Back from a break...

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You’re probably wondering why I haven’t written for a while. Guess I just decided to take a little break, regroup and put things back into the correct perspective. I must be at that point in the deployment when you just get tired of playing the “deployment game.” No matter what activities you do, how exciting work is or how positive an attitude one keeps…There is a serious yearning to get back to what’s familiar. Back to the things that make you laugh. Back to the food that tastes “normal” or maybe you can just get in the car and go down to your favorite drive-thru and grab a burger. There is a feeling of boredom, never any excitement and the attitude is contagious. Everyone talks about going home. Everyone wants a day off where they can just sleep in and have no responsibilities, but about the best we get is every once in a while you are rewarded with a day of “lesser responsibility”, which equates to a few hours off that you really look forward to. Not that any of these feelings are actual, but things just play with your head; it’s just a phase…A feeling that you just have to get through so that you can move on to the next stage. Most get through and some will spend all their remaining time wishing they were somewhere else.

Really, a ton of things have been going on every single day and most are interesting or at least different. For instance, we get a bunch of Distinguished Visitors visiting us here at Camp Bondsteel. Some are Generals, some are political figures from the states representing soldiers from our Task Force and still others are military leaders who come from Europe and other military locations from around the world. While some come on operational visits to see how things really work here at Camp Bondsteel, it seems as though others come as part of a boon-doggle just to say they have been to Kosovo. So we do many briefings, tours and usually go through the motions which normally disrupt the normal operations in most offices. So far we have received more visitors here in our short few months than all of the previous rotation did in their entire 9 months.

Happily a few weeks ago we had a wonderful visit with the North Dakota Governor and National Guard Adjutant General. Seriously… It was actually one of the best visits by Distinguished Visitors so far. Such a breath of fresh air from home they were that when they departed it left me with a strange feeling of home sickness. These two high powered leaders spent five days here traveling around our sector patrolling with soldiers, spending time with our Liaison Monitoring Teams out in the villages and towns on their sensing missions and they even made the effort to stop in to see most of the staff members who are trapped inside the confines of the joint operations center which is segregated from the rest of the camp by layer upon layer of concertina wire. For me the best part was that they spent so much time just interacting with soldiers. It seems as though during a deployment leaders get so caught up in daily responsibilities that many times we forget or don’t make time to reach out to the average soldier. It’s not an intentional action, but just seems to be a casualty of the circumstances. So when these leaders took the time to eat with the men and women here on Camp Bondsteel, or to just sit and chat or to wave and be friendly to whomever they came across, it warmed my heart to see the recipients of their friendly actions smile and walk away with a good feeling that people care. What great role models for many of us to follow as we creep up the ladder of rank and can somewhere in our future hopefully display sincere and needed caring leadership.

Aside from all the visitors I had also been waiting with much excitement for the Winter Olympics to start. I figure that since I was here I might as well take the time each evening to relax and watch the games with more time than I would ever had dedicated to TV back home. So as the days counted down I cleared my evening schedule and finally was relieved of my sporting anxiety when the day I’d been counting down to arrived. We missed the opening ceremony because of the time difference but figured that I could live with that because of all the exciting events that would be broadcast. The first few evenings were dedicated to ski jumping. Not a sport that I would normally watch but at that point I was still excited to be watching the Olympics, but as the hours wore on I found myself less interested in the athleticism of the sport and was distracted by the sheer boring pace of the event. The commentator was yapping about how the guy had “caught a good wind” and “look at how he sails through the air”. By the end of that event I was judging the sport by how cool some of their helmets had been painted and I was hoping that the best was yet to come. Oh and did it come. There’s nothing like watching the steady pace of cross country skiing. This sport has no pushing, no shoving and barely any falling, so the thrill of just scooting across flat snow was lost on my attention span. But I stayed dedicated to my goal of watching as much as I could possibly stand. Then for me, it all got worse. I had never in my Olympic viewing years watched a match or game of Curling, and sure enough that was the headline sport for the evening line up. Not just for one night. Not even for two nights. Folks, for seven nights in a row about the only Olympic sporting event on our TV’s was curling. What!... I had always thought that curling was just a icy version of shuffleboard that retirees play on cruise ships. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There are big heavy stones that are thrown down a lane, players use brooms to polish the ice so the stone goes faster and overall the pace of the game is… excruciatingly slow. To really put this into perspective, my Olympic experience has been much different that I had planned. Haven’t been able to view any ice dancing, not much speed skating, didn’t get to see the Flying Tomatoe guy on the snow board doing incredible acrobatics in the air. But I have watched some of the two to three minute special interviews that talk about the stories of the athletes and the incredible hurdles that they had to overcome to get to reach their dreams. Those are always worth a few tears and it’s so heartwarming to see athletes give everything for the opportunity to represent their countries.

So now I will get into a rhythm that should take me into the final four months of this adventure. We have many changes to come, and before we know it the time for planning will come upon us as we will start to gear up for the return trip home.

But for now I must go and watch my next to last night of sporting events. The curling events are over so now the highlight of my evening will be…the 30Km women’s cross country skiing marathon. Yup, 18 miles of flat, slow, methodical, one ski in front of the other, racing to the very end. Sure seems a little representative of this deployment. So I’m off to find the adventure in something that I really never intended to be watching, but am happy to have the opportunity to sit in my recliner in my room here in Kosovo, far away from the dangers of the wars so many other service members are experiencing.

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