An Explanation of Sorts

A knife sits wedged into the desk at which I type. Uniforms, clean and dirty, hang haphazardly throughout the room as if waiting for guidance. As of today, I have less than 600 days left. As of today, I have less than a week to go. In a week I hit my 4 year mark. It’s all just numbers I know, but its always been this way.

This isn’t anything more than me writing down my thoughts. My memories. My current events, and with some work my future. This is simply a story I happen to be sober enough to tell. The story won’t always be mine, and even now before it starts I’m not sure it will ever be mine.

This is the story of a relatively new concept. Of a group of people. We are men and we are women. We are juvenile and mature, single and married and engaged and divorced. We are experienced, and we are brand new. We are models of our kind, and we are examples to be set. We are educated and wise, violent and criminal. We are strong and weak and big and small. We are parents and children alike. We are White and Black and Latino and Asian. We are nervous and excited and bored. We are rational, and we are insane. We are many things, but most importantly we are a team. We are Team 3, a Multiple Functions Team from an Intelligence section of the Army. And we are going to Iraq.

Our mission, at the concept, is to conduct Site Exploitation. In layman’s terms we raid houses along with a combat unit and gather evidence against insurgents. In training, we are superb. In actuality, we are untested.

We roll out on in less than a week. I get out of the service in 598 days. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

-VW