Clear Thinking

RSM and me have been lucky enough to be placed on the same FOB. As we sit and talk, reminisce, and gripe and complain about stuff, it lets the smoke clear where I can see more clearly.

This deployment as compared to my Iraq deployment has been way more taxing on me. Our mission here is to train and support the ANP, Afghan National Police. It isn’t sexy or high speed, but its necessary for this country to develop. In Iraq we were so busy that you didn’t have a whole lot of time to slow down and think, here it seems the opposite. Some of the down time we get here leads to constructive thinking, like contingencies and other things related to the mission. But some of it gets around to thinking and over analyzing other things.

I have thought about my life and the woman I love, Home 6. I have tried to line things up at home so I can continue my education as a Physician’s Assistant, but alas I need to take a few more classes in order to meet some of the minimum requirements. That’s fine, but I’m the type of guys who knows his job, and knows it well, I just wish there was some way I could prove to the military and the civilian schools that if I get accepted I would be the best student they could ever think of having. I could contribute real world experience and still have a multitude of material to learn.

And all the thinking about Home 6… I can’t wait to get home to show her how much she means to me. I tell her when I call her, but I want her to know it without me saying a word. I want to be able to give her everything she wants and more. I know I’m not perfect, but to use a cliché, I want to be a better man for her. I hate to put her in the position I have, but that’s one of the sacrifices I’m made. This is her first time she has dealt with a deployment, and probably won’t be the last. There is so much I can’t tell her for security and most of all I don’t won’t her to be worried or scared. I always tell her there is nothing that can keep me from coming home to her.

And as the deployment goes on I talk to some of my buddies throughout the brigade, which is spread around Afghanistan. There are a lot of things we talk about that really makes me mad. Just how some of the people in uniform (see previous blog post) do very stupid and shady things to undermine and disrupt the military order of things. Certain people use the “rank has its privileges” to an extreme that would make any real solider want to snap their neck and burn their carcass to prevent the cancer that kills the military from the inside to spread to anyone else. Some others of the people in uniform don’t have a job in this country. Yup, no job, and American tax dollars go to pay and feed these idiots. It just pisses me off that these people who go back home and are seen as heroes, are just a bunch of people who just happen to be in the area.

I’m just ready to be home so I can move on, close this chapter, start the next and begin to live a normal life for a while.