Midnight Plane to Georgia

I have Georgia on my mind…
I am to report to Emory, Atlanta and then I will be on my way. Georgia invokes songstress Glady’s Knight’s ode to a lover gone back South in a midnight train. That song was played to death on Radio 3’s vintage afternoons back in the 1980’s, and I was captivated by it, a boy of 13 and knowing nothing at all about love. In more recent times, I hear Ray Charles crooning…

Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

But whether what’s on Ray’s mind is the deep south State of the United States which has seen it’s fair share of human (or perhaps inhuman) suffering, or maybe another lover gone away, I am not sure. But I am headed out there.
I board the flight from Washington Dulles, having arrived that morning from Cape Town. I sit next to a gentleman from Florida and soon we are engaged in pleasantries and a conversation. He tells me that he is in the military and has served with Africom in Kenya and the Congo. Africom is the US African Command Centre which Robert Mugabe has railed against in the past because it was to relocate to Botswana and was seen as part of the regime change moves by the Americans back in 2007. Then we talk about Africa and other things of no consequence.
The flight is going well enough when we are told that there is a storm coming in from Atlanta and that there will be a delay. A few minutes later the captain informs we will have to land at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and wait for the seemingly vicious storm to pass. Raleigh ironically will be my final destination but I have to report to my hosts first. We disembark and it soon becomes apparent that we may be there indefinitely. I am exhausted, now clocking over 24 hours since departing South Africa. I pace up and down, restless to get to my destination and a warm meal, a bath and a bed.
I sit down in the departure lounge and strike up a conversation. He is a young man, a boy actually, chubby and his skin is more orange than black. His eyes are a strange blue-green, a testimony to the diversity in his cultural gene pool. In America, black is less a racial hegemony and more a state of mind, perhaps. Obama has recently called the black race in America, a “mongrel race”, all shades of chocolate if you like – from shiny ebony black (count me there!) to dark all the way to light brown, caramel and almost white. Here be more colours to black than black!
The young man tells me that he is in the army, and I am taken aback. He has done the rotation to Afghanistan and will be back there later on in the year. I look at him, there tapping on his laptop and fiddling with is iphone, a normal young man not much unlike others ambling around pants drooping here in this airport. His gentle mien belies the things he has seen and done out there in the war fields. He is but a boy, 22 years of age with a girlfriend waiting at the airport for him to drive him home to his mother.
Are you not afraid when you are out there, I ask.
He shrugs the question off, and I feel awkward asking him something so personal. But I know he must shake in his boots when he is in Taliban country fighting a war he probably doesn’t understand or care too much about. But it’s the military code and bravado which keep him from answering. It’s a job with a high premium being in the American military.
As the year unfolds and I get more and more immersed in American society, I am hit by the staggering realization that this is in fact a country at war; and it has been at war for every decade since World War Two, having been bombed out of isolationism by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Young men and women, many of then still unable to legally smoke, drink or drive, are sent to war where and given the licence to kill and / or die for America. I think there is a song about that from some anti-war pacifist rocker, but maybe I am wrong; perhaps there ought to be one.
As of July 2010, 4500 Americans have been killed in Iraq and 1200 in Afghanistan. Lest we forget, the number of civilian casualties in both wars is well over 1 million lives. Whatever the justification of the wars, the bloodletting goes on everyday and not one week passes without a reminder to the tragedy of war. On Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news television (aka American ZBC but without the “Comrade X urged…” or sycophancy) once a week they have a silent memorial to the dead soldiers. Every one of them gets a final 15 seconds of fame with their photos, age and city of origin panned across the TV screen. They are mostly young men touching 20 or 21, white, Hispanic and black, and in their photos they are appear relaxed, clean cut and professionally attired in well-starched uniforms, a flag in the background – a picture of true patriotism.
Sometimes in that sad silence of flashing photographs of the dead, I think about that chubby, polite young man, blue-green eyes and near orange skin tone and I wonder if he is not this one or that one on the nightly newscast. Then I pray for his safety, because he is just a boy in the killing fields – a grist to the mill of war.