coming home

Wow.. I am still amazed at the title. Coming home. We actually are and I can't believe it. This place has gotten so routine that to be leaving is surprising. Yesterday I realized that in 2 weeks I will be a student again. Since we have moved to Basra things have already started changing. There are no more missions, we officially turned over the reins to the 354th mp company a couple days ago and received our end of the deployment awards. I have spent the last 3 or 4 days playing xbox or watching movies with my friends while we wait for our flight. We're starting to prepare to leave though, got to clean weapons and repack to get out of here. Mom knows the majority of my dates for planning if you need to know talk to her (we developed our own little code ha. take that OPSEC)
We spent 6 months down at Camp Bucca before returning to Basra last week. It is crazy to be back with all of these people that I hadn't seen in so long. I catch myself seeing people I have already forgotten about. Makes me realize that 6 months from now I will.. finally be a sophomore, have just completed my first semester since fall of 2007, hopefully be contracted as a rotc cadet and not thinking about another deployment, and have forgotten about a lot of this place and these people. Obviously I won't be forgetting about the people who have made an impact or the people I have worked with/ enjoyed being with. I'll remember hooka nights, and late night movies and halo. I'll remember softball, basketball,and some missions. But I know I will have forgotten the weight of the gear, the feeling of driving a 68,000 lb vehicle, and the dumb things we put up with while we were here. Talking to Lee, it was easy to hate basic while you were there, but there is always that part that misses it after a while. I guess this is the same, I hated a lot of being here, never felt like I did anything worth giving up a year of my life, but I know I will miss some of it too.
Hopefully I can fit back into school and move on. I'll be 21 in a couple of months and my whole life is ahead of me. This was just a year, Jan 2009- Jan 2010, but a year that changed a lot.