Green is Unbecoming...

I admit it. I'm jealous of my counterpart in Afghanistan. He'll complain about being stuck working in a Operations Center too.

But he isn't.

Most of the time he's working a desk. But he also gets to go out and play somewhat regularly. His complaints about staff work ring hollow when he is just coming back from a mission.

One of the enlisted guys was teasing me about it, saying that I'm an officer and that I should embrace it.

I told him that he's right, but that my narrow window in my career to gain real field experience is closing. He knows, and said that I'll join the ranks of many other officers who don't really know how things are supposed to be and that my NCOs will quietly clean up any messes I make in my ignorance before anything really bad happens.

He made me feel much better.

I do like the big picture officer stuff. I like being responsible for the training and readiness of my team. I like putting it all together.

But one of my goals as a leader is to be ready, willing, and able to go whereever I may have to send my guys or my team mates. Unfortunately the actual opporunity to physically lead from the front seems to be eluding me.

So it goes.

It's also a funny time here. Some of the new guys aren't so new anymore and so they are hitting the initial wall. Now they are very comfortable with their jobs and are realizing that they will be doing that same thing every day over and over and over and over.... it's no longer new and exciting and so their morale is taking a slight hit.

It's a pretty normal pattern. One guy was comparing the daily routine to prison. There are big fences. Guards. Set work hours and details.

I told him that prisons have indoor plumbing, you can get alcohol (ok, so it was brewed in a toilet-still...), and your family can visit.

Me and the NCO that was boosting my morale, we are flying home on the same bird out of here. So soon, yet so far away. Now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, time seems to be stopping some.

Also pretty normal, I think.

Must have just been one of those days for everyone.

Every now and then I guess the repetive nature of things here gets to be a little much. But we have warm food, running (if not necessarily potable) water, hot showers, beds, roofs, and there really aren't that many people trying to kill us at the moment. It's really not that bad.

It's just a bunch of sheepdogs stuck in a cage I guess. And we don't like it. But it's our job and we'll do it to the best of our abilities like any other mission.