Two Worlds

I pause at work and rub my hands. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain in my left middle finger. I look at it again. Oh yes, I think, after only a second’s pause. The source of the pain is well-known to me. Two weeks ago, I was clearing brush, when the spine of a yucca plant stuck straight through my working gloves, into my finger at the joint. It was painful at the time, but even after two weeks, it still hurts a little.

It’s strange now, this odd anger and resentment that I bear for a plant that is now weeks behind me and separated by an entire universe, it seems.

When I arrived in Baghdad on Sep. 11, I was eager to go, in the right mindset. Situational awareness, they call it, and it’s a critical tool for survival over here. Being aware of everything around you, constantly keeping one eye open for threats, one ear attuned to sounds. They say that the most dangerous times for a soldier over here are the first few weeks after he arrives and the last few weeks before he leaves – when he lets down his guard.

I had spent almost two months preparing myself, and felt I was as ready as I would ever be.
But hardly had I arrived when unforeseen circumstances brought me back to the U.S. For two weeks, I was thrown back into the civilian world. My mindset, my mission, all of that went out of the window. Suddenly, I learned, there are worse things than war.

On my second day of work, I got a simple message from the Red Cross. It stated, “Father very ill. Actually dying.”

A phone call confirmed the worst. Thus began a marathon journey for me back home, a hectic period of attending to crucial matters there, and an agonizingly-slow return trip back to Iraq.
Almost everything in military bureaucracy is inefficient. Fortunately, emergency leave – which I was taking – is the one exception. It’s like they wave a magic wand and every protocol and strip of red tape is banished. I got the news at 9:30 a.m. By 2 p.m. I was on a flight out of country. In between, I had to pack and store my gear, check in my weapons, and get to the airport.

Fortunately, my command gave me an enlisted soldier as a driver. Specialist E., who had picked me up at the airport the day before, drove me from point to point, and finally back to the airport. It wasn’t always easy. While I was checking on my flight inside the tent that serves as a terminal, a tow truck suddenly appeared out of nowhere to tow our vehicle – with all my gear in it. Suddenly, Specialist E. was running down the road, his M-16 in one hand, chasing after the purloining parasite. I jogged somewhat behind him, tired, beat down, and bitter.

Fortunately, the truck wasn’t taken far, and after about 20 minutes of haranguing the Air Force folks, he got the truck back. Air Force personnel in normal situations can very often be major jerks. But when they’re not only Air Force, but Air Force tow truck drivers, you can only imagine.

My gear rescued, I finished my check-in. The gear is necessary because you can’t fly in or out of Baghdad without body armor and a Kevlar helmet. After waiting in a VIP tent with an Army Colonel and a very fuzzy and loud FoxNews on the T.V., I heard my name called over the PA. I donned my protective gear, lifted my rucksack to my shoulders, and grabbed my small backpack.

Oddly enough, I was to fly out on a Japanese Air Force C-130. As I walked up to the baby-blue aircraft, I took a quick look at the big red meatball painted on the side. I kept thinking that somewhere, my great uncle, who fought the Japs in WWII, is twitching in his grave.

I must say that it was a much better flight out than the one I had going in a few days earlier. This time, there were only about seven or eight people on the plane. Besides the crew, there were only one or two Japanese, plus a few Europeans and Americans. I was the only military person aboard. So, with pretty much open seating, I grabbed a seat next to a gorgeous American woman with dark black hair and deep, almost oriental eyes…who nonetheless proceeded to completely ignore me. I guess dirty, smelly (after all, I had just chased a tow truck for a half mile) military people were just not her type.

She wore a blue floor-mat looking thing that seems to have passed for body armor for whichever cheapo contractor company she works for. It had two pouches – front and back – for the armor plating which was supposed to stop rifle rounds. But as she sat down on her seat, she pulled open the flap and pulled out not armor plating, but a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. Then she grabbed her little hand-held fan and cooled herself down.

Damn contractors, I thought.

She even appeared loathe to wear her dinky blue helmet until the crew chief of the airplane came back and told her to do so in broken English.

“Must be wearing the equipments,” he said. Or something like that.


