Best friend. Kuwait.
I don’t know.
While I met a lot of people - and had a lot of good, close, short-term friends - during military career, I’ve only kept in touch with a few. The vast majority of those forgotten were Navy, and I take comfort knowing that they’re likely sitting out in the Gulf in air-conditioned spaces.
But.
I’ve given a lot of deployment briefings to those in the Reserves and National Guard as part of my volunteer duties. I’ve spoken to many, many family members during trying circumstances. And every time I have face-to-face contact with yet another 18 year old kid about to ship out on deployment my heart just…
Yeah.
Since an entire Reserve battalion I serviced when I was still in the Reserve forces plus several officers from my old brigade HQ have been mobilized and shipped to the Baghdad airport, I am well acquainted with a pot load of people who are in theater. A nephew of a colleague who I have spent social time with commands a tank company in the 3d Inf Div. A Marine gunnery sergeant who was killed is the son of business acquaintances. A number of people I know were called up with a National Guard signals battalion and a National Guard medical battalion HQ’d in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and are now somewhere in greater Baghdad. The son of a client was badly injured early on in the invasion when a tank drove over his foxhole. I know or am somehow connected with too many people who are in the middle of it.
I know a guy who was recently sent home from Iraq because he injured his arm in a accident unrelated to combat. He claimed that some Iraqis tried to sell their young daughter to him. I’m not making any point there, just passing along a weird bit of hearsay.
My cousin just came back (safe and sound), and I have a bartender/pretty good friend who’s in Afghanistan. Or he was, last I heard.