You never know what it is you know

[aadler]

Just 20 years ago now, I came back from my first Iraq tour. We staged back through Fort Bragg, and I learned that demobilization takes less time than mobilizing for theater, but it isn’t exactly quick. Finally it was done, and a flight was arranged to take my unit home.

For some reason, one of our guys elected to drive instead. And for some reason, I chose to go with him. Because there were two of us, we had no problem trading off time behind the wheel, and the others got back to our home state quicker than we did, but we made it to our own homes faster because we were able to go directly there instead of staging through the unit HQ.

His city was closer, so he got out there and I proceeded on to mine. Once I had arrived, I went to call on my mother. The subject of my return trip came up, and I indicated that I’d come through on a straight shot from Fort Bragg. She stared at me and asked, “When did you sleep?”

Actually, the other guy had driven while I slept, with him doing his own rest when I took over. I hadn’t actually mentioned that we’d been driving together, though, and she clearly thought I’d made the drive by myself. I paused a second while all this was going through my mind, and then I said dismissively, “Sleep is for the weak.”

I’d gone into the Army Reserve at … um, a relatively advanced age … after a life of no particular hardship, and did it for the express purpose of going to war, and now I was back from that. Ever after that comment, my mother went on and on about how much I had changed, and I’m pretty sure most of it was because of something I said off the cuff, almost as a joke, and simply never bothered to correct.

She didn’t know there was something she didn’t know, and yes, that was mainly because I failed to be entirely forthcoming (and did so purely because the whole thing was funny to me). Still, her view of an entire section of reality was less than accurate because she lacked pertinent information, and that makes me wonder just how many things I might be missing because something I don’t know I don’t know stands in the way of that.

Mostly, though, I still remember that because I still think it’s funny.