The Gresham's Blog: Brandon left for West Pac 2004-2005

I'm sorry everyone that I have been so behind on updating the website. It's been a very busy month.

Brandon left for WestPac 2004-2005 with the USS Milius on Dec. 6th. It was very hard to see him go especially since it had been sort of unexpected. His ship is an optimally manned shipped meaning they are an experimental ship that is trying to figure out the exact number of people it takes to do all the jobs on the ship. So, they can only have a certain amount of people for each job and they can't go over that amount. Well, the ship was full and they didn't have anyone leaving until towards the end of Pac. The ship wanted to keep Brandon and since he still need more schools for his job they were going to send him to a school while they were on deployment and then when they got back from deployment he would join up with them then. Nothing was for sure until the ship left though. They told us to be prepared to go because you never know what's going to happen since it's the military. So, we tried to get Brandon as prepared as much as we could without knowing for sure if he was going. About a week before the ship was scheduled to leave they told Brandon the funding for the schooling has been approved now we just have to find you a school to go to. We'll tell you by Friday whether we can get you a school or not. We knew to be prepared but there didn't really seem like there was any chance of him going even if they didn't get him the school he needed just because they didn't have room on the ship. The Thursday before the ship was supposed to leave I started having a bad feeling about it. Then Friday came around and I was a mess. I just had the worst feeling about it. I was waiting to hear from Brandon and he normally was getting out of work around 10 or 11am but I didn't hear from him until 1pm. He found out he was going. His school was full and another guy got sent to a school instead. It was horrible. We had tried to not get our hopes up but we had so it really hit us hard. My parents were originally going to come down and see Brandon off and spend some time with me after he left but since he most likely wasn't going they decided not to come since they would see us at Christmas. Fortunately, my good friend Jeri came with me to see Brandon off.
I've included some pictures of Brandon leaving. I also got a great pic of the LHD USS Bonhomme Richard which is basically a mini-aircraft carrier.