BigJim49 asked "how was it?" in the Chuck Yeager post and I figured rather than derail it I'd start another.
A very short background on me: Non-reg Class of 94. Joined the military (Navy) through direct commissioned officer program after 9/11. Deployed to Iraq in 2007-08 and Afghanistan in 2017-18.
A question I get, first of all, is why am I in places like Iraq and Afghanistan if I'm in the Navy. The fact of the matter is the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created requirements for more joint operations between the branches. GN was a result of the investigation into the Desert One fiasco of 1980. Long story short is, whenever possible, we want the different services to interact and serve in joint billets. The practical result in the War on Terror is that the Navy and Air Force identify specialties that are valuable to the fight and send individual augmentees (as opposed to units) forward to serve in Army or Marine commands.
Once you're selected, the Navy sends you to NIACT, which stands for Navy Individual Augmentee Combat Training stateside. You train under army auspices, learning weapons familiarization and basic combat skills. I've been twice and can see it's evolved over time. It's a rush crash-course focused on familiarization. Yes, you do get good time shooting your own weapons (M-16A2 (2007) and M-4 (2017) and M-9 pistol (both times) in my case). You have to qualify or you don't go. I was fortunate to qualify as an expert on both, partly because I've been shooting all my life, but also because the army instructors are darn good and will teach you things about shooting you never learned from dad. As for other weapons, like the 50 cal, 249 and 240B, you just get a short course so you know what to do in the unlikely event that someone else is incapacitated and they let the Navy guy join the fight with real weapons. There's comms gear training, chem gear training, Humvee rollover drills, and actual combat training scenarios with blanks and live fire. Like I said, a lot of these positions are jobs that fit particular needs, although there are some more general jobs. When I first went to Iraq, I had a number of young sailors under my command (I was the only, therefore senior, officer in our class), who had no specialty of relevance at all. One kid was a submariner, and had never held a gun. He shot a round off into a clearing barrel once and cost me a lot of hell and even more paperwork.
Once you're trained you go forward through a variety of bases until you arrive at your final destination, which in my case was Kabul. My job, without including detail you don't need to know, was on base, not exposed to significant danger on a day-to-day basis. In fact, it was quite calm. Whereas my base in Baghdad in 2007 got rockets sometimes 3-4 times a week and one of them hit my trailer while I was conveniently away at breakfast, Kabul was peaceful. Our base was small and rockets are like horseshoes and hand grenades, so therefore not very accurate, especially if you are just shooting them off some scrap angle iron set on a berm rather than from a BM-21 like the Russians intended them. The few times they tried to shoot rockets at us they missed us and blew up some poor Afghan civilians.
What we did have were suicide bombers, but no car bombs, fortunately. We had six, I think, over the course of the time I was there. Two were in one day. They blew up one outside our wall and then set off a second one where all the Afghan journalists gathered to cover the attack. I watched the 2nd one live on closed circuit TV and watched those poor Afghan reporters bleed out. As a former journalist myself, that was a bit sobering. I watched a number of other attacks live, including this one: Afghan hotel attack
There was another time when there was a direct assault on an Afghan base down the road. The bad guys hit the first checkpoint and got past it, but things bogged down there. There was a long road with barriers you had to swerve around and they got stuck in that, and basically traded fire with the Afghan Army until the latter realized that they could just do drive bys in an MRAP while hosing these insurgents, who were on foot. This ended with a dramatic moment in which one insurgent got up and charged the gun truck, guns blazing, before he vanished in a puff of smoke that was probably his suicide vest getting struck by a round. We all cheered like it was a touchdown in overtime, and then a second later, some white object came floating down from the sky, and someone said, "Look, it's his underwear!"
My days were 7-7 roughly 5 days a week with a couple of "light" days where I only worked 8 hours. In periods of high intensity of working on a big project, they could be 15 or more hours.
Other than work hours, life on base was pretty uneventful. I went to the gym 4-5 days a week and lost 20 pounds. The base was a NATO base with probably half the people on it being non-Americans. I went to Catholic mass with the Germans and the Italians. The Spanish, who never worked anyway, set up a Spanish class three nights a week. When I could get time off work, I made that. I had an informal bluegrass band with some Australians that was lots of fun. Played football a few times, but every 3-4 plays we had to pick up our sideline markers and clear the field so helos could land. We had an on-base market and could buy stuff from the Afghans. I bought several nice rugs, plus jewelry for my wife, and an 1859 Martini Henry (see below) for myself.
Obviously, when I had time and wasn't working, I tried to focus on my book. I brought a laptop full of research over and went through it all and finished my first draft by the end of the deployment. Still working on the 2nd draft now.
Deployments can suck, but fortunately we have good tech for communicating with our families now. I had access to video chat and could literally help my son with his homework, so that was nice.
My tour was 330 days boots-on-ground which is actually very heavy for the Navy. Money is tax-free anyplace you get hazardous duty pay. Came home through Europe, got to spend a few days there relaxing before getting stuck in Norfolk for what seemed like forever to outprocess. Then back home, off active duty and back into the good old Navy Reserve, thence to finish the push to 20 and hopefully I'm on the safe list for the rest of my career and won't get called involuntarily.
