TJ here with a little late night tell-all on the real life events that have been and will be effecting my hobby/ blogging time here. For those of you who could care less please move on to one of the incredible blogs in our blogrolls, for you long time followers and friends of DFG, I will give you a little insight into what has been keeping me so busy. In short, I'm on a boat ...
... or ship depending on your preference for Naval terminology. You see I have been a Marine since 2000 and as a part of that duty, I have deployed numerous times over the years and it is time again for me to sail for foreign shores, this time aboard the Bataan, or the "Dirty Nickel" as the Sailors refer to her. I recently completed some work-up time aboard the vessel, which is why I haven't been responding to the posts I had scheduled to post over the last couple of weeks.
This work-up represents the first of three at-sea periods I will complete before disappearing for most of 2014.
We did a number of cool things like ride in LCACs.
Which are like hover craft that we can store inside the ship and deploy troops with.
We also performed a ton of flight hours, in fact, I left the boat via CH-53 Super Stallion the other day.
Here is a photo of the boat as I watched it vanish while I headed home. For now, I am back, but soon I will head back to the boat and in the new year, I will leave for quite some time. It is both exciting and sad, but such is life. How about you all? Any other military folks out there past or present, U.S. or other nations? I would love to hear the stories of other veterans in the hobby.