Wednesday, December 12, 2007

11 December 2007: Another sign of the end

About three weeks ago I stopped by the Iraqi Bazaar here in Camp Liberty. While there, I placed an order for plaques for each of my team members to thank them for their service during this deployment. It's normally a tradition to give soldiers something (other than an award) that commemorates their time and effort. Today I went back to the bazaar to pick them up. They were all ready, but two of them needed to be corrected. I took all the others with me and left the two plaques that needed to be fixed. The vendor promised they'd be fixed by Saturday. It's a big milestone for the deployment to be doing this. In about three weeks I will present each of my team with their respective plaques. From that point forward, our primary purpose will be preparing for the end of our deployments. We'll be conducting inventories of all our equipment, updating out continuity books, documenting all the AARs for the missions, and preparing the handover training we'll give our replacements once they arrive. Picking up the plaques represents yet another sign of the end. It's coming up fast.

The rest of the day was spent focusing on mission support requirements. We ensured that we could keep our billets at Camp Liberty long enough to complete our present missions. Another huge guarantee was that our NTV would continue in our possession throughout the duration. VBC/Liberty is a big place and it would really suck to be footbound. The last thing we attempted to do was get our flu shots. The TMC (Troop Medical Clinic) was out of flu vaccine. They told us to come back Sunday.

By Sunday I'll be down to 82 days remaining.

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