My Deployment and Nothing Else Interesting

So big news…or not…soon I will be heading to Afghanistan to live in a wooden hut for 6 months (seriously…check the pic). To tell you the truth I’m actually looking forward to it, minus leaving Stephanie behind. Most of my friends have been and done their job and I figure my turn is overdue, so here we go.

This blog might change a little bit. Instead of ranting and complaining about all things Christian I hope to write more about my experiences, as a Christian, “at war.” I was thinking about changing the title of the blog to something like “Memoirs of a Christian in Combat” or “Being All I Can Be…and More,” but that’s kind of stupid, so I’ll just stick with what I got.

When I head to Afghanistan I’ll be filling an Army deployment, which means I have to take five weeks of Army Combat Training in New Jersey before I go. I’m currently doing that right now. (I’m actually sitting on my top bunk in a room with 11 other guys, my headphones jammed up my ears and pumping Boards of Canada to block out the noise.) Now, This doesn’t mean that when I go to Afghanistan I’ll be running around with soldiers throwing grenades and shooting nazis…I mean terrorists. It just so happens that the job I do in the Air Force is also done by the Army and they need extra bodies, so the Air Force is stepping up and filling the deployments. The Air Force has begun filling a lot of Army deployments so now every Air Force person who is filling an Army deployment, regardless of the job, has to do combat skills training…even lousy broadcasters like myself. So…needless to say, I’m here in New Jersey doing Army combat training.

There has been a lot of things happening, a lot of nothing happening, and a lot of wondering what’s going to happen, but I’m not going to write about much of that now. I will say this: To play Army, you have to look like Army. So yesterday all of us in training went and loaded up on Army combat gear: helmets, boots, goggles, sleeping bags, body armor, knee pads, elbow pads, etc. When we get the stuff all put on we actually look like we can do some butt kicking. The only problem is, it took us all an entire night to figure out how to get it on. You should have seen all us Air Force retards in here last night trying to figure out which way to put on a helmet and wondering how to strap on the goggles.

We did get it all on though. And if you didn’t know me and saw me running around with all that gear on you’d probably be scared of me and run the other way. If you did know me however, you’d probably just start laughing, push me over, and go get your friends to watch me try and get up.

Maybe by the end of the training I’ll at least be able to hit back.