What is deployment really like?

Here is how you do laundry on a deployment, according to Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran, 82nd Airborne paratrooper and Gulf War Veteran.

“You get a five gallon bucket, put the lid on it, you just put your clothes in there and put some water in there, some detergent, drive down the road.”

Hear it at 6:15

An hour later you dump it out, add clean water and drive some more.

“Just about three times, you’d have some clean clothes.”

Hear it at 6:30

Nobody films that part. The movie version of a deployment runs ninety minutes and most of it is gunfire. The real ones, as told in interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, ran from four days to sixteen months, and most of the hours went to something else: a gate, a night shift, a bucket, a plane that would not leave. Fifteen Veterans describe theirs here, along with one sailor who is still in. They are not describing the same thing. That is the first thing to know.

What came home with these people is its own article, What stays with you after deployment? This one ends when the plane lands. It includes a shooting, told briefly.

One word, four different trips

Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, deployed four times and came back with four different answers.

“All my deployments were combat deployments. Some more kinetic than others.”

Hear it at 19:33

The first, in Iraq in 2005, was convoys, roadside bombs and snipers, and he has said elsewhere how little you can do about either. The second was the one with the machine guns and the air support, the one that looked like the brochure. He had planned to get out afterward. Instead:

“It was an awesome deployment. And I was going to get out before that deployment.”

Hear it at 20:51

He stayed in, waiting for another one like it. “Ironically enough, I never had a deployment like that again.” Hear it at 21:02 The third, in Afghanistan, he files under a word the infantry uses for people who stay on the base.

“That was kind of more like fobbit life. I got out of the wire a couple times, but nothing crazy.”

Hear it at 21:24

The fourth was on a ship. Same Marine, same job title, four trips with almost nothing in common.

The length does not hold still either. Nick Merrick, a former U.S. Army Green Beret and founder of Green Beret Racing, started in the infantry: “Came back from a 16-month deployment, went to selection and never went back.” Hear it at 3:37 Jamie Waterberry, a Veteran who was supporting Air Force units attached to the Army, says her deployments were six months when the rest of the Air Force was doing four. And in one of our earliest episodes Tom “Ghost” Martin, a Desert Storm Marine Corps Veteran who owns The Leatherneck Club, describes being shelled in a fighting hole and then does the arithmetic against the Marines who came after him: “We did it for four freaking days.” Hear it at 27:58 (Vegas Veteran Voices shares an address with The Leatherneck Club.)

Nobody asks if you want to go

Raivadus Gill, an Iraq combat Veteran and founder of Operation Battle Cry, went in 2004 as a .50 cal gunner. Before that, his unit of about 120 was told half would go to Saudi Arabia and half to Iraq. He knew which half he wanted. He called his mother.

“I’m crying not to go to Iraq. Please don’t send me to Iraq.”

Hear it at 47:22

Then came the day they read names and pointed people to one side of the room or the other, without saying which side was which. The men on his side looked at each other and worked it out. He went to Baghdad. He tells it laughing now. “I’ll never forget that day, man.” Hear it at 48:11

Alfred Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired Marine Corps K9 handler and author, trained for Iraq and was told six months out that it would be Afghanistan instead. His unit flew over in 2010 with more than thirty working dogs on one aircraft.

“It was loud, smelly.”

Hear it at 22:10

People ask him how the dogs went to the bathroom on the plane. He says you do not want that answer.

Mostly it is chores

Bourn deployed about five times, by his count: the first Gulf War, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo. What he describes is housekeeping. The shower was a heater dropped in a five gallon can and a canvas bag one man held up from the back of a truck while the next man stood under it. When they were out on the road they ate where the locals ate.

“We’d get a big platter of chicken and rice. We’d all just eat with our hands.”

Hear it at 6:55

He calls it a simpler time, which is a strange thing to say about a war and which most people who have been to one understand.

Then there is Emilio Mackie, a U.S. Navy Veteran and surface warfare officer, on patrol in the South Pacific. The ship’s sewage system was his responsibility. At three in the morning he reached out of his rack and his hand went into water. It was not seawater.

“For two days, all my HTs and the DCmen and DCA and I were doing was repairing sewage systems on the ship.”

Hear it at 27:28

His verdict, years on: “It was messy. It was gross. And it’s over. And looking back on it, it was kind of fun.” Hear it at 27:37 The recruiter had not covered it.

And then a lot of nothing

Lindsay Gutierrez, a U.S. Air Force Veteran who served in security forces, loved her first deployment, to Qatar. “Which was a great first deployment. Loved that one.” Hear it at 7:39 Her second was Djibouti, on a Navy base, working nights.

