Army Mental Health

so, more on the mental health thing.

The airforce base is currently limited to one psychiatrist and you can't get in to see them until October, so I had to go to Fort Lewis for the day with two other guys. We flew in the morning and flew back at night. I got home about fifteen minutes ago.

that's probably some of the easiest money I've ever made with the army, though it was the first time I had ever flown in uniform. We got a lot of handshakes and people telling us how much they appreciated what we are doing. Warm fuzzies were shared by all.

It was strange, when I got back from Kosovo I didn't really know what to say to this, because I genuinely didn't feel like I did anything and really didn't deserve to be thanked for sitting on my ass picking my nose for a year. Now that I feel like I'm actually doing something worthwhile, I can give them a thanks for their support without thinking twice about it.

The mental health questionare had some, well, interesting questions on it, some of which had definite delusions of schizophrenia and paranoia, about people stealing your thoughts and being able to read your mind. My favorite completely random and at first appearances pointless but probably has some abstract purpose was 'Your favorite sport to watch is the High Jump." My assumption leads me to believe that this question is thrown on there to make sure you are not flubbing the health exam but whatever the case, i answered false on that one.

The evaluation went great, I am not insane, the only real red flag that came up was my Dysthemia which hasn't been a problem.

I don't know why we had such a late flight back, but because we had traveled in uniform and didn't bring a change of close (we've decided to rectify this in the future in case a scenerio like this should arise again) once we were done with the eval, we had to figure out how to waste the rest of our time until our flight left.

We chose to see a movie. Life Free or Die Hard, which I will include in an upcoming summer movie post. But we got some funny looks coming out of the theater, like 'what are they doing here? is this our tax dollars at waste?' We were considering going to Seattle, but walking around Pikes Street Market in uniform didn't exactly appeal to us. That and Seattle traffic just plain sucks.

But Seatac is not an airport you wait for the last minute to arrive at. I'm just thankful there is such a place as the USO, which offers free wireless internet and a forum to post my previous rant because that was very fresh in my mind. Still, I wish it wasn't a case of flying all the way to Fort Lewis for a 2 hour examination. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

I need a new set of ACUs. I washed a set with a pen in the pocket. Gah!