After six years in the Air Force I had spent over a year in the desert. Just so you know after a service member has been deployed to the Middle East, whenever you say the desert that is what you think of. Only 1% of the United States population serves in the military. The other 99% will never know what it means to be a veteran and the sacrifices they’ve had to make. That is where I come in. I will tell you about my experiences in the U.S. Air Force, starting with a good day in Iraq.

My job in the Air Force was F-16 Avionics System Craftsman (quite a mouthful huh). To keep it simple, lets just say I worked on planes. I had been in the military for two years when I was deployed to Balad Air Base, Iraq, at the ripe age of 21. We were the first Air Force Squadron of F-16’s deployed to Iraq. You may think I was young at 21 to be sent to Iraq but I had already been around the block. Only one year earlier I had been deployed to Qatar, which is right across the Persian Gulf from Iraq.

So lets get to a good day in Iraq. Everyday I would wake up for work at 2200, which is 10 P.M to you civilians. First thing that would happen when my alarm went off was someone yelling, “Shut the hell up!” And that is toning the language down quite a bit. The tent was normally made to house twelve but the capacity was currently at thirty. Upon waking I would pick up my flashlight, since the tent is pitch black, and find my bottle of water very carefully to ensure it was water. Next I would make sure that there weren’t any spiders or scorpions in my boots or around my cot. After this as soon as I was dressed, to include my sixty-pound flak vest and helmet, I would brush my teeth with a bottle of water if I had time. Then I would grab the bottles next to my bed to throw away, since that had been my toilet the night before and I was off to work.

To get to work I had to walk about a mile then take a thirty-minute bus ride. After I got to work, hopefully there would be enough time to have an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat). MRE’s are one of those things you hope you don’t have to eat but they are better than nothing. They have about 3000-4000 calories each and I was eating three a day. Work lasted 14-16 monotonous hours each day. In between fixing jets, talking about how much it sucks here, and filling sandbags (among many others), the monotony was broken up by the attacks. It wasn’t unusual to have 5-8 mortar and rocket attacks. You could hear the explosions continuously throughout the day.

After every attack, you would have to walk around in pairs to see if there were any unexploded munitions, as well as make sure there weren’t any wounded. After the attacks you would continue working on the aircraft. This wasn’t easy considering you are working on a metal jet, on an asphalt road, and the temperature was a constant 120-145 degrees. Trust me, water was your best friend and you could never have enough.

Then after a sixteen-hour day, you get on the bus, finally ended up back at your tent. Then you get ready to go take a shower, if you still have the energy. Then you get to make a half-mile hike to take your combat shower. To take a combat shower, which is 3 minutes, you do the following. Turn on water to get yourself wet, then turn off water and lather up, then turn the water back on to rinse off. Since you are somewhat clean now you make the hike back to your tent. When you get back to your tent it feels like you never even took a shower since you are sweating and there is sand everywhere.

Finally, after a nineteen-hour day, you lay down on your cot. You hope that you will get a good three or four hours of uninterrupted sleep, but for some reason the terrorists don’t want you to. There would usually be one or two attacks every night. After every attack I had to get up, put on all of my gear to run from tent to tent doing accountability checks since I was the highest ranking in the tents. After you made sure everybody was accounted for and reported it you could go back to sleep for an hour. Then I would wake up at 2200 hours and repeat. It plays just like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray.

This was a good day for me in Iraq. There are thousands of others that have even worse days. Constantly thinking about death, having people close to you die, and wondering if people even care about what you are doing. These are only a few things the men and women serving overseas have to deal with. So the next time that you are stressing out about college, worrying about a test, or even getting upset about not having time to get coffee in between class, think about the members of the Armed Forces overseas fighting and dying to protect your freedoms. Most of them are worrying about whether the next time will be it or if this guy has a bomb on him. At that same time you are worrying about a test. I hope if anything that you can take some time out of your day and think about all the men and women overseas and all that they are sacrificing.