For Freedom

           Fighting a war in the desert is not ideal. The air is dry and hot. The sting of the wind-swept sand forces me to cover up from head to toe causing my skin to boil underneath. By the end of each shift I’m completely soaked with sweat and covered in sand. I think I’m losing water faster than I’m taking it in. I have no choice on the matter, though. We get a gallon each every two days. We all want to complain but we don’t. Those who do are considered weak. I can’t look weak out here. No one can afford to look weak after challenging the status quo like we did. That’s when everything falls apart. We can’t let this revolution fall apart. If it does, we die.

            That’s the problem with a revolution. If we win we’re considered heroes. If we lose we’re guilty of treason, and there is no such thing as humane treatment for traitors in Libya. We understand these consequences, and that’s why losing is not an option. It’s freedom or death.

            We are stationed here as the first line of defense for our stronghold in Benghazi, a port city on the coast of the Mediterranean, east of Tripoli. The only problem is that we’re short on defense. There are only three soldiers occupying the outpost at a time. We have one fifty-caliber machine gun on top of a small hill where we stand guard and an artillery cannon hitched to the back of a jeep just in case things get out of hand. Both guns face south into the desert. We dug a small trench into the north side of the hill where two of us sleep while the third man stands guard. We tacked up two pieces of red cloth over the trench and the guard post to provide us with some protection from the sun. Each team occupies the post for a week at a time and then moves to another location. We’ve been running low on men so this is our ninth day out here. I’ve also noticed that the rations are becoming smaller and fewer in between. Everyone is asking themselves the same thing: “What the hell are we doing out here?” but no one dares to ask out loud. We don’t say much at all actually. Everyone talks of brotherhood in the city, but out here there is no talking. There’s nothing to talk about. We all miss our families, we’re all hungry, hot, and tired. We don’t need to talk about that. All we have are our complaints, so we keep to ourselves. We can’t look weak.

            It’s my shift. The ground is flat and empty, giving my eyes nothing to focus on, nothing to direct my attention to. As the days go by I notice that I am becoming more and more introverted. Not out of fear, but because my time is spent waiting in silence. I just sit at the guard post on top of the hill and stare at that thin line where the desert meets the sky. I watch it squiggle from the rising heat. Nothing is coming, but all it takes is a single moment.

            Last time something came, I had only been here for two days. I was on duty for only an hour. I looked down to unzip my pants for a piss. As I brought my eyes back up to the horizon I saw three vehicles dancing in the heat as they approached our tiny outpost. They turned out to be our supply envoy but I had no idea at the time. After all, they were coming from the south. Before I could finish my business I jumped to the gun, pants to ankles, spraying bullets the size of my index finger in their direction. I let out a constant single-note yell over the deafening clamor of the gun. If they had been loyalists my actions would have been called heroic.

            They were still far enough out that the metal hailstorm I created fell a few yards in front and to the left of them. Having heard their screams for cease-fire on the radio, the two other soldiers tackled me to the ground. By the time it was said and done I had sand all over my piss-soaked clothes, a quasi-heart attack, an angry supply envoy, and the first sense of how confusing war can be.

            I was ashamed. I try my best to forget that day, but nothing else has happened since. I look out on the horizon in the hopes to find something, anything to take my mind off of all of my regrets. Perhaps our envoy is coming a day earlier. I can wave to them this time and prove that I have some self-control. There’s nothing. All I can see is sand. There is sand everywhere. It’s in our hair, our beards, our clothes, our noses, and our shoes, its everywhere. For as far as I can see there is sand. It’s in our food and our water. It has become part of our diet. I lived in Benghazi before the protests began just over six months ago. I knew that I was living in a country made up almost entirely of sand, but I guess I never really paid it much thought.

             I am a light-skinned Sunni from the city. I had never held a gun before in my life. I walked on concrete, took cabs, and lived in an air-conditioned apartment with my mother and brother. I dropped out of school a few years back and worked as a waiter in the restaurant of the Tibesti Hotel. I could still have that life right now had I not been sucked into the romance of fighting for my country. It was my brother that dragged me into this, kind of. He had just graduated from the Libya International Medical University. He was always the political one. He had such a self-righteous attitude. “Don’t you care about your country?” he would ask urgently. “I don’t own Libya.” I would reply with an arrogant smile. But as the days went by the crowds in the streets grew bigger. On the television I could see hundreds of thousands of people gathering in Tripoli.

            It was March 18^th, 2011 and my brother asked once more if I would join him in the streets. Maybe it was that all my friends were already down there or the threat of a pending attack by the loyalists was circulating, but for whatever reason I said yes. I drank the juice. All of the sudden I valued abstract ideals like democracy and freedom. I was drunk with nationalism. I was ready to march to Tripoli and assassinate Gaddafi myself. It started with chants and picket signs. The next day the loyalists attacked and our signs were replaced with rocks, guns, sticks, anything. We acted instinctively, attacking when we could and then retreating into the back alleys. Eventually that nationalism we felt turned into fiery hate, hate for anyone who disagreed with us. I couldn’t tell who was changing. Was it I or everyone else? Was I becoming more defensive or were the loyalists becoming more aggressive?

           It was terrible now that I look back on it. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to do anything I could to help our struggle. I think it was that attitude that landed me here. No one wanted this post, and I was an eighteen-year-old kid fantasizing about front line combat. I was determined to be the one to kill Gaddafi. The two other soldiers on my team were the exact same way. Maybe that’s why we didn’t really get along. In a way we just wanted to be war heroes. If the other succeeded, it was at the cost of the other two. At least that’s how I saw it. Gaddafi was a war hero. I wonder if he ever felt like us. Were we like him? We hated him, how could we be like him? What if they sent us out here not because we were needed, but because we were unpredictable? Did they think we were like him? We did some pretty ruthless things back in Benghazi, but we weren’t the only ones. It’s scary the things people can do in the name of freedom.