Uncomfortable Conversations ...

My posts as of late have taken on a different tone. Obviously, there has been a lull with the birth of the twins, but that’s not all. Some of the topics haven’t been the exciting, amusing sort like in the first few months. A good friend of mine contacted me today and asked if I was feeling alright. I explained to her that this is the normal development of a deployment. The first third flies by as you are in a strange place doing amazing things. The last third flies by as you plan for your return home. The source of the excitement in these two phases is different, but the feeling as much the same. The middle third, however, is a strange slow time where the job has become somewhat routine and the prospects of a return home seem so far away. This often leads to mild self-induced depression, self-pity and often sickness brought on by the stress of the separation (ask anyone who has been on a Navy deployment – you tend to see many folks come down with what appears to be just a bad cold near the halfway point – it spreads like wildfire throughout the ship.) The sickness itself shouldn’t be enough to knock grown men in good shape down, but combine it with the malaise of the middle of a deployment and it can be a nightmare. The morale folks will try to come up with events to keep your mind off the time, but the ‘fun in the sun’ on the flight deck often reminds you of the fun you’re missing back home. I am smack dab in the middle of the middle of the deployment. The Army has done one thing right in their approach to deployments – the mid-tour leave program. If you are here longer than nine months you can take two weeks off at a point you choose near the middle. This helps to break you out of the mid-deployment doldrums. My break is just under two weeks away, and I am truly looking forward to it (as is my oldest daughter, Daddy coming home means she gets to go to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg – she is quite the roller-coaster buff).

As I said before, I’m in the part of the deployment where your job becomes routine. Its days like today where you realize that nothing over here is ever routine. I have to start this with some background information. We lost a guy a couple of days ago. One of our teams was hit, several guys were injured and one was killed. Today, I wound up face to face with one of the guys who was injured. Normally, I have no problems talking to … just about anyone. However, I felt extremely uncomfortable in this situation. This guy had a mix of feelings, he felt extreme loss over his teammate, but he also felt unbelievably lucky that he walked away with minor injuries. He came over to my desk to ask the difficult question … did he screw up? He was the truck commander, the man in charge, and one of his guys was killed. I can’t even imagine what was going through his mind. I could tell that part of him was blaming himself for his teammate, and he was looking to me to tell him that everything was alright, and that he did all he could to prevent this. This is where I became uncomfortable … do you tell him that all is right with the world just to make him sleep at night, or do you dig into the data and be brutally honest with him about the entire incident. The thing that got me the most was their ability to separate themselves from an event that was barely a couple days old. I’ve mentioned before that the Army has a different view on ‘acceptable losses’ than the Navy or Air Force. In the Navy, we would be back flying shortly after an incident that costs a life (you have to, if you shut down, you’ll never get back up there), but it does stay with you for a time. It usually lasts for a few weeks until we can truly go blow off steam in a non-flying related activity (this often involves a wake at a bar in a foreign port). The Army does not have time for this, they need to be ready to get back out there within minutes of a casualty. These guys before me had already been through all phases of grief and were looking for answers, all except the Truck Commander who needed to know whether he could have prevented it. In the end, training took over and I dug into the data (I had been doing this since the incident happened anyway), and I let him know (much to my relief) that he had done all that he could as a TC to prevent this. It really wasn’t a difficult decision, but the topic of the loss of his teammate hit kind of close to home for me for some reason (I’m sure a head-shrinker would say it has something to do with the loss of my father, and they’d probably be right). When all is said and done, I truly believe we are doing the right thing as a nation being over here, but the losses can be horrific.

Like I said, the middle phase of deployment is often associated with self-pity. Do me a favor and say a prayer for the kid we lost (and for all the other ones). Until tomorrow.

-Grease out.