Babby's first chopper ride

I had zero conception of what I'd be able to bring to COS Sykes in Tal Afar, so I think I packed everything I came to Iraq with. That morning, I found out I could only bring two or three bags... so much of it was spent frantically redistributing everything to make sure I had enough clothes for however long I would be out there for. Then, I got to da choppa and flew out west across the desert... oh joy. It was super stressful for me, having a day's notice I would be going out to a base away from my team, where I didn't know anyone. In my email newsletter to my buddies, I wrote about the visual textures of flying in a Blackhawk, but I feel like I had to present a sanitized version of events and inject as little emotion into the process as possible, while keep it it humorous and interesting.

"You're leaving for Tal Afar tomorrow. Pack your bags." WHAT?!

It's such a contrast to me: tonight the 29th was spent in Royal Oak and Ferndale hanging out with old friends, while last year I was basically given a day's notice that I, the least experience soldier on my team, would be traveling by myself to a base in the middle of nowhere to do a job that required someone who actually knew what they were doing... makes me appreciate little things like hanging out more! I'll post more substantial content once I've gotten some sleep.

One Year

A year ago today (December 28th) marks my first day in Iraq, and I feel like I have a lot to say about that... but there's so much else to write about, like fear and drinking with other veterans! I guess I'll write about the first thing.

C-130 Porthole

December 28th, 2010 - the day I arrived in Iraq! All the fretting, all the waiting, all the planning finally over! After spending more than a week in a daze somewhere in Kuwait, we finally boarded a C-130 and flew to Mosul.

I've never been much for observing people, and I don't think I really started noticing people's personalities until the deployment. I got picked up at the airport by a young Asian NCO, and over the course of the ride back to the PRT compound I learned everything I cared to learn about him. He was the same age as me, and though it was interesting how our paths diverged (he enlisted right out of high school whereas I enlisted after college) I really didn't care at all for his ridiculous machismo. I tried to make some light conversation about how the deployment had been for him, like asking about how many missions he had been on, and he gave hard ass responses like "yo dude I've been on over 400 missions!" Then I met one of his buddies, and unsurprisingly this guy was the same way, if not worse... haha as insecure as I am/was, they took overcompensation to a whole new level! I'm pretty certain they didn't shoot anyone or have a chance to be involved in any kind of shenanigans outside the wire, and that they had simply taken after a senior NCO in the wrong ways.

I will admit I was like that once, thinking I was an absolute BAMF immediately after basic training and AIT... then working on Red Dawn illuminated how foolish my notions of badassery was. If anything, in the past year I've been thinking about how to be kinder, gentler, more thoughtful, more loyal, and generally trying to better filter the words coming out of my pie-hole. Sure, I've deployed, I like to shoot guns, and I'm really good at video games or whatever, but those things in and of themselves don't define masculinity, they're facets of it at best. It's just something I'm increasingly conscious of, how selfish I might have been during college, and learning to appreciate little things here and there that people have done for me, and being actively engaged to try to pay them forward.

On Fantasy and Memory

Jon: lol

  you should blog more!

 i think i want to do that...

Coincidentally, we were talking right after I wrote about reading military fiction and how I can't relate to the book I'm reading. I remember having a conversation with a NCO (staff sergeant) about literature, and how he read fantasy novels to keep himself busy, particularly due to the ferocious nature of the Iraq War during his previous tours. Though I haven't really been reading fictional books as much, I must admit I've been enjoying video games with a fantastical element like Killing Floor, as opposed to the faux realism of Battlefield or Modern Warfare. More on wargaming later, I could write a whole blogpost about that.

Now I'm not that educated on the whole process, so this is probably going to sound like ignorant drivel, but human memory is something I've always been fascinated with, especially since it's something I can learn so much from but oftentimes do not. One of the things that intrigues me: my memory strongly remembers December 26th as the date my team got to Iraq... but all of my photos have timestamps of the 28th. I wonder why that little detail is off by two days - maybe because I remember with great certainty being stuck in Kuwait on Christmas? In any case, it's nice not to be in the Middle East, and I'll probably write more about it as I reflect on the past year.

Our accommodations in Kuwait - borrowed that blanket, travel pillow is mine

War Fiction

I recently purchased a Kindle Fire to do some reading with, as well as to entertain myself at airports or in the air. I bought the novel "Of Rice and Men" because I thought it was a nonfictional account of civil affairs units in Vietnam, but as it turns out, it's fiction based on the author's experiences. For that reason, I can't really get too absorbed into reading the book - I don't really care, because on some fundamental level, it's not real and I don't know what I can learn from that.

"We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People" was a much more interesting read for me, mostly because I would have written a very similar book myself, and I can relate to the subject matter. Basically it's the story of one State Department diplomat's time as a PRT team leader in Iraq, so it's interesting to see how things unfolded from a top-down perspective.

I wonder if my reading tastes are another one of the things that have changed this year.