Camouflage Travel

I have the privilege of writing again from my favorite place: the airport. Today as I sit in the Denver airport a thousand thoughts fly through my mind, with or without destination. With or without a place to land. I sat upstairs and ate my dinner while drinking a paper cup of jasmine green tea (thank you Target) and watched the rest of my fellow travelers walk by, always familiar, always strangers. Today, the airport was full of soldiers. They’re coming home for Christmas from wherever they have been in the world. Their families, wives, children, parents, girlfriends, and best friends will be waiting for them when they get home. And, after 20 days or so, most of them will leave again.

The aim of my blog at this point is not to express my opinion. I will not pretend to be learned enough to have something to say on every issue, and even if I do I will not be so presumptuous to think I have all the answers, or that I am anywhere near done forming my opinion on life. My views on the military have changed drastically in the last years. But, let us shed the mask of politics. I want to say what I see. Moving through the Denver International airport, I saw very few grown men. I saw so many young boys. Young ambitious boys, dedicated perhaps, lost maybe. And it doesn’t really matter which side of the issue we fall on at this point, because what I see are their faces. And I really wish I could give you a look at the photograph that is etched in my mind of this young soldier sitting alone on the floor of the airport. His eyes follow the people who pass, flitting from traveler to traveler. He wanders back and forth in front of our gate. As my mind replays the words of Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States, I think about our government and I think about the ambitions and missions of the empires of the past. I watch us fight what seems to be the same wars over and over…. And I see it in the eyes of this soldier.

But I watch camaraderie form between strangers as more soldiers join this one in front of our gate, and see fraternity that has been developed between them since the first day of boot camp, despite whether or not they knew each other before this moment in time. And, there is something that we all long for in finding a brother in every place we go. I sit and watch them smile and pace, waiting to be off the ground. And I desperately want to shed the presuppositions and the politics and instead see stories. Why is it that we have clumped people into groups and prejudices so that we can more easily dismiss their humanity and assert our beliefs? Our very nation was founded on our efficiency in this area. If the land was “given to us by God,” it is simply righteousness which drove us to destroy the humanity and value of the Indians and claim that the earth held its destiny in the hands of our empire. What will it take to strip our eyes clean so that we no longer look at people and see a philosophical stance or membership to a movement, but the face of a human being, a child of God, a design, with innate not assigned value? I begin now, thinking that the first question I would like to ask this soldier is, “If you could build a house, where would it be and why?” Stories are the angles in which our existence takes place and they long to be told, bursting forth from the one dimensional plane of acquaintanceship into the deep, complex, and multidimensional planes of personhood and friendship.