that is where eubank got hit. that is the third truck bomb in that neighborhood this week. they reminded us of each call. the calls come all day and night. rockets in the morning and car bombs all afternoon. in between prayer time and after dinner as darkness sets in, after curfew when all average citizen should be home snug in their beds. only trouble awaits on patrol. trey said it's not a daintily sleep. sometimes when the calls pileup you can go from yesterday to tomorrow and never get to sleep. don wake up to tepid mushy oatmeal. hardened hamburgers on drysdale funds for the reg of afternoon suicide car bomb downtown, in the school or playstation. the weekly serving of a suspicious looking white trash bag call them buy a house or hauser petrova turns out to be nothing. midnight shower, rubbery pancakes and endless drive out and back at 20 miles per hour to a cell phone multi-frequency decoder board set up discovered by long-haul convoy in the dark and distant desert, gone. wreck for so spicy sausage patties and cold ama to take down of weapons cache, more hardened hambu

eubanks slipped on a hugh hefner silk robe. took a seat to wait with a cup of specially-prepared fancy coffee. jeter pored over supply inventories and complained that no one completed their paperwork right. mitchell and fisk smoked and joked the minutes away. i endlessly read reports, wrote reports, rewrote reports and justified not having to write reports. ill filled the time -- it filled the time between phone calls. the ops desk, continuously manned, existed simply to answer that phone for a call. sometimes there was a warning of a call, thunder in the distance on a clear day, a black cloud hanging over the city. usually we were not so fortunate. monotony, a string of tasks, the long wait and then, piercing the quiet, a ring. the ring. time to go on a call. if i close my eyes now and let my mind drift, i can see every ritualized movement, every inch of concrete crossed, every step between my desk and the waiting armored truck. the papers thumb tacked next to the phone, the computer that prints maps of the location of each ca