Back with a vengeance

It seems that time fly's when you're off playing the conquering hero in foreign lands, or if you just happened to get distracted by something else cool and shiny. If you remember my prophetic words from an earlier blog, I am easily distracted by both movement and shiny things and in this case it was a big shiny plane moving in to take me away on another deployment.

Before I walked into Big Blue's recruiting office many moons ago, I had this preconceived notion that the Air Force wasn't big into the whole deployment gig. Turns out my preconceiving of notions sucks cuz I'm now on #5. 5 deployments in 6 years, and 1 of those years was a remote to Korea. So it's really more like 5 deployments in 5 years. In reality, if you total them all up back to back, it's around 2 years. So 2 of my 6 years in the operational Air Force, I've been washing sand out of my arse somewhere. And I gotta say, it's been alot of fun. Yes, I miss my wife. Yes, I miss my routines at home. I dig seeing new places though, being part of something larger than my own little world, and the pay is frickin awesome. Yah, I said it. I get bank whenever I go down range. You think that caramel latte from Starbucks is gonna pay for itself? You think wars are won without that caramel latte in hand? Did you know that the only time Napolean went to war without a caramel latte was against Russia? Yeah, how'd that work out? Like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.

So now you're wondering why the heck a man such as I needs that victory ensuring latte. The answer is simple, I'm a comm guy. Comm guys need coffee. Can't function without it. I got an I.V. one time and the doc put 3 shots of espresso in the bag for me. That's why I need that caramel latte. I'm the guy making sure communications is flowing from way in the back. Need that e-mail? No problem. Want your phone's working? I'm the man. Need someone to charge that hill or take that bunker? Lemme call somebody for you.

And now I'm back from #5. Probably the easiest one to date. I'm actually embarrassed on this one. I ate lobster twice a month. Lobster. There was an actual Starbucks there. I got 3 beers a night. The gym was nicer than any Gold's Gym I've ever been in. It had an indoor pool and a massage parlor complete with Asian strumpets ready to get busy on me. Whoever coined the term "War is hell" has never been to Al Udeid.

So it's back to the mean streets of northern Italy. The Dolomites look primed for some skiing so I may have to head up there this next week to learn. Stay tuned.

edit: my wife has informed me that she only got a brief mention in this blog. to alleviate her sufferings caused by this I'll dedicate my next blog to how awesome she is.