Personal Narrative: My First Deployment

not intentional. To prevent this from happening again, step 8 of the Troop Leading Procedure was done and rehearsed by “identifying our weaknesses and practicing essential task((ATTP 5-0.1 p4-1,)” by giving everyone a class on “Arm-and-Hand signal”. My take away from that experience was, even though accidents do happen, they can also be prevented by allowing only individuals who are trained to operate a certain piece of equipment, be the operator for that equipment. As the saying goes, “Life is not fair,” during that whole deployment, the only award that my Fuel section and I received was an AAM. It was insulting in my opinion compared to everything that we had to do and undergo during that deployment. I guess “it is what it is, as

I have never worked so hard in my life, and in such a hostile environment and then, only to be awarded an AAM. In comparison to my second deployment as an aviation Fueler, the stress was way less, we had more personnel, less dangerous environment, and I received two ARCOM’s and several AAM’s. My second deployment, situations occurred where I was scared of my life, but in overall, my first deployment was way worst that my second. My first deployment, the possibility of getting killed was the highest, and it had the highest work load, and at the end of it all, I only received one single AAM. I placed the blame starting from my NCOIC for not fighting harder for us, and I also blame the rest of the chain of command all the way up to the Battalion Commander(BC) for not recognizing all the hard work and sacrifices that we did out there. They did recommend an ARCOM for us though, but it was downgraded to an AAM by the BC, probably because of all the mishaps that happened during the deployment with my section, or maybe partly because of the times he caught us doing fuel operations without the proper PPE. On few occasions, the BC taught that the winter fuel gloves we were