Neil Gussman stepped out of his School Lane Hills house recently and was thrilled to meet yet another dreary day.
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Unlike his waterlogged neighbors, he wanted to get wet. He went for a walk in the rain.
After all, he'd spent the past month and a half in parched Middle Eastern deserts.
Nothing falls from the springtime sky there except UV rays and, one day, some 120 mm rockets.
The rocket attack produced low-frequency booms, recalled Gussman, who did not see the craters getting dug but felt his surroundings vibrate inside the wire at Tallil Ali Air Base, Iraq.
The attack came just a few days after his birthday.
Gussman, contrarian and intellectual, chewed on that.
"At 56, I finally got fired at," he said. "It's a real war zone. They say when it gets really hot out they'll fire more rockets at us."
That's gossip.
What's undeniable is that Gussman is up to his neck in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Previous installments of his story, reported in the Sunday News, examined his Army service in the 1970s.
The series chronicled how a yen to serve God and man moved him to reup two years ago, despite age and the fact that he did not favor the war.
Gussman, a writer for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a museum and library of chemistry and early science, expected to work weekends as a Pennsylvania National Guard chemical weapons specialist.
He figured on living at home with his wife, Annalisa Crannell, and four kids and pursuing his passion for bicycle racing.
The Army instead made Sgt. Gussman a dispenser of motor pool tools and jetted him to Iraq.
He arrived May 3 by way of Fort Sill, Okla., and Kuwait, but came back to Lancaster June 14 for his first and only leave.
While sipping a latte recently at a downtown coffee shop, he discussed culture on the war front.
He outlined plans to stage a Labor Day weekend bike race in Iraq with his friend, Rich Ruoff.
And he pondered his return trip, starting Monday, to the no-reading zone.
He plans to go back with fresh bread and "The Allegory of Love," among other literature, he said, and he hopes to start a book club for the troops.
"It's like this huge fraternity without any books."
House of PainIn recent days, Gussman reveled in spending time with his son and daughters and attended a memorial service for his mother-in-law, who died on Mother's Day.
He's scheduled to spend the next six months providing support for the 104th General Services Aviation Brigade.
His home in Iraq is a sprawling base on a flat, sandy plain with the Great Ziggurat of Ur looming fortress-like just outside the fence.
His companions, who have been rebuilding the facility formerly occupied by Saddam Hussein's forces, include thousands of men, many fewer women and a smattering of spouses who share quarters and are vastly envied for it.
The dry, 115-degree heat is more extreme than he anticipated, Gussman said.
Everyone sweats copiously and swills Gatorade by the half-liter, he noted. "Everybody's got dust in their eyes and their ears."
"We all dress alike. We all live in state housing," added Gussman, joking that Tallil is the perfect socialist community.
Shelter is row upon row of 30-by-8-foot air-conditioned trailers called containerized housing units, or CHUs. Chow halls rival a Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
Steak. King crab legs. A quintet of pastas. Mongolian food bars. "It's extravagant how much they feed us," Gussman said. "People come back either buff or potato butt."
On the spud side of the divide is the young soldier who celebrated passing a fitness test by ordering a three-foot pizza.
Broadly speaking, Gussman added, commenting on the predominantly 20- and 30-something GIs, out-of-shape guys watch the most war movies, maintain the fiercest personas and believe they can rise to meet any emergency through sheer will.
"The movies culture has given them an irrational belief in magic," Gussman said.
Another thing distinguishing him from his gung-ho mates, he said, is that they're eagerly anticipating their next deployment, to Afghanistan.
Already, he added, he's looking forward to returning to family and friends and resuming his job in Philadelphia.
The youth bracket prefers electronic entertainment to books, according to Gussman, who said he stands out as a member of the minority "51-to-infinity" set who reads a lot.
Still, he noted, comradeship helps bridge the grandpa gap.
The soldiers' wry, casually profane humor is sustaining, Gussman said. And military society is endlessly fascinating.
On the spiritual end, for example, there's the Adder Chapel community church. Choirwear consists of flowing robes and "35 pairs of combat boots," according to Gussman.
Buffness reigns 24/7 at the House of Pain gym.
Gussman said he regularly works out there, but he's canned running because of a painful bone spur on his right heel.
Morning and evening biking around the perimeter of the base has continued.
"I ride every day with a gun" and 30 rounds of ammunition, said Gussman, adding that toting such armament is required.
While home on leave, he mailed his new mountain bike, the ironically-named GT Peace 9R, to Iraq.
The machine might come in handy during the Sept. 5 Tour de Tallil Air Base cooked up with the help of Ruoff, a well-known Lancaster bicycle racing promoter.
"The challenge is to organize it from this side of the ocean," Ruoff said of his first competition outside the United States.
"Please join us for the sunny weather!" wisecracks Ruoff's Web site, All That is Good.
The site extends a tongue-in-cheek invitation for stateside racers to enlist, complete basic training and get themselves assigned to Tallil, all in the next couple of months.
"It's for fun," Ruoff said, noting that admission to the 45-kilometer race will necessarily be confined to soldiers on the base.
Ruoff said he'd like to get military clearance to time the competition professionally, "Otherwise, Neil will have to find a couple of friends with a pad of paper and pen."
Gussman's pal Scott Haverstick cast some doubt on his involvement last week.
"I'm 62," quipped the masters bike racer from Washington Boro, "so even though I really would like to [sign up], that's pressing the limit."
Nor has Haverstick had "the prerequisite catastrophic health problems" that almost derailed Gussman's Army plans in 2007 and 2008, he added, referring to his buddy's bike-wreck-related injuries.
Haverstick has been pedaling again with Gussman in recent days.
"It's great to see him," said Haverstick, who has closely followed the Army journey on Gussman's blog,
http://armynow.blogspot.com.
He's tried for two years to figure out why Gussman enlisted.
"However all this came to pass," Haverstick said, "it's a great story."
Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.
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