Getting Started

My intent with this blog is to document in some reasonable fashion my experiences as well as my thoughts while enduring my first, and likely last, Army deployment to a war zone.

In my case, the war zone is Iraq. I need to caveat this with the fact that the US military role in this conflict is rapidly drawing to a close and, thus, the connotations differ significantly from more desperate operations in this country as recently as a year ago.

My background: 52-year old Army colonel with over 27 years of service, including two years enlisted time. I was a commissioned (at 27 years old) as an Armor officer, but leveraged acceptance to an Advanced Civil Schooling opportunity into a 15-year stint in the Army functional area of Operations Research, Systems Analysis.

It is in that capacity that I was drawn into this war as a replacement for the departing chief of STRATCOMM Analysis and Assessments for US Forces – Iraq. I had the opportunity to spend time in theater with the incumbent a month prior to my actual deployment date, but I’ll begin this saga a month hence with my arrival at the CONUS Replacement Center, known in this acronym-filled world as the CRC, in Ft. Benning, GA.

The bulk of military deployments are whole units that train and deploy from their home station. However, there are thousands of positions that are better managed via individual replacements and the CRC was established precisely to prepare those individuals for deployment. It is a one-week ordeal with two primary foci: assess the individuals ability to deploy and provide some fundamental skills deemed useful in combat situations.

My next entry will delve deeper into my experiences with CRC.