Changeover is Hell

I had to smoke a cigarette today. They’re not hard to find. There are a lot of guys that smoke in the Army. Maybe it’s an Army thing. I don’t smoke but today I decided to smoke one. We’ve had a hell of a week and after it was all done with today, it felt relieving.

We were told last night that we were meeting up this morning in the motor pool at 0945. I decided to get up early to chat with the wife and eat some breakfast before the day started. I arrived at the motor pool at 0930 just to be on the safe side and found that I was the first one there. I wondered where everyone else was for a while. The next person on the scene was one of the squad leaders from the new unit. He’s a pretty good guy, tall, brown hair, and resembles Mel Gibson. He asked me where everyone else was. I told him I didn’t know, I was just told to be there at 0945. A few minutes later a few more of his guys started arriving. Only a few of the guys from my platoon arrived a while later. Some of the guys were already going AWOL and I was pissed cause leadership was doing nothing about it.

This afternoon we were having the change over. We were turning over our trucks and all the equipment. It wasn’t too bad. We had to wait forever because the supply sergeant from the new unit had to go through all the serial numbers on all the equipment for each vehicle. I grabbed whatever I had left and said goodbye to my truck. It was being turned over to a new team.
Another milestone happened today. We also turned in most of our body armor and ammo. That brought to me the realization of something else; I may never go outside the wire again. It’s still possible, but unlikely. I heard the guys are going back to Ramadi pretty soon. I’m hoping I don’t have to go with them. Not because I hate going outside the wire, I don’t, I just don’t feel like going through all the motions. After the day was done and the headaches were over with, I decided to have a cigarette.