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Losing Track Of Time

Time Moves Differently When You’re In A Combat Zone

By Spc. John S. Wollaston
3BCT PAO

BAGHDAD, IRAQ – There’s a song by the music group Chicago that’s called “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is”. I was reminded of that song over the weekend when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine in the States. They asked me if “I had enjoyed my weekend?” to which I laughingly replied, “What weekend?” I then had to explain to him that when you’re deployed like I am, your sense of what day it is and sometimes what month it is becomes a blur unless you physically make yourself go look at a calendar. Your normal cues that tell you that it’s the weekend (i.e. I’m not getting out of bed for PT and the kids are willingly getting up early to watch cartoons) aren’t there.

Then I got to thinking about how much and how little time and its essence actually play in a soldiers mind on a deployment such as this. Some things regarding time remain constant no matter where you are. There will always be 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 365 days in a year. In today’s pop culture that analogy has been distilled down to the phrase “24/7”. As in one soldier asking the question “Hey man, when are you on the guard shift roster?” and another soldier replying to him “Man, I feel like I’m on there 24/7!” In that sense, time here in Iraq can seem to drag on forever.

Being deployed to Iraq has even broken several laws of physics where time is concerned. (Ok not really but it seems like it.) This fact was hammered home to me on my two-week leave back to the States. Where, as I found out, there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted to with my family but I made the most of the time (there’s that word again) that I did get to spend with them. Anyway, here in Iraq we tend to focus only on the world around us and judge how fast or slow the rest of the world is moving by what’s going on here. And as I found out, Iraq is moving slower in relation to the rest of the world than I actually realized until I stepped off the plane in Midland, Texas and was greeted by my family. Things I had talked with my family about that were going to happen before I flew over here last April that, in my mind’s eye had yet to happen, had actually happened weeks or even months prior. And I won’t even mention how much my children had grown in the time that I’d been gone.

In that sense of time, looking at everything that’s happened in the world outside of Baghdad, time has literally flown at the speed of sound since we’ve been deployed, moving like a sleek sports car in the fast lane. While Iraqi time has been moving like one of their taxis in the slow lane. I know I’m going feel like a distant relative of Rip Van Winkle awakening from my own 12-month nap when I get back to Ft. Riley. Life outside the bubble of Baghdad and Operation Iraqi Freedom will have passed me by, gone into the ether without a chance to recapture it.

Or has it really moved that slowly here? I often find myself thinking that the days are going by so fast that they are actually blurring together. Which most times they are and out here that is definitely a good thing. As I told my friend, the days are going by so fast here that you don’t know if it’s Sunday or Friday unless you look at a calendar because the days just whiz by. So in that frame of reference my time in Baghdad has, thankfully, flown by. I actually do find myself amazed sometimes that the deployment of the 3rd Brigade to Iraq is within shouting distance of its one-year anniversary. It seems like only yesterday that our boots were hitting the ground at the airport in Kuwait City to start our desert adventure. Now here we are beginning to make plans for returning home.

But sometimes time can be pretty cruel to us here as well. There’s the difficult task of steeling yourself for an extra six weeks of time that has been added to your deployment when, in your head, the time for you to go home had been this close. Or the soldiers who thought they were departing the military before their units returned home, who recently found out not only are they going home with us, their time in the Army has been extended 90 days after we return to Kansas thanks to a stop-loss order. Like a runner who mentally prepares himself to go all out in a race for a certain distance, only to find out as he rounds the corner for the finish line that the race is two miles farther than what he expected. Its frustrating yes, but you have to keep going to the finish. Then there’s the cruel aspect of not having enough time with someone before one of life’s cruel twists takes him/her either from this earth or mercifully, just off the battlefield. The common refrain is “If I’d only had a little more time to talk to them or to tell them ‘good job’ or ‘be careful’” or something like that. When it’s a person’s time to go, there is never enough time to tell them all the things you should have or wanted to. A fact that many of us, myself included, have found out too many times to mention since we’ve been here.

Ok, so you’re asking yourself “Which is it? Is time moving like the tortoise or the hare in Baghdad?” The answer is “both”. This deployment has truly proven that time is a relative thing. It all depends on how you look at it. Time is moving rapidly in that the year we’ve been here is almost over and we’ll soon leave for home. And it’s moving along like an arthritic snail in the sense that it feels like that departure date will never get here. And we haven’t even touched on how our internal clocks are going to be messed up from the 9-hour time difference between Baghdad and Ft. Riley and how at four in the morning we’re gonna be wide awake for a few days because our body is telling us it’s two in the afternoon! So spouses please take pity on us if we seem a little confused when we get home. It’s just going to take us a little time to figure out what time it really is after a year in which it seems like time stood still. Or did it?