A Moment in the Campaign — Gonzo Dispatch

 

Yep. It’s like that.

The war against charlie grinds on, a low-budget jungle operation with no theme music and no goddamn medals. No artillery barrages lighting up the sky—just the long, paranoid shuffle of a campaign that refuses to end. Weeks of uneasy quiet, then a flare in the brush. Not enough to call in air support. Just enough to remind you the enemy never signed a treaty.

This wasn’t D-Day. It was Tuesday.

Another checkpoint. Another slog through the bureaucratic swamp—appointments breeding in the calendar like mosquitoes, paperwork stacked in sterile white towers, waiting rooms humming with the soft mechanical purr of machines that look like they were designed by cheerful Nazis. No smoke. No gunfire. Just fluorescent lighting and the smell of disinfectant. But don’t kid yourself—the vigilance is real. You never stand down. Not when there’s always another scan circled on the horizon like a distant artillery coordinate.

So I went in for the first scan. Recon mission. Easy on the throttle. A cautious stroll into the fog, telling myself this is just the beginning of a long road. And in this campaign, a long road is good news. A long road means you’re still breathing dust and cursing the map.

But dread is a faithful companion.

Five days of it. Not hysterical, not frothing—just a low electrical buzz under the skin. The kind of hum you get waiting for a verdict from a judge who doesn’t know your name. Each day stretched thin and brittle. Each night wandering into speculative madness. By day three I was pacing. By day five I was sick of hauling that invisible question around like a duffel bag full of bricks.

Then today the report dropped.

Clean.

No sign of the rat bastard charlie. No tracks in the mud. No smoke on the ridgeline. Just a crisp clinical communiqué from the front lines: Not this time.

No parade. No ticker tape. Just a bureaucratic sigh and a new date inked at the beginning of May. A reprieve stamped in twelve-point font. Breathing room. The jungle goes quiet, but nobody holsters their weapon.

And now—because the campaign must expand—another practitioner of the medical arts enters the theater. I’ve been referred to a dermatologist. A new specialist in the relentless hunt for insurgent freckles. Annual inspections. Another arena. The rat bastard has forced us into amphibious operations.

It could wear a man down, living life in quarterly installments. Measuring existence in scans and reports and follow-ups. Time reduced to medical checkpoints. But for now, clean is clean.

As the old song says, the lion sleeps tonight. The jungle is still.

And in this war, stillness is victory enough.

 

 

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