(no subject)

[camwyn]

Long as I remember
The rain been coming down.
Clouds of myst'ry pouring
Confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages,
Trying to find the sun;
And I wonder,
Still I wonder,
Who'll stop the rain...

Well, it looks as if I just might get home in time for my niece's birth after all.

Close to it, anyway. The colonel said they were going to try and get me sent back to the States by next Thursday, which is pretty close to my sister-in-law's due date. There's no guarantee, of course, but they've already extended my tour in the sandbox twice. They can't really justify extending it any longer. (Well, they could, but there are other guys they'd rather keep over here. One chaplain more or less isn't going to make that much difference.) As long as nothing goes catastrophically wrong on Sunday, and I mean really catastrophically wrong, like whole-city-goes-boom kind of catastrophic, I'll be on a plane bound for Fort Dix sometime next Thursday.

They tell me it's been snowing back in Jersey, which should be entertaining. I haven't lived in that state in years, but I don't think the people there ever learned to drive. If the ground's still white when I get there I'm going to talk to someone about 'borrowing' something with treads on. I don't trust Jersey drivers. They're almost as bad as the drivers in Boston. About the only difference is that the ones in New Jersey don't usually go up on the sidewalk when they're impatient. I don't know why my brother Doug and his wife still live there- I mean, Patty's family is all in Pennsylvania, and the rest of our family's in New York and Connecticut- but they're the closest family I've got to my point of return, so I'll be staying with them when I get back.

I expect to get a phone call while I'm stateside, of course. Wouldn't be too surprised if I get shipped to Korea at the end of my leave. I won't mind, the cold should make a nice change from what we get over here in the sandbox. And I can read a little Han'gul. My Arabic stinks- Dr. Laing back at the seminary would probably kill me for saying so, but it's true. Hebrew? Yeah, I can read that, speak a little too. Aramaic? Bring it on. Arabic? ... not so good. The reading is okay, but the spoken, no. I've tried, I really have, but I can't hear the spaces between the words when it's spoken to me, and the accent I learned to use in school doesn't seem to be comprehensible here. Maybe it's the local dialect or something. I understand there are problems like that with Italian. I can guess what people are saying really, really well, but I can't hold anything like a proper conversation unless you allow pantomime. I'm told this actually made me popular with the local kids. They think I'm a clown.

There are worse things for a soldier to be mistaken for.

Anyway, just thought I'd keep you posted. I'm almost out of computer time. There's been a lot of guys who need to talk to me lately, between the improv explosives and the chopper crash and everything else. I'm almost starting to wish I'd stuck around to get my doctorate before going to St. Andrew's, I could at least, you know, write them a prescription or something...

I know, I know. They don't need drugs. They need to talk. And they don't need to talk to me so much as they need to talk to what I represent, and I can live with that. It's just that sometimes I kind of wonder, you know- what if things had been different, huh? Almost as soon as I knew what a priest's collar meant, I knew I wanted to be one, and as soon as I knew why we always took Grandpa out for dinner on Veteran's Day I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I don't think there was ever any doubt in my mind that I'd find a way to combine the two. It's not a bad job, being the Catholic chaplain for my unit, but sometimes I kind of wonder how I would have reacted if it had been derailed somewhere along the way. If I'd gone for more sports in college. If I'd taken that advanced physics class, or the international health course instead of the one in linguistics. If I'd gone to a different high school. If I'd been born a girl. Who'd be here to help these guys out? Someone else? Anyone at all? You never know. One change, changes everything else...

Anyway. Gotta go. Someone else wants the machine. More when I can manage it.

Ch (CPT) Matthew Brian Carter
US Army
The Other Side of the Rabbit Hole

Comments

[whobunkyboo.livejournal.com]

Well done.

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

I guess every day's a bit like Alice over there in the sandbox.

Nasty business about the chopper. I've got USMC family, so that one hurt a lot even though no one I know was on board.

