Defining moments and dividing lines
Posted by SigSpace at 9:58 PM, 8/2/07 |
Jeffreygenehk writes:
maybe
sometime, if it`s not too personal, would you share a bit more of what
you mean about your life being divided into pre and post afghanistan?
Sure.
Before I do anything else--anything at all--something needs to be made
perfectly clear. I am not a combat arms soldier. I`m not infantry.
I`m not (heaven forbid) SF or anything of the like. I never kicked in
doors. I never bled, aside from the nail I stepped on while building a
b-hut internal wall. We didn`t do street patrols or checkpoints. I never patched up someone else who was
bleeding. We never lost anyone on our team.
I did take fire--direct and indirect. I did return fire; I don`t know
whether I hit anyone, but they were surely keeping their heads down. We
did "find, know, and never lose the enemy," and once we did that, we
radioed reports in and our combat arms guys made bad people
into dead people--military alchemy. In that very real sense, I am
responsible for the deaths of human beings. Don`t shed any tears for
them, though--they started it.
In short, I had a relatively easy deployment to Afghanistan with a few
very terrifying moments, a rather larger number of tense ones, and many
months of tedious ones. "Normal" meant putting on my rifle (or later,
SAW) as part of my uniform, going weeks without a shower (or shave or
call home), digging holes in the shale only to discover during an enemy
attack that they really weren`t deep enough after all...
You contrast this a little with my old normal life, where a bad day was
one in which a server went down and I got a lot of annoying phone calls
during my lunch break. Or perhaps a Chief Something Officer in the
company needed something stupid on his computer, and it was my job to
explain why that couldn`t happen. Or maybe some tickets didn`t get
documented properly and I had to reinvent the wheel--the sort of thing
that I`d definitely bring up in the next staff meeting.
At home, a car breakdown is a major catastrophe. You`re stuck on the
road. Gotta call AAA, maybe get a ride from your family member.
You`ve missed the dinner party.
In Afghanistan, my humvee became stuck in the mud. This would not have
mattered so terribly much if it hadn` t been for the RPGs landing
nearby and the rest of the convoy being fully engaged in a retrograde
advance. I had enough time to contemplate trying to cross that mud on
foot with my extra armor (turret gunners being required to wear full
kit at that time and place) and SAW when a friendly Canadian LAV-III
gave us a nudge and got us moving homeward again. Their turrets were
all to the rear, providing cover fire.
[I love Canadians. They have great weapons, the will to fight, and they make excellent
coffee.]
Earlier this week, I heard a sharp THWAP while I was on the highway. A
rock put a pretty big chip in my windshield. The last time I heard a
noise like that while driving... well. I took a picture. [link]
Life on a deployment--if you can get away from the flagpole--is life
turned up to 11. Everything you do matters--everything has real
consequences. There are people out there who are trying their darndest
to kill you. If they succeed, you won`t have to start the game over or
regain the level or play the DVD over again--you`ll be dressed up
nicely and you`ll have a nice ceremony and your family will get a flag
and you`ll just be dead and that`s all. Live with that knowledge for
11 months--even a relatively easy 11 months like I had--and you`ll
understand why life is divided into "before" and "after" with a
disproportionately large dose of "during."
And in the meantime, look charitably upon those who have trouble making the jump.
Sig
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