Reminds me of being in the Sinai.

The desert there is littered with old military hardware, some of it lethal. There are still land mines; sometimes the feral dogs will stumble on one and you’ll feel and hear the rough roar of an explosion savage the silence of a warm desert night.

Most of the time the dogs are too light to set one off. But not always.

Being in the Sinai and in the Middle East there is no mistaking that it has been and is a conflicted place. A rusting armored personnel carrier, its door canted and one-hinged, fills no longer with personnel but with sand. The turret of a bombed tank rests atop a dune, beetle-like, its main gun’s barrel an antenna bent to the sky.

Tanglefoot. Barbed wire. Concertina wire. Fences with razor wire on top. Cement barriers. Fifty cals in your face at a checkpoint, AK-47s slung, M-4s on a casual stroll — in a McDonald’s. At the beach.

So many things designed to keep others out, others in, repel the threat. To destroy.

I don’t miss being there. But it was a learning experience.