Started innocently enough with PT. My ankle gimped up on me when i rucked yesterday morning. I've been waking early on Tuesdays and skipping formation so I can add some extra miles (or stairs on a climber at the gym) but yesterday I just...ugh. Last time i pushed my ankle was the last 20 miler, and it put me out for a week and a half.

So I promised myself to lay off the ~5 mile run today at the first sign of ankle trauma. There was none.

Work...some miscellanious tasks finally completed and swept aside and then...nothing...

until 1400 when I'm told I have to be at this Family Advocacy "thing" in an hour. I grumble about it...family advocacy is a command thing, not a JAG thing...but I say I'll go. (my thinking is I'll just sit there and soak up whatever information it is and keep myself informed...) It turned out to be something COMPLETELY aside from what I expected...

"Sexual Misconduct". 

One of my soldiers has a child from another marriage that shows signs of sexual molestation. The entire family has a history of problems--the mom, the husband, both children...

sigh

No-one wants to point fingers until a doctor sees the poor child...but deep in my heart I know the truth. It sickens me...I haven't gotten it out of my head. I can't put into words the way it makes me feel. Disgusted, horrified, frightened, burdened, and mournful...these adjectives only scratch the surface.

My heart hurts. My head hurts.

I had a dive planned today and I went straight to the scheduled meet up after this..."family advocacy thing". I was hoping the time down there would settle me out a bit. The forced breath control, slowing your body down to conserve oxygen...it's like meditation...

My last dive felt...different. Tonight, skipping into the waves just as dusk came on...it felt WHOLY different. There was a bit of a current we had to push through but even still...it shouldn't have produced the waxy, soup like feel I got from Mother Ocean.

sigh

Just before I surfaced I happened upon a huge school of Bat fish...From close up they looked angelic, young, innocent...it was unsettling.

So many things have finally gone right in my world...and now I'm drawn into something that shocks me back into the cynical and disgusting reality I have always known. It makes me tie this new reality into my fantasy world and see the fantasy from a new angle. It paints a dark and evil cloud in paradise.

All the petty things of late like a dissatisfaction with my recent role in the unit...so horribly replaced, so horribly, horrible replaced by my duty to know. 

I don't want to know. I don't want to see. I just want to go on living these last few precious days over and over and over again.

But I can't. Who I am dictates that I must not. What I do mandates that I follow this to the end.

My heart cries as I think of children...so innocent, undeserving, full of life, possibilities, freedom, and future...cruely stolen. These children, other children...our future. 

current mood: horrified
current music: Over the Rhine _Films for Radio_  

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