One last look . . .

In July 2005, I walked into my first class at University of Virginia, The Darkside of Hollywood: Film Noir.  Looking around the room at a dozen or so young students, I was nervous.  I felt impossibly far from where I'd just spent the last year of my life and from where most of my thoughts still dwelled.  Four months earlier, I waited on the tarmac for the bird that would carry me home.  The lumbering C-130 finally dropped onto the runway.  I scanned the hazy perimeter, took stock of the thousands of meters of wire I'd pounded in the suffocating summer heat.  Inhaling a last lungful of burning, dusty air, forcing a smile, I turned my back on the Iraqi plains. It was over.  With the drone of the props lulling me to sleep, I wondered about where we would all go, what we would do, what would become of us "back in the world."  I daydreamed the dream that kept me going on every mission, of sitting in an air-conditioned classroom, charged only with the task of learning and building fortifications of knowledge.  Looking at the soldiers strapped in across from me, I realized for the first time I was no longer dreaming.  I was finally on my way back.