“It was so boring because we worked nights and there was nothing to do.”

Hear it at 12:57

Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran, trained as a logistics specialist and says she never did that job once.

“When we got deployed, I worked the ECP, so I was at the gate every day. 12-hour days at the gate.”

Hear it at 4:37

That was Afghanistan. The ECP is the entry control point: the front gate.

At sea the nothing has no view. 2K Kenny, an active duty Navy Retail Specialist Second Class and musician who was still serving when we filmed him, wrote a song about it: “I don’t got no windows.” Hear it at 27:15 When he could, he went topside and looked at the water for no reason.

Even the comfortable deployments come with an argument about how comfortable. Jamie Waterberry was in Qatar on her first one. “I think by week one I realized, oh, the rest of the Air Force gets a day off and we don’t.” Hear it at 12:55 Her husband, Cole Waterberry, also a Veteran, was in Iraq at the time and laughed at her down the phone. He still wants one thing on the record.

“Even in the early 2000s, Qatar had a pool.”

Hear it at 13:31

And in another of our early episodes Nate Rosas, a U.S. Army Veteran who went to Afghanistan in aviation, puts himself on the easy end without being asked. He was, in his word, a Fobbit, and rarely left the base.

It depends who you went with

Somebody said it plainly in our interview with Gutierrez, in a stretch of tape where she and our host, who deployed to Afghanistan, are talking over each other. We cannot tell you which of them it was, and it does not much matter.

“It depends on the people you go with that makes the deployment either bearable or unbearable.”

Hear it at 7:54

Caitlin Duffy, a U.S. Army Veteran and 50 cal gunner, spent a year and a half deploying for eight weeks at a time. On one of those trips she got close to two other women. Nothing happened. That is why she remembers it.

“I have this funny core memory of the three of us sitting on the floor with our rucksacks on, just giggling and laughing hysterically like 23 year olds do.”

Hear it at 8:23

The day it went wrong

For some of them there was one.

“Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, was back in Afghanistan for a second time and volunteered for guard duty because the base was short of people. His checkpoint looked across a soccer field toward the Afghan National Army’s side. Soldiers from the unit his was replacing were out there playing football.

“I heard some burst fire start going off and I’m like, what’s going on?”

Hear it at 1:02:17

They came running toward his tower. “None of these guys had brought their weapons out with them.” Hear it at 1:03:27 He had not seen who fired, so he held his own fire and watched the one armed man on the field. When that man shot a wounded American where he lay, Aguillon fired twice. One soldier had been killed in the first burst. The wounded one lived. Aguillon, whose job was to assist the chaplain, then helped with the memorial.

“I became that chaplain assistant that shot a guy.”

Hear it at 1:11:10

Brenner’s deployment went the other way around: it started quiet and got worse each time he moved. “I had a very easy deployment, to say the least.” Hear it at 26:07 Then potshots, then a bomb, then firefights, then a big push near Kandahar. On the morning of October 24, 2010, he called his wife.

“Hey, can’t talk to you for about two weeks, we’re going to be sleeping on the side of the road.”

Hear it at 27:20

That was the day he was wounded and his dog was killed. He tells it in the other article.

Joe “Doc” Worley, a U.S. Navy corpsman who holds a Bronze Star with valor and a Purple Heart, went to Fallujah in 2004 with a Marine unit he loved. He had about two weeks left when a roadside bomb took his leg. He sums up his whole time in uniform in three words.

“My military career ended up being, you know, school, war, hospital.”

Hear it at 7:00

Gutierrez’s bad day had no enemy in it. Before dawn in Djibouti, on the daily meal run, the truck she was riding in rolled off a small bridge. The brain injury was not diagnosed until years after she left the Air Force.

And the people at home hear a version with the sound turned down. Jamie Waterberry, back in the States during one of Cole’s deployments, got him on a satellite phone and heard a boom behind him.

“I’m like, what is that? He’s like, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m in the bunker. It’s cool. We’re good.’”

Hear it at 57:12

When the plane lands

Cole Waterberry’s trip out of Iraq ran through Qatar, where Jamie was stationed, for what he calls “all the standard military paperwork of getting you back out of a war zone.” Hear it at 14:43 There is a form for that too.

Ask fifteen people what deployment is like and you get a bucket, a gate, a pool, a flooded berthing, a soccer field and a night shift in Djibouti. The Department of Defense’s own support service, Military OneSource, opens its deployment pages with a sentence our guests would sign: “Every deployment is different, whether it’s your first tour of duty or your fourth.”