Back In America

Wow does the weather feel nice here. I never thought the cold, wet, weather would feel so good. We arrived yesterday morning here in Washington State. The flight was long but I'm glad we only had one stop. We stopped in Germany to refuel before we left on final trip here to start our demobilization process. Of course we had the rest of yesterday off to recover from the jet lag on the plane. Most of the guys slept since 1600 hours and woke up pretty early. I tried not to sleep but got tired around 1500 hours. I took a nap and woke up around 1900 hours. After that I decided to get up and wash some of my equipment to get it ready for turn in. I went back to sleep around 2330 hours and woke up around 0600 hours this morning.

The plane flight was long, like always. They played around 8 movies from our trip from the Middle East all the way over here. I slept through some of the movies and watched others. Most of the guys slept right after take off. I could tell that our clocks were all messed up when everyone started waking up on the plane around the same time.

I'm glad we only had one stop. That was in Germany. I heard that other flights that are leaving after us will be stopping in several different places on their way over here. We had a big plane so it was prepared for those long trips.

Well, it feels really nice to be back in the states. We haven't been granted the freedom of leaving the post. We're confined and our command won't let us leave. I understand and it doesn't bother me much. They try to keep control of all the guys and they want to make sure that we all make it back home to Arizona safe.

We started our outprocessing today. We had a few briefings from several different agencies like the chaplain, finance, VA, legal, and medical outprocessing. Tomorrow we start turning in our equipment. I can't wait to get rid of that stuff. Some of the guys have lost equipment and I hope that I'm not one of them. If so they'll be taking that money out of my pocket.