Over the last two weeks, I have been doing some training with another unit. It was a good experience for me, and I learned a lot of things. One thing has stuck in my mind a lot, and it dose not have anything to do with the training, but with the flight home. In Iraq, especially in Baghdad, almost every day the smog layer was think and toxic looking over the sky. Some days as you watched the sun rise you could tell when it was above the smog because there would be a very clear difference between the lower part of the sun and the upper. It was disgusting! One of the things I loved thinking about was coming home and taking lots of nice deep breaths of our beautiful pristine air.
I may have been romanticizing it a bit.
On the flight back to our facility, we flew at a fairly high altitude to try and keep clear of some weather at ground level. As I looked out over the expanse that was laid out below me, I was also looking out. I saw that brown smudge, like a dirty footprints on a clean white floor. It was traced across the sky tainting that glorious view, an ugly reminder of my trip overseas. It also makes me wonder. We were flying over some very lightly populated areas. What is it like over New York City, or LA? What else are we not seeing from the ground? Why is my Carolina blue sky stained and dirty. I thought that the government was supposed to be fixing that, and preventing it from getting worse. I guess I was wrong. It breaks my heart to see that despite all of the government agencies, we still have that brown cloud floating over our heads like a hornets nest on a tree branch.
I will not stop loving the air here, but the next time I see another day like today, I will probably remember the smell of the dirty wind and two shades of the sun and wonder when it will happen here as well.
