Tough Assignment (Understatement!)

Those assigned to military duty in Iraq around 1990 spent a lot of time waiting around for the Gulf War to begin, and then within three days the whole thing was over.

Unfortunately, Jimmy wasn't so lucky. He got sent to Kuwait to clean up. Don't confuse this with the kind of thing that a custodian might do. Remember that Saddam Hussein blew up all the oilwells in his neighboring country, and killed multitudes. Civilians. Women. Children.

Jimmy literally had to scrape corpses off of the ground. Imagine soot-crusted babies among the tangle of bodies oil-paved onto the once-white sand. The terror of their deaths were preserved in full detail, down to the agonized facial expressions and tortured body poises.

The oil darkened the ocean and blackened the sky. (Jimmy's descriptions of the environmental destruction bring to mind Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun.")

The experience broke Jimmy's heart, permanently scarring him and fueling his nightmares long after he returned from the Gulf.

But I see Iraq's meddling with the oil supply as a much larger theme in Jimmy's life, not only because of any physical damage he may have sustained from his exposure to all the toxins in the area.

The issue reared its ugly head again more than a decade later, during the last six months of Jimmy's life. He'd bought a motorcycle for its fuel efficiency, in a time of rising gas prices. What prompted the rally in fuel prices to begin with? It started with our second war in Iraq, which prompted local terrorist groups to bomb oil pipelines, the opening salvo in a series of strikes against oil supplies.