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Tossing and Turning

I forgot that a return to print meant a return to those 3 a.m. wake-ups -- the sort that turn your mind on like a switch, and set it running through everything you wrote. It always finds something to feast on.

In this case, as my second column was already rolling off the presses, it was the fact that I described listening to' 70s Rolling Stones with Tony McCloskey, just back from Afghanistan. Accurate, but in the interest of shorting an already long sentence, I missed the opportunity to give a detail that would help build this portrait of nursing a beer with a sensitive, salty sort - a South Philly guy who'd just done a very intense year based at Bagram Airbase.

The album was Black and Blue. We were listening to "Hand of Fate," among other things.

Couldn't you have worked that in Hemingway?

So No. 2 has landed, the second in this month-long series of metro column try-outs. I bought that beer for the sailor who served as a soldier in Afghanistan and blogged about it so strongly. Wrote about him once in Blinq. Promised him a beer, since it seemed like he wasn't getting enough props from the homefront. He turned out to be a very good man.

You can read his unfiltered look at the front at his blog.

My piece is here. And printed in full, so you don't have to go digging through our Web site for it:

..................................

Daniel Rubin | Discovering what 'courage' means

By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Columnist

At night, inside the wire at Bagram Air Base, Tony McCloskey dreamed of falling - falling down steps, falling off a narrow mountain pass.

And when awake, he couldn't push away the fear that just as his tour in Afghanistan was ending, he'd get blown up or shot.

He wrote this on his blog, called "War In the Sandbox," where he tried to understand how anyone back home could think those who serve should be ashamed of what they had done.

"How easy it has become to send men into harm's way," he wrote. "It takes nerve to blame us for it."

Someone owes this guy a beer, I wrote on my own site, which was how Tony and I wound up spending a few hours at Chickie's & Pete's in Wissinoming the other night, nursing black and tans, listening to 1970s Rolling Stones, and talking about the land he calls "the Bible with Toyotas."

McCloskey, 29, is a berm of a man - short, low, immovable with a round face, shaved head, and a physique hardened by dead weights and six-mile runs.

The year 1386

"Nothing can prepare you," says the Navy fire controlman. "In Afghanistan, it's the year 1386. You can read about poverty, desolation and hunger, but until you see it..."

For a year and a day he was shot at, mortared, cheered and jeered as he served in an Army special operations division, trying to win the hearts of the Afghan people from the Taliban.

Ask for a high point, and he tells of the time he delivered 1,000 kites to the children of Kabul, and watched their joy as they rushed his vehicle.

A low point: the day he lost $70 worth of books in a desert rain.

McCloskey is not an easy man to peg. Over the course of the evening he will share that he's a deist, a libertarian, a Central High grad who at age 10 dreamed of being a master chief, the Navy's highest enlisted rank. He comes from a long line of sailors, and speaks of standing up for one's beliefs, of making a difference.

With the Army stretched thin by Iraq, the South Philly sailor was picked to serve with soldiers in a special operations unit.

Somehow, upon their return the soldiers got counseling and the sailors didn't.

Two days after landing, McCloskey was back in Philadelphia. He'd be driving his Dodge Nitro truck, see a plastic bag in the street, and swerve as though it were an IED. He handed his girlfriend the wheel after realizing he was jerking away from other cars on the highway, bracing for explosions.

"Any noise, and I'm ready to fight someone," he says. Three weeks of leave have helped. At first, he stayed with his girlfriend, a grad student in nursing at Penn. But he felt like a visitor, he says. She had managed without him. So he found an apartment in Northeast Philadelphia to share with his niece and Morris, a fat tabby cat.

He's starting to sleep through the night.

Finding peace in war

"I had to go to war to discover peace," he says. "Before I went in, I guess, I was an angry guy. Some part of me was a little bitter, felt I got a raw deal. I grew up poor. I've never been that good-looking. When I went over, I saw real problems and what anger can produce."

The experience has left him with a new definition of courage: "It's not an absence of fear. That's insanity. I was always scared. Courage is not letting the fear get the best of you.

"At the same time, I don't feel it's courageous just to go with the status quo. I think people need to stand up for what they believe in, to try to make a difference. A lot of times in the military that isn't career-enhancing, but I tend to do that."

He has been assigned to an admiral's staff at a naval supply center in the Northeast, where he's looking forward to wearing a tie. Soon he must choose whether to reenlist for another 10 years.

He's leaning toward it. We can use the sort of serviceman who reads up on the Taliban, al-Qaeda and kite running before shipping out to a foreign land.

I just wish we could take better care of him.