Qatar
Before I completely lost my mind, my sergeant major must’ve seen it coming.
He’d seen the look before—the kind of stare that doesn’t blink, doesn’t focus, just hovers somewhere far behind your eyes.
So he sent me to Qatar for a week.
It felt like the Riviera compared to Iraq. Clean sheets. Cold air. Food that tasted like it came from Earth. I went swimming, got a tan, even a facial. The showers had real pressure. The air smelled like soap instead of gun oil.
For a while, I remembered what normal felt like.
The best part was the noise—or rather, the absence of it. No generators. No radios. No Humvees idling outside your dreams. Just silence so smooth it almost hurt.
At first it was beautiful. Then it started to feel wrong.
Like someone had turned the volume down on the world and forgotten to turn it back up. I’d wake in the middle of the night, waiting for the sound of boots or engines or someone calling my name. Nothing. Just the hum of air conditioning and a clock that didn’t care what time it was anywhere else.
I remember lying in a beach chair, eyes closed, sun on my face, trying to believe the war was still going on somewhere far away. It felt unreal. Like I’d stepped out of a photograph and didn’t know how to get back in.
When I flew back to Iraq, the noise hit me before the heat did. The engines, the shouting, the static over radios—it all came rushing back at once, familiar and almost comforting.
That’s when I realized what silence really was.
Not peace. Just the sound of waiting for the next thing to break.