Whereas I had flown into Kuwait on a charter jet, which landed at a Kuwaiti Air Force Base, I flew out in civilian clothes through the Kuwait City International Airport. The airport itself is very nice – built to western standards. Or maybe 1970s western standards, because travelers are allowed to smoke throughout the terminal. I had thought Frankfurt was bad, but at least there, they have to stand next to machines which suck the smoke out of the air. In Kuwait, they stand everywhere – old Arab men in their “man-dresses” and younger Arab kids in what passes for hip-hop clothing. The smoke was everywhere. It was like standing inside George Burns’ lung.

Overall, Kuwait is very nice and modern. It’s always been a rich country – that’s why Saddam wanted it so badly in 1990. You would think that there would be a lot of damage from the Iraqi occupation and the Gulf War, but that isn’t the case. Almost everything that was damaged has been rebuilt. Oddly enough, the most visible signs of the war are at bases housing U.S. troops, such as airbases where U.S. aircraft sit next to concrete fighter hangars with massive holes blown through their roofs. The Iraqi fighter planes we bombed in 1991 are long gone, but the hangars are still there – some sort of patched, others unchanged.

All the Kuwaitis drive new cars. On the highways, you rarely see vehicles over 10 years old. This is partly because Kuwaitis are rich, and partly because the Iraqi Army stole just about all the cars they could get their hands on before retreating. In contrast to the desert where I had spent most of my time in the country, Kuwait City is a nice city of shopping malls and clean buildings. Kind of like Phoenix – with mosques.

The flight out of Kuwait to Frankfurt – and the next leg to Dallas – were on Lufthansa, which for me was a special treat, as I am perfectly fluent in German. Or at least I used to be. I’ve slipped a little. I drove the stewardesses nuts, I’m sure, by hitting them with a torrent of talk, trying to get in a little practice. I made a few mistakes – I used Abhangigkeit (dependence) instead of Gelegenheit (opportunity), but I recovered quickly.

I bought the latest novel by a writer I’d never heard of on the Frankfurt Airport, seeing me reading it, the stewardess was eager to talk about it. The writer, Frank Schaetzing, is apparently the best-selling author in Germany, sort of the Tom Clancy of Schnitzelland. Since I hadn’t been back in 9 years, I’d never heard of him, but the stewardess had read several of his books, and raved about him. The story, oddly enough, starts off in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and follows a Hamburg-based female private detective tracking down a former mercenary from the Gulf War who is tracking down and killing the fellow mercenaries who betrayed him and left him for dead. It’s pretty good so far, and only once did I have to ask the stewardess to translate a word. I had guessed from context that it was some kind of box or bag, and her translation was “treasure chest.”


Being home in Texas, back in the civilian world, was strange. At first, it didn’t hit me, because I was so caught up with dealing with my father’s passing. But as I got ready to return, I realized sharply the difference in the two worlds I was transiting through.

For two months, I had been surrounded by people who know exactly what their mission is, and do it without questioning. Discipline, respect, dignity and pride abounded.

Suddenly, I was back in airports and restaurants with the undisciplined, the unmotivated, the disrespectful. Naturally, it was a bit of a culture shock.

To the limited extent I was able to visit with friends, that too was great, but there were too many friends, and too little time. So much of my time back home was spent helping my mother out at the farm or tending to urgent personal business. Add to that the fact that my cell phone – with my entire address book – was sitting in the bottom of a duffle bag in a shipping container in a Baghdad parking lot, and I was woefully out-of-touch.

Before I knew it, my short leave was over, and I was once again Iraq-bound.

The trip back was eventful. The flight to Kuwait was fairly easy, but things got messy after that. The Army picked us at the airport and put us on a couple of busses to a Kuwaiti Air Force Base. En route, my bus blew a tire.

Rather than stand there on the side of a highway in Kuwait, they transferred us all to the second bus – along with our gear. The rest of the ride was cramped, but I was ready to keep moving.
Movement, however, was not what the Army had in mind. Instead, I got another lesson – as if I needed one – into the crucial meaning of the Army term “Hurry Up and Wait.”

