Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

February 13, 2006

Dear Army Guys,

I pray you are healthy and well and engaged in all manner of wholesome activities and vigilant security measures. Be sure to eat right, wear clean socks, wash your hands frequently, and get plenty of sleep.

Never underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep. I hope a full night of rest is yours for the taking, but my experience with the iron-fisted tactics of 2-130th leaders causes me to speculate otherwise. If you are forced to arise and function long before nature intended you to do so, please know that I feel your pain.

I, too, suffer the rudeness of being woken each morning long before I am ready to slip the silken bonds of sleep and touch the face of day, and I’m getting pretty damned tired of it. Rudy, my personal 1SG from hell, believes it is his duty to shake me from my slumber at the faintest crack of dawn. He says that I am becoming ever more resistant to his efforts. He reports that this morning, upon being nudged into wakefulness, I sat straight up and yelled,
“IS THIS HOW YOU GET YOUR KICKS? DRIVING INNOCENT WOMEN FROM THEIR COMFY BEDS??”
He claims I then scrunched back down into my pillow and pulled the blankets over my head. I don’t remember this at all. At first I thought he was making it up, but… well, it does sort of sound like something I might say under duress.

I am of the opinion that people should not be forced to arise from sleep at any hour earlier than they naturally would if left to their own devices. It’s unnatural, unhealthy, and a clear violation of a certain inalienable right, namely the Pursuit of Happiness.

I am very happy when I’m asleep. My sleeping self minds its own business and infringes on the reciprocal rights of no one. I see no good reason my happiness should be wrecked by other peoples’ slavish devotion to an artificial construct of time. Why should I have to respond to the wholly arbitrary and thoughtlessly sadistic command to wake up? It’s an inhumane violation of natural law.

Thousands of years of evolution have clearly led me to NOT rise from my slumber before the sun has cleared the horizon. You don’t have to be Fred Flintstone to know that Homo erectus could hardly have jumped from his cave in the pre-dawn hours and gotten any genetic reward for having done so. He’d have stumbled blindly in the dark and would have either fallen to his death over the edges of cliffs or been eaten by nocturnal predators. Prehistoric early risers would have had their sleepless strands of DNA cut off mid-evolution by Darwinian forces far more persuasive than a radio alarm clock.

And that, I contend, is why anybody who calls himself a “morning person” is genetically substandard and ought to have his DNA examined.
I am particularly suspicious of people who, for no good reason, get up early on Saturdays. There’s something really fishy about that if you ask me.

Much Love,
--An Army Mom