"Right now, terrorists are trying to kill me.
My wife and family are faraway,
and the people I work with are idiots.
My name is SFC John H.
I am a US Soldier.
This has been the longest year of my life."
—from the blog John of Arabia

Never have soldiers in a war been equipped with so much personal technology. It's not just backpack missiles. "You literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket," grumbled journalist Kevin Sites in his blog. Sites would later videotape a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed man in a mosque, provoking international controversy, but that day in Kuwait, still waiting to cross the border, the image that stayed with him was the glow of laptops, temporarily left alone by their users: "One by one, the ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appear[ed] from the depths of cyberspace—as screensavers." Read More

Metaphors

After E. and I smoked a cigarette each on the frozen patio steps, we went back inside and began to drink beer in great gulps. We set up the backgammon board and played with a combination of intensity and absent-mindedness, forced to count out intervals we once had memorized. Jessye Norman's voice soared to sing the last line of the third of Strauss' four last songs, "Tief und Tausendfach das Leben," but through it all, upstairs in her darkened nursery, our six-month old daughter cried and through it all we heard her. Do not think that we were being horrible, indifferent parents. We were trying very hard the whole time to be good and dutiful ones. We were practicing what the army of child sleep specialists call "Extinction," letting our daughter learn to settle herself to sleep on her own. There are many ways of extinguishing your child: "graduated extinction," or Ferberizing, as well as extensive cuddling and prolonged breast-feeding (not really practicable for working mothers), and probably some other method involving elaborate Wica rituals. Ferberizing allows you to sit with your child while she cries, talk to her or stroke her hair, everything but pick her up, and to do these soothings at intervals gradually longer and longer. Behind Ferber is the sound idea that your child needs to know you are there in order to settle herself to sleep. Behind the outright Extinguishers or whatever you want to call them, is the no-less sound theory that your child wants to be cuddled to sleep and nothing else will do, so you might as well teach her that while you are there before she's about to sleep, and when she wakes up with a genuine hunger, you are not there while she tries to sleep. Read More