A Smidgen of Civilization

After all the medical exams tonight (Tuesday), the guys in my barracks were jubilant at having passed (although most, like me, actually have some stuff pending before they’re really fully cleared. But we have to stay positive!). One of the guys produced a bottle of Seagram’s 7 from somewhere and we shared it around. It only amounted to a few sips each, but we all found it very relaxing and it turned into a nice clichéd bonding experience like you see in the Norman Rockwell paintings, or Argosy magazine stories. We’ve agreed that tomorrow night we are going into “town” to have a nice dinner… although we’ll have to move fast, because the camp shuttle bus leaves the Wal-Mart parking lot at 8:25 sharp and if we’re not back by then, we’ll have to dig out Mr. City Cab’s number and hope he feels like earning a fare that night.

In the meantime, in high spirits, we decided to visit the one real sort of club on post, a place called “The All Ranks Club,” aka The House. Turns out it’s actually a pretty nice bar and restaurant, with good music, and some pool tables and video games. I hiked down there with the aforementioned Ray and two other guys who sleep in our end of the barracks, Adrian and Ben. Though younger than me and Ray—they both seem to be about 30—they are both married family men, ex-military, and have already had their share of adventures in exotic places. I gather from their stories that Adrian was a mechanic, who knows all the Army’s combat vehicles inside and out, and Ben was some kind of Navy diver. He’s even done some underwater welding, so he and Ray have that in common. Ray is a master welder who finds a lot of work all over the world going to work on industrial infrastructure-type projects. When he’s not on deployment, he calls east Texas home where he owns a charter fishing boat business. His goal is to save enough money from these deployments to buy some land in Costa Rica, get another boat, and run fishing trips from there in the winter and from his Texas base in the summer. Sounds pretty great.

We had a couple rounds of drinks at The House, where they feature both Jameson AND Bushmills (!). Then we ordered some food and moved over to the pool tables. After some intermural (is that a word?) rounds, they started playing against some of the other guys from our “class” who are prepping for deployment this week. A good time was had by all and we all slept soundly when we got back to the barracks, around 10 PM.

Except for me. I caught someone’s cold and spent the night with stinging mucus draining down my throat and my sinuses swelling up. I’ve been taking Zicam regularly for almost 24 hours now and it seems to have ameliorated the symptoms some, but these things always seem to be at their worst at night. I was only able to sleep for about an hour last night, so I’m really hoping for some quality Zs tonight.