe's Crosstown, the Chartleston Rifle Club and Station 18. One is in Afghanistan and the other is in Africa. I get emails from both. The guy in Afghanistan sends me (along with others on his mailing list) reports of the daily routine in the Army. It goes something like this:

Another day in Afghanistan. We have a countdown on an Excel spreadsheet; it computes the months, weeks, days, hours etc. It has a pie chart to tell you how far along you are. The good news is that I am hearing rumors that the teams we are on are not deployed for 15 month rotations. The army came out that units would be deployed for 15 months, instead of the already-too-long 12 months. With that, I think the military will see an exodus of personnel. Other things I do to count it all down is a bottle of anti-malaria pills . . . when they are gone, the deployment is over, and also a Family Guy calendar. It's the little things.

One of our convoys was riding out to provide medical support to a village, part of winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. It hit an IED. This was an armored Humvee. Engine was pushed up into the frame of the vehicle, and both tires were sent far away. No one was hurt. People that were sitting in the truck emailed pics back home, and those made it into the media, and the Army here was not too thrilled. You have to be careful with the media, it is amazing how stuff gets around.


I went to Qatar for a four day pass. Qatar is another country here in the Middle East, it has a healthy US Military presence. We flew to it on a cargo plane from the Air Force, flying around Iran (can't fly over their airspace, not without getting shot down). I think Saudia Arabia asked us to leave their country, and Qatar took us in, but I don't do history and politics, so I could be wrong. Qatar is a friendly country, and it once held the Asian Games, whatever those were. So I got to see Arabs. The women wear veils so that only their eyes are shown, and because of that, they really do up the makeup around the eyes. They looked pretty good. The food was okay. The county had lots of construction, and some really nice cars, shopping malls. Inside the shopping mall was a TGI Friday's, a KFC, and a McDonalds. I purchased a memory card for my camera at the Fugi Photo shop. I think the country makes money off of oil.

The Afghan soldiers are pretty good people. They want what everyone else wants: a stable life, healthy children, etc.. There is some corruption, but the definition of corruption is different. On one of our Village Medical Outreach missions, some of the soldiers took some of the food home with them. Technically, it is stealing, but you really can't blame them if they have hungry family members. We accuse them of taking anything they can and selling it at the Bazaar; this is particularly a problem with fuel and ammunition. The Americans control both, but we have to keep an eye on them. Someone once said that the Afghans don't realize that when they steal, they are hurting themselves.

My other friend relocates African refugees. His emails go something like this:

From the perspective of a speeding automobile, African village life seems to oscillate from the bucolic to the destitute. The reality is that it is both and it is neither. I say "neither" because what may be bucolic to one observer may not be to another; and what may be destitute to one perspective is in fact normal, even comfortable, to another. The village life that flashed between the supremely sublime lake scene was harsh: hard work isn’t rewarded, people are born into a poverty that they may never escape. When not drunk on fermented bananas, men scramble for coins: shining shoes, hauling hand carts of produce, peddling charcoal, fixing broken bicycles and radios. The African women, saviors of the continent, press ahead - saving money, investing, rearing children, raising crops, fetching water.

And, at times, this:

The genocide in Darur enters its fourth year. When I started blogging on Darfur, 30,000 people had been killed. Now the count may be as high as 400,000. Due to War on Terror alliances and a host of other political alliances, the world has done far too little to help end the Darfur crisis.

Both of these guys grew up in my old, Rockwellian neighborhood in Spartanburg. Craig, the guy in Africa, went to Davidson, moved to Japan for a couple of years, and then went to grad school in Denver for International Studies or something like it. He spent some time in Africa before Denver, but it wasn't until he left the mile-high city that he assumed this larger, seemingly selfless role in Kenya.

Jim Duncan, the army of one, grew up on my street. We all played manhunt in the woods, smoked cigarettes on rooftops and drank at the end of undeveloped cul-de-sacs (which, seeing as how our negihborhood was old, were not in our neighborhood). I abhor cul-de-sacs. But they are good for boozing teens. We also learned to ride skateboards together, broke out our sleds at the first sign of snow, talked about girls (which we lacked) and wondered where we'd be in twenty years. Going back is like a scene out of Beautiful Girls, minus the bitter winters and Uma. And going back reminds us all that we didn't quite do the things we thought we'd do by this point in our lives. I always wanted a creek running through my house. The closest thing I've got to that is a dog who urinates on the floor occassionally. I imagine Craig and Jim Duncan never thought they'd be where they are now either.

We had a going-away party for Jim Duncan before he was deployed to Afghanistan. I didn't want to say it then, but it felt like a fucking wake. The food and small talk and all. Fortunately, Jim Duncan isn't in Iraq, so it just felt like a wake; it wasn't portentous by any means. Craig was there, as he does make it back to the States 2-3 times a year. And many of the other guys who grew up going to Pine Street School were there, too.

Receiving their emails makes me think about how nice I've got it here in Charleston. How easy my life is. How ridiculous my complaints are about overdraft charges and slow drivers. So log onto Craig's blog (I wish Jim Duncan had one) and forward it around. He's a good writer and certainly covers an interesting topic, albeit a foreign one. A very, very foreign one.