MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA (SEPT 2007-JAN 2009)

“Once you face death, once you overcome your fears, then you are free to live.* These are the lessons that I've learned....

I will martyr myself with my words so that you may understand, and I may heal.* It would have been simply easier to have died a hero’s death in Turki Village than to wrestle with the demons in my head.* I’ve died over and over again in Iraq.* My bird was shot down in Ramadi.* My tank crashed is As Samawa.* An RPG got me in Baghdad.* Indirect fire struck me in Balad.* A suicide bomber destroyed me in Baqubah.** The grenade got me in Turki Village.* The sniper hit his mark in Zaganiyah.* The moments flash through my mind again and again.*

They brought me home on the C-17, draped my coffin with the American flag, and laid me to rest in Arlington.* The motorcycle boy’s rode in, and some fanatical religious left wing group protested the war.* My friends flew in from all around the world, cried at the funeral, and headed to the pub for beers.* They drank throughout the night in memoriam.* “Mike was such a good dude,” they cried in their heightened state of inebriationated awareness.* They would mourn, remember, and dance.* It would be beautiful.* I’ve replayed this time and time again in my head.*

In the end, there would simply be a grave marker that Taylor Elizabeth Few would eventually visit and wonder who her daddy was.

Physically, I did not die.*

-Considerations on my own death in Iraq