Chris' Deployment Journal

It’s early yet, very early, but we can’t help but get a little excited as we’ve just started to hear the very first, very early words about our return home. The initial word is that we’ll be de-mobilizing (turning in gear, getting medical check-up’s, mental evaluations, and just generally winding down) out of Ft. Lewis, Wash. This is good news for most of the guys as it’s the closest Army facility to Idaho that we could ‘de-mobe’ out of. That could, as always, change of course. We also heard that a conex shipping container will be here at the end of the month for us to start to pack some of our less necessary gear into. Just these little signals have us all excited, perhaps a little too much. This news, coupled with the new knowledge that I gained while on leave of just all that I’m now missing at home, (further coupled with the heat) is already making the days CREEP by so much slower than before.

Just after writing the above, we got some further news that was not ideal. They expect us to be off our base early September, spend a month and a half or so living out of tents on the KRAB (we’d hoped that we might be there only a week or two), all be in Kuwait by November 18, and, they’re now saying, all done and back home by mid-December. I’m still holding out hope to be home by Thanksgiving as another rumor has us in Kuwait by October 22 (this kind of depth and breadth of rumors is pretty typical in a military unit… and often extremely frustrating, until you just learn to stop listening to them), but we’ll see. My now-experienced guess is that they are telling us the worst possible dates, based on possible logistic difficulties and snafu’s, so that we do not get disappointed if our return date is later.

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