Calling Baton Rouge

My unit is on our post-deployment leave now, and I've been staying at my parents' house in Baton Rouge for almost a week. And I gotta say, being here and seeing my family and old friends makes me not want to go back to Camp Lejeune at all. Not even a little bit. I am just not in the mood for a garrison environment where people gripe at you for not having a fresh haircut every Monday morning or for not looking busy at work even though there is literally nothing to be done. But I think being here is one of those situations where the temporary nature is better than the reality of a long-term situation. For example, I love California, but I'm pretty sure the high taxes, outrageous cost of living, and aging, dope-smoking, hippie liberals would combine to make me hate living there permanently. I do enjoy spending time with my friends and family, but every time I've come to visit I've always had the feeling like I don't belong here anymore.

I just like the simplicity of what Baton Rouge has become for me. All my friends who are left in this area are married and have jobs, so they don't want to do anything crazy during the week, and those who aren't married have jobs in other states (like me), so they never come back just to hang out. That sounds like it could be a bad thing to a 23-year-old, but it's not to me. Maybe I'm just a loser. I mean, you know you're getting closer to being a boring old man when you take leftovers home from restaurants and get excited because you're going to eat them for lunch the next day.

All this downtime has been making me think about my future, too. Doing a deployment in Iraq and coming back to Baton Rouge has made me question my future in the Marine Corps, which is something I've never done before. Pretty soon it'll be time for me to think about reenlisting, and I know I'm going to have to think long and hard about it. For starters, I know I would not reenlist into my job. They're offering a $20,000 "topper" onto anyone's bonus if they stay in their job for another two years after reenlisting, but that's not worth it to me. I mean, I like my job sometimes: There is nothing that can compare to a fire-for-effect from an entire Panzerhowitzer battalion in Germany, or a Hellfire slamming into a Bongo truck in Iraq. But I don't think it's something I want to do anymore, especially since the higher in rank you get in this job, the closer you move to a desk and a COC. And it's almost as if you have to hide your intelligence, because the fear is that if you're smart, you might get snatched up to sit behind an AFATDS or JADOCS computer. Plus, the leaders of my MOS, the highest enlisted decision-makers, are those that grew up in the Marine Corps during the 80s and even the late 70s, when there was no long-term war. I'm not saying they're out of touch, but this past deployment taught me a lot about how their thought processes and policy decisions are very different from those of the junior staff ranks. Sure, they may have adjusted to the fact that there's a war going on, but they're not like the lower enlisted, who joined because there's a war going on -- those whose "growing up" in the Corps was done through multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, not through medfloats and westpacs.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and if I had to reenlist right now, I think the only thing that would make me stay is if I'm able to do a B billet. I want to look into the Marine Security Guard program, the guys who guard the embassies and consulates around the world. But I have a lot of time to think about it, as well as another deployment to go through, so who knows where this will all end up.