Luxury and Adaptation

Not a day goes by when you don’t miss something about home. Whether it’s somebody or something, at least right now, when you aren’t occupied it’s where your mind kind of leads itself. It’s natural this early on I think. I’ve realized how much I took for granted how easy it was to send an email, or make a phone call. The internet here is so slow you almost see how much you took for granted just being able to check your email. Things that seem to be implied stateside are luxuries here. You find just being in the United States is a luxury.

We’re starting to get to work here as we begin to establish ourselves more and more. As you have no doubt seen in the news, things are heating up significantly. I can’t say there’s really a work routine established yet, but we’re starting to fall into grooves and fall into the mindset that the mission requires. It’s a little different then NTC when you were doing an Afghanistan scenario in a section of the Mojave Desert. We’ve gone from a place that size to something the size of Texas. It’s obviously a significantly larger area, so you have to kind of modify and adapt what you’re used to for a larger scale.

Everything associated with being out here is kind of an adaptation. It’s an adaptation of tactics, an adaptation of routines and an adaptation of your every day life. How do you fill the day before and after work that makes it so you aren’t just sleeping and working? What else is there that you can do? What is there you have to do? Due to the chow halls only being open at certain times, you have to schedule times to go and eat too. You have to schedule times to shower, do personal hygiene, get haircuts go to the gym, etc. Back home you can kind of do things just to do them, here you do things in order to free up time for something else you have to do. There is no autonomy in your routine really. You are afforded some of the privileges of a free man, but the general restrictions of a prisoner. It’s not depressing, just what they call the initial culture shock of deployment. It takes getting used to.

Until next time.

-DM