Off to Afghanistan

I remember and I was probably pretty naive, I think I was 23 at the time, but there was another guy there at the unit and he had a whole chest of medals and he was probably 32 and two kids and it was very much the adventure but it was also… you see these guys that are older but they’re still pretty young and they have done a lot of tours and a lot of rotations so it’s trying to step up and take some of the burden off of them too. It’s quite a culture shift, I think for me a lot of times if anybody has asked me, it’s more of a shift coming back then it was going over because up until we left that’s all we were doing, it was get ready to go, get ready to go, get ready to go, get ready to go, we’d do different training here and there. So getting there was kind of expected like that’s what you were doing but ya it was a massive difference even just from the weather, you know, we had briefings before we went they said, you know you’re going to get sick at some point whether it’s a month or two weeks in you’re going to get sick and you’re going to be sick for a few weeks and it’s going to happen. So just simple things like that. And you know the heat and everything else under the sun. I think there was a day it went up to about, you know, sitting out in the sun our temperature gauge went up to nearly 50 degrees so like it’s quite a shift working in that type of weather whatever you’re doing even if it’s just loading up. So it wasn’t maybe as bad as I thought, I think like I said I was 23 when I went, I think I kind of had more naive ideas in my head that I was going to go and really do something and we did to an extent but I don’t think I had a perfect idea. I think we have ideas back here that everything is so clean and so proper but it’s very different on the ground right.