Trevor at the will to exist:

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmingly fatigued. My body has been demanding a lot of sleep but even when I sleep 12 hours, my sleep isn’t deep enough to leave me feeling refreshed. Life seems to be passing in a blur, and every day blends together.

The background harmonies here are always the same. In the distance, explosions make dull thumps. Nearby, sirens wail constantly. Helicopters fly low over our hooches, vibrating me in my bed and making the roof, floor and walls shake momentarily as two or three Blackhawks fly by a few feet overhead. When you add these noises to the karoake parties that are held outdoors at night, it’s sometimes still very surreal after three months in theater.

I sleep restlessly in this place. Something is always waking me back up as soon as I drop off. Even when I am wearing my noise canceling headphones, something always shakes the hooch as I’m dropping off or going into REM sleep and forces me back into alertness. The only thing that seems to help is working out to the point of exhaustion. Once I’m sufficently drained, my body shuts down and allows me the rest I need. Despite this, I feel tired all the time. I think I’m tired of living in a sea of concrete and metal surrounded by a city that seems to be filled with madmen. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for common Iraqis. [. . .]

It’s well past time for Iraqi leaders to put aside their real and petty differences and all start pulling together. It’s time to root out the evil sociopaths among the various factions so the sentences of life in Iraq will no longer have death and war as their punctuation marks. I’m ready to sleep soundly again, and I hope most Iraqis will be too in the near present future.
 

Columnist William F. Buckley says the war in Iraq is lost. . . .

I’d like to know what he proposes we do. Should we abandon the country like we did in Vietnam? Leave everyone who cooperated with the coalition to their fate? Let the country devolve and destabilize further? Let the evil men run the show?

If Iraq was a patient in a hospital and you were the doctor you certainly wouldn’t say, “We’ve lost,” and go play a round of golf, at least not if you were an ethical man. I think Iraq is a lot like a very sick and delirious patient who hasn’t been properly restrained and is banging his head against the wall repeatedly. Sure, the medical team can just give up and say “nothing we’ve tried has worked.” But that would be plain wrong and the patient would eventually severely injure or kill himself. What’s your prescription, Dr. Buckley? I am over here with 130,000 others, waiting to find out.