Welcome, Judah!

So, the big news of this week (as I’m sure you all know by now) is that Amy had her baby, and I am now a proud Aunt! I now have a picture of Judah posted by my desk here in my office, and my screensaver scrolls through what pictures I have of him. I wish I could be in Oregon right now, but I am getting by with pictures.

Probably the largest sacrifice that Marines (or anyone in the armed forces) makes is their time with their families. (The second-largest one is sleep…but sleep can be caught up on. At least in my job.) I know several Marines that are on their fifth deployment, each spanning at least 7 months. These Marines have spent more time away from their families than with their families in the past few years. One of my Marines’ wives will give birth to their first child while we are here, and I know there are more in our Battalion in that situation. Some Marines receive “Dear John” letters from their girlfriends (I hated that movie), others will come home to find their spouses have left them for someone else. (Very sad, but I personally know Marines this has happened to.) The old joke that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife it would issue one is just that—a joke—but there is that nugget of truth hidden in it. The Marine Corps is very hard on families and relationships.

Depressed enough yet? Makes my whining about not being there for the first days of my nephew seem paltry. Overall I’m doing well, though. I’ve gotten plenty of pictures e-mailed, just got a letter in the mail, and am anticipating a couple of packages in the next few days.

Our pace has slowed down slightly since the first month and a half that we were here, but we still have missions here and there. Last weekend the news of the weekend was the river reconnaissance we did. I took a couple of Marines that are familiar with military bridging (from a different platoon in my company), and we went to a few locations on the Helmand River to determine suitability for bridging. The river was actually fairly nice, if fairly and fast-flowing. Before we went out there we were worried about how clean it would be, but it looked as clean (possibly cleaner) than any river in the US. And certainly cleaner than some of the beaches in LA.

Once I got back, I got to sit down and fill out all of the river and ford reconnaissance forms, and put together a brief for the unit that requested the recon. It was actually kind of fun, once I got started, figuring out the way to best brief it. Most of the briefs I do follow a pretty standard format and are designed to brief what will happen, not what has happened. This was just different enough to be fun, and by the time I delivered the brief I had gotten comfortable enough with the people I was briefing so as not to be nervous.

A logistics officer recently mentioned to me his observation that engineer school seemed to prepare its students well for briefing. I would have to agree; we did at least four formal briefs, and a couple of other informal briefs. When I got here, I actually went back to some of those briefs I did at school to figure out how best to brief my actual missions.

I hope that’s a random enough collection of thoughts for tonight. I do actually think about posting more often, but nothing I do seems interesting enough to talk about. And I can never say much about the things that are interesting.

Until next time.