Fair Winds and Following Seas

Greetings all. I am finally back in Las Vegas after my 196 days at Guantanamo and three glorious weeks on leave. I've been sitting at my laptop for sometime now attempting to come up with some way to distill the nearly seven months in some pithy manner. Based on the number of times I have typed something only to highlight and then delete it, I'm not doing terribly well. There is something to be said for writing longhand when one at least has the wastebasket filled with crumpled up pieces of yellow legal pad ascending precariously to an impossibly high altitude.

Especially for an Air Force officer, with a career ruled by the succinct and often ridiculous bullet points that compose our Officer Performance Reports, it is temping to look back on the deployment through a work based lens. Deadlines met, cases won, and the like. As the months pass, however, I doubt I will retain detail in terms of the projects with which I was involved. As most junior lawyers find out rather quickly, whatever we work on is going to be the most boring possible aspect of the larger project. It is like some distorted version of King Midas' curse, where everything we touch turns banal and is imbibed with Gordian complexity.

For the purposes of this over-extended metaphor, let's just say the gold represents boring. 

That little diatribe aside, my position within JTF-GTMO was actually quite fascinating and incredibly rewarding. I served as the Legal Adviser to the Joint Intelligence Group (JIG), composed primarily Navy and Air Force intelligence types, Defense Intelligence Agency analysts, and a number of civilian contractors. I essentially served as the liaison between the JIG and the Department of Defense Office of General Counsel. I became immersed in the byzantine world of GTMO habeas litigation and served in a supporting role to the Office of Military Commissions - Prosecution. Like most things in the JAG Corps, it was largely a baptism by fire; I thankfully found myself with an outstanding SJA and had great support from the folks within the JIG and in DC. Without question, a once in a lifetime experience for an attorney.

As compelling as my work was, it is the people with which I served that I will remember the most fondly. As I find more and more with each year of military service, a good assignment is less where you are than who you are with. I simply could not have asked for a better group of friends and peers down in Guantanamo. The social context of the deployed environment is incredibly peculiar. On one hand, it is highly intimate; one spends nearly every waking hour with the same group of people. Every meal, every workout, and every social outing was generally with the same 5-20 people for nearly 200 consecutive days. On the other, it is consciously ephemeral. We all knew our time together was for a term and once that term expired, we would all go back to our regular lives. It reminds me of my final year in high school, college, and law school - there is something truly bittersweet about having an expiration date that forces one to savor the time left while simultaneously forcing the recognition that one is in a holding pattern, merely delaying the inevitable next chapter.

Crashing the Navy Ball in ABUs, DCUs, and MARPATs. Stay classy San Diego.

GTMO breaks down into two independent areas separated by the Bay. The Naval Station and Joint Task Force are all on the Windward side. The air terminal is across the Bay on the Leeward side. As a result, one has to take a ferry from Windward to Leeward. It is tradition at Guantanamo to send off those leaving the island for good by jumping in the Bay at the ferry landing and swimming after the ferry as it sails away.

No question, it is good to be home. That said, I'll miss you guys. It was a privilege to serve with you.

On the ferry ride to freedom. I have now joined the ranks of Harold and Kumar in escaping Guantanamo Bay.