Overtime

For those that have been counting I will have been deployed for a full twelve months this Monday. Yes that’s right, I have been gone for an entire year. If it wasn’t for that little extension that they hit us with I would be home right now if not on a flight headed that way. Bummer.

Even with about two full months to go signs of change are starting to show around here. Large tents are being put up to house the incoming new soldiers and their equipment is starting to arrive bit by bit everyday. There are even a few 101st Airborne patches walking around the FOB lately. It is just good to see that someone has finally shown up to replace us and we can begin to start packing up and preparing the get the hell on out of here.

What this means to you is that due to my short amount of time left over here you can no longer send any more care packages. I know you all are so saddened by these news. But don’t worry, thanks to your generosity I have plenty of food to make it through the last little bit of time. You all have been so good to me this entire year. I could never thank you all enough.

As for our missions and our continued fight over here, things are still the same for the most part. We are continuing to take the fight to the bad guys and we aren’t letting up just because we are short on time. We don’t want to hand a new unit an area that is all messed up and hasn’t been patrolled or raided in the last thirty days. We would simply be setting them up for failure. They will be fresh and this all takes some time to get use too.

In other news of randomness, I was at the patrol base in the city last night for a good sized mission we were running. While standing around waiting for everything to kick off I was talking to a member of the Navy EOD Team (Explosives Ordinance Disposal, think bomb squad). While talking to him he all the sudden blurts out;

EOD: “Is that really your last name?”
Me: “Uhhh… Yeah, been my last name my whole life.”
EOD: “Holy S***, my ex-wife had the same last name, she took everything from me, even my dog. I hate that b****.
Me: Even the dog? That sucks.

What is so weird about this whole thing is that through out my entire life I have never seen, met or heard of anyone that has my same last name. Well of course there is my immediate family but no one outside of them. Everything I was ever able to trace back showed that my name game from German settlers that came over and settled somewhere in the Ohio and Pennsylvania area. Sure enough this guy and his rather hated ex-wife were from Ohio.

So yeah, that was a rather random story. Just one many I have collected over here. But when you scrape up so many of America’s finest and stuff them all in a sandbox, some rather odd stories will emerge. After living, fighting and sitting on the highway waiting for EOD for 5 hours you even begin to learn too much about the people in your truck.

Over this past year my platoon has grown rather close. Granted that deep inside I think we all really hate one another but on the outside we get along rather well. We all love to make fun of how incompetent out leadership is and how our platoon leader couldn’t lead him self out of a paper bag. We are just like any other group of boys; we like to make fun of each other and just try to have a good time despite what it is we may be doing.

So here we are at the end of the fourth quarter, so let’s all get ready for a little bit of overtime.