The day has finally come

It is a mere few hours till I leave for the airport. I can hardly believe that this day has finally come. If all goes well, I should be in Texas in less than a week. I have already made contact with the gaining unit and all the paper work is in place. The process is going more smoothly than I ever could have imagined. It is just so hard to comprehend that I am just days away from sleeping in my own bed, driving my own car and seeing my family. This is a great day for me. I am not sure how, exactly, the process will work for all of the surgeries and the recovery process, but, from what I have gathered I am going to be getting E-mails sent to me telling me where to go and who to see for all the pre-surgery stuff. And when I am not scheduled to be at one of those appointments, I am supposed to report to one of the armories to do filing and other tasks that need doing. I was also informed that I am going to assist the recruiter with his duties on the days that I am available. Sounds like I am going to be kept busy, so that is a good thing. These last few months I have not done much except sit around and gain a ton of weight. That 39 pounds I lost during my deployment is now almost all back. I got down to 168 in country and since returning stateside I have regained 24 of those pounds.

I received great news today

I received some really good news today. I am getting transferred to Community Based Warrior Transition Unit (CB WTU). It looks like I have a report date of 28 February 2010. I will be going to Little Rock, Arkansas to in-process the unit and then going home to my dearly missed house in Dallas. I am looking forward to the trip.

To the best of my understanding of how it works, and I want to preface this with, "I am not 100% sure of this." But, here is how I understand the process to be:
1 I sign in to the Unit in Little Rock Arkansas.
2 I in-process all of the different Departments. (medical section, S-1 through S-4, ...)
3 I go home to Dallas and wait for all the appointments to be set up.
4 On non-appointment days, I report to the Armory near my house to do work (regular duty days)
5 on days of appointment, those are my duties for that day.

And this is supposed to happen until I am medically cleared and am ready to return to regular duty. At that point, I will have to decide if I am going to retire or stay in the Guard for another tour. This is where it gets difficult. 3 months ago, I was hell bent on getting out. I have done some thinking and I kind of like the military comradeship. I like the adventures that come with it. I like the people, for the most part. Even the ones that I do not agree with, are good people, just have different opinions or methods of getting things done.

I will admit, though, that I am leaning towards retirement, but, only because I do not want it to interfere if my business. I have had to shut down my business 3 times now for deployments and it takes around 4-6 months to get back up to speed and make a living. From what I have gathered, that is going to be a bit longer this time due to the economy.

Anyway, I am happy to finally get out of here. This is a really nice place and would be a great place to live if the sun would shine a little more. I have been here since 20 November 2009 and I have seen less sunshine since then, than any 7 day period in Texas. Here, we measure sunshine in Hours per month not weeks per month. It is just so depressing. But, when the sun finally does come out, it is absolutely incredible.

Sorry I have not written in a long time

I am home and have been for a while now. Well, actually not home, just stateside. It seems that I have messed up my knee and my right shoulder in the fall I took while evacuating our hide site back in April, after it was compromised. I have been just dealing with the pain and figured it would heal on its own. I was wrong. It looks like I have shredded my cartilage and have a torn meniscus in my right knee and have torn my rotator cuff and partially torn some tendons in my right shoulder. I did not even mention to the doctors anything about my back. I refuse to let the military touch my back in any way. Well any way. I am currently at Fort Lewis, Washington. It is located just south of Tacoma. I am hoping to be able to transfer to Texas for surgery. If all goes well, I will be leaving here in early February and going to Texas. It is all up in the air right now. If I have to stay here at Fort Lewis to have my surgeries and all my physical therapies, I will have to take leave and go home to get my vehicles. I do not think I can go without a vehicle for 7 months without going crazy.

Most of the Battalion left here in time to make it home for Thank Giving. There were a few of us that were held up by medical conditions. I think that there are only 2 or 3 of us left that have not been sent home yet. I think that I might be the only one from our battalion left here in a few days.

On a sadder note, we lost a great NCO this month. SGT Travi died in a car accident on the 5th of January. He is going to be greatly missed. I have not heard the details as to what happened. I was just informed that he has passed away from injuries he sustained in an accident.

The day has finally come.

