I wasn’t in Balad long. Most of my team is out on mission right now. That meant that I was back into the fire without delay. At 0700 I dropped by Catfish Air to catch a Blackhawk to Taji. I haven’t been back more than 20 hours and I’m already back in the fight. It was a cool, overcast morning. It felt strange to fly on the helicopter without sweating my ass off. Before long I’ll need to start packing my gortex and fleece.
Taji is the same ugly place it was a month ago. I’m not billeted as close to the artillery this time. I can’t say that anything exciting took place. I’m still on leave in my head. I’ve noticed a dramatically different perspective on deployment now that I’m post-R&R. Prior to leave I had an optimistic, happy-go-lucky perspective that was fueled by the approach of my R&R. Now there’s no R&R to look forward to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still happy. I still enjoy the work. My eyes are more fixated on 140 days from now. That’s when I expect my deployment to end. All I need to do is stay busy. If I do that the time will fly by. Fortunately, there are lots of missions between now and then.
In the meantime, I’m in Taji. The water is out in my billets. The nearest functioning shower is too far to walk. All my personal hygiene will be done with bottled water until the showers are working again. After work today I stopped by the gym. My only choice afterward was to take a “whore bath”. That meant standing in the shower stall and pouring bottled water on my body while I scrubbed. Yeah, it sucked. That’s life though. Well, that’s military life sometimes. Freezing my ass off with bottled water beats smelling like a polecat from my own body odor. The soldier that looks after our billets assured me that the water pump would be functioning again in a day or so. Until then it’s bottled water all around.
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1 comment:
I read some of your posts, I really don't know how you do it. If I were where you are, I'd be counting the days too.
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