No time like the present to have no time…

So I’m still here and many friends are not… I have no time on my hands and apparently my friends have a little more than they are accustomed too. I am far to tired to be bored and my friends are bored with how slow and tired things are. So I asked for a little help. I've "ordered" an entry from a stateside friend - I bring you Captain KJ:
(We pronounce that like the old CAPTAIN CAVEMAN!!!! cartoon by the way…)

Capt...
So after being teased inordinately for my previous “Sex In the City: Baghdad” style guest-blog, I’m afraid to write anything that’s typically Captain KJ… Not really, but anyway, I’ll try to stay on topic about getting back home and all that. Man, these PA types really crack the whip.

I’m back in the thriving metropolis of Montgomery, Alabama where I have been for just about a month, now. OK, I guess a month ago I was still technically in transit, living in the tents in Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, floating around through empty days wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with myself. The funny thing is, that particular feeling has stuck with me ever since the night I left the Green Zone.

The only real goal I had, leaving, was to get OUT OF THERE. And then once I was out, what was I shooting for? Well, to get home, of course, and then to get my pets and my car from family out in Arizona. But as soon as I was back home with all my possessions and back in work for those funny short 40-hour work weeks… The boredom set in almost immediately. For all that there are joys to be had in wearing what you want when you want to, driving where you want when you want to, and being the only person in control of what you get to eat each day, those joys lose their thrill pretty quickly.

And here I am, something of an “area expert” on Iraq, a subject that no one seems to want to hear about. The typical question—often the only question—that I get from people about the deployment is “Wow, how was it being there? Weren’t you so scared?” How, exactly, do you explain in a social setting that, no, you live with the knowledge that a mortar could come in and send you to Kingdom Come just like people living in a large city know that they could very well be carjacked or mugged… or killed in a car accident by a drunk driver, for that matter, and while you’re aware of it, you don’t waste your time worrying about it.

What, too, is it that makes Iraq so uninteresting to everyone? I guess they think they’ve been there, done that, it’s all car bombs and terrorists… but it’s really not. And if the military people around me (I work on an Air Force base and most of the people I know are other Air Force officers) aren’t interested, you know that no one else is.

Well, it’s perplexing. I’ve found myself disturbed by this—and by being in a backwater setting where I’m so far out of the loop that all I can do is beg my still-deployed friends for the latest in what’s up. Which normally they can’t say much about because of security concerns. In my frustration, I found myself actually looking up deployments that I could be doing in the future. But in the future, none of this messing around with a six-month deployment! No, 365+ days is what I thought would be interesting…

Though I’m going to give myself some time on this. Maybe my Navy friends haven’t impressed on me well enough the “Never Again Volunteer Yourself” motto…

So being back home is a mixed bag. I didn’t realize, while I was there, that I was really enjoying being in the middle of everything, being in a place that has the eyes of the world fixed upon it. (It would take something really strange for that to happen to Montgomery.) Normal life, which sounded so wonderful in the extraordinary situation of Baghdad, seems flat and a little bit pointless, and I’ve had some days where it feels like all the interesting times have ended and I’m going to be stuck living a vapid, uninteresting life from now on. But I’m already working on that, putting together new goals and a new life plan—and I have Baghdad to thank for that. A lot of my priorities and values have been shifted around as a result of my time there.