It looks like that day is finally here. I was just given word that we are on our way home. We are about to have our awards ceremony and after thatm, we are getting our bags loaded on the trucks to go to the flight line. I just hope that we get to Ft Lewis in time to do the De-mobilization before the Holiday weekend starts. Otherwise, we have to wait there for the post to open back up on the 30th. It was a great year over all. I am, however, looking forward to getting home.

The first order of business will be to get my vehicles from up north and then drive home to Texas. I am especially looking forward to getting behind the wheel of my little MX-5. I only wish that it could have been a month sooner. I would be able to go to the track while up in Michigan, before heading home. Unfortunately, the racing season is over and the tracks up there are closed for the winter. Well there is always next year.
At least I will be home in time for Christmas this year. I am really looking forward to spending the holidays with the family. Not to mention being in my own house for Christmas. This is also my last deployment with the military. I plan on putting in my papers for retirement as soon as we get home. That will put me at 22 years of service. I figure that it is enough. I can hardly wait to be a retiree. Of course there are no real benefits for several years, but, it will come when I will need it most, once I actually hit retirement age.
Well, any way, this is probably going to be my last post on this blog. Like I said, over all this was a great deployment. We accomplished out mission and although some people did get injured over the last year, no one in our battalion was killed and thus we accomplished out mission and survived to tell about it. There are well over a thousand bad guys that cannot say the same thing. They neither accomplished their mission, nor lived to tell about it.

Went on leave.

I am sorry that I have not posted in a long time. I did not want to post on here that I was going home on leave because I wanted to surprise my Mom. And surprise her I did. It was not for sure I was going to be able to take leave. So, I did not tell anyone about it back home. I had been scheduled to take leave several times since April and for one reason or another, it was either cancelled, delayed, or rescheduled. I was tired of putting the family through the roller coaster affect. It was downright frustrating. So, this time, I was told I would be going home sometime in September. I told them that if they cannot get me home by the end of the first week, to not even bother. I would just wait till we were done and go home at that time. It would only be a few more weeks any way.
So, I landed in Dallas on Saturday morning on September 6th. I had a long day planned out, getting to a dealership to buy a new car. It took me till almost 7 PM to get it done and then started to head for the house. I went by my mom's house, but, she was not home. I tried to call her with the caller ID blocked so she would not know that I was home, but, she was out with some friends and so I left a message. She did not get the message till really late that night and E-mailed me to tell me she was sorry that she missed my call and to call her back on Sunday morning. Which is exactly what I did.
I called her from my cell phone. Again, I had the caller I D blocked. She answered her phone and we talked a few minutes. I then knocked on her door. I was on her porch the entire time. She did not hear me knocking on the door so I said over the phone, "I think I heard someone knocking on the door. Who was it?" She said that there was no one at the door. It must have been the cup she put on the table. So I rang the door bell. To which she said "you have really good ears, I did not hear the door, but, someone just rang the bell. hold on I will see who it is." as she pulled the curtain aside from the front window, I just said "Hi mom" as I waived. It took her a second or two to realize that I was not in Afghanistan but on her front porch. I wish I would have had a camera. That would have been a picture worth taking.
I was home for 15 days. It was probably the worst two weeks of the year for me. The weather really sucked. Every time I wanted to go to the lake to do some fishing and or skiing, it would rain. Then, the last time we tried, we discovered that some ASS WIPES stole all the fishing tackle out of the boat. Over $2000.00 worth of poles and tackle gone. I hope the thief dies a miserable death. I hate thieves. And I believe that there is a special place in hell for them.
So, with the fishing trip now officially taken off the table, and the weather not cooperating at all, there was not much to do. I went and visited a few of my friends who happened to have a day off here and there. I spent some of my time catching up on the shows that I had recording while I was gone. That only took a day or two. Then, not wanting to spend too much money, too late, I only went out to dinner a few times.
I did get invited to some friends houses for dinner and so I did have some good food while I was home. If I had to rely on myself for good food, it would never happen. I can barely boil eggs. LOL I also went to my favorite restaurant. I ate at Osaka's Japanese Sushi and Stake. It was everything I remember it and some. A little on the expensive side, but, worth every penny. Great food, great service, and really nice ambiance.
The trip back to Afghanistan was not what I would call quick. We were stuck in Kuwait for 5 days because of maintenance issue from the week prior. They were 4 days behind schedule and were focusing their flight on people going to the states for leave and the resupply runs. They put us on planes as space would permit, with the cargo for the resupply runs. It was, to say the least, a long trip. As you can all see I am back here safe and sound.