Hope you make it back on time.

[ohimesamamama.livejournal.com]

We are clearly sharing a Creedence Clearwater Revival theme, you and I here on this side of the rabbit hole.

Luck.

[lasa.livejournal.com]

I was born and grew up in Mt. Holly. You're right. We don't know how to drive.

Wonderful letter. Thanks.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Very nicely done. I didn't really twig to the fact that this was "rabbit hole" material (as opposed to a transcribed letter or some such) until I got to the part about being fine with Hebrew & Aramaic but not Arabic. I've studied each of the three (years of Hebrew, some not-very-structured learning of Aramaic, a year of college Arabic) and the grammar patterns are similar enough that that line didn't feel right, especially given some linguistics background as suggested later in the post. *shrug* Figures I'd get thrown out of the post by a language detail. Sometimes being a geek is not so fun.

[camwyn]

Believe me, I thought of that. I was thinking of how my brain just runs away and hides when I try to stumble through French, even though I've studied assloads of Italian and some Spanish.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Now that *so* rings true with me, but with the languages in reverse: 3 years of French in high school with a bit of refresher for a grad school reading exam and then (about 10 years later) an attempt to cram Spanish for G's sis's wedding. While I could understand most of what was said to me, every time I tried to talk it came out mixed Spanish-French (with me not always noticing when I switched languages) and when I tried to suppress the French, Hebrew popped out... I gave up and asked for someone to translate when I needed to talk to one of the few relatives who doesn't speak any English.

[camwyn]

Edited that paragraph to reflect what I was trying to say more accurately.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, now I get it. Very true about the dialects of Arabic - there was a kid in my class whose family was from Egypt, but almost every time she knew how to say something she had a different word from the one in our textbook.

ClassicDrogn

[(Anonymous)]

If I knew how, I'd send this in private mail, but... uh, it's military stuff too! Yeah, that's it. And itis definitely the kind of cause/info you've shown interest in - land mine marking with trained rats, in hopes of using them to find all the ones buried in various brush-war-infested places.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/18/1084783512636.html?oneclick=true

- CD

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

Nicely done. First rabbithole I've truly liked so far (not done reading for the day yet).

[derien.livejournal.com]

Very well done. I went with deciding you were starting a new fic, completely didn't realize it was a rabbit hole until near the end. :)

[camwyn]

Well, the basis for the whole thing is that when I was seven I desperately wanted to be a priest, and that at several points in my life I've wanted to be in, or at least considered joining, the military. (Usually in conjunction with 'paying for medical school' type ideas.) Lately I have had a number of impressions that in another leg of the Trousers of Time, I did go into the military as a would-be medic. This... well, I'm almost dead certain that if I had been born a guy, I would've gone to college, then signed up at a Jesuit seminary. St. Andrew's Jesuit Seminary used to be located in Poughkeepsie, NY; they sold the school in the late 70's or early 80's. It's the Culinary Institute of America now. And if I had been born a guy my name would have been Matthew Brian. My parents have told me that several times. 'Carter' is the last name my father used when he had to employ an alias as part of his security work for Bell Telephone, before the divestiture, so I figure I'm entitled to that too.

[(Anonymous)]

Boston drivers aren't bad! We're amazingly skilled, in fact. And we expect everyone else to be excellent drivers too, or to get off the road. But not on the shoulder, since we drive on some of them too. That's not a joke -- we open 'em up for rush hour in places.

(My favorite commute involved driving up Storrow Drive from Charlesgate to Leverett Circle. If it didn't jam up, everyone would fly along at 60+ in a 40, in bumper to bumper traffic. It was great.)

[camwyn]

When I went up to Boston to see what BU and Tufts were like (and Boston College, because my parents made me promise to check out at least one Catholic school at the undergraduate level), the drivers absolutely blew my mind. Maybe it would've been better if it hadn't been days of ice and snow, but still... freaky stuff.