Do Soldiers like Deployment?

It is an interesting question to anyone outside the military, especially to families of soldiers. Do soldiers like to get deployed? Why would anyone rather be in a foreign country away from the luxuries of America and from their families?

It was strange to come back from Afghanistan and begin getting used to garrison life again. I found myself wanting to be back in Lagman and doing what I was trained for. Back here in the rear we do a lot of exercise to keep ourselves in shape, we keep up on the maintenance of our vehicles and weapons and we do a lot of jump training. Not me of course.

Now, we don’t use those vehicles over seas and all of the jumps are kinda useless since we wouldn’t jump into Iraq or Afghanistan anyway. Basically we’re doing a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t really help us when we deploy. There’s training on Wednesdays and we go to the range. But we’re not doing our jobs, and getting paid like we’re not doing our jobs.

Deployment offers us the opportunity to do what we expected to do when we joined up. We can also earn a lot more; the government doesn’t take out any taxes when we’re over seas. And of course we can’t spend it as fast over there either. There is also the sitting around. We do a lot of that here. We sit around a lot over seas too but we can read, play games or do other things. When we sit around here, it’s because we’re waiting to be released for the day, despite the fact that we have nothing more to do. It becomes very boring and monotonous. Even to the point where we would rather be deployed than here stateside. It explains why the Army has such a hard time keeping people. It may be a strange thing but many people I talk to would rather be deployed.