My phone rings at about 0930, waking me up.
I work nights a lot, to take advantage of the internet freeing up while everyone else is sleeping. With the exception of a few days when I have to get up early for a meeting, this works out pretty well. I make my own schedule and am largely my own boss.
The phone call is from one of the KTRs I work with – Rick – telling me that he’s located some of the vehicles we had been looking for. Back in November, I had helped install some data collection devices on 4 x vehicles and we periodically have to get hands-on them, to verify they’re working and to download the data. We’d struggled to find them recently, and so we were both excited by this prospect.
I'm up and in my uniform by the time he knocks on my door, and by 1000 we're in the maintenance yard crawling inside vehicles and hooking up our computer. It is not how I spent any of my previous 32 Christmas mornings.
By lunchtime we’re across post; I have asked the guys I work with to all have their midday meal together. One of the new arrivals is sick as a dog, however, so it’s just 4 of us.
The food is, I think, identical to what they had at Thanksgiving, which is to say better than usual but not up to snuff with food back home. Nonetheless, we plan an early lunch so that we can digest and take advantage of the food again with a late dinner.
We chat about home, as always, and about our families. My coworkers are all married with children, so we talk about what they bought as presents for their wives (online) and all the money their wives are spending on the kids. It is a somewhat subdued conversation and before long we’re done and move on out. They to their tents, Izzy and I back across post to what he has taken to calling ‘the condo’ – the small building that houses our two rooms.
It is among the most indistinct Christmases I’ve experienced, and perhaps we’re better for it. Leading up to the holiday, several of my colleagues expressed exasperation with the decorations, saying they didn’t want to be reminded that they were missing this time of year with their loved ones.I wouldn’t go that far, and I appreciate what the military tries to do for us out here during this time, but it’s true that we are more cognizant of the distances today. In fact, this holiday season was the first and to date only time I have really felt homesick during any of my deployments. It was not acute, and it was passing, but it was there. Or, I should say it was here, with me, in Afghanistan.
