Photo of the Day: The Long Road Home

Image Source: The Atlantic.

In the 2010 movie, Repeaters, the characters get trapped in a time loop.  One of the film's commenters on the IMDB suggested that their predicament was a metaphor for post-traumatic stress, and the purgatorial relationship with time that it inflicts upon its sufferers, wherein they relive experiences over and over (see the trailer here).  The photo above is perhaps a related example of the so-called thousand-yard stare.  It is a photograph of an American Marine in Afghanistan from January 2012, but it made me immediately think of the experiences of the British military in the same region, recounted in Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, stories which were originally published in the Civil and Military Gazette.  This photograph could have been taken yesterday, or 120 years ago. From The Atlantic: "Men of 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, during an operation near the end of their third deployment in three years in Afghanistan. They were securing route 611, which runs Kajaki Sofla, an area that had long been a safe haven for insurgent sub-commanders and for arms and drug trafficking. (Cpl. James Clark/USMC)" Other photos from Afghanistan are here.