The prank of the year

I guess I can talk about it now since it is done with. One of the other E-7's went on leave last month and his guys wanted to pull a prank on him. And what a prank it was. I was asked to build him a new door for his room as part of the deal. We have been saving the water bottles after drinking them. Everyone was chipping in under the guise that we are going to recycle them. As it turned out, all those tens of thousands of empty bottles were used to fill his room to the top of the wall. That is where the door came into play. His original door opened inward and thus it would not work for the gag. I had to make a new door and make sure that it was set to open out into the hallway.
After he left to go on leave, we started filling the room with the bottles. It was a huge surprise to find out that even thought we had several big black trash bags full of bottles, once we had emptied all the bags into the room it was less than half way up the door. We had been saving these bottles for 3 months and now we had only 2 weeks to get twice as much to accomplish the mission. It was obvious that is going to have to do something. Failure is not an option.
I called in some favors from some of my contacts. I went to the Gym and talk to the guys there and had them save all the bottles from the people that were working out. I called a few other offices that asked them to do the same thing. Within a week we were filling the room to its peak. I do not have the video of him going into his room yet, but, I will get it and try to post it once I do.

Today was yet another rather pleasant day.

The weather here has been pretty nice the last few days. It has not gotten over the 110 mark in a while. Since the "mandatory uniform", when in, ACU's, is full dress, (Another words, I have to have the ACU coat on at all times) I was told that I could work in my PT (Physical Training) uniform.

It was great in the beginning, I had two sets of PT uniforms, so while one was in the laundry, I wore the other. Well, that was until Murphy came to visit. The Laundry service lost my bag with all my clothes in it. So now I have only one outfit to wear. Makes it kind of difficult to wash it while I am working in it. I have ordered 7 sets of PT uniforms, but, they are on back order. Luckily, I know the lady that runs the facility here on Camp Dragon. She has been taking my laundry directly into the facility and getting it done overnight. She brings it in with her in the morning at 0730 and I pick it up on the way back to the hut from the showers. She is optimistic that they will find my bag before too long. I, on the other hand, am not so sure of that. But, I will be waiting, none the less, for it to show up someday.


It seems that someone has noticed all the things that have been accomplished since I became "Bob the Builder" or "Bob Villa" as I am sometimes called. I was told to report to a 1600 (4 PM) formation today for an award ceremony. There were three of us that received AAM’s (Army Achievement Medals). It was an Impact Award. That means that it was based on a specific event, as opposed to a time range.


We received it for the work we did back in April, the wall and the tables we built for one of the sections that was relocating to the Battalion area. I was told of the task at around 1400 hrs (2 PM) and once I said that I could do it, they dropped the bomb on me. It needed to be ready by 0800 hrs (8 AM) the next day. I was not so sure I could get it done that quickly,but, I started anyway. It looked like a 2 day job, at least.

I asked them to provide me with one or two people for some assistance and they did. We finished the job at 0530 hrs. We worked through the night without a break because they team that we were building it for was to move in immediately. The two guys kind of complained at first, but, they continued to work, so it was all good. It was nice to get some sort of recognition for all the work that has been done here in the last few months.


Well, it looks like I am going down range after all. In fact, I am going down a little sooner than even I thought I would. I am, however, not going to where I was originally supposed to go. It seems that I am wanted by one of the other 1SG’s that needs some office space set up. This time the plan is to get me to Solerno and convert an open bay hardened structure into individual offices. I am not sure of what all is available there. As it is right now, there is not even any electricity for me to use. I am going to be using a generator to power my tools.

Not sure when my next post will be, but, I will take my laptop with me in case there is a USO there. If there is, it might have Wi-Fi that I can get on the web with. I like the USO, they are very good to us. If ever there was an organization that took care of the troops, it is the USO. Well any way, I will write again when I can.