Round 3: Departure

This is the first in a series of articles on my third deployment to the Middle East/Southwest Asia. I learned a lot on this deployment and am excited to share it. Remember to swing by the shop for Norseman Creative stickers and signed copies of all of my books!

The months long march of Taliban forces retaking Afghanistan had drummed loudly in my summer’s background. Jenny deployed in late April, a tasking that would have taken her to Kabul, but she thankfully stopped short in Qatar when her unit pulled out of Afghanistan shortly before she arrived. The military had been slowly pulling troops out of Afghanistan and putting them in other Southwest Asian countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. This massive movement of personnel to the rear echelons was being referred to as a “Retrograde.”

Retrograde. Because “retreat” makes it sound like we lost, and “withdrawal” makes it sound like we abandoned the Afghans to die. Retrograde. A soft spin on a hard reality.

By the end of the summer, the situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated so badly that it was finally making the evening news, breaking through a never-ending stream of pandemic and partisan politics. Terrified men falling off a C-17 cargo jet as it took off. The men died and the jet flew away, overladen with terrified people, to Qatar. To where Jenny had been since April.

I watched the news, refreshing my social media constantly and searching for any sort of positive spin. As I witnessed widespread heartbreak unfold from afar, a knot grew in my stomach. Twisted guts that told me two things. One, that our highest leadership had lied to us as a country. We had all been misled about the capability of the Afghan National Army to hold their own country. Second, and most importantly and pressingly, I was going to be asked to head over there, somewhere, to help.

No phone call had come through, nobody had intimated to me that I was going to get a tasking, but the knot in my stomach was certain that I would get the call. I even joked to a friend that I had a feeling I was going to get tasked. There were other officers I worked with who still hadn’t deployed, even fewer who had already deployed twice. Normally they would get tasked first, but this wasn’t a normal situation.

Perhaps I manifested the tasking by wearing a sweater from a previous deployment’s base gym or by worrying about it constantly. Whatever the karmic reason, by noon the day after desperate men fell to their deaths on the Kabul tarmac, the phone call came.

Originally, the tasking gave me nine days to get fully trained, earn my unlimited Contracting Officer’s warrant, and take care of the house. With the support network I had helping me, I could have been gone in 72 hours, less if some of the training requirements were waived. My deployment kit is always packed in a trunk, ready to be packed in a big rolling duffel bag and hauled off into the wild blue yonder.

One day before I was scheduled to depart, less than an hour before I was to meet my Unlimited Warrant Board, my tasking was changed. The shift meant I was given just a few more days to relax. I was going to a different country, supporting a different mission.

Now, having gone and come back again, I am comfortable telling you that I did not want to go. Publicly I would express excitement. It wasn’t exactly a lie, deployments are exciting in nature. But the timing was dogshit for sure, extending my time apart from Jenny by five more months. And there were officers that I knew and worked with who needed the experience. Here I was, stepping off for Deployment Round 3, where they had not yet been afforded the opportunity to step in the ring.

I lost the ability to gripe about the deployment anyway. Almost immediately after the tasking was read to me, my leadership subtly asked if my ankle and neck were going to be an issue. My ankle has been messed up for years, and I was working through a frustrating treatment. Then Jenny and I had been rear-ended on the freeway in April shortly before she left for her own deployment. That Lieutenant Colonel was giving me an out, a way to step aside with some semblance of dignity.

With images of desperate mothers handing their babies over concertina wire burned into my mind, I assured my leadership I was in tip-top shape, if a little pudgy from months of pandemic eating and not working out the way I should have been. After that, I convinced my physical therapist to clear me for the deployment with promises that I wouldn’t over do it.

How could I not go? By this time, 13 Marines and 169 Afghans had been killed in a suicide bombing, under circumstances that had further illustrated the clusterfuck the “retrograde” had become. How could I stay home and hide from responsibility, when the sacrifice I was being asked to make was so small in comparison?

I could not stay. So I packed my bags, and just after the Global War on Terror turned twenty years old, I stepped off on yet another deployment.

At least this time I was headed somewhere new.