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.
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.
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| C-130 Porthole |
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.
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