My good friend Ian is about to be sent to Afghanistan as part of the Oregon National Guard. He posted this in his Live Journal and I want to share it with anyone who reads this blog, too. If you know anyone in the military, please read it.
However, I do have a bit of a complaint. If there is one constant with
civilian to military relations is that you all are really supportive
and say you want to be there for us, but when we start to talk about
what we're doing, you all (the generic "you" here) tend to draw back.
Hey,
let's not kid ourselves here, I'm going somewhere very dangerous and I
do run the risk of coming home a bit banged up or not at all. While I
understand the tendency to want to draw away from that, the way people
tend to draw away with people with terminal illnesses, it helps me and
my compadres not at all.
A lot of us have already noticed when
we were describing our Convoy ops on our seperate blogs that almost no
one responded. For my part, I got one response from my wife. I'm not
asking for therapy here folks, but after I get some huaw training or
what ever, I like to share what's going on in my life, as do my fellow
soldiers. Writing up these long posts and then getting nothing back
makes us feel disconnected from you folks back home. We start to worry
if folks are going quiet about us training, what's it going to be like
when we get home in a year.
Danger isn't contagious folks. I
can't believe that no one out there reading my stuff didn't have some
sarcastic comment about me swearing over the radio while training. That
no one did makes me feel like either you're all not reading my stuff
(which I guess is okay) or that there is some other reason.
I'm
just asking that we all are hungry to keep our ties with our family and
friends back home. Traditionally this doesn't happened and the only
people we can turn to is our buddies and fellow soldiers. Then when we
get home, soldiers tend to be distrustful and scornful of the civies
for awhile. A lot of us where talking about it, especially with those
who've been to Iraq before and they say it happens all the time.
I would hope that me and my buddies won't have to it happen to us.
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