270 Days in Afghanistan
about being deployed to Afghanistan. We wish him a safe mission and it will not be a short one—9 to12 months. Today he started a blog to keep his friends, family and fellow servicemen informed. Here is a bit of teh first excerpt. You can follow him here at 270 Days in Afghanistan.
I got the call on a Tuesday afternoon. The boss was out of the office, so the call came to me. The colonel is on the phone with me explaining how there is this list of personnel who have been "earmarked" for potential deployment.
Now, there are times when a situation just hits you funny...like the dubious term, "earmark". One might be spurred to look up this term to see where it came from originally. The term "earmark" has been used for quite some time in politics to identify sources of funding. However, just between you, me and the BlogWall,the original origin of the word is said to have come from marking the ears of pigs on farms to identify them as belonging to a certain farmer. Thus the phrase "pork spending". I suppose it's not that far of a leap to expect that a lot of the terms we use in today's day and age come from such humble beginnings, since our history is steeped in the hard work of agrarian society...but I digress.So there is this list, and I am supposed to call the people on the list to see if they might be interested in an all expenses paid trip to Afghanistan for approximately 9 months to a year. Simple enough. The colonel says he will get the list to me in a few minutes, but the focus behind the selection of personnel at each level (officer, sergeant, etc.) is to select personnel who have been in a position of leadership previously, and preferrably at the company command/first sergeant and platoon leader/platoon sergeant level. I give him the proverbial "thumbs up" (which I belatedly realize that he can't see) and I let him know that I will stand fast until he gets the list to me.
Cross-posted at Freedom Dogs. Comments welcome.
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