Back down to Blue Lake for another definitive workout doing the full length of the lake twice. The far end is shallow and covered with a fine mud with nodules of organic material, almost like crypto-biotic soil, and extending the hand into the mud, it’s warm, though I can’t tell whether that is an affect of the heat-flow driving the upwelling action that has generated the spring, or merely sun-warmed sediment. The water temperature is perfect, right around 82F, with the air temp at 50F, a great combination for working out.

There is a shallow play of fear when getting into the water — snakes? big fish? underwater dangers? Loch Ness monsters? It’s deep and not absolutely clear as it normally is because of the heavy wind and dust. The depth is indicated, though, through the deepness of the blue. In the middle it feelsdeep: gravitational fluctuation operating on the body. While overhead, the F/A-18′s fight gravity and each other.

Then a short photo trip to do a portrait of Wendover Will and some images of the casino landscaping. Plenty of material there! But somehow I am tired of simply illustrating western society in wasteful and dis-connected abandon. I’ve seen too much of it, and there simply is too much out there!

Today, a group of large Winnebago’s towing large trailers descend around the Enola Gay hangar, spread their leveling legs, expand their living-room sides, deploy external camping chairs, and unfurl their shade awnings. In the large trailers are a range of amateur racing vehicles. Mostly stock cars with over-amped engines. A huge course is set up on the near taxi-way.

Meanwhile, at South Base, a contingent of active Army troops is engaged in a live-fire exercise, complete with fire-finding radar systems and a half-dozen porta-potties, everything obscured in form through the ripple of heat-waves coming from runway one and two and the old taxiways between here and there. In early evening, a contingent of UH-60 Blackhawks come in to land along with a handful MH-6 Little Bird Special Ops ‘choppers.

When a highly-ordered techno-social system meets a disordered system, what are the results? Is it similar to an osmotic membrane with more and less salty water on either side, the fresher water is drawn through the membrane to dilute the salty water? Is the energy-based order diluted and lessened through the contact? A combat situation is, itself, a hybrid sequence of events transitioning between order and disorder at many scales over time– with the different actors intent on maintaining an in-flow of energy in order to maintain their order. It is the ordered expression of collective techno-social energies with the goal of decreasing the order of the opponents system — whether at the single body scale, or at the scale of the wider techno-social infrastructure.

In the case of Afghanistan, the points at which the advanced ordered system (US) can apply weapons to increase the disorder of the opposing system (Taliban) are so limited to be almost point-less. The Afghani society has so minimal an ordered social infrastructure to be destroyed and the relation of individuals to the destruction of their own body-systems (in the case of the martyr), makes the conflict literally sense-less and not win-able in any classic way — where winning is the imposition of a critical level of disorder on the capabilities of the opposition to express concentrated energies that will disrupt the order of ones own system.

Today, upon waking, there are two buses parked to the west of the hangar, a bit later, numerous SUV’s begin to pull up along with several official SWAT command vehicles and their teams from Winnemucca, Elko, and Wendover. It’s SWAT play. How to deal with a bus-load of terrorists/hostages or so. Several squads are lectured and engage in practice drills for the morning. I had originally been told by the airport management folks that there were going to be live-fire exercises at South Base, so we were surprised when this began to unfold in the back yard.

There is the fascination of playing Army, recalled from early days in the Maryland woods beyond the pond, beyond the corn fields, into unknown territories of abandoned farmhouses and hunting camps. Learning to make the sound of a gun and of explosions. And here, older boys, men, with very fancy toys, playing for their lives and the lives of their charges. Learning to stay alive, to save life. Learning to kill, or be killed. Learning to protect the innocent and kill the profane.