Since Monday, I’ve been at this base.  I’m waiting for a military flight from Kuwait to Iraq.  I don’t know when I am leaving.  The past three days have felt like a week.  At six in the morning and nine at night, I show up at the terminal for a roll call.  They read a list of service members who are waiting for flights into Iraq.  When they call off a persons name, the person is suppose to sound off to say that they are still here.  If you don’t sound off, you have to reregister for a flight, and your name goes to the bottom of the list.

My friend, Nick, works at Ft. Meade, Md.  He says the Army has more in common with Office Space than most war movie.  If Oliver Stone really wanted to make a movie to discourage military spending, he should show the bureaucracy and the administrative nightmare the Army is.  Pain and suffering can be romanticized but mind number boredom cannot. No boy would think, “What a bunch of tough men. They must be really emotionally strong to wait like that.” Of course, no boy would pay to see that film either or buy the action figure

This morning, I was promoted from specialist to sergeant. It’s a leadership position but it doesn’t mean much because the 47th Military History Detachment is a three man unit and I am still the lowest ranking soldier. Sometimes, I’ll be expected to do things I didn’t have to do before. For the most part, it means I get paid more.

After watching a safety briefing, with a bunch of other soldiers, a staff sergeant came in the class room. He asked all the sergeants to step up. There were five of us. He explained we would be monitoring a urinalysis. I couldn’t believe that just a few hours ago I was promoted and now I would be staring at guy’s wieners.

Two hundred dollars is a lot of money, especially if you’re buying something that fits in a shirt pocket. I thought about that for about five minutes before I bought an iPod at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. After that, I promised myself to always check my shirt pockets before doing my laundry, which is something I didn’t do the last time I had an iPod.

That day I had a three-hour layover while I waited for my connecting flight to Chicago. In the pass six-months I’ve had a lot of waiting to do and I expect to have even more waiting during the next twelve-months.

Right now, I am at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. I’m here for pre deployment training. I am staying in an open bay barracks. That means I am sharing a living space with a bunch of dudes.

Today, I was engaged in listening to David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed In Flames,” while I waited for dinner. I was smiling like I normally do when I listen to Sedaris and staring into space. I barely noticed that I was staring at some dude who was changing until he started to change his underpants and Sedaris started to finish a joke that I would have normally busted into hysterical laughter.

As Nick and I were entering the elevator in the hotel lobby, I was thinking what an adult my brother had become. I’ve been driving across the country with him, his wife and his four-month-old baby. He’s moving to his new home in Washington to start his government job and begin the rest of his life.

As I was thinking about all this, I notice a mirror across from us. I could see the man at the front desk watching us. As I made eye contact with him, I fell to my knees because my brother had just hit me in the crotch. The elevator door closed at that moment and we headed to the second floor and my brother couldn’t stop laughing.