Pass is nearly over and i have begun to look forward to the future. I run through the accounts of my last tour and then i have to bring myself back to reality and remind myself this tour.....this war will not be like the last. Not that i long for combat or i wish for the chance to shoot, but the last war was much more romantic than this is shaping up to be. I use that term with some artistic license. Romantic in the sense that the soldiers still had a sense that what we were fighting for was just and right. We believed we were fighting a evil dictator who was going to use chemical warfare, and who would use his army to put up the best fight since Vietnam. Now we are set to deploy knowing the fight is limited and very controlled. We are treating this conflict as a business venture. We incur some sacrifice but that is always swayed but the financial windfall most soldiers incur. If i could tape conversations about what people are going to do when they come home or why they are going to Iraq this time, more often than not you would hear about a major purchase set to be made. I fall into this same category already planning out the money i will make during this deployment. We fought the first time because we felt we wanted to defend our freedom, we fought the first time for our family and friends, for those who died on 9/11, this time I fear we fight for the paycheck.
Does that make us Mercenaries? My first time at war we all did the math to find out how much cash we would make, but the talk of what would be purchased or how much the money meant was very secondary to the reason for the war. Yes the first war was romantic, we went with flags in our eyes and the stories of WWII in our heart. We all watched the amazing movies depicting great American battles in all previous major wars. We believed or maybe hoped that our chance at war would give us those same stories. Maybe we had a false belief that they would make epic movies about our battles and our stories. Who knows maybe in time their will be that great war epic about Iraq.
Maybe I should enjoy the diminished combat, maybe i should be happy to have such a limited amount of time in the war zone. I hope this time we can replace that quest for our great story with conquest of ourselves. I know i return to Iraq looking for a closing chapter on this part of my life. I return to this war torn land with the hopes to return home like the rest of my buddies did the first time. I want to enjoy the return to the states. I want to experience the joy of leaving Iraq under my own power and on my own terms. My stories were formed in my last deployment, now i search for my summary, for my closing chapters so the novel that has become these past 5 years or so will finally be finished and can put on display for all to see.
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