The Patriot Bowl

I can't get it out of my head. I wish I could, but I can't. It's been three weeks since America the Beautiful, the National Anthem, the military color guard, the Navy Blue Angels fly-by and of course, the Super Bowl. And yes, it was an outstanding contest. Let's forget that I had to leave the game with five minutes left and that it was by all accounts the best five minutes of football all year. Whatever, I'm over it. No, what I can't seem to shake off is, of all things, the coin toss.I thought it to be the most portentous coin toss I've ever seen.

Did you notice it?

General Petraus flipped it from the fifty yard line. He looked so small standing there in his best green smile and his dress green uniform, all jangly and medally, next to the gathered gridiron heroes on either side. Who knows, if Pat Tillman hadn't joined the Army maybe he would've been there in Cardinal red next to the smiling little general. But he wasn't there. He was just dead, accidentally shot by his own men, as it turns out, after the media finally water-boarded the Army into confessing. The coin looked oversized and heavy, perched on the 4-star thumb, and it launched with greater effort than usual, I thought. Heads. Tails. Some live, some die. The coin flopped lazily through the stadium air like a fat girl being thrown from a horse, and plopped onto the turf with the same dull thud that my daughter's hamster makes when he drops off the top bars of his cage. Or the same sound a gut-shot soldier makes when he flops onto the dirt.

But it's getting better, isn't it?

Isn't that why the general was smiling at the big game?

I met a sergeant the other day just back from Iraq. He was an EOD guy, a bomb defuser, and he was jumpy as a cat, worse than me. I mean, I flinched the other night while opening a package of flour tortillas. A soft package, it was, not crinkly and hard like you get with cheese doodles, and I don't even have a reason to BE that way. But trust me, this sergeant would have jumped at tortillas dropping onto a bed of cotton balls. So I asked him: How's it going over there? He shook his head and grimaced as he made that universal symbol of uncertainty, mensa-mensa, with his hand, the one that looks like you're flipping fresh tortillas from off a sun-beaten rock in Iraq. Where grimacing generals belong...