Heavy sleeper|Joseph Petersen

I didn’t sleep much through my junior high years, at least not at night. I dosed in and out during classes, but at night I rarely got more than three or four hours of sleep. I would lie in bed hoping sleep would come, trying to turn off my constant river of thought and internal dialogue, but when sleep didn’t come I would read. This became a pattern for me into high school. Then, other activities cut in to my reading time as interests changed, girls, computer games, friends, late night TV, and girls predominately. I recall coming home at four one Thursday morning just in time to read a little and get an hour of sleep before school. My parents were recently devoiced, so former rules were relaxed or all together ignored. While I was in high school, I also learned a technique for shutting down my mind, so I could get to sleep whenever I choose. But, Habits being what they are, I rarely choose to until I joined the army. They I used the technique nearly every night.

I most appreciated this ability when I was unexpectedly sent to a base called Asadabad. It was in a beautiful green valley in the high desert mountains of the Hindu Kush range in north eastern Afghanistan, foothills leading into the Himalayas. The base held about three hundred soldiers, about thirty percent of whom were in the Afghan Army. I had been sent to support a mission with a little less than thirty minuets of notice. About an hour after my gear was thrown unceremoniously from a Blackhawk, with me only half an instant behind, (the pilots in a hurry to be somewhere else); the artillery began firing at the hills. Working in aviation I hadn’t been around Howitzers much, and never when they fired. Everything shakes when those big guns fire. My room/shop was about ninety yards from the nearest Howitzer, and when that gun fired everything shook. It even shakes you a little bit. I had come with a few brand new guys. They had only been in the army about three months and in country about three days. When they heard that big boom and felt the walls and floor shake they ran to find a bunker. Slowly and sheepishly they returned once they noticed they were the only ones heading for the bunkers. (It’s easy to tell if artillery is incoming or out going, if you here a big boom and then a little boom it’s outgoing, if you here a little boom a then a big boom it incoming). The artillery fired about every ten to fifteen minuets that day, and that night, and the next day, and so on with only occasional breaks in firing. After the first night my companions were tired, but I had slept well, undisturbed. By the end of the week nearly everyone managed to sleep despite the noise and world shaking.