The quiet in between

Time definitely slows down at the end of a deployment. I have observed this personally and everyone I talk to says that this is a real phenomenon... people don't get excited until they are on the plane or helicopter, actually leaving. When you stay in one place long enough, it becomes your default reality. Everything else is either sentimental reminiscence, or an imagined future. Here it is easy to imagine a different future (i.e. being home) but is difficult to make it feel imminent. It is a really strange feeling and I think it must be related to how the days are so similar, the same people orbiting in the same square mile for days and weeks and months.

As my deployment winds down I am more aware of the slowness of each day, but behind the slowness is that subtle anxiety that I have written about before. The persistent sense that there is something lurking around the corner.

The spring loaded slowness is the worst part-- worse than fouled latrines, worse than the endlessly rotating menu at the chowhall, worse than sleeping on cots, the noise, being dirty, the omnipresent smell of diesel. When there is shit blowing up, the anxiety of expectancy is erased by the adrenalin of the moment. Everything shrinks down to what is going on right now, right at that moment.

I'm not combat arms, so I can't fully articulate or appreciate all of the nuances of anxiety, adrenalin, and combat, but I do know that waiting for the next mortar or rocket to hit is almost as bad as the nervous jump you get from the actual blast. The mind is relieved that the explosion was elsewhere but it also starts calculating the odds of the next one falling closer. Maybe you nervously look at the plywood walls and remember seeing what a 107mm rocket did to a Hesco barrier full of a thousand pounds of dirt and rocks.

In August I was visiting a COP that had been getting attacked with indirect fire fairly frequently. I had settled into my sleeping bag and turned off my headlamp when I realized that I didn't know where the nearest bunker was, so I put my boots on and found it, just meters away, and then I went to bed.

The quiet in between. That's the feeling that keeps people up at night, not the fear of being rocketed in the night, but the agitating background anxiety that is like sand in your sheets.