The Unexpected Beauty of War

The war in Iraq was ugly, but the country of Iraq was not. I’ve never seen a more perfect sunset than when I was in the turret of a gun truck. The horizon lamented the turmoil in the land with scarlet and crimson to a degree I may never see again. It’s as if she were mourning the loss of our humanity, all while reminding us of our insignificance in history. The same dirt Jonah and Abraham walked on now swirled in my Wiley x ballistic goggles.

In each convoy, I stayed hypervigilant and surveyed all that surrounded me. It was hard not to be enraptured by the beauty of antiquity. The date palms showcased their verdant greens, and the mosques proved that even humans could create beauty. Our buildings were beautiful, but our actions were not.

I saw blue-cheeked bee-eaters perched on concertina wire bordering fields of sunflowers in full bloom outside Balad. Who knew such tropical-looking birds existed in a place I was told to be a barren wasteland? Roadside blossoms showcasing eternal glory next to the ruins of a bombed village felt slightly poetic. Amid the scrublands were highlighter yellow Uromastyx lizards living in burrows, all while dining on the yellow flowers that bloomed in the spring.

The beauty was there and had been for time immemorial. My task was as a soldier, not a naturalist. Yet, I was only a soldier for a short time, and a naturalist I’ll always be. Old habits die hard. I spent the time I should have been sleeping gazing at more stars than I could count. I was awestruck by the same bedazzled sky that may have created the religion I now subscribe to. The reverence I felt on some of those nights was overwhelming. I would lie prone with flashlight in hand, watching harvester ants billow out of their sandy mounds late into the night. When the days are too hot, nature shifts nocturnal, which has always amazed me.

Splendor subsists even in places where horrors exist. It’s all a matter of perspective and the beauty of surviving to an introspective middle age. Things can always be worse, and sometimes we let the ugliness win, but beauty is always there if you only take a moment to notice. Sometimes, that small shift in focus is all it takes to change your outcome.