War in Iraq, a Soldier's View

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25-Apr-03 10:29 AM

Not much going on today either, except that the General is coming through and we’re hoping that he’ll be bringing our orders to go home. I get the feeling that the only reason that he’s coming through so that the commander of this camp can kiss his ass and show him how proud of this camp he is. He won’t mention that we’ve been here over our 180 day mark or that we’ve been out here longer than any other unit at the camp. But I have had a feeling the last few days that today we’ll find out that we’re going home. It seems that that’s how good news always comes, when you’re at your most miserable point somebody says something that just brings you around a full 180. That’s the way the news to go home was before, everybody was miserable and SGT Slocum told us we had a group meeting. We were all sure that we were going to get news to go forward further, then he told us we were going back to Doha and probably home. Of course a few days later he said that the news had changed and we were going forward now and that brought us right back down to the gutter.

I’ll just keep hoping that the day to go home will fall on the time when I had my bet which is sometime in the next few days.

As for keeping busy the last few days I’ve been using Quicken 2001 to get all my finances in order. It’s nice to plan how much money I’ll have in the future and how much I’ll be making. Almost all of my future plans are just estimations (that’s why it’s called the FUTURE) but even if I get a job after this that pays near what I’ve been getting at Balkamp and here then I’ll be well on my way by the end of the year. From what I’ve been able to enter in my net worth right now is 15,000 with only my two vehicles as assets, and I’ll be out of debt by Dec-2004. But I had to get the interest rates of my vehicles off the top of my head and there’s always things that crop up at the most inopportune time to take all of your money away. Plus I can’t expect to keep the same cash flow I have here. When I’m here there’s no spending and I only have cash flow in. But even when I tried to put as many deductions in my future plan as I could it still came up with a steady incline reaching $5000 in the bank by mid October and $15k by May 2004.

I’m sure that a lot of other things will come into the picture that will keep me from getting to far above $5000 but hopefully I won’t have any loans in a year and a half and it will only be regular payments like phone, rent or whatever. And it will be nice getting a career started where I’ll have 401k and medical and dental, plus with all of the VA benefits that I have after this deployment I’ll be set on house loans and other things like that. I’m not even sure what benefits I get when I’m done with this, it would make sense that we get most all of the benefits that they get after a 20 year term of service, service in an actual war has to worth something. I wonder if you get any money for retirement, or if you get full medical/dental or if they only work on things that were caused during the war.

My mom said she got a booklet in the mail that tells what some of the benefits we get are, like unemployment when we get home. That will be nice, I’ve been thinking of taking at least 2 weeks off for myself when I get back because we’ll have that much accrued leave, but now I might let it go as long as a month. And when I start looking for a job I’ll be able to take my time and get a good one because the job market for Network technicians has been down lately. I’d like to get a job where I was getting at least 15 an hour starting with plenty of room for promotion, I want to get my CCIE and run large networks for companies like American Express or Qwest , maybe even start designing large networks. It’s weird that I find networks so interesting to work on, just describing what a network technician does bores most all people but figuring the best way to move information from one place to another is just so interesting to me. I guess it comes from when I was a kid when I got interested in engineering problems of moving rivers to get water to communities, building efficient tall buildings and other engineering feats.

It will be nice to pick up where I left off when I got activated and get my life on the move again. I just hope it comes soon because every week I spend here is one more week I’ll be behind in getting my life on the move.

It will be nice to start hanging out with my friends again too, I’m listening to Social Distortion right now and it reminds me of going to concerts with the whole group. The concerts are always pretty good but the best time is hanging out before and after just talking and listening to music.

I hope that the General has some good news about us, it would be nice to be on our way out soon, it would be absolutely fantastic to be back safe with my family and friends as soon as two or three weeks from now. I already have so many plans on what to do, me Layton and Hansen will probably go to Vegas within the first week of being home, I’ll spend most of the first week getting the Xterra tuned and out in the mountains, and all nights I’ll spend with my sister watching movies till 2:00am. One weekend in the first week or two I need to have a party with ALL of my friends there, not a welcome home party just a big hangout party like we always have. And there needs to be a UXOC trip to Moab within the first month of being home with as many Xterra’s there as possible including others from other clubs, maybe we can even see if some of the other guys here in Iraq home by then and we can have a “make-up” Moab Easter Safari. I’m sure by GOX almost all of the soldiers will be home and we can talk about where we were and what we saw.

Hopefully it will all happen soon.