First Deployment, Part 1
This is another week of me writing blogs for you to read and hopefully find useful or interesting. Every week we are gaining more and more readers, which makes me very happy and excited about where my web-site is going. Now that it is blog 7 I decided to write about my first deployment back in 2018. It was 7 years ago already. Time flies when having fun, right? This week its part 1 of my deployment and next week will be part 2. Stay tuned to read more next Friday.
It was my first real experience of the military in the military. Hope that makes sense. At the time, I was working at a regular gate or patrol duty at MacDill. Friday nights were spent at the bars, weekends were for the mall, movies, beaches, etc. Life felt regular with a routine job, I just had to dress in uniform and arm up every shift. It felt like not much had changed since I left home a year and a half ago. Now that deployment was coming up life felt different, more real. I was excited, a change was needed and a break in routine was needed. At that time, I had no idea what deploying was, I only knew that it’s 6 months away from home station somewhere overseas. To this day I still remember how I was tasked/told about it. At that time, I was working the night shift and right before posting out to my assigned post a flight chief* from the previous shift came to me and said “Kalinin, you ready to deploy?” I was like “Yeah of course”, not taking it seriously. He replied, “We’ll stay in touch, have a good shift”. That is how I found out I was deploying. It’s interesting that I deployed with the same flight chief twice in a row and to this day he’s one of my great friends today. It all started with the first interaction.
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There were two 13-man teams tasked to deploy from my unit. One team was going to the Caribbean Island of Curacao, and we were tasked to a little base with less than 300 people in Kenya. At least we got to experience what real military deployment is. None of us knew anything about the place. It was like non-existent. The thrill was through the roof. Being brand new in that world was pretty stressful. That is where I had to grow up quickly and do a lot on my own (read about my AF career here). No one was holding my hand, the task was given, it had to be completed. Got a question? Figure it out. Most people on our team had not deployed before, which was even more stressful and unknown. Running errands around the base, and going out to the firing range, was fun (read about deployment readiness here). It felt like the last week of school, where you have stuff to do, but once you finish you can goof around until you are released. That was us for a couple of weeks. We did some pre-deployment training courses, one in El Paso for 2 weeks and the other one at Lackland back where BMT and the tech school were for me. Seeing trainees and tech schoolers walk around was different because only a year ago I was in the same boots as they are. Now I am on my way to Africa for 6 months, who would have thought?
As the days got closer to leaving I had to start packing my stuff. I have no idea what to pack. We got issued lots of great gear, boots, uniforms, flashlights, and everything you can think of. Not knowing anything about the place we were told to pack toiletries for six months. You can imagine how much stuff every single one of us brought. Each one of us had 3 military deployment bags (they’re huge) that were over 100 lbs each. We flew commercial out of Tampa, FL to Norfolk, VA, and I remember seeing workers loading our bags on a plane, they were struggling. Out of Norfolk, VA, we hopped a rotator* all the way to Djibouti and after that on C-130 to the final destination. The road there was long. I remember flying through Ramstein, Rota, Sigonella, and Djibouti and thinking to myself how cool is that? I just wanted to walk out of the terminal and explore but we couldn’t. Little did I know at that time that a couple of years later I would know each one of those places like the back of my hand because of all the missions I flew through them all. Very interesting how life works, never know where we will be in a couple of years. Three days after we arrived at Djibouti we found ourselves on a C-130 plane flying through the African skies with a jungle beneath us.
Landing on the airstrip in the middle of the forest was intense, the strip was so short that the C-130 had to brake hard, it threw us all forward. “Welp, welcome to our new home for 6 months” as we all are trying to peak through little round windows on the sides of the jet. The jet was full of people from different bases. They opened the back door, unloaded pallets with our bags, and told us to get in the cars. As I stepped out, I saw 1. monkeys and 2. people cheering. Those were some of the happiest faces, they were finally going home. Only when I was leaving that place 7 months later I felt their excitement. Their uniforms were all worn out, and colorless, they looked beat down but thrilled, I could tell they had some long nights and tough times there. We dabbed them up and got into cars to take us on base. The same day we checked in, got briefed, and showed around the base. The base was the size of a big Wal-Mart maybe. The next day we had to work the Security Forces job our bread and butter (read about Security Forces here). Our whole team had to work the night shift from 12 am to 12 pm. The other teams worked the day shift. On the first day of working, we had no idea wtf to do, plus being jet-legged did not help at all. We traveled for close to a week straight. We had the old team stay back for a week to show us what to expect, a changeover. Within a week we had to soak in all the information. Day by day we got better, found our groove, and started rolling, slowly but surely. I worked in towers and patrols. Lower ranking usually had to sit in the towers and watch all avenues of approach. Sounds easy but you have to do that for 12 hours, good thing there are 2 people per tower. We worked 3 days and had 1 day off, it was getting rough. The only day off was not enough to recover and do something fun. Just laundry wasted half of a day. Oh, and that place had its own laundry detergent and some toiletries, so everything we brought was not necessary. Since I brought all the stuff with me I had to use it and in fact, it did last me the whole time.
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Next Friday, my blog will be about, “My First Deployment, Part 2”
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You guys rock!!!
Very Respectfully,
Vlad Kalinin
Flight chief – highest ranking individual during that shift. Shift lead.
Rotator – civilian plane contracted by DOD to bring military members overseas for deployment, moves or travel.