Goodbye Blackhorse

Sunday morning we packed up for the final time, loaded up the trucks and said good bye to Camp Blackhorse. I can't say we really "liked" it there, but it was our home for a year and was one of the better places to be stuck, if you had to come to this country. It was good to leave though, hard to say good bye to some of the friends we made, my guess is, being the small world that it is, we will cross paths again.

The new Navy team drove us over to Camp Phoenix where I am currently located, waiting to finish all my out-processing and to find out when we fly out of here. So far so good, it was a solid admin day that I think put us real close to being done. Tomorrow we have to turn all of our stuff in to customs - except our carry on items. Now...the issue with that is, all my bags have my clothes, toiletries, towel, shower shoes, etc. My carry on just has carry on stuff, books, electronics etc. That poses a large issue because we drop it off tomorrow (Tuesday) and fly sometime later this week, before we board our charter flight even later this week. Hmm. We are all going to smell. My current plan is to completely repack and stuff my carry on with some clothes and hopefully get enough in there to survive a few days. That still leaves me without a sleeping bag - this event was well thought out. I'd say I care, but I am on the way home.

It's good to see all the guys from last year at Shelby. It's interesting what a year will do though. We were all pretty tight last year having gone through 2 months of crap training, but after a year apart, everyone is sticking tight to their groups that they actually went downrange with. Just today some of the cliques are breaking up, I guess it will just take time. We will probably all come together in time to separate again.

Some bad news to temper all the good news. We were slapped in the face with the fact that this is a war zone last night. The prison we visited last week has Americans as it's mentors and last night two were killed and two were injured after being attacked by a guy in the Afghan army. Amazing - the guys we are here to help -completely turning on us. I don't know yet who it was, but it's a small crew over there and we met almost all of them, I will be shocked if I don't know them. Sad, and it will be the first people here that I knew that were killed. I think it's time to go. I am very disheartened by the fact that it was ANA that did it. I figure he was a Taliban guy who got himself into the ANA, but regardless, it doesn't make me feel better about the situation.

I think that's about it, I am well on my way, and will do my best to keep up the progress reports!

Gary