For those of you who have never been in this situation one of the things we deployment-prone folks do while on deployment is set a few benchmarks when we get here. Most tours are 12 months long and during that time there is certain to be quite a few things missed, but with each missed birthday or anniversary is just one more benchmark passed. The Team left on 10 April 2010 and for me the marks that I was looking for were as follows:
mid-June...my birthday
mid-July...my anniversary
early-September...football season
late-October...Halloween
late-November...Thanksgiving...just kidding, Alabama/Auburn game!
mid-December...R&R (leave)
I really haven't given a whole lot of thought to the milestones past R&R, I just want to get there first. I assume a good mark will be the Super Bowl, after that we'll have less than a month left here.
My reason for discussing this is because tomorrow marks 200 days of deployment...only 50 more until R&R. We didn't plan for 250 days until R&R, it just worked out that way. By the time we get to mid-tour leave we will have been gone from home for over 8 months and 1 week...entirely too long.
Our office has gotten busy again after the two-week lull that we had for end-of-year closeout. Between work and Alabama football the overall deployment is going fairly well, no complaints outside of the typical Army complaints. It has been interesting in the sense that we are co-located with Air Force and Navy troops, which means that I've had to learn a new language or two. For a while I was in an office that was completely split...1 Army, 1 Air Force, and 1 Navy. We were constantly having to remind one another to stop using acronyms since no one understood them outside of our own service component.
The next exciting thing that is going to happen here is a back-up taping for ESPN of the UA/Miss. State game. ESPN plans to do a live broadcast from Bagram for that game, but just in case there are problems they will be taping ahead of time for the sake of redundancy. Apparently The University sent some Bama gear that we are going to get and there are quite a few Tide Alumni scattered around post. Hopefully I'll be on camera giving a shout-out to my wonderful family!
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Todd, When you said it's been 200 days..I actually looked at my calendar! For those of us left behind, it feels like longer most days..then again we look back and say "wow..it's been 200 days already". It will be an amazing site to see you guys get off that plane for R&R!
ReplyDeleteRoll Tide Todd!