Personal Narrative-Deployment To Iraq

Deployment To Iraq “You are order to active duty as a member of your reserve component unit for the period indicated unless sooner released or unless extended. Proceed from your current location in sufficient time to report by the date specified. You enter active duty upon reporting to unit home station”. These were the words telling me that I was going to Iraq, to fight and destroy the enemies of the United States of America and face one of my biggest challenges yet. Soon after I received my orders in the mail I had a dilemma, what’s going to happen when I tell my mother and the rest of my family? Have I been taking my family and friends for granted, now that I have this situation in front of me I realize that maybe I should have tried
I knew it was going to be the longest nine weeks of my entire life. The first three days were pretty excruciating, no sleep, and no food. We were basically being prepared and tested for the hail storm up a head. Our drill sergeants were pretty much crazy, drill sergeant Calarco, 5’10 half Italian half something else, he had broad shoulders, abs of steel and did over 100 pushups in two minutes. Then there was the meanest, sickest person I had ever met, drill sergeant Coolidge. Probably around six feet tall freakishly skinny, freakishly strong and always gave you the crazies stare downs that made you look away immediately. I thought I knew what pain felt like, but after a session with Coolidge, the word pain took a very different meaning. Each exercise he made us do was meant to inflict pain and pain only. Towards the end of our training Coolidge told us that 90 percent of us were going to be deployed within a six month or a year period and man he was right. Six months later I had orders in hand saying Spc Garcia, you’re going to the sandbox.
When we did convoy training I was assigned a cruiser weapon, the M60. This is a weapon that’s suppose to be mounted on the back of a vehicle and its specifications are; Weight, 10.5 kg (23.15 lb). Length, 1105 mm and shoots rounds of 7.62mm, so if someone was taking cover behind a cinderblock wall it wouldn’t matter he is a dead man. Needless to say I had a lot of fun during the convoy training especially when I sat on the back of the vehicle as it was moving at forty miles an hour and the M60 on my lap with my finger down on the trigger. All I could see was a wave of dust as my automatic weapon punished everything that came in its path. Even though all the hot brass was falling around me and burning me, it didn’t faced me, not when I felt the adrenaline running through my