Snowflakes and Shrapnel.

I was at the bookstore today, just browsing. I found a book, I don't remember the title, but it was about a soldier in Afghanistan who's job was to train the soldiers of the newly formed Afghan Army. I guess it was a blog he wrote that he published after coming home from a yearlong tour in Afghanistan. I found it extremely interesting, the detail he put into his writings. His writings had a lot of acronyms, military talk that I had to keep referring back to earlier pages to understand what he was talking about. Whenever I read about soldier's experiences in war, it always gets me thinking. About how their lives change heavily after going through war, combat, losses, and traumatizing experiences. Another book that I love that also is about a war experience is the book Jarhead by Anthony Swofford. I have to admit that I watched the movie first before I read the book. I must say that I enjoyed the book a lot more. Anyway, back to the earlier book, through all his accounts of training the new soldiers, he also had a lot of photos. Two photos stuck out for me. One was of a mountain range covered in snow. Whenever I see or hear about the soldiers fighting in some foreign land, I always picture a desert wasteland with dilapidated buildings, fires constantly burning, gunfire, explosions, and innocent civilians running for cover. Seeing that photo of those mountains covered in snow, somehow transformed my entire outlook. What they show us on the news isn't the entire picture, I know that, but just realizing that the war is constantly ongoing while we all sit here in our own country taking it for advantage makes me feel a little uneasy. I don't support war at all, but there are many soldiers out there right now who would love to be sitting in their own home, typing on their laptop, listening to music, and just being as far away from the carnage of war as they can. But...they're not. They're out there far from home and fighting a war that no one has a interest in anymore. So why are they over there? I don't know. The second photo was of a suicide bomber. All it showed was a blast impact and some pieces of his body scattered across a desert road.