War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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23-Jun-03 7:20 PM

Layton just read me his little pissed off letter home and it inspired me to write a little about my thoughts on our situation.

Our situation is a joke right now; we’ve been here for far too long. It doesn’t take 16 and counting days for them to send us an order to move from one base to another. I could understand us being out here for weeks if we were busy turning in equipment and washing vehicles to be put on ships. But we sit here literally doing nothing to help ourselves or the rest of the Army. I made up a quick spreadsheet to see how much it costs to keep us out here and it came up with $2,770.63 a day for the detachment, $78,563.80 a month, and almost one million ($942k) a year if we had to stay that long (heaven help us).

All that taxpayer money for us to do nothing but sit and get fat; at least back in Arifjan we fixed a few Humvees a day. Now we’re just a money sink that they’re delaying from leaving. If any corporation had a financial problem like this they would get turned upside down when they got audited. From a former taxpayers point of view I’m outraged, but right now I don’t care, I just want to go home. But if you ever wondered how much the war is costing us I figure that it takes $55.4k a year to put one person to sit here, that doesn’t include equipment, ordinance, or clean up costs the years after the war.

I was thinking of why I want to get home so much, a small part of the reason is that I want to be home in time for Bear Lake but I’ve wanted to be home even when I thought I’d be home before the Bear Lake trip. I know you’re probably thinking that you know why I want to go home, nobody wants to be out here away from their family, but I’m talking about a different feeling of wanting to go home.

When you take the family and friends out of the picture and go just off of my personal life, I don’t really have any reason to be so worried about going home. I don’t have a wife or kids like a lot of the guys here. I don’t have a job anymore so there’s no reason to worry about that. I don’t have a girlfriend to miss, although I feel the longer I’m out here the worse the chance I’ll have that the girl I want to go out with be single. I don’t have any school that needs to be done soon; I can start back in my curriculum whenever I want. Basically I’m a free agent as soon as I get home; no matter when I get home I can get started. So do I get so depressed that I’m still out here?

I guess I’ve always had a problem with being left behind. When I was a kid I’d have weird dreams where all my friends were going to some great/fun place but for some reason I couldn’t follow them. One time it was because they lost me and I didn’t know where to go; another they got shrunk down and went through a tiny door and I didn’t know how to follow (I think I had just watched Alice in Wonderland before). But I always hate being left out.

When I was a teenager my Mom couldn’t get me to sleep because she would be up late watching TV and I had to be up too incase she was having fun and I was missing it. And now today the times I get the most depressed is when my friends send me letters or tell me of all the fun their having back home. When I was hearing all the stories of the GONE Moab trip with the Xterra crew I was so pissed of that I was here that I nearly exploded out of jealousy. I hear about all the great movies coming out, and all the fun things I could be doing if I was home and I feel like life is passing me by out here.

A year is a small part of my whole life but it seems that the year I’m spending out here is one of the most pivotal in my life and that this may have long reaching effects in my life. I hope that nothing bad comes out of me wasting so much time out here.