Life is, or I should say, my life, is often thrown off a bit from the path that I want or need to follow, the path that all signs say I should follow. Sometimes it seems that an unseen little organ grinder monkey is doing back-flips on my shoulder as its distracting little monkey screams sow doubt and hampers my confidence....but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Even here in desert there are some beautiful girls, both military and civilian. There are all types from all walks of life and from a million different countries and cultures, this place is an amazing melting pot. But when I see a beautiful girl somewhere, and she notices me, and then a few days later it happens again, and then a few days later AGAIN, the rusty wheels in my mind start to creak and slowly move until all of a sudden it clicks that maybe all of the eye contact made between us from across the chow hall or walking through the PX, it might just mean that she's interested in me.

Then the instincts start coming back. It sounds retarded but stay here long enough and maintain your standards, and you'll discover that one of the acute side effects is that you forget a lot of the normal rules of socializing with the opposite sex, the instincts get rusty and always kick too late thanks to the constant vigil of trying to maintain a professional bearing. Sometimes a girl will ask me why I address her as ma'am when she's amazingly cute and only 21. "Because you're carrying a machine gun, ma'am." Or a few years ago when a beautiful young captain spoke a few words that completely turned me on, I kid you not it went something like "...I need to move 6,000 lbs of C-4 and blasting caps up north, I spoke with your boss and he said that you're mine for the night..." Professional Pete. I hated me the next day, I prepped and moved three tons of plastic explosives on short notice for the hottest Army captain on Kandahar and instead of a phone number or her email address, I got an attaboy from my boss and another coin from some colonel to add to my collection.

But back to this beautiful girl. So Kandahar is a pretty big base, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20K+ folks but there is a lot of turnover as people come and go from all over this part of the country. But it's still a bit like a small town in that you see a lot of the same people around. I noticed this girl in a few different places and then she started noticing me. I saw her in the DFAC a couple of times and caught a hard time from some guys I was eating with for looking at her too much, but she was looking at me just as hard.

And then! I agreed to fly a mission for a sick coworker of mine, and as I'm sitting out at our little pax terminal at 4-something in the morning, I see my little Ms. Fantasy Girl come walking off the bus toting all of her lovely lady luggage. AND THEN! She's slated to fly on my bird!

So what does dumbass Pete do? I did everything BUT look at her the entire flight. I spent 3 hours before she got off talking about stupid sports stuff with one guy, critiquing movies with another, pretending to read a book, looking out the window, and trying to act like I was dozing off behind my sunglasses. So finally we land at her base and everyone is standing up in the chopper and trying to grab their luggage from under the net as the engines and rotors are screaming. As she comes down the stairs, I reached up and helped her with her bags and she looked at me with a slightly confused and disgusted look as over all the noise I stammer, "Hey....um....so have fun and don't work too hard! We'll see you in 4 months when we get you for R&R!" Her eyes were even more beautiful up close!

And it was only then as I see her walking away that I suddenly notice the friggin monkey on my shoulder laughing his furry ass off as it all suddenly hit me what an idiot I am. Let me ignore the pretty girl who's been smiling at me all week, let me try to act all macho doing whatever stupid Pete thing I was doing and just let her sit there and then walk off...sometimes I hate this place and all of the excuses that I make for myself here haha.