5

23JUN2009
　
(working alone in the connex, inventorying the ACU draw. There is a breeze and being out here is enjoyable.)
Usually when I’m working alone in the connex I’m slinging heavy boxes and totes and the mind goes silent and the how is strong.
This time with all the numbers and detail work or the ACU draw, my mind wandered all over the place and the How was weak .. I sold myself short .. I most enjoy physical work, working with wood, working on my car, playing sports in Kentucky, going on missions – I just thought I couldn’t do them, or wasn’t allowed them. I sold myself short, going in the direction of logistics, support, and not infantry.
__________
　
24JUN2009
　
K____’s been moved to a line Platoon. If he didn’t think he was better than me before, then he definitely thinks so now. I don’t understand it. Secretly I think it’s because I wasn’t _cool_ enough.
The dusk was the same as that evening coming back from the gym in God‘s Country. I felt the same, too. I sold myself short. No wonder I was numb. All along I was me and throughout those years I thought I was what they said I was.
Losing K____, makes me think of all my other losses, Great Losses, during eighteen years of Horrific.
Last night I waited out at the maintenance yard til one a.m. for the Logpack to come in. A pretty girl was friendly with me and kept keeping her eye on me. I was cool, unfazed. I must already know I’m Good.

I was working out, and realized I was over it. The end of the friendship just stopped f-cking with me, altogether.
After the workout I went back to our room and took down the partition I had set up to make the room into two rooms. K____ woke up, I told him I wasn’t angry anymore. He began to argue. I just took it.
When K____ suddenly changed into a cocky, arrogant version of himself, I was so frustrated by the change, by the deteriorating friendship, by the inevitable end to the friendship, I became so frustrated and angry, those days seemed like a blur in my mind, and I wanted to know my crimes, so I let him tell me.
He said I just stopped talking to him and that that was wrong. He said the idea that I could ever get in my head that he thought he was better than me was insulting, and he didn’t need a friend who could think that of him. He said I was full of shit. He went on.
He seemed genuine. In that way he was telling the truth. He comes from a different culture than me, where trust and distrust aren’t the end-all, make-all, in friendships. In his mind I had over reacted.
But I wasn’t. Which is the problem. Things are not simple. I was genuine. I was Tough, and handled things appropriately, according to the rules of my culture, which meant he could only be full of shit.

I ate chow with Doc Wood__ afterwards. I was disconcerted from K____’s lashing out at me. I told Wood__ my crime. How I had come from a bad place, where if a friend suddenly changed, distrust and the end of the friendship was absolutely appropriate, it was required for survival.
I told him K____ had gotten cocky, had stopped talking openly like he used to, that conversation with him was difficult and awkward. I thought I was taking the hint, leaving the friendship.
K____ thought I was crazy to suddenly be leaving. Wood__ talked about himself mostly, but I know he’s a little crazy, and means well.
People who like K____, and even envy my place as his friend, say he can be arrogant, and kind of a jerk. I wouldn’t have thought that, I had never noticed it before.
It did make me feel better, made me feel less crazy, when Wood_’s first guess about why we were arguing was that K____ could be arrogant.

Though it seems off-subject, the problems in the friendship seem to somehow stem from my not respecting my story.
I try so hard to put it behind me it didn’t occur to me to respect it. K____’s story is in sharp contrast to mine, and is full of coolness: elementary school, highschool, college, and a running successfulness throughout.
Mine is void of those entitlements, is full of struggle, not success, but the sheer Toughness of kids like me, the sheer Toughness of it was cool.
Reckoning with the whole world all at once, from the moment I was born; doesn’t get much Tougher than that.
It’s like K____’s culture only has Insecurity and Confidence, it has no use for Toughness, for uncertainty, for the unknown, for standing in the middle of storm that you don’t understand, you don’t know what it means, you don’t know where it comes from, you’re just doing your best.