Deployment “RUT” I feel for them..

I have been there. I have been in their shoes. I wish there was something I could do to help my brother out who is winding down on his “4th” Deployment to Iraq.

Yeah it sounds like it should be happy time, bells and whistles etc, but in reality it is the worst of times. The newness of the deployment has worn off. Loved ones have learned to get along without you. Your focus is on the daily mission and nothing else. Little things that never ticked you off do at a moments notice.

I can relate. Gysgt Bermudez and myself, great friends, Would joke and coke all the time, I remember when we almost came to blows on a deployment due to stupid tensions. Crap that I didn’t understand (He did) and that was all brushed under the rug when we got back, but at the time, I would have killed over.

This is the Rut of Deployments, the most dangerous time for a Corpsman taking care of his charges.

Read HM1 Dustmans Post below from his site “Doc in the Box”

Sean is working on his 4th Deployment. I had been worrying about him for the last 2 weeks as we have not heard from him. HM1 is a writer plain and simple. He’s one of those unique folks that can put thoughts on paper and you just understand what he is going through. The Navytimes thinks so as well and have used his articles for their papers.

I started to worry from the silence, but today he popped up from under his rock. Here are his words from his site. For you young bucks out there.. this should be read and heeded.

Monday, June 02, 2008
My brain has stopped adding words together

I’ve hit the slump of the deployment along with many of the Marines and Sailors that I work the only difference is this is the first time that the slump has shut down my writing cold. I would put an idea on paper and try to expand on it and would end up having monosyllable conversations with myself. As painful as it is to have a conversation with one of those people, it’s worse to read it.

I did a two blog post a while back ago called Twilight of the Deployment (take one and take two) and I can’t really improve on either of them with this block filling up my head just to note that my unit is in that period of time.

The Dear John’s or Jane’s have started trickling in one party, here or there is shocked and can’t believe it’s happening to them. It’s that season of the deployment, between the middle till right before we get home. I’ve been here before and most of the Staff NCO’s I work with are on their second or third marriage, it’s the junior guys that worry me. Right now is where relationships crumble, one party realizes that they really don’t like being alone or that their significant other isn’t the “One” or meets someone special who isn’t far away and don’t know how to break it off with someone on the other side of the world then waits till right before they get home. There is no easy way to break off a serious relationship.

Where one party is lonely and falls for someone they are interacting with daily and breaks the relationship off. The spouse that cleans out the bank account and max’s out credit cards out of spite and disappears. Tired of the lack of email, phone calls, letters, etc. Tired of how the other party is spending their finances.

I see these stories every single day, the names and faces change and as a leader or a healer, you have to help these people make something constructive out of the crap that life took on them. For an air unit like mine, it’s not the suicide bombers or the mortars that cause most of us to toss and turn at night or think it’s not worth it anymore. It’s the worry about the person we expected to spend the rest of our lives with on the other side of the world. The military is tough on family life any way you look at it and there isn’t a cookie cutter solution that can fix all of the problems.

For me, this trip I’m just soul weary tired, 4 trips out here is beginning to add up and it’s tough to keep that cheery grin on my face or to find the words to put words down on paper. The last year was a bit rough on my psyche and I haven’t a chance to patch all of the holes that have been made. It all adds up in the end.

If I haven’t proved it in the past, I do write when I’m depressed but that’s not exactly what I’m feeling right now. I just a sense of numbness in my brain, I’m trying to talk some of them out, the heartache I’m feeling isn’t for me, it’s for the people whom I work with and care about. It sucks not having an answer to such big questions when they are so desperately. My head feels like I’ve stretched something too far and it broke away.

Speaking of away, while I wasn’t typing on the keyboard I did get a chance to read everything by an author named Jim Butcher and Bane, I agree, thanks for the tip. One of the ingredients that probably added to my writers block was the lack of sleep I was getting because I couldn’t stop reading. Seriously, he’s good.

I’m sorry for not popping my head up for an entire month, every writer I know hits a low point in their writing and this has been mine. Some days they flow from my fingers but I just haven’t found it lately and I’m not one of those people that like tossing up words.

This is stuff you can’t learn in a book, this is why we have leaders like HM1 and Crazycajun who impart valuable knowledge to our juniors.

This is why we have Corpsman.com