It's 5:57 in the am, very quiet here in the apartment complex on this Sunday morning. My porch garden is looking well, I have coffee and cigarettes so I'll continue my story. Shortly after my assignment to Fort Carson I found out the unit I was assigned to was to was heading to Afghanistan in only a few months. On top of that my new wife had found out she was pregnant with our son and didn't want to be alone during the pregnancy ( which is understandable don't get me wrong ) so I moved her back to Texas to be with her family. Then in June 2010 I found myself living in a tent on a combat outpost south of Kandahar city supporting the takeover of valley that had been taken over and lost before or never been able to be taken I'm still not quite sure what we were doing there. I didn't need to know I guess,I just had to do my job and not get killed doing it. Our unit had a rough few months in the beginning. Just the Taliban as a fighting force has been fighting for decades on their own land, and year after year we fly in a brand new unit with brand new soldiers, some have been there before, but the the Taliban is the same and will always be the same. We lost 7 in the first few months alone 5 in one IED attack taking a chaplain to another combat outpost. It was the first and only chaplain killed since Vietnam. The vehicle they were in was supposed to withstand a 600 lbs bomb. It did not. It was opened up like a can of soup. The gunner had to be identified by his tattoos, parts of him and the turret were found 50 to 75 meters from the vehicle. The driver was thrown out and over the wall of a near by village. The others were still in the vehicle, mostly......that hit the unit hard. I think maybe everyone lost a friend in that attack and it certainly let us all know how real our situation was. Time went on mission after mission day after day, I was doing recovery operations for logistics convoys mostly, and on my "days off" which just ment I didn't go outside the wire I fixed a welded whatever need to be fixed. My son was born on the 24th of December 2010 I was able to go on leave and actually stepped off the plane the day my wife went into labor. I was there for his birth and for the first two weeks of his life then back on a plane to finish my tour of duty. I don't know why but when I got back I was calm. Maybe it was just because I was just worried about living long enough to see my son and now I had but I just wasn't as concerned about death anymore. Not to a reckless point or anything, just calm. Nothing worth talking about really happened for a while until that spring. We got hit, in the middle of the day, in the middle of Kandahar city, by VBIED a car packed with explosives. It came from a side street, drove right into the side of the vehicle in front of us. All I can remember is a big flash and then nothing. I don't know how long I was dazed or out or what but when I came to everything was on fire. The truck that got hit was now sitting on top of the 3 foot concrete barrier that split the road. I got out of the truck to pull security and stepped on a part of someone's arm. When I looked up all can remember seeing is burning bodies of all people that had been out on the street that day. Women, men, children some still alive. Screaming in pain. These are the images and sounds that don't leave me behind......we didn't lose anyone in our unit that day just a few wounded. A few weeks later is when I started having speech problems and forgetting what I was doing right in the middle of something. I blew it off for quite a while. I definitely shouldn't have.