10 January 2024

One of the Army Bros. is visiting while packing up stuff we’re getting ride of. We are funny creatures, last night we drove to get some food and my buddy was on the phone with the girl he’s dating. It was an ear piece so I guess he was ok leaving it in while we talked and maybe she listened to the conversation. She asked if he’d ever been camping and that got a big laugh out of me. At a certain point what we did shouldn’t be called camping, making it hard to compare the two. We were living in the woods which seems like the basic definition of camping. We were living there though, that’s where things feel different, it was as if nothing was supposed to change whether we were in garrison or the field. The individual would pack their life in the bag they’ll carry and the unit equipment will go on the trucks, then set up where we land. Of course on days when we’re going out to the field the loading process is taking place between 2 and 4 AM. And we wouldn’t be mountain soldiers if our work wasn’t being done in negative temperatures. When I look back on that time I feels like an outsider looking in, that it couldn’t have been me in those situations. Not the current me, but a slice of the multiverse. Thankfully I get to reap the benefits of being that person in the past, I suppose there was a price to pay as well. Still I focus on the positive. There’s less stuff in my house, that’s a win for the day. Tomorrow we’ll get rid of more, yesterday was trash day and now I’ve got two empty cans.