wish my luck, everybody!
My mom is going to be so mad lmao
I remember how good it felt to come home. I still want to go back though.
Welcome home
#AdultHood
Drunkenly stumbling through Best Buy drinking midrange scotch from a trendy flask with Soviet marking when a red headed employee in her early 20s tells me I can’t drink in the store with all the seriousness of a doctor delivering news of a terminal illness. Shhhhhh, I tell her. It’s cool, I tell her. I buy a $1,500 computer. It’s cool.
In 2010, photographer Paula Bronstein documented a special section of the Marines working in Afghanistan - a Female Engagement Team (FET). Muslim tradition often forbids interaction between men and women, so the FET was created in order to engage with the local female population.
Yesterday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon would formally open combat roles to female soldiers.
I worked a lot with a FET team in Afghanistan because we both fell under the category of “Enablers.” The FET PL was a Puerto Rican who would always greet me in the mornings by saying “goo mornning, E-Specialist.” Their medic got her CMB by patching up a wounded Talib who wouldn’t bleed out even though he had multiple gun shot wounds to his abdomen. She later explained he didn’t bleed out because he was so dehydrated. This has been a post about ladies.
When you only sleep for three hours a night
you are free to surf the dark crevices of the internet. Why only this morning I was able toread a morbidly obese woman’s morbidly detailed blogpost on her post restroom hygiene process.
I also went to Sephora to look for something to put under my eyes to hide my eye baggage but Sephora isn’t open at four AM. I then set my watch to an American time zone.
Other things I’ve done with my new found time:
- fucked up a recipe in my new crockpot
- done all of the laundry
- identified with Hanna Horvath in a deeply spiritual manner
- went on a date with a dude who had previously dumped me in a FUCKING OLIVE GARDEN before I deployed
- updated my iPhone’s operating system
- considered apologizing to the grown ass man I made cry/almost fought when I was drunk last night
- squats
My favorite parts of the 30+ hour plane ride home:
- A senior enlisted soldier saying, “I know it’s been a long flight, but there’s cameras in the terminal. Try and look camera ready.”
- This female’s face during this picture.
Seriously, my iPhone takes weird pictures (the case is fucked up because I dropped it out of a help and now takes weird pictures) but I had to share this because of the judgment on that rando female’s face.
I’m back in the greatest country in the world. There were a lot of emotions, some of which I don’t necessarily feel like reliving, but I’m really happy to be back. For a while I was actually kind of dreading leaving Afghanistan, but again, really happy to be back.
Our welcome home ceremony was… whatever. I don’t understand why country music has the marked cornered on patriotism. I don’t understand the need to draw out a ceremony when Soldiers haven’t seen their families in a long time. I did like giving the Rear D privates shit when they carried my bags around. That was fun.
The one part of the ceremony I did like were the old, salty Veterans who held flags outside the gym as we walked in. It was great to feel like I’m part of a brotherhood that’s been around long before me and will be around long after I’m gone. It was beautiful and somber and not cheesy at all just let me have this Goddamn it.
You can be on top of the world at only six thousand feet
The thing about paying off school loans while deployed
Is you start to think about grad school. Suck it, retention NCO.
