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The Dave Box Chronicles - Volume 6 - The Final Chronicle I gratefully provide all of you with MY FINAL ARTICLE. I hope they have been as fun to read as they have been to write. I thank all of you for the opportunity to contribute to the T&T Website.   Getting Short   When someone nears the end of a deployment, they get called "short". I am now officially short and I'm looking forward to redeploying back to the United States. This is my final blog from the desert and it's hard to believe that my seven months of deployment are coming to an end. I should rotate out of the AOR in the middle of June (fingers crossed) and hope to be back in Cleveland by July. It has gone by quickly.   I still remember many experiences from my first deployment 18 years ago (God, I'm getting old). Likewise, I can say that there are things I've experienced on this deployment that I will take with me my entire life. I am convinced that the hardship of being separated from family and friends is sometimes worth it when the cause is worthy. Serving your country is one of those causes. I am also convinced that no matter your politics, we must all support our troops unconditionally. It no longer matters how we got here or even why we got here. That fact is, we are here and we have many young Americans 'in the breach' that REQUIRE our support... both while they are deployed and when they return home. We can never forget that each of these 'kids' (yes, many of them are just that) have seen and experienced some of the horrors of war and they need to be made whole again when they come back to us in the States.   I would say the BEST part of this deployment are the relationships I've made here... some with people I hope to keep in touch with and some with people I may never see again. Some of them Army and Air Force and Navy and Marines. Some of them Coalition Forces like Brits and Aussies and Canadians and Georgians and Poles and Lithuanians and Bulgarians and Dutch. I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to work with MANY of our Coalition Partners while here and it is always interesting to see how, as the shared experiences go up, the communication barriers come down. The shared experience of serving your country in the military is something that cannot be explained. If you've never experienced it, you'll never fully understand or appreciate it.   Unfortunately, good experiences in a war zone are almost always accompanied by bad ones. There have been experiences here that will haunt me forever. The faces, the stories, the sounds and the sights of war are not enjoyable. It's not glamorous, it's not kind, it's not fair and it's not pleasant. As a whole, I've observed that we tend to use humor to compensate for the sometimes terrible toll war takes on us. I guess the old saying, if we didn't laugh we'd be crying, really holds true in a war zone. Unfortunately, sometimes even the laughter doesn't help. Those are the loneliest of days.   Looking back, I think I'll take the little things with me from the desert. A hot cup of coffee; Sleeping indoors; A good cigar (even if it is accompanied by a 'near-beer' - yuk); The feeling after a long run; A hot meal; Opening a card or letter from home; A good 'lift' at the gym; The taste of homemade cookies (even if it took them two weeks to get to me); A hot shower; The trivial pursuit competition 14 hours into your eight-hour 'shift'; A cold bottle of water on a hot desert day; Sharing a laugh and even sharing a tear with someone who really understands what you're feeling; Yep, it's the little things I've come to appreciate here, and it's the little things that I will miss when I leave this place.   Cheers,   Dave   David W. Box CDR, SC, USN Deputy Mission Director CDDOC - Current Operations DSN: 318-430-5222