24 June 2009

After a year, things are different...(part one)

I'm in Iraq now. I feel I need to bring everyone up to speed after a year of absence.

Shortly after my last post, I received orders to deploy to Iraq. At the time, I didn't exactly know what I was going to be doing. I only knew that I was going to Fort Riley, Kansas for 8 weeks for training before a year long deployment. I didn't even know where I was going. I was slated as an "Alternate", meaning that I would go to training and if they didn't need me I would go back home. As you would later find out, this was most decidedly not the case. I had a few months to prepare, as I wasn't leaving for training until September. I was able to put my Household Goods into storage and terminate my lease with no great difficulty. I never did see nor hear about my security deposit. Oh well, not that much money anyways. I stayed with my Grandparents for a few days before I left for Kansas. I also left my car for them to babysit for me while I was off to training.

At Fort Riley I found out that I was going to be a Combat Advisor to the Iraqi Army, more specifically geared to Logistics and Support (Supply systems, Maintenance, Medical, etc.). We went through the usual riggamarole with weapons training, convoy training, comms training, and specialized classroom training on "How to be an Advisor" and Arabic language and cultural immersion classes. I also had advanced medical training which was a joke... Also, it was at this time that one of the HM1s in our group hurt his back in a Hummvee rollover trainer and was sent home. Guess what? Yours truly was bumped up to primary. We got to go home for Christmas, which was pretty nice.

I flew back to California to pick-up my car to drive to Washington. I made it to Redding, CA on the first day. We(My Grandpa was riding with me) left Redding at about 0600. We started to get some snow in the Siskiou(sp?) mountains. After we crossed over into the Oregon flatlands it cleared up. About 100 miles out of Portland it started getting bad, and what was normally an 8 hour drive turned into a 18 hour slow crawl all the way home. It never let up, in fact, once we crossed the Columbia into Washington it started to get real bad. It cleared up though as I got through Olympia, as the snow plows had already been at work. I got to the base of the hill at my parents house and high-centered on the unplowed snow and ice. I had just drove 1200 miles and I run into trouble 250 feet from my house... sigh...

I had a really nice visit with my family. The hard part was leaving. It always is....

To be continued...