What is most noticeable about the US troops waiting in Shannon to be flown to (or from) the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq is their silence.
SHANNON AIRPORT on a dull Sunday morning. Standing in line for security, mired once more in the punishing spincycle of the stag weekend, and beyond that, the greater spin-cycle of wedding-and-stag season itself. Nauseated by the smokers huddled outside in the drizzle, the announcer inside droning into the Tannoy, and everything in between. A friend once told me of a taxi ride he took at the onset of a bout of food poisoning, and how, when he glanced out of the window at Howth Head, he visualised an enormous cream bun across the bay - even the sight of Howth made him ill.
There are no Howth-shaped buns in Limerick but there are roundabouts, plenty of roundabouts - each one an oven-fresh Quiche Lorraine of grass and concrete pastry, cooling in the middle of the road. How my stomach had lurched in negotiation with each of them. To take my mind off the subject of food, I concentrated on the fact that I was being charged €75 for the cab ride, and how the driver only had the Sunday World.
I wasn't yet able to recall the positive aspects of what had just happened - that brief, euphoric moment, standing on a surfboard in Doonbeg in the blistering sunshine, the more routine but equally pleasurable ordering of 14 Jaegerbombs at a time, the raucous homeward minibus rides at the end of the night, etc, etc. Such is the human mind's predisposition towards self-pity (or my mind's, at least), that on this Sunday morning I couldn't convince myself that the time for fond recalling would ever arrive.
It must be part of our survival instinct that draws the mind to the things it likes least, when we are sick. We always think of food when we least want to eat - perhaps it helps us to purge the body of whatever it is that is making us ill. Perhaps it just tells us not to drink so much. Either way, standing in the security line I found myself examining the hair of the young man in front of me, which had been shaven into an intricate pattern of Celtic runes. I was lost in this stunningly horrendous topiary just before my own bag disappeared behind the leather curtain strips of the X-ray machine. Then I noticed the eyes of the woman manning the X-ray machine opening to their greatest aperture - in horror.
She stood up and half-walked, half-ran to a back room, returning moments later with a guard who grabbed the bag lying in front of mine on the tray - a khaki rucksack. The security guard pointed it out to the guard who held it aloft and bellowed, "Cé leis é?"
By this stage I had passed through security and was putting my belt back on and pouring dirty coins from the plastic tray into my palm and shovelling them back into my pocket. With them, I was now free to buy exorbitant, sickly perfume and flanks of orange salmon, and of course, here my mind offered up the image of Dan Ackroyd drunkenly smuggling a salmon under his Santa costume in Trading Places, and hungrily biting it through strands of acrylic grey beard. Perfect. Nothing good could come from lingering at security, and yet here I still was. Perhaps I wasn't feeling bad enough.
The guard and the man with the Celtic runes shaven into his hair were now standing over the bag. The guard was opening various zips, but judging from the intent and speed with which he closed a pocket and moved on to the next one, this was no random search. Apparently, he had not found whatever it was he was seeking. Then, he flipped the bag over to the reverse side and with a grim, I-got-you smile up at the bag's owner, he opened a last, hidden zip, dug his hand inside and produced a scabbard. From it, he drew a 12-inch hunting knife, which glinted malevolently in the light. My stomach lurched.
"I'm a huntsman," the man said.
Indeed, he might well have been a huntsman. It's okay to be a huntsman, but the sticking point between him and the guard was what it was he was hunting with a 12-inch knife at an airport. I tried to block idle speculation from my mind as the guard led the huntsman away, ushering what was left of my sanity through the shopping area, towards the departure lounge. This was to be the last leg in the last of a series of hideous homeward journeys. Once in the lounge, I would be able to compose myself, and get home, albeit strapped into a tin machine loaded with flammable fuel, travelling through the sky at 500 miles an hour.
I had forgotten all about the troops.
What is most noticeable about the US troops waiting in Shannon to be flown to (or from) the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq is their silence. Under what other set of circumstances would a few hundred kids sit in a foreign airport in such silence? And they are kids. Some were playing PSPs, others chewed at their nails, and quite a few just gazed at the ceiling. Many of them couldn't have been more than 18 and many couldn't have been motivated by much more than the desire to pay for a university education.
Irish kids gawked at the soldiers and were dragged away. Old grandmothers drank Lyon's tea out of paper cups with the bag still in it and stared at the buzz-cut kids, every one of them identically dressed - to kill. Upon seeing them lounging in their seats, mothers unconsciously clutched their handbags a little tighter, and though the walls of the departure lounge were lined with holiday-makers sitting on their bags, nobody took the free seats beside the boy soldiers. Their boots were shined to the point where it broke your heart.