1:15 a.m. Arrive at Ali Al Salem Air Force Base. I was hoping to check in for the night, but then I was told to prepare to fly out as soon as a flight was available. Rushing over to get my body armor out of the storage facility, I was geared up and ready to go when they gave me the news about the flight:

3 a.m. No space available on first flight.

“Come back at 4,” the Air Force guy said.

I sat on what appeared to be recycled airport terminal furniture inside a tent that was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Outside, it was about 40 degrees Celsius.

4 a.m. No space available.

“Report back here at 6:30.”

The movie on the T.V. in the tent was “Back to the Future.” Then they played “I, Robot.” Now, it’s “Transformers.” I had to go outside and sweat in the heat just to avoid the murderous assault on my good taste.

And so it went. For the next day and a half, they kept stringing me along, mostly in spans of four hours or less – precluding almost entirely the idea of sleep. Each time, I was led to believe that it was only a matter of time before I’d be on a flight. Finally, I got some inside info that the next flight was booked and I skipped one of the roll calls. At the next one, I learned nothing had changed, but it allowed me to put together a space of five hours to sleep.

As I’ve learned on so many occasions, you need to catch sleep whenever you can. Sometimes you can’t. At Ali Al Salem, there is a constant rotation of people going in and out. Living in transient tents, you close your eyes only to have a new batch of people enter your tent, open up every zipper or Velcro thing they have, and talk loudly about how the Army, Navy and Air Force are screwing them (the Marines screw people too, but Marines simply say, “Thank you, Marine Corps for screwing my life up. Please, sir, beat me again!”).

Actually the best sleep I ever got during the whole 40 hour ordeal was a 1-hour stint, lying on the dusty, hard concrete on the flight line of a Kuwaiti Air Force base, leaned up against my backpack. Somehow, that one hour rejuvenated me more than four or five hours on a lumpy, sand- and sweat-smelling mattress at another Kuwaiti Air Force base.

Finally, I arrived in Baghdad, touching down at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) in the early morning. Stepping out the back of the C-130, the brutally-hot wash from the propellers burning me, hiking fast across the tarmac in my body armor and Kevlar helmet, with a pair of Blackhawk Helicopters streaking across the sky above, I thought how strange and surreal it was. Here I was, at the same place I had stood just over a month ago. Arriving into a war zone amid imposing signs of American power and control.

But between then and now stood a great chasm, a great void. I had been through some tough times, and I’d been through some simple, quiet, thoughtful moments. I had stood on the farm back home, looking up at the heavens, contemplating the crystal-clear, star-filled sky of Southwest Texas, and thinking back to the dreary, pollution-filled skies of Baghdad. I had walked in the depth of night from my workshop on the farm to the house, and had thought back to the bleak, pitch-black walk from my sandbag-lined tent to the showers back in Iraq.

Now, having returned, my perception of the surreal continued. As I returned to work, I rubbed my hands and felt the sharp pain in my finger. A painful, true reminder that yes, this had really happened. That yes, I had transited between these two worlds of mine. That these two lives that I’ve been living are not separate from each other – one a dream and one a reality – but in fact were separate threads of one ongoing existence. That in one exists James Aalan Bernsen, the guitar player, or consultant, or…farm worker, and in the other exists LTJG Bernsen, the Naval officer who’s never even been on a ship, but trudges around every day in this dusty, smelly place.

I get this feeling every day. How strange and odd it is that the two worlds should go on simultaneously, not the one waiting in stasis until I return to it, but moving on without me, as if my presence were entirely unnecessary.

I got it just yesterday, as I walked across the base, looking for an internet café so I could email my sister to ask her to check my mail. As I’m trudging through the sand and busted concrete, I hear the sounds of a gun battle in the distance – off to the East, towards downtown. I pick up my ears and judge it to be two to three miles. And then I put it out of my mind to concentrate on the greater worry: Is AT&T still charging me for my cell phone that I cancelled?

Both worlds do go on, I guess, though right now I have to live in this one, and keep my focus, keep my discipline – keep my situational awareness. Doing my job in this world, ultimately, is what will earn me a right to go back to the other one.