They say this morning that suicide car bombers are neither depressed nor distressed.

I imagine that could be true, though I have a hard time wrapping my gray matter around it. I saw one of those internet stories over the weekend that claimed some of the bombers were found with their hands shackled to the steering wheel, and their last mission had been directed by Bad Guys with no interest in dying. They who followed them to the target, detonating the bomb remotely.

The story claims the mechanism by which the unwilling are forced to drive to the target is the leverage of a family held hostage.

I don’t know. It is a good story, and helps dehumanize them. But it seems to me that the targets are selected with a certain grim enthusiasm. The harvest of this weekend is another four suicide bomb attacks, these in the North, around the oil city of Mosul. There are reports of 38 dead, mostly Iraqi security forces, and of course the injured are many more.

Don Rumsfeld was at his ruminative best on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday. My son told me about it when we talked yesterday. He got up to watch, or perhaps he was just coming in as the Secretary was getting up. My son said that Mr. Rumsfeld said the insurgency could go on for as many as a dozen years.

I told my son it was chilling talk, but perfectly in keeping with the words everyone has been saying since 9/11. “It is not a sprint to victory,” our leaders said solemnly. “It is a Marathon.”

I heard it more than once, and I know the difference. Sprinting makes the heart pound and the lungs burn. Training for a marathon involves something else, something seductive about the miles beneath the shoes, looking down, watching the asphalt blur.

It is an odd distance. Twenty-six-point-three miles was the course from the battlefield at Marathon to the Acropolis in the middle of Athens. The Persians had landed in 490 BC, and the Athenian men had marched out to meet them. They drove the Persians back to their ships, and realized, suddenly, that it was possible the enemy could sail to the undefended capital and rape and plunder their way through the streets.

They were a philosophical bunch, the classic Greeks were. They were all nervous about the fighting capabilities of the Persians, a line of thinking that is still around today. Some thought that surrender might be an option, and others reasoned that giving up democracy and returning to an oligarchic form of government might do the trick. But in the end a vote was held, and the majority decided to hustle back to the capital just as fast as their legs could carry them, and save their democracy and their homes.

Most of the Athenians made the distance, which in those days was at least an eight hour march. They cut that in half, at least, which was the time I always was shooting for when I could run. It is a risk pace.

It worked. When the Persian ships rounded the point, they saw the Athenians waiting for them, well-flooded with dopamine.

In fairness, I should note that response to the brain chemical is different for everyone. I am not talking about the gazelle-like Kenyans, or the other emaciated real competitors. I’m sure their lungs burn in their hyper-developed chests, and the sinews burn just like sprinter.

I am speaking in the context of my own experience as a plodder, a week-day jogger with mild dementia and an increasing hunger for dopamine, the neuro-transmitting brain chemical that moves the body.

Dopamine makes you feel good. It is said to communicate information from one nerve cell to another, and can influence a wide range of feelings and behaviors. For me, tickling the two small clusters of dopamine-producing cells deep in the brain was what the whole running thing was about.

It would take a mile or so for all the signals to reach the little masses, and begin the chemical process of changing the amino acid into a substance called L-dopa, and then into dopamine itself.

The dopamine plugs perfectly into receptors in specialized nerve cells. The plug-in produces the famous runner’s high, a perfectly natural and quite pleasant feeling of well being, almost invulvnerability. I can imagine how the Greeks felt when they got home.

It is so powerful that it is an addition. As a plodder, an Irish draft-horse of a runner, I managed my high so effectively that I did not feel the interiors of my knees grinding themselves down. By the time I began limping to the Pentagon Athletic Club to run my six or seven miles, I knew that I had a problem.

I was reminded of that last night. The Czech lifeguard was tapping his toe at the residents who were slow in gathering up their things by the pool. It had been a pleasant summer day, and people were reluctant to let it go. I had just time to slip through the gate, throw my towel at one of the poolside tables and take a bold leap toward the deep-end to shock the nerves.

As I leapt, I felt something grind in the knee, something toward the back, and the flash of pain mingled with the shock of the cool water. I knew I had crushed something, and paddled around briefly until I could see the displeasure growing on our young employee’s face.

I scuttled out of the pool enclosure a little side-ways, like a sand-crab. Pain speared though the back of my leg.

I was not the last one out, which might have bought me a few points in good will. I know the rules.

The plunge had not done much to change my brain chemistry, except to give it the mental equivalent of a wedgie.

Flooding dopamine to the receptors requires roadwork, and I can’t do that anymore. I understand that other activities can stimulate the soft tissues, and I am looking at my options carefully.

I am going to have to find a substitute, since doing the national equivalent of a marathon will require something to dull the pain.

Despite the polls that claim public support for the war is dropping, there are indications that the public is pragmatic about things. A friend reported that he saw passengers give up their First Class seats for some troops coming home on two-week leave.

President Bush is going to visit the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., tomorrow. They say he is going to press for a large continued military presence in Iraq. He is going to explain why his strategy is going to take a long time, but will eventually work.

I think he is right. Given enough time, anyone can finish a marathon. But like the Athenians, we will probably have to consider our options.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window