Welcome home, again. - part 1 - To new beginnings

Fort Lewis, Washington. Wet. Green. Fresh

If I had to describe this place in 3 words, those would just about do it. I arrived in January 2003 to what I had hoped to be a fresh start. Germany was over and done with, and my girlfriend at the time that I had left there like a jettisoned cigarette butt, was anxiously awaiting the return to Europe after I got out of the Army... this was an intention in theory of course, and like most theories, this never actually solidified into reality. Starting fresh for myself, and I know a lot of other soldiers that think the same way, meant to discard the old, and lay down the pavement for the new.

My hometown would be only 6 hours away, so just a hop, skip, and getting a car down the road would lead me back to a place I had forgotten for the last 2 years. I didn't necessarily miss anything about my hole in the wall home-town. Its a nice place, great for retirement or a raise a family, free from gangs, or shopping malls for that matter. No place in this world that contains human beings goes without a problem now and then, but when its small town problems, usually everyone knows about whatever happened before the news even picks up on the story...

I'll summarize my first two years at Lewis. I arrived to a rag-tag bunch of 'kilo's' that had never seen a tank outside of basic training. The Infantry now ruled this base, and we were stuck in a limbo state as the vehicle that I had been told that I was going to be on, hadn't even made it past the drawing board. Our First Sergeant was still an E-7, and liked to use the company in mass to help setup his churches pot-luck events... Abuse of power? Fuck yeah it was. What was SPC me going to do about it? Suck it up, and setup the god damn tents, that's what.

Its easier to ride the wave, then it is to swim against it. I had a severe lack of balls after being in the 'old school' army of Europe... Ft Lewis and its infantry would help me reach puberty again.

Now, I thought I was hot-shit coming to this place. 300 PT score, awards up the ass, tons of stories about "one time in germany" ... but that was about it. It was a different world here. The brotherhood that I once felt in my old armor unit, wasn't the same here... Each person was out for themselves. Joe was pretty much stuck, in a 20x20 foot barracks cell, with a kid he didn't know, left to find for his own damn self. Germany you had camaraderie, esprit de corps, and this little thing we called Tanks. None of that seemed to exist here.

If I could think of something close to what we had in Europe, I'd say the closest that we had was what I always called.. the "Bash bro's." Gil, Tex, and Strader. These guys were completely fine individually, but as soon as you added alcohol, and 2 or more of these jokers in the same room, you just introduced a recipe for disaster, or chaos, however you'd like to see it. To put things simply, these guys could fuck some shit up. I was the lame lucy. Always the DD, always the one getting picked on, smacked in the nuts, or manipulated in one way or another. I perpetually felt guilty around these guys for no real reason. I admired them, followed them, and wanted to be like them. I found it difficult to abandon all morals and discipline, so I assumed the role I fit in best.

A few months at Fort Lewis, and I had already found a girl that I liked. I wouldn't say that I had a thing for a specific ethnicity outside of white girls, but I think there was something about Asian girls that caught my attention. I think its a woman's eyes. Sometimes you gotta kiss a girl with your eyes open. If you can look into her eyes, and she looks back at ya, those have better be some stellar peepers, or its kinda going to the wind. Asian's have beautiful eyes.

We had a "thing" I guess. She was more into the physical part of the relationship, and being the romantic moron that I was, I read way too much into it. I wrote her a book during one of our month long stints in NTC. Poems, pictures, drawings, you name it... it was in there. She read the first 2 or 3 pages, game me the 'what the fuck is this' smirk, and tossed it into a trash can. I didn't see her again, well, not until a few weeks later I found out she was fucking a buddy in my platoon... yeah, I couldn't have made this shit up. I was devastated, but I think that realizing she was a whore helped me get over it that much faster.

Realizing that chicks dig assholes helped me understand a few things about women and maturity in general. Time is relative, and love conquers all. As many inspirational things as I could have thought to say to myself at that time in my life, I still lost too many hours of sleep over a broken heart.

We received word that we were going to be deploying that year. 2003 was going to be rough. My old unit in Germany had already been sent over, and we'd be part of the second push from 2003-2004 somewhere in Iraq... There were no specifics, and our unit hadn't even been qualified yet. Still fresh out of the bag, this new "Stryker" unit was supposed to be the most elite unit ever in a conventional military sense... I guess the Secretary of the Army REALLY wanted to show us off overseas.

Too bad we didn't have any equipment to even deploy with.

To be continued...