One More Time Into the Fray 2016-2017

Well, here I go again. One more Christmas and New Years in Afghanistan. This will be my first deployment to a region I have already been. However I am sure that things will be much different. 5 years ago, I was over here and now I am back. The process of getting here was familiar as ever, but I had blocked out some of the more unpleasant aspects of preparing and then leaving. The two hardest things were the packing the night before leaving knowing that these were the last hours I could spend with my beloved wife. All we both wanted to do was pause time and allow us to celebrate our anniversary without a deployment hanging over us. So instead we drank champagne while I packed my duffle bags. Happy Anniversay....

I had clearly forgotten how long the flights to get to the Middle East were. That was completely blocked from my memory. However it is strange how I could dislike something so much yet find comfort in the familiarity of it once it was again experienced. For many of my travel companions, this was their first deployment. These were all new bewildering experiences that were contently disrupting any sense of normalcy that one may have had, like waves crashing against a poor soul struggling to get up and out of the ocean surf. But for me, the comfort of knowing what to expect (even if it was knowing to expect suckville) and the assurance of knowing that God had me at the center of his hand, allowed a relatively smooth and even fun transition to deployment. At times I even felt like a tour guide..... "and now ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will stop and off load all our gear for no apparent reason just to load it back on again for some reason.... happens every time....oh yeah and there are no bathrooms at this stop so please pee in a bottle or hold it." At least I knew what to expect and it helped others not get so bent out of shape when those ridiculous things came. And I was very pleasantly surprised when for the first time in all my trips we stopped in Ireland! I had heard many of my friends talk about stopping there, but I had never experienced it before. And now .... at 3 am, we were in Ireland. So cool! Even if all I saw was the airport. It was so neat to hear their accents and fortunately there are some pretty cool pub owners in the airport that kept there place open all night for us.... which is where I had the best burger I have ever tasted in my life..... it even had a fried egg on it and some sort of sweet jam and sizzling bacon....oh so good!

The one rookie mistake that I made was forgetting my power converters....darn those European plugs.... fortunately some of my battle buddies remembered theirs and I powered up all my devices for the next 6 hour leg.... ugh. From there it was on to Kuwait and then another flight to Afghanistan and a few days wait in a major city before taking a puddle jumper to my new home. see the pic from my puddle jumping window....

The further and further I went out, the more body armor I noticed everyone wearing...we are definitely not in Kansas anymore Toto. At this phase it began to sink in that we are really still at war. And guys are really fighting and bleeding and dying for the cause. And it is my job to make sure the latter two are stopped short. Then after a week of travel the day before Christmas eve me and my ortho buddy arrived at our new home...

And met our new team, facilities, and a few interesting people....

The we learned that inorder to get into the DFAC (Dinning facility) you have to do pull ups...

And that the only place to "do you duty" was ....

.... I literally had to stop someone from going in just so I could snap the picture. But all in all I is a great place and has a nice gym and obviously internet connection (since I am able to continue this blog). So on Christmas the guys of my FST tried to make it as much like home and they cooked gingerbread pancakes and bacon....the XO is an awesome cook from New England....

So that's about it for now..... I will leave you with just a funny story that happened to me today in the gym. Every day I run about 3 miles to try to stay in as good of shape as the warfighters out here....each of them is like a college athelete! When they aren't on a mission, they are either eating sleeping or in the gym. So anyway, here I am in the gym running with these guys. And they like tough-guy music....Metallica, SlipKnot, Alice in Chains....etc. So we are all in there together tough music playing and heavy lifting of weights and the whole bit..... and as I am running and listening to my music, I smile and laugh a little cause they can't hear what I am listening too in my earphones.... I know that everyone assumes I too am listening to tough guy music. Little do they know that I am jamming out on my 5th mile to Amy Grant's "Lucky One". Well, that's it for now from Helmand.....