Ready To Deploy Again, and Ready For What Comes After: Days before the barracks on this small Army post emptied for leave, Lt. Col. Peter Zike flipped through his unit’s schedule as soldiers briefed their plans upon return. Down to the final weeks before a summer deployment to Afghanistan, Zike’s team of military advisers — a group of officers and NCOs from various branches of the service — needed to schedule a meeting after the break. Someone suggested a Wednesday evening. “That interferes with my yoga class,” Zike said, without looking up from his papers. Several soldiers smiled, but the 48-year-old artilleryman was serious. Zike recently embraced yoga a response to his body’s growing stiffness and the stress of work, both important considerations for a soldier with his history. The coming deployment will be Zike’s seventh since 2002, a decade in which he has spent more time on the battlefield than at home, at the expense of two marriages and what many people would consider a normal life for a middle-age man. “Anybody that deploys, he volunteers to go,” his former sergeant, Leroy Gadson, said. “That’s just him. That’s his life.” Now mulling retirement, Zike is thinking about what comes next and how he’ll adapt after years spent building his life around the Army and its deployments. “I know what my lot is in life,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m a simple soldier.”
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 13:35:56 +0000
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