More Stress, Less Work, and another 3 months in Afghanistan

   New base, new circumstances, less Internet. Now I share the only computer with my entire platoon, and it is slow. So I have been less enthusiastic then normal about responding to comments and waiting for pages to load. (about 3mins per) Also, the chance that I will type this entire post and then watch it disappear into the oblivion of Internet space when the site doesn’t load in time was less then appealing. But the other day I was reading the last few posts and they are terrible in my opinion. Not at all what it used to be. When I started this site I was writing for myself and the overall integrity of my posts was way better then when I started writing for an audience. My apologies to those who do read the site regularly for the long delay in posts and and gap in overall quality. I expect both to change. I have alot to post about in the near future…

   But for now I thought that I would repost my first entry that I wrote on the way to Afghanistan, before I had any idea what was about to happen here. If we were redeploying when the rumors said we were, I would be getting ready to go home this week so I have been spending alot of time thinking about home, and coming back. Having said that I find alot of humor in the perspective that I held almost a year ago about this deployment…

     So we are in the air…expecting turbulence. By turbulence I mean a year of my life spent in the desert with people I don’t expect to have much to offer. The strange thing is, I have such a low level of stress about the situation. No butterflies, no lost sleep or staying up all last night in anticipation for today’s departure. I think it is because at this point I have absolutely no idea what to expect except hot air and sand for a long time. It is hard to worry about something when you don’t know what part to be anxious about. Obviously a year is a long time, but how impossible is it to try and quantify a year of your life in terms that you can relate to.

    I watch all those families saying there goodbyes and crying and I wonder why I feel like I am going on vacation. How long will it take for me to get a hold on what this situation is really going to be like. Because while I take off and bank left it doesn’t feel like a year yet, as I reach cruising altitude and fly into the sunset at 648 miles an hour, it doesn’t feel like a year in the sand, it feels more like just a trip to Ireland…but then what. I already feel guilty for the inevitable fact that I am not going to make full advantage of this opportunity for self improvement offered by a year away from everything else. I won’t do enough push-ups, write enough, learn enough on the guitar, definitely won’t save enough money. That is unless I can find the balls to start right now, as a different person…committed to change. Without momentum from the time that I touch the foreign soil there is a strong chance of completely wasting a year and coming back with only a few cool stories, a nifty patch, and a few thousand dollars.

    As I walked out to the plane all of those things and more ran through my head. As I shook hands with all of the brass that took there time to come tell me how proud they obviously are of me, my unit, and the army all I could think about was a corny promise I had made to myself to bend at the waist and get on all fours and kiss the fine American soil goodbye for a year. And just as I thought, although my lips were only on the dusty runway for an instant, the moment lasted much longer and will probably always be with me. So I climbed the stairs still trying to sniff out some sort of feeling in the situation rather then just watching if roll by me like a silent movie. The events taking place today are without taste, it is like they are already just memories, and I am just watching them happen.

   As I fly above the dark clouds into the beautiful sky amidst the setting sun, my mind is searching for some sort of symbolism in everything so that I might have something to attach myself to. Goals are the theme for this flight, everything is about the endless possibilities to get something back from this year that as of right now, has been taken from me. Taken my beautiful girlfriend, my adorable puppy, my family. But replaced all those things with a disguised opportunity to make this the best and most productive year of my life. Every passing moment is another opportunity to turn it all around.