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For old times sake
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For anyone who cares, my old blog can be found at www.paratroopersaresexy.blogspot.com
I was feeling nostalgic, and reading some of the oldies, and below is one of my faves, from September of 2004:
It was the best of times...
Being in the military, you always here the cliches about how this will turn out to be the best time of your life, and you'll have all these great memories, and what not.
At the time, you really don't think so. I remember running a mission in the mountains of Afghanistan, blowing up thousands of pounds of cached weapons. We got stuck outside of this little village for almost three days because the weather was so bad the pilots couldn't get the choppers in to get us out. We had planned for a 18 hour mission (it was supposed to take 3 hours) After the first 36 hours, we had very minimal food and no water, and really no hopes of getting any. We literally pooled our money and paid the locals for food and firewood to keep warm and thaw out (the first night it poured down freezing rain ALL NIGHT LONG - needless to say the next day was a cold friggin' day). This was by far the coldest experience I have ever had in my life. You know how your fingers get if you spend too long in the tub or shower? My HANDS, to my wrists, were like that, pure white, for 3 days after the mission ended and we finally got back to our tents.
We went from that to having to climb thousands of feet of the most severe terrain I have ever thought about, in full battle gear, in 130° heat. We would drink a gallon of water before breakfast. Everyday. It was so hot that there would be random lightning storms almost every night - very surreal. We were fortunate enough to have our resupply helicopters (we were operating out of a forward base somewhere in the country) carry some of our supplies to the tops of the mountains we had outposts on for us. But everything else we carried. Weapons, ammo, extra water, food. Plus our body armor, and radios (with batteries), and all the other necessary items to sustain yourself on a combat mission.
And you know what? Those cliches are right. I look back at my experiences in Afghanistan, getting 107mm rockets shot at us almost nightly, to my travels through greater Baghdad, Iraq, having 82mm mortars landing in the lake next to our living quarters, and I can't help but to laugh.
We had a couple minutes of downtime today, and we were reliving some of our tales, and we were laughing our asses off about some of the stuff we did. Like driving full speed in a Ford Ranger pickup between bases in Iraq, in the middle of the night, with no lights on because we could see tracer fire in the direction we were going and didn't want to let the bad guys know we were coming, with rifles loaded sticking out the window just in case. Or having to make checks around the perimeter of our base in Afghanistan making sure the towers had batteries for their radios, and having the headlights of our John Deere® Gator going out, so we turned on our triple-A powered headlamps and kept hauling ass.
Everything from our section leader at the time insisting we all got up at sun-up to go running (we all got up before sun-up and left him alone) to the donkey we hired to carry supplies up a mountain that fell down about 700 feet of jagged terrain (we had to put the donkey out of its misery the next morning - our chain of command wouldn't let us risk going out and doing it at night, and we had to pay the locals for the donkey), to the guy who we bet couldn't eat a case of 30 yogurt's in 30 minutes (he made it to 22 in the first 7 minutes, and then only got 4 more in the rest of the time).
At the time, it was some of the most horrible experiences of my life, and some of the things I saw on my world-tour-to-date will be etched into my brain for eternity, forever haunting me at the most inopportune times. But looking back at it now, I had some of the funniest times of my life with those guys, and I will never forget the times we had, and most of the memories we made.
I remember those times mostly with fondness an laughter, lightheartedly making fun of each other for some of the stupider things we did while there (see above night-time driving stories), but I also remember the camaraderie - the knowledge that at any time I could be called upon to literally save the life of my closest friends, or help them kick the living crap out of someone that was trying to kill both of us. If you have never shared the experience of whole-heartedly fearing for your life with someone else, you really don't know the kind of closeness that we soldiers share - I believe even more so in our unit. Shared hardship is one of the things that bring people closest together, and an Airborne Infantry unit that has spent 12 of the last 21 months in a combat zone half a world away have shared a lot of hardship together.
I continue to pray for my brothers and sisters still over there, and I sincerely hope you do, too.
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