Marcel "Blood and Guts" Peters

Alors le coup. Proust avait ses madeleines mais moi, j'ai l'ârome de la graisse du mess. Lors de plus des soldats et des Marines ont matérializé des tentes du camp de transit en route des WC fétides ou en queu au mess, j'ai été encore chez moi : au monde dont j'avais passé la plupart de ma vie adulte.

-Ralph Peters

For a long time, I rose early. Sometimes a band of rosy light would stretch across the horizon promising a magnificence to come, only to fade quickly into a gloomy murk whose rapid descent across the band of sky visible through the flapping door of my tent is now in my mind inseparable from the sense of disappointment that once welled in my chest on a similar morning in a similar tent in a place not altogether different from this one, but neither was it entirely the same, merely a figuration of my mind whose soft edges recalled to my mind any number of foreign yet familiar places, whose borders, like the limits of memory, were neither fixed nor infinite, but restlessly located upon a territory in between. As my eyes opened and the cool air floated into the tent like a familiar perfume worn by a woman I may once have known, but whose chimerical form breaks up delicately at the efforts of my mind to recall, like a footprint on a sandy shore washed ceaselessly by waves, I see here and there the forms of soldiers, each lost in private reverie, their minds likewise casting back into the deep pool of the past even as they moved into the hot, dry, and dusty air of the desert, which in my mind is now inseparable from the sense of disappointment that once welled in my chest on a similar morning in a similar tent in a place not altogether different from this one. I had not slept well. Lodged between two great mountains of men, who nightly fell rapidly to dreaming and thus began a concert of snores, sounds redolent of my own youth and training, so loud as to be nearly visceral, a chorus full of memory and futility and despair, whose metronomic regularity seemed to contain within its rumblings the very passage of time itself, I had failed to find either rest or the solace of recollection, and so have my recent days passed neither thinking nor sleeping, but merely drifting on a sea of memories of a disappointment that once welled in my chest on a similar morning in a similar tent in a place not altogether different from this one, but neither was it entirely the same, merely a figuration of my mind whose soft edges recalled to my mind any number of foreign yet familiar places, whose borders, like the limits of memory, were neither fixed nor infinite, but restlessly located upon a territory in between . . .