Colors

While soldiers wait for missions they lounge in the Ready Up room, which has a large screen TV and shelves stocked with DVDs. Today they were watching A River Runs Through It and I sit down for a moment. Out of the sun, the desert fog and flies, I am captivated by the river, the water running over rocks like tongues running over smooth teeth, the grass in the wind like hair one could let down in a civilian world and the mountains rising in the distance remind me that there are some things humans cannot cover in concrete.

The best scenery here is at night before the sky turns black. If you look straight up you'll see midnight blue, then a bit lower there is deep ocean blue fading into shallow sea blue then robin's egg blue, white-blue, gray-blue, gray-white and finally a bit of pink and orange over the shadowed trailers. These are colors we cannot replace with computer or television screens. Colors that fade so quickly that we can still say,"Isn't that beautiful?"