As has always been the case with my deployments, I have officially given up on keeping track of the days. That's not to say that I've completely lost track of time, days, etc., but I have arrived at the point where on any given day I can't say immediately whether it's Monday or Friday. We're on a 7-day schedule here in country. I wake up at approximately 8am each morning and I'm in my work area by 0900 cranking away on the computer. Reading probably takes up the better part of 4 hours of my work day. In between all the reading I'm running back and forth coordinating with other military and OGA units and spending intimate time with a bunch of dudes who have killed American soldiers and contractors, or desperately want to kill us all. If I'm paying attention, I'll break for lunch between 1200-1400 hours, and dinner somewhere between 1700-1830 hours. After dinner I link up with the other unit I work with out here, go over our plans for the evening, board a helo and venture out into the dark to do the work that needs to be done. At some point I'll try and get in the gym either before or after dinner and somewhere around 0300 (or later) I crawl into bed and do it all over again. 7-days a week for the most part, though every now and again circumstances dictate that we don't go out at night. When that's your routine, and you're logging about 120 hours each week, you start losing track of the days. Hell, you start losing track of time.
Obviously that screws up communication. I'm up late enough in the morning that calling Napi and Ami' in the mornings is a problem. 0700 Baghdad time is probably the latest I can call home. Assuming she's still up at 2200, I will have just caught them before they crawl into bed. But I fall asleep so late at nights, it's a herculean effort just crawling out of the bed at 0800 to kill the alarm. At 1500 my time, DC is just coming online and I'm busy bouncing emails back and forth with people back at HQS. It's not until around 1700 my time that Napi and Ami' are getting out of bed. Usually I try and get a call in to them at 0100 my time, but on a night when I'm heading out on a mission, those conversations are usually pretty short. Lately I've also had the bad luck of calling when Ami' is in the middle of taking a nap. And so the cycle goes. Getting through to them is hit or miss, and for the first time since arriving here, I will have gone two consecutive days without talking to them, and maybe three or four days since I last actually laid eyes on Ami'.
I will say though, that like most of my Army friends who have raised families while spending the last 6 or so years deployed to one war zone or the other, you either get used to it, or you quit. I'm used to it at this point, because my ability to communicate with my family is much better than the average Joe's. There are times when you realize that you're doing what you were meant to do in life, and the realization that I can go a couple of days, maybe even weeks without seeing my family tells me that this is the sort of business God intended for me. I'm not saying it ain't difficult...I'm just saying that I can deal with it. I doubt there will be many more deployments like this in my future - those days are long gone - but I do know now that if the opportunity arises where I feel compelled for whatever reason to jump back into the fire for my country, I can answer that call. Napi isn't a big fan of what I do for a living and I can't say that I blame her - but I think she realizes now that this is the kind of work her man enjoys doing. I fight for my country, but more importantly I fight for the people I love. I've seen the enemy up close here, and he wants to kill Americans and he doesn't care who you are in America, what you do for a living, or what your political beliefs are. If being away from my family means that I can stop even one such guy from reaching our shores and launching some attack that somehow manages to injure or kill my wife and son, then I consider it a small price to pay. I have fully gulped down the pitcher patriotic kool-aid my friends!
