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pulled out the ring. The music started, and I was so happy that it just so happened to be my favorite song. I turned to Greg, smiling with excitement, and he had the ring. He said, “Nej, we started our relationship here, and I felt it only fitting we start the rest of our lives here. Please do me the honor and say you will marry me.”
    I was filled with joy. I couldn’t get those damn gloves off fast enough to put on the ring that meant I would be able to spend the rest of my life with my best friend.
    “GERG! Yes!!!!” I screamed. I was so happy in that moment.
    When I graduated, we were given a list of assignment options to choose from, and I felt strongly it was Greg’s decision to make, so I turned the list over to him. After weighing the options he chose Tyndall AFB to be the place for us to start our next chapter. We arrived in June, and the panhandle of Florida was an unbelievable culture shock from the metropolis of Las Vegas! I felt completely out of place when we first arrived. I cried all the way from the airport to the base. I was used to the big city life, and now I was in the southeastern United States where there were alligators and people shot squirrels and ate them for dinner. It was humid, and gigantic mosquitoes and cockroaches seemed to be everywhere. One day, shortly after we arrived, we took a walk on the base and ended up at the beach which was covered in pure white sand that felt like flour between our toes as we walked. The waters were the most brilliant emerald green I had ever seen, and as we watched our very first sunset we decided we could “deal” with the absolutely breathtaking beauty that surrounded us. We were where we were meant to be. We purchased our very first house as a married couple, and very soon it became our home .
    Home. I had barely left it and sitting there, going through all of these memories, made me miss it and my life with my Gerg terribly already. I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted, the time I had to spend with loved ones, until that moment.

Day 3
We have a flight
    29 April 2008
    We finally got scheduled for a flight out of Manas the morning of 30 April at 0600 with a bag drag at 2200 hours which meant we would be checking in our bags. I began to feel nervous about actually getting to Bagram, but excited too; I was ready to get established in what I would be doing. I was able to talk to Greg again. I initially went back to the coffee café but there were so many people I ended up going to the morale phones. I had to wait there too, but it was much more organized and the calls were limited to fifteen minutes. It was so hard to limit the time spent talking to loved ones to just minutes. As I sat there waiting for my turn and thinking about how much the waiting sucked, I looked to my left and my right and I saw a room full of Army soldiers who were on their way home after being deployed for ten to fifteen months waiting to call home too. The difference between them and me was that they weren’t complaining one bit. To them, six months was a walk in the park. In that moment I no longer felt sorry for myself; I felt guilty for my selfishness.
    At lunch time I caught my first glimpse of the news and saw that two days before, actually the day we arrived in the AOR, there was an assassination attempt on the Afghanistan President, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul, the capital city of the country, about twenty five miles northwest of Bagram. This news was a bit unnerving to me because I knew I would likely be traveling to remote locations throughout the country that could potentially be in the “hot” zone. I had to prepare myself to be exposed to some dangerous situations.
    As the day came to an end, we began to get our bags ready to check in at the terminal. After the bag drag was complete, we all agreed to have one last drink at Pete’s before we left in the morning. I laid down to rest at about 0130, but didn’t sleep at all. I had too many thoughts running