or two years in college, Tara and I lived in a dingy teetering apartment complex called “The Casbah” where we threw ragers and took a thousand embarrassing pictures of ourselves – the two of us slamdancing in the living room, or leaning on each other for balance, or inexplicably putting pizza boxes on our heads. Tara wanted to be a journalist – as long as I’ve know her -- and so she worked at the Capitol and spent a semester interning at CNN and knew all sorts of factoids about dailies and weeklies and monthlies. At parties, when she felt like being serious, she would teach me things about a journalist’s life, like how a war can make your career.
“Look at Christiane Amanpour,” she said.
“Where?” I asked, looking around.
“The journalist who covered the Gulf War.”
“Oh yeah, of course,” I said. I’d never heard of her.
In our senior year, Tara was the editor of the college paper, the same daily where Walter Cronkite and Willie Morris began their careers, and it rather consumed her life. I was a bit jealous, if you want to know the truth; suddenly her opinions seemed shinier and weightier than my own. They came loaded with statistics and citations and were not merely the puffed-up ramblings of a beer-soaked college kid. Those days, I wrote plays and told funny scatalogical stories about the five-year-olds at the day-care where I taught. (“And then she said, ‘But I love to poop!’ It was heeelarious!”) If it hadn't been reported in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, I hadn't heard it.
So when Tara asked me to join her editorial board, I was surprised. And pleased.
“But I don’t know anything about journalism,” I said.
“But you know about writing and editing,” Tara said.
“I’m afraid I’ll let you down,” I said.
“I’m not.”
And that was that. My career in journalism began. But wait. This story isn’t about me. It's about this.

About a week ago I got the following email from Tara:

"I got my assignment on Friday. I'll be leaving in the next 7-10 days for Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Force Base in Kuwait, it's about 75 miles south of Iraq. I don't know many details yet, but I will likely be leaving with the air force on a C-130.”

We had been exchanging emails about this possibility for some time. The Texas correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers, Tara was tapped as part of the first wave of reporters dispatched in the event of war. She was excited about it; I was not. I don’t want a war, for one thing, but if there is a war, dammit, I don’t want anyone I know over there. Does that make me a terrible, selfish person? Shit. That’s just how I feel.
In January, Tara went to a journalists boot camp at Fort Dix, and when Steven Colbert spoofed it on The Daily Show – one of our favorite news sources – we talked excitedly on the phone that night. If you looked carefully, you could see Tara in the back of a truck. We laughed about it, but the boot camp had been sobering, a lesson in humility and sacrifice. The column she wrote about the experience began like this:

“Fort Dix, New Jersey: Wednesday Jan. 22, 18 degrees, wind chill factor, 4 degrees.
Marine 2nd Lt. Darlan Harris is gently rubbing my toes. They are close to frostbite – frost nipped is the term. They hurt with each step I take.
Lt. Harris is 24, I am 28. In this military training camp for reporters, she’s been my group leader. I arrived with fancier gear than she gets: a lighter, more advanced sleeping bag, a lighter-framed backpack. Brand-new hiking boots and top of the line wool socks.
Yet I am totally shaken by the cold, and she, with maybe even colder feet, is now caring for me.
It’s humbling. Second Lt. Harris, and thousands like her, fight for our country in boots that are not as good as mine. Hers: uniform black jungle boots with Marine uniform black socks. Mine: brand new, with Gore-tex. Mine could not keep out this cold. But when I need help, she doesn’t miss a beat to assist and comfort.”

In the week before she left, Tara began to voice a few of her concerns – how she would miss her boyfriend, her bed, her down comforter, the great luxuries we all take for granted. She was still enthusiastic about going, of course she was, but the reality of her impending departure was sinking in. How long would she be gone? What would she be doing there? Like soldiers, I suppose, one of her biggest fears was the level of her own fear. She worried about the ride out there, and how she would cope on a military plane.

She left from Washington DC yesterday. This morning, I received an email from Amsterdam, where she was en route. When I told her I wanted to write this entry about her leaving, she sent me a list of things she took with her, an homage to a piece of writing we both admire, a Tim O’Brien short story called “The Things They Carried.”

“1 mountaineer backpack, with desert gear in little ziploc baggies. This means everything. Bandanas, ziploc baggie. Business cards, ziploc baggie. Two cartons of marlboro lights in honor of the Casbah, and because the base exchanges are having difficulties staying stocked for an ever-growing number of troops, big ziploc baggie. Photo of Daniel and I on our cruise, which was almost exactly a year ago, ziploc baggie. A suede-bound journal I bought on a last-minute whim. Cans of skoal that one of our reporters intends to trade for another humvee ride with the troops, ziploc baggie.”

My feelings about the war exist primarily in my stomach, not in my mind. I can’t articulate these things. When I was a liberal-reactionary kid growing up in conservative Churchville, I always thought that if a war broke out, I’d be some screaming liberal burning my clothes in the street and dragged away flailing by the cops. But I can’t. I’m confused. I didn’t even go to the anti-war demonstration, which brings me nothing but embarrassment in the eyes of my dear Austin pinko friends. I think there might be a reason to go to war, if you want to know the truth, but I don’t trust Bush, and I don’t trust my weak political understanding, and I don’t trust celebrities – celebrities! – waving their fists, and it’s hard to know where to start, what to do. But what am I talking about? Like I said: I can’t articulate these things. I guess what I’m trying to say is that things feel more complicated than they used to. As I write this, my college roommate – the one who hired a stripper on my 20th birthday, the one who proudly sewed herself a shimmery blue fish suit which she donned at every party, the one who gave me my first job in journalism – is in the Middle East. I miss her. And I wish her luck.