A very short background on me: Non-reg Class of 94. Joined the military (Navy) through direct commissioned officer program after 9/11. Deployed to Iraq in 2007-08 and Afghanistan in 2017-18.
A question I get, first of all, is why am I in places like Iraq and Afghanistan if I'm in the Navy. The fact of the matter is the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created requirements for more joint operations between the branches. GN was a result of the investigation into the Desert One fiasco of 1980. Long story short is, whenever possible, we want the different services to interact and serve in joint billets. The practical result in the War on Terror is that the Navy and Air Force identify specialties that are valuable to the fight and send individual augmentees (as opposed to units) forward to serve in Army or Marine commands.
Once you're selected, the Navy sends you to NIACT, which stands for Navy Individual Augmentee Combat Training stateside. You train under army auspices, learning weapons familiarization and basic combat skills. I've been twice and can see it's evolved over time. It's a rush crash-course focused on familiarization. Yes, you do get good time shooting your own weapons (M-16A2 (2007) and M-4 (2017) and M-9 pistol (both times) in my case). You have to qualify or you don't go. I was fortunate to qualify as an expert on both, partly because I've been shooting all my life, but also because the army instructors are darn good and will teach you things about shooting you never learned from dad. As for other weapons, like the 50 cal, 249 and 240B, you just get a short course so you know what to do in the unlikely event that someone else is incapacitated and they let the Navy guy join the fight with real weapons. There's comms gear training, chem gear training, Humvee rollover drills, and actual combat training scenarios with blanks and live fire. Like I said, a lot of these positions are jobs that fit particular needs, although there are some more general jobs. When I first went to Iraq, I had a number of young sailors under my command (I was the only, therefore senior, officer in our class), who had no specialty of relevance at all. One kid was a submariner, and had never held a gun. He shot a round off into a clearing barrel once and cost me a lot of hell and even more paperwork.
Once you're trained you go forward through a variety of bases until you arrive at your final destination, which in my case was Kabul. My job, without including detail you don't need to know, was on base, not exposed to significant danger on a day-to-day basis. In fact, it was quite calm. Whereas my base in Baghdad in 2007 got rockets sometimes 3-4 times a week and one of them hit my trailer while I was conveniently away at breakfast, Kabul was peaceful. Our base was small and rockets are like horseshoes and hand grenades, so therefore not very accurate, especially if you are just shooting them off some scrap angle iron set on a berm rather than from a BM-21 like the Russians intended them. The few times they tried to shoot rockets at us they missed us and blew up some poor Afghan civilians.
What we did have were suicide bombers, but no car bombs, fortunately. We had six, I think, over the course of the time I was there. Two were in one day. They blew up one outside our wall and then set off a second one where all the Afghan journalists gathered to cover the attack. I watched the 2nd one live on closed circuit TV and watched those poor Afghan reporters bleed out. As a former journalist myself, that was a bit sobering. I watched a number of other attacks live, including this one: Afghan hotel attack
There was another time when there was a direct assault on an Afghan base down the road. The bad guys hit the first checkpoint and got past it, but things bogged down there. There was a long road with barriers you had to swerve around and they got stuck in that, and basically traded fire with the Afghan Army until the latter realized that they could just do drive bys in an MRAP while hosing these insurgents, who were on foot. This ended with a dramatic moment in which one insurgent got up and charged the gun truck, guns blazing, before he vanished in a puff of smoke that was probably his suicide vest getting struck by a round. We all cheered like it was a touchdown in overtime, and then a second later, some white object came floating down from the sky, and someone said, "Look, it's his underwear!"
My days were 7-7 roughly 5 days a week with a couple of "light" days where I only worked 8 hours. In periods of high intensity of working on a big project, they could be 15 or more hours.
Other than work hours, life on base was pretty uneventful. I went to the gym 4-5 days a week and lost 20 pounds. The base was a NATO base with probably half the people on it being non-Americans. I went to Catholic mass with the Germans and the Italians. The Spanish, who never worked anyway, set up a Spanish class three nights a week. When I could get time off work, I made that. I had an informal bluegrass band with some Australians that was lots of fun. Played football a few times, but every 3-4 plays we had to pick up our sideline markers and clear the field so helos could land. We had an on-base market and could buy stuff from the Afghans. I bought several nice rugs, plus jewelry for my wife, and an 1859 Martini Henry (see below) for myself.
Obviously, when I had time and wasn't working, I tried to focus on my book. I brought a laptop full of research over and went through it all and finished my first draft by the end of the deployment. Still working on the 2nd draft now.
Deployments can suck, but fortunately we have good tech for communicating with our families now. I had access to video chat and could literally help my son with his homework, so that was nice.
My tour was 330 days boots-on-ground which is actually very heavy for the Navy. Money is tax-free anyplace you get hazardous duty pay. Came home through Europe, got to spend a few days there relaxing before getting stuck in Norfolk for what seemed like forever to outprocess. Then back home, off active duty and back into the good old Navy Reserve, thence to finish the push to 20 and hopefully I'm on the safe list for the rest of my career and won't get called involuntarily.