Relief or Regret

I've been following the series on F/X called "Over There", I find it rather fascinating, and semi realistic. Having been active duty army, I can see some glaring errors that the layman would miss.

Thinking back to my own enlistment, I have feelings of relief and regret. Relief that I never had to put my training to use in actual combat, there are just some things a person shouldn't become too good at doing. Regret....Well, that we never put any of our training to actual use. Our unit was the Division's training unit, if another unit was slated for a deployment, we were tasked with training and testing said unit in preparation for it's going.

I spent my first Christmas on base, on alert status, waiting and wondering if we would get the call in the middle of the night to deploy to Bosnia. Six months later it was wait and watch for a deployment to the Sudan, then Rwanda, then Mogadishu and finally Kuwait.

I'll get into detail later on, but I can say this, I don't envy the men and women deployed over seas now. It gets hot over there in the summer, with temperatures ranging from 120-140 in the day and the sand storms that can whip up suddenly and reduce visibility to 0.