Anticipation

I’ve been a little restless. It could be the anticipation of going home or the mosquito in my trailer that has kicked my ass for the past 3 nights. Whichever it is, I’m up before they call everyone outside the wire to morning prayer and I’m sitting in the TV trailer listening for tell-tale signs that I should be someplace containing more concrete. Thank God I don’t have much more of this to go.

I’m what you’d call a short timer. I have completed 336 days in Iraq and only have a few more to go before they ship me home just days shy of a year. As I’ve noted in previous blogs, I’ve spent the last few days packing things up, throwing things out, out-processing and generally trying to stay focused on the things I need to do (like not getting blown up). I have a lot of thoughts about my deployment, most of which I’ve already written about, but as my days here number in the single digits, I’ve oddly spent a large portion of this week looking back on my last year instead of looking forward to my trip home. I would love to say that this experience here has been a positive one, that I was called up when I was needed to do a job that was very necessary to support the mission. I would like to think that some other soldier with multiple deployments under their belt didn’t have to come over here because Uncle Sam called me up instead. I want to believe that my efforts contributed or mattered. Only time will tell if I’ll ever accept any of these things as true.

Even though I’m out of here soon, I still have some more hoops to jump through before I arrive in my home state of Texas. There’s a stop-over in Kuwait and then back to Fort Riley where I’ll most likely freeze by rear off. Only after I do all that will I be released. I call Dallas home because both my civilian job and my stuff are there, but technically I’m homeless since I sold my place before I deployed. I have some wonderful people who are going to put me up until I can find a place of my own so I won’t be living out of an abandoned refrigerator box in the bottom of the Trinity River valley.

On top of figuring out my living arrangements, I’m looking forward to returning to my life outside of uniform. I’m going to try and do some traveling to visit friends and family, especially those who supported me and kept in touch with me, my parents and my girlfriend during this tour. I’d love to take just a month off to travel the states, slowly letting myself get readjusted to the common liberties I’ve missed by being away from the US for so long, but there are many factors that will prevent that, the biggest of them being the cost of gas. I guess I’ll just chalk up paying the $75 to fill the tank on my truck as one of those freedoms I’ve missed out on.

I wonder if they sell monkey butt scented car fresheners back home?