1461 Days Ago, Half A World Away

4 years is equivalent to:

48 months
1461 days
35,064 hours
126,230,400 seconds

Consider that it takes four years to get through high school or get a Bachelor’s degree. The Summer and Winter Olympics come around in separate four-year cycles. A presidential election happens every four years. A normal military enlistment term, one that I served from 2002-2006, is four years.

Four years is how long that it’s been since my deployment to Iraq. Already.

I arrived in Baghdad on October 28, 2005 with the sole purpose of assisting the American Forces Network in gathering news and completing special video projects. Though my time there was short, I remember most of it like it was yesterday.

It seems surreal that I was ever over there, especially when you take into account the history of the area. I walked by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers on more than one occasion, traveled past the ancient city of Babylon and even scaled the Ziggurat of Ur.

Also surreal were, of course, the numerous rocket attacks and various other insurgent activity we put up with. God kept his hand on me, inside the wire and outside it as well.

I don’t want to delve deeply into my time there…there are plenty of posts here on my blog that you can see for yourself that provide insight as to what went on, starting here. (Bear in mind that most links to video/audio are dead because I hosted the site on a different server then, and also that the last four years has seen a shift in how I view the war in Iraq.)

I just wanted to simply reflect on the starting point of a time in my life in which I was forced to grow up well beyond what I had been taught or told to do thus far…and a time in which I learned to put faith in God in action rather than in words.