Catching up

I had lunch with my old Team Sergeant this week. It was good to see him and we spent a good deal of time discussing where everyone was and what they were up to. Some times I really miss the camaraderie and all the cool stuff like jumping out of planes and shooting shit.

When he told me about all crap he was dealing with though I remembered why I'm out. I think there is something fundamental wrong and broken in the Officer/Enlisted class structure, but I don't really have a recommendation to fix it.

Cinco de Mayo is coming up, and it will be the 5th anniversary of the day we got on a plane in Baghdad and left Iraq. I thought this year I would finally get to writing about the Battle of Basrah (or BOB as we affectionately called it), but I guess it was too soon.

The following is the last entry from my journal while in country, and nicely illustrates the kind of characters we had on our team.

Word comes at 0730 that we are supposed to be SUPCEN at 1000. We are all on the bus, in uniform, at the same time as our morning meeting. Smith comes be-bopping over in PTs and our Team Sergeant flys off the bus to intercept him. We can't hear the dialogue but there is a lot of animated hand waving and we can see Rod's forehead getting red. But Smith is used to this and he is back in less then 5 mikes and in uniform. Rob, our jester provides a voice over of the conversation from the bus and has us all cracking up - “Don’t be mad at me for being 10 minutes early to the meeting!"