War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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09-Jul-03 8:25 PM

Well we finally got the good news yesterday, we’re leaving tomorrow. I’ve been so excited that I forgot to write in the journal. We were originally going to head to Navstar on the border then to Camp Victory then to Doha; but since we don’t want to get stuck at Victory we asked some other officers if it was ok to move straight to Doha and skip Victory since we already have housing.

Anyway we’re hoping to be out of here by 7:00am tomorrow but now 171 wants us to go down with 3 other vehicles. Slocum doesn’t want us delayed so he asked if they would be ready by 7:00AM and 171 said that was good enough for him, but I get the feeling that we’ll be waiting for them until 9 or 10. Since they’re going they don’t want to stop for ice on the way out so we’ll be cooking the whole ride down.

It doesn’t matter as long as we’re out of here.

I’ve really been enjoying the sandstorms today, that sounds weird but it feels really good when you know it’s probably the last day of your life that you have to deal with things this bad. Hopefully the ride down goes good, and this is the end of the misery of Iraq.

I’m not as excited as I was when we left Scandia; I guess waiting a month has let the buzz that we’re leaving wear off. I’m not saying that I’m not excited though, I’ve been counting the hours till we leave, and we keep talking about home like it’s only a few days away. Then we start talking about how nice Doha will be compared to this. Burger King, Subway, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Inn will be nice to go to but even the D-Fac will be 5 star compared to the MRE/T-Rations that we’ve had for the last 3 and a half months. And there’s a good chance that we’ll have A/C too.

I think I’ll be spending all my free time at the Gym trying to catch up on all the exercise that I’ve been missing since I’ve come to Iraq. And I’ll have to find a port to hook my Laptop up to, the net will be different and last time they wouldn’t allow us to put a Laptop on the net unless the wiped the drive first, but I’d much rather hook my laptop up rather than rely on the internet café they have there.

Everybody’s pretty excited that we’re leaving; everybody’s up right now talking outside the tent about what’s going to happen in the next couple days. We spend so much time speculating and going over scenarios that we’ll make great consultants when we go home. We can predict the future with all the speculating we do.

I can’t believe I’m actually getting close to seeing everybody back home, I hope Ft. Carson goes smoothly and quickly; I don’t want to have wait any longer to see everybody. It’s too bad that so much of the summer is already over, I would like to have a giant vacation over the summer but the last month will be nice, after that I’ll be on my own because everybody will be going back to school. That’s another thing, should I go back to school in fall instead of spring or should I focus on getting a Networking job before school or should I just chill out till spring and slowly ease back into everything. I won’t be able keep away from work for too long, but I will have Leave until September and unemployment after that. I’ll have to decide things on the fly I guess, there’s so many variables that I’ll just see what comes.

A lot can change in the next month or two, I’m really glad that we’re finally getting things moving again though. Sitting on my hands for the last month has been really frustrating, I’m glad that my life is finally moving again.