On surrender…

Quick note–I was scrolling through some recent blogs, and found this interesting post:

Everybody wants to end the War in Iraq – that is not an issue. The issue is how to end it. There two possible endings. One is winning the war, and another is losing the war.

Great point! Even warmongers like me (said with a heavy dose of irony, in case you were wondering) don’t want this war to continue indefinitely… we’d just rather come out of it so that we’re not “hamburger-eating surrender monkeys”…

Another voice on the topic:

What I don’t understand is the people who want to throw in the towel, pack up the tents, and go home. What is gained? A political defeat for Bush? Perhaps, but at the expense of a defeat for America as well.

Out of the blue

It’s funny how things change, so quickly sometimes. Here I’ve been feeling sorry for myself (just a little) because my life was so dull… and over the course of a few days, I figure out that I will most likely be spending the next month away from home. Whoa! Yeah, an opportunity came up to go to Korea for a month–they need a couple analysts, which my office (a little recklessly) promised them. Then as we started asking around, two of the four of us currently here–a fifth is in Baghdad for his own tour–had prior obligations that they couldn’t get out of. Which meant it came down to me. I wasn’t particularly keen on going, and when today I realized it was inevitable, I’ll admit to feeling a little trapped and cranky about it. However, I’m already starting to come around to the novelty of the idea.

I just wish that there had been a little longer to prepare–as it is, I’ll be taking off most of the rest of the week so that I can square things away. In this case, that’s going to mean finding, meeting, and setting up access for a petsitter for a month (and cleaning the house frantically so that they don’t judge me when they come through for the initial meeting). I feel quite horrid to be leaving my kitties alone for an entire month. Sure, they’ll probably be just fine–but I’ve never left them alone for that long. Unfortunately, when you live cross-country from your whole family, these things aren’t so easy to arrange at a moment’s notice. Sigh. One of my friends told me jokingly that I needed to set up a Family Care Plan for my cats. (That’s a “what we’ll do with the kids if we have to be deployed at a moment’s notice” document that the military requires of all military personnel with dependents.) Thankfully, once you set up a petsitter, you’ve got a go-to person from then on.

So from stagnant summer routine to another mini-upheaval… I’m not sure that I’m quite ready for it, all my big talk about wanting to deploy again to the contrary.

I think this will be a good testing ground for me–do I really like the experience now that I have (some) idea of what to expect, and is it something that I’d seek out voluntarily the next time it’s available? That’ll help me separate out my tendency to romanticize past experiences from my enjoyment of the real experience.

All in all, I think it’s a good thing–for all I felt like a (very cranky) martyr for several hours this afternoon. I still feel a little… miffed, I suppose… at not having specifically chosen this particular trip, but such is life in the military, after all. They say that once you volunteer for a deployment, it’s quite likely that the floodgates open and your name comes up for all sorts of other things. It could make for an interesting next couple years, then…