Should I Stay Or Should I Go
My enlistment with the National Guard ends in November. For a long time, I had planned on reenlisting, but I had a change of heart earlier this year and have been dead-set on getting out since then. Now, though, I'm starting to feel tempted to sign back up. I'm not entirely sure what's inspired this, but I've spent the last few days trying to sort through it. This post is an attempt to get everything down, more for myself than anyone else, so it may come a bit jumbled. Feel free to pipe in, though.
The biggest hanging point, of course, is the prospect of another deployment. If I reenlist, it will probably be for three years. During that time, my unit is pretty much guaranteed to get mobilized. We're an attack aviation battalion, and for a while we've been transitioning to a different model of helicopter. Once that's done, the plan is to spend six months re-training at Fort Hood, then be put on the top of the list for an overseas deployment, probably directly from Hood. As things stand, it would be a twelve month deployment, so I'd face a year and a half away in total. Though that may seem like a deal-breaker at first, there are other factors.
As some of you know, I was originally a mechanic for the Army, and switched to a supply and logistics job a couple years ago, after coming home from Afghanistan. Being a mechanic never really meshed with me; I just never had the knack. I learned enough about it to be adequate, but I knew I could never excel. As a result, I was dissatisfied with my work for a long time. Now, I'm in a job that I'm damn good at, and that I am appreciated for. But I've never done it for more than two weeks at a stretch. On the two deployments I've been on, I've worked hard and pulled my weight, but I often felt like I could be more valuable. Part of me wants to see myself do this job in the "real world."
It's not a good time for me to be leaving from my unit's standpoint. For a long time, I was one of only two people doing this job in the unit. The other guy might be getting out or transferring soon, too. Three new people have joined us throughout the summer; one is a recruit, and the other two, though they have ostensibly held this position before, they've been doing other things. We've trained the new people as much as possible, but it's tough to really teach someone a job in two days a month, and I don't know if they're ready to run things on their own yet. Plus, we've been trying to organize some of the things that have so far defied organization, and I think we might finally have a system that works (I could go into this, but it would be a whole other post). It's going to take time to get the kinks worked out, though, and I'd like to see it through.
Both of my previous deployments, and in fact all of my time in the military, have been enriching experiences and I've grown a lot, and continue to. Now, though my rank doesn't reflect it, I hold a de facto position of leadership. I know that serving actively in that capacity would do me a lot of good.
Combat pay and tax exclusion ain't half bad, either.
Now, the other side of the coin. I probably don't have to tell you that being away from home for an extended time sucks. I've missed my friends, my family, my goddaughters, and the basic comforts of life on my deployments. Furthermore, the boredom can be a killer, the food sucks, and you see the same set of faces every single day. It's a drag.
There is, of course, the danger. Afghanistan has heated back up quite a bit since I left, and Iraq is, well, Iraq. I am fortunate enough to be in ground support for an aviation unit; we generally don't do the fighting, we send our officers to go do it. And wherever I go, I would be in an established base, and not leave it much if at all. I certainly wouldn't be on patrols. Of course, no one can be completely safe in a combat zone, even in a non-combat job (I do the exact same job that Jessica Lynch did, though the situation is a lot different now than it was then).
And finally, there's the career aspect. I'm 27 years old and just finished college and started working. I don't know if I want another year-and-a-half setback. If I'm still working for the same company I am now when I get deployed, there's no guarantee that I'll have a job when I get back, because the laws about that don't apply to very small companies. (I work for a pretty good guy, and I don't doubt he'd hire me back if he had a position, but there's no guarantee he would have one.) Most likely, I wouldn't have much of a problem finding a job and getting by in the meantime, but chances are I'll be thirty by then. Not a huge deal, I suppose, but I always thought I'd be further along by then.
Finally, there's a wild card that could go either way. Politics. Next year, we'll elect a new President. Depending on who it is, there's no telling how this will affect the length and frequency of deployments. I don't think they can get much worse than they already are, though, so I think this factor will either work in my favor or have no effect.
And assuming my unit goes to Iraq, there's the question of whether I want to be involved in it at all. I don't talk much about politics, on LJ or anywhere else, partly because I'm pretty much a centrist and have a hard time finding a common ground, but mostly because I'm no good at arguments and debates and hate getting into them. But here's my feelings in a nutshell, and you can take them or leave them. I supported the war in Iraq for a long time, and I definitely don't feel bad that we've taken down Saddam's government. The war was launched on bad information, but I place more blame for this on corrupt informants like Ahmed Chalabi than on the Bush administration. I do not think Bush is nearly as dumb as he looks (he's just a terrible public speaker), nor is he some caricature of a villain, twirling his mustache like Snidely Whiplash. He and his administration looked at the evidence with a skewed perspective, but they did what they thought was the right thing.
Unfortunately, they did it with no foresight for what would happen after the invasion. As a result, we've made a real mess of things. It's a mess that I feel we are responsible for ("we" as in all Americans, not just Bush, not even just his supporters. That's how democracy works: we're as responsible for our leaders as they are for us, perhaps more so). The problem is, I don't know how much we can really do to fix it anymore. It may be that we're still doing more harm than good by staying and trying to sort it out.
However, this really doesn't affect my decision much either way. Whatever happens will happen whether I am still in the military or not. Whatever decision I make, it will be for myself and for my unit, and not to make a political statement one way or the other.
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ducttapeavenger) wrote,
