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Persona non grata....me.


Storytelling:

In the days that have passed since I got home from deployment, more than anything people have asked me, "So how was it?" My friends who are not in the military have this notion that every day things were going on like those shows, "Over there", or "the Unit". More often than not I would say, "It sucked..but it could have been worse." For some reason people are inclined to believe that I am downplaying things but really I am not. I had Soldiers wounded, but not one death. Not even a death in our battalion. At one point we were the only battalion in theater to not have had anyone killed. In that regard I consider myself lucky. We were engaged by both Shi'ite and Sunni militia, but more often than not our engagements were because of spillover between factions. I really haven't had the urge to go into a great amount of detail about things. More often than not, people want to know things, but generally start to get bored by military stories. I know there are a lot of guys telling bullshit stories about things that they did overseas. I really don't want to expound about the simplest of things to people that I don't know. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the myth that, "Guys that have really been through something don't talk about it all the time." It is because of the fact that I don't want anyone to think that I am a storyteller.


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