Home Is Were You Make It

“The homing pigeon is not merely able to find the roost from astounding distances: the pigeon seeks its home” (Staying Put 8). As Scott Russell Sanders points out, no matter where we humans are, we are also like homing pigeons, seeking home and safety. I experienced this personally in the Marine Corps during two deployments. Surroundings there are very different than in the United States. Mud huts made of straw and mud shaped into a shelter, streets that are narrow, twisting, more like alleys than streets, the prayers that are chanted three times a day that are heard above every other sound and that remind one of death, sounding almost like our military “Taps,” and the danger that is always present, knowing that death could come at any time, encourages those who are deployed to find esape, especially to think of home.

Dehydrated from a long patrol threw the Mud Huts of Afghanistan, I lay in six inches of very thin sand or what we call in Afganistan “Moon Dust.” Stuck in a foreign country where you are the outcast and have been thrown into a society to learn their way of life is very overwhelming. Coping with the environment, an environment that one may never have encountered before, is extremely difficult. Dust packed in my nose from the moon dust, forming in a cloud like powder does when it is pushed into the wind. I lay there thinking about the comfy bed I had back in the states. Why was I here? What was the purpose of this? Why me? I asked myself these questions everyday as I know the other Marines that had my back during this deployment also asked themselves. I asked myself this just to remind me that because I was there doing this that my home would still be there and my family safe inside when I returned to the States.

Convoying out five clicks (a military measurement close to a kilometer) to a mountainside right outside Of Ouellette, we made our cordon, then started our foot patrol up the mountain to the sniper team waiting for Explosive Ordnance...