A Year from Afghanistan
Reflections on deployment
It has been 378 days since I was wheels-up from Bagram Air Field. It has been 375 days since I was wheels-down at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Today marks 365 days since wildly pushing through a crowd of cheering, laughing, and crying families and Soldiers, searching desperately for the one person I had not seen for a year. The hug happened before we even saw each other fully. All I remember from that moment is the feel of her hair on my face and everything else in the world fading out.
As a National Guardsman, I always knew that a deployment was a vague possibility; somewhere out there in the distant future. That changed with the phone call from my battalion commander two years ago stating, “We’re going.” The reality of it never hit until the ramp of the C-130 went down and the blazing Parwan heat reflecting off the tarmac engulfed me. Stepping onto the flightline, I saw the Hindu Kush rise around me and took in the mixed aromas of Afghanistan. Reality became starker that evening when I first heard the 107mm rockets fly over and detonate on the FOB, amidst the wail of the incoming alarm.
Mine was not a combat deployment. I spent the majority of my time on tactical bases and forward operating bases. I was indeed a POG (Personnel Other than Grunt). I was to arrive home without the Combat Action Badge sported by those who had taken direct fire on convoys. Conversely, I was also free from the corresponding post-traumatic stress. Or so I thought. Turns out, even a POG staff officer can bring bad stuff home with them. A combination of stress from planning battalion operations and being separated from loved ones brought its own mixed bag of problems. Learning how to go back to a normal work schedule and figuring out how to interact with regular people, let alone my wife, made things interesting. Then came nightmares. Incredibly vivid combat nightmares, which I found odd since I had never been in combat. These came with embarrassment; who was I to have nightmares or symptoms of PTS when I had never been “in the shit?” I resisted discussing anything with my veteran friends because of this. Ironically, it was when I finally broached the subject with them that the nightmares began to fade. As one, they all answered, “Yeah man, I get those all the time. It’s normal.” Normal is good.
Since coming home I have paid some attention to the on-going events in Afghanistan. Since my mission was retrograde, the polite term for tearing everything down, I was interested to see how the U.S. would phase out combat operations and move into “Resolute Support.” I was happy to see that the mistakes made in Iraq were not exactly replicated in Afghanistan. Am I optimistic about Afghanistan at one year back? Don’t ask me that. Was our retrograde mission a success? Don’t ask me that either. Do I miss it? Sometimes. There are times I miss the camaraderie and the sense of purpose deployment gives. I miss the striking scarlet sunrise over the Hindu Kush, watching F-16s hit their afterburners after combat takeoff and disappearing into the skies in seconds. Or the roar of Apache attack helicopters roaring over our TOC, like angry hornets.
But all of this fades away when I can wake up next to my wife every morning.
Talking to a friend in the unit that replaced us, I found out that their tour had been cut short because retrograde was over. Their tactical operations center, a series of tents that I spent countless hours in, was struck by a 107mm rocket shortly after all personnel had vacated it.
Timing really is everything.
