I guess...

There are times when I don't know where I am, or what I'm doing. I feel lost. I feel like I've been stuck in a time warp, or a freeze-framed photograph, and that I'm the only one who's confused.

It's getting better, but there are times when I wish that I'd done more, and taken better pictures and just been a better soldier while in Iraq. We went to the National Aquarium, and from there to the Maritime Museum in the Baltimore Harbor. The USS Constellation is there, as well as the USS Torsk, and Coast Guard Lightship #116 (Chesapeake).

The USCG cutter Taney is also permanently berthed there. The Taney was one of the only ships to actually be in fighting condition just after the attack at Pearl Harbor, and she served from the start of WWII to the middle of the Cold War, undergoing several refits and modifications to reflect her different missions.

I guess that's probably incidental, since the Taney isn't really what sparked my introspection, and to some degree, self-loathing. The photographs in the WWII/Okinawa memorial were, though. Those photographs are...amazing. They're raw and painful and horrible, and I wish I'd taken them.

It's hard to put into words what that desire is. It might be considered ghoulish, since I want to be there to take pictures of horrific things. It might be considered psychopathic, since I'd willingly put myself in harm's way to document that harm, and the aftermath, but I don't really think of it as either.

The old cliche is "a picture is worth a thousand words" and that's true. Good photographs can convey so much without a single written character. They can convey slices of life that can never be duplicated, or recreated and I want to be there to see that, I want to be good enough to convery the horror or the joy, or the pride, or the anger, to someone who can't be there, or who doesn't have the courage the men and women I serve alongside.

I can't begin to explain it any better than that. I can't begin to explain the need to show the world what it is that I've seen. What it is that I saw when I walked along with patrols and young men from every corner of America. I want to be able to show the sadness, the joy, the pain, the rewards, above all the absolutely amazing face of our soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen.

I wish that I had the skill to capture some of the things I saw, and I wish, every day that I'd had more opportunity to go out and document the struggles and heartache and the brotherhood that I was priviledged enough to be a part of, even if only for a few minutes and even with the distance of the lens.