Finished another mission. This one was pretty short but it felt really long. Things get to be monotonous and tiring. We were pulling some crazy hours this mission too which might have been the reason why it felt long. On the last leg back I was so sleepy! I’d gotten 3hrs sleep before a long push. I was so tired I was swerving all over the road. I was surprised the gun trucks behind me didn’t say anything over the radio cause there’s no way they could have missed my erratic driving and there weren’t any potholes around for me to be swerving that much! The biggest problem with my sleeping is that to other people I sometimes create the illusion that I’m awake because I spontaneously wake up and either do or say something that is 75% right on track with something I’m supposed to do. For example I was sleeping in line to start this obstacle course thing for training. I figured it was dark and the line was pretty long so I decided to try and catch some sleep standing in line. What sucked was that during the course of my sleep someone decided that it was retarded for us to be out there training at that time since we had just gotten to this post earlier the day before and hadn’t had the chance to sleep since we’d gotten there or adjust to the drastic change in climate. So when the other people that were awake found out about this they yelled out to me. Somewhere in my mind I thought they’re yelling at me cause its my turn to go through the course. So I shot up and ran through the course and when I got back everyone else was laughing they knew I was asleep and I guess the way I woke up and just started running seemed funny to them. The other problem is that when I take these little naps I start dreaming but most of the time my dreams continue where my consciousness left off so I don’t catch the change from awake to asleep. For example, one time we were stopped because someone thought they found an IED (turned out they did) but here I was sitting in the dark and I guess I fell asleep. But man if you could be in my dream I was being very productive. I talked to some people on Convoy net and called up a 9 line UXO, I scanned the area around the trucks we were escorting making sure no one was trying to sneak up on them and gank em, I even noticed that the chain holding our landing ramp on our trailer was broken…that’s when I woke up because at that moment I called out to my co-driver and asked him to check his mirror to before we got out to see whether or not he could see the landing ramps down. When he retorted, “what are you talking about,” I realized that it was no longer dark outside and when I leaned out the door and climbed up on to the catwalk it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with the landing ramps. And whatever I dream about seems to be related to what I’m currently doing or supposed to do. So basically people around me think I’m ok and I think I’m ok, but really I’m asleep. My co driver was passed out and everything I was trying to stay awake had failed. I tried listening to music, sermons, lectures then listening to other people’s music. I had been pounding the Monsters and Red Bull’s and Rip its and tried eating and chewing caffeinated gum. None of the stuff was working so I took out my Airsoft gun and started shooting myself. That worked for the first 5 minutes then I would doze off again and when I woke up and realized I had been asleep I would have to shoot myself again. So that’s obviously not effective I guess I’ll have to just stick to good old fashioned sleep to prevent myself from falling asleep when I need to be awake. But other than all of those minor things, this is the first mission where I haven’t experienced catastrophic equipment failures or anything else. It was nice not to have the added stress of having to fix broken things or recover wrecked things and switch em out. Thank you God! And thank you whoever has been praying for the wreckage to stop!
On another note I’ve finally started filming for the training videos for our replacements and for a Company video. Hopefully there will be enough time and enough discipline to finish editing it in time.
