The stark contrast was almost a thing of beauty: the long, desolate stretch of desert slamming into a rushing, winding river; on the other side, green everywhere. It was my first trip outside of the
While I was in
This brings to mind a question asked over and over again about our occupancy and the current wars - what is the ideal deployment time? Each service has a different rotation length, ranging anywhere from 3 months to 18 months. The standard for just about every service except for the Army is 6 months. The Army standard? 12-18 months. I'm pretty sure I think this is asinine. Your motivation and morale starts to plummet at the 6 month mark, as I have experienced two times now. I know the arguments for the longer deployments. 1st, if we had short deployments, we'd just deploy more often. But I'm pretty sure we deploy alot now. 2nd, we don’t have the manpower to sustain shorter, more frequent rotations. 3rd - we are just starting to learn what to do at the 5-6 month mark, therefore making our latter months here that much more effective. That one is laughable. This is the Army - you can learn your job in less then a month and be effective at it. Those latter months are spent more thinking about how many ways you hate this place then in ways to improve your job.
Regardless, with R&R approaching my morale is climbing. I think, and hope, that upon returning I will be able to sustain a higher level of motivation and use it to make an actual difference before I leave this place. That, however, remains to be seen. . . . .
One more note: This article by Michael Yon is a must read. In one article he gives a far better depiction of the current situation in Iraq than I could manage to get across in a hundred meaningless posts!
5 comments:
Would like to hear what your Iraqi counterparts have to say about the possible Turkey attack on the Kurdish PKK terrorists in the north part of Iraq.
Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 10/23/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
amazing pictures! thanks for suggesting that weblink
So once you're home, how long before you get deployed again?
Steph - home for 2 weeks, then back here for another 4-6 months . . .
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