Mobilization – Day One – 27 November 2009

Today was the official first day of the mobilization of Task Force 334. Today was mainly a travel day for those Soldiers who had to travel long distances to reach East Windsor, CT in preparation for our travel to Fort Dix, NJ for the final CONUS training event prior to our arrival in theater. However, this day brought on some emotion for many of the Soldiers as we began to meet and begin spending time with each other.
One of these traveling Soldiers, SGT Dawn Champion, said something that caught my attention as we were preparing to leave to a party. She said that the day was kind of like a family reunion; had just been together a few weeks prior, but we were already getting back into those newly formed bonds that we had formed by training together six of the previous eleven weeks. We had truly begun to develop the close bonds that would be required as we moved forward and actually deployed into theater.
The second part of her comment is what gave me pause, however. She was already looking forward to that time in the future where the deployment would be over and we would all go our separate ways. While many of the organic Soldiers would simply stay with the unit and keep in touch, all the others would return to their home units and potentially lose touch of what everyone ended up doing after this deployment. While this may be inevitable due to various circumstances, I know for sure that one of the reasons that I am planning on writing this book is to document what we do while we are together as the Task Force, but also giving us something that we can all have to remind ourselves of the time we spent together. Even if this book is never officially published, I hope that it is part of something that can at least be shared with the other 58 members of the Task Force. One thing I told SGT Champion tonight was that it was my intent in the least to maintain contact with everyone as well as I could, especially those that I now consider friends. I envision a book like this as that link and reason to keep in contact. We will see what actually comes to be.