Hell and High water.

I was originally going to post a response to one of the comments I received but after a few days of having fun with my wife and my friends I decided I'm just not in the mood to deal with the idiots that clog the pipes online. I leave tomorrow to go wait for my plane to depart sometime in the next week or so. I'm not going to see anyone I care about for the better part of a year and it makes me sick to my stomach to think about. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little bit scared. I'll probably be fine but everyone my age has a feeling of immortality about them. Tragedies always happen to someone else.

But honestly, that's the last of my worries. The hardest part about doing this isn't my own mortality staring me in the face. If I was afraid of dying I would have taken the easy way out and claimed that I was suicidal or depressed or something less legit that would have gotten me disqualified. I know I wrote about wanting to get sent home when I first got to Camp Atterbury but I wasn't feeling well before I got on my medication and just wanted to be home where I could fix the problem and go on with my life. I still don't want to go over but I feel physically better and know that I can complete the mission without being a liability to anyone else.

The hardest part about doing this is leaving my wife behind, leaving my friends and family behind, and leaving unfinished all of the things that I want to accomplish with my life at the moment. It feels like writing a big paper for school, one that you feel adamant about and is very important for your grade, and then the power going out for the foreseeable future. Sure, you'll be able to get back to it as soon as the power comes back and your instructor will understand when you see him next but it doesn't make you feel any better about it at the same time. Now that I'm home I have a better picture of what I want to do but it has to wait. The interests of the United States are waiting on me to get over and do my mission.

However, if I took all of that out of the equation, I'm actually a little excited to get over there and do some good for whatever it's worth to the people of Afghanistan. I know there will be good times ahead and it won't be all doom and gloom. There's dangers ahead of me that most of you that read this won't ever see in your life but in the grand scheme of things many Americans face death on a day-to-day basis and don't even know it. How many times have you been driving down the freeway and merged into the other lane and not seen the car there, almost hitting it while doing 70 miles per hour? You don't think twice about getting in the car again after that, even though you just escaped almost certain death. It will be the same with me. People willingly put themselves in danger on a day to day basis without knowing it. I know I'm probably downplaying what I'll be facing but hey, it helps me sleep at night.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a chance that I might not come back from this but there's a chance that I might not come back from the grocery store too.

I'm not the most religious of people. If there is a god then I think he's probably sitting back and watching the show. How else could he let things like what's going on in the middle east and North Korea happen? Mankind will destroy itself and it's quite possible that it could happen in my lifetime. What god would create life and then give it the power to destroy itself? But if you are religious, which I respect, then pray for me. Pray for everyone that's going with me. The unit that we are relieving lost 2 people last year. 2 out of 80 is a small percentage but that is 50% of somebody's marriage and 25% of somebody's immediate family and those are way bigger numbers. I have a good team and I want every one of them to come back to their friends and families. So pray for them.

So if you will excuse me, I'm going to lay down with my wife and do my best to express how much I love her and how much I will miss her in the 9 months to come. I'm not the best at expressing my feelings, mainly because I'm a man and I wasn't gifted with a woman's ability to do so but I hope that she knows how much she means to me and that I will go through Hell and high water to come back and see her again.