I wasn't able to anticipate it. To be honest, we were very well prepared for our departure to Afghanistan, but the return was horrible for me. I was completely out of sync. I arrived here moving at 100 miles per hour, with my bayonet between my teeth, used to not sleeping and doing everything that normally took a day in two hours.
Then you get to the grocery store and you're eighth in line. That's a problem veterans face. Civilians don't get it. When you're in line, you feel exactly the same way you did in Kandahar, next to what we called “Candy Lane”. There was a plastic barrier separating the two lanes. We were sitting in an RG‑31, it was 45°C or 47°C—oddly enough, the air conditioning wasn't working—and we were gritting our teeth, waiting to get blown up. When you're waiting in line, you feel exactly the same way. There are lots of things like that that I discovered for myself.
To answer your question, I was ready to go there, but I wasn't ready to come back.