Thank you for your service.Worked in a water treatment plant too, for a SHORT time. If you have to crack open the pumps to repair one on the incoming lines it was real bad.
Spent 10 years as a correction officer down at Wabash Valley. Convicts can small bad, and can be noisy as hell. Had to "force shower: a poop thrower named Castro couple of times after he got too ripe (about a year) from refusing to come out for a shower. Also been in many fights, had poop and pee thrown on me many times, been bitten once, and stabbed twice. I hate convicts. Far as I'm concerned, anyone gets more than 10 years, just put them down. Every time I see baggy pants, I think "past or future convict".
War lived up to it's rep as being "hell". Yes, shooting people or getting shot at sucks, as does getting blowed up, but the smells of a ****hole like Iraq are unreal. People (including ours, ok, even me) just relieve themselves wherever they want. Sometimes you have to, I get it, but most times it's just because that's who they are. Any porta-pottie on the base that is used by the TCNs is something you avoid. Trash, and human waist being burned. True meaning of **** detail. Coming up on a bus full of dead police recruits that was bombed and is burning. Cooking humans smell different than any other meat I've ever smelled. People who get blown apart stick like hell too. The rotting food in their guts (basically vomit and poop) is awful when it gets splashed around and mixed with the iron smell of blood. Sometimes a body will take a dump after it dies...
Besides smells, years after you retire, sometimes a sound, or a situation will make your brain throw a flashback at you, and it will be just like you are back there. Your body will react with the flash of adrenaline that gets you ready for a fight, and you start freaking out looking for where the attack is coming from... but there isn't one. When it doesn't happen, you have to deal with that adrenaline dump without looking like a fool. I couldn't stand fireworks for the first 3 or 4 years. A large professional firework mortar sounds pretty much like a haji mortar going off. Oddly enough, when you're sitting in your lawn chair waiting for them to start, they are (or sound like they are) about the same distance away that haji would set up shop... You go to the range to shoot, and there are other guys there with their ARs, all is cool. Some dude fires off an AK on the left, and when the sound of that x39 hits you, you really wake up. I hate AKs. They're good weapons, but I hate 'em.
I took my son to see Lone Survivor. When the one guy was walking down the hall in the tent to show his buddy the horses on his laptop, the plywood walls were on screen and the sound effects of the tent blowing in the wind were too real. I swear I could smell the tent from my seat in the theater. Many vets out there probably know the smell of old Army tents and plywood.
So, I'll say that war was the worst job I had, because it doesn't want to let go of you when you're home. It's also the greatest thing I ever did. Weird, but I'd take my crippled ass back there in a heartbeat. Sadder still, I won't have to. I think it has followed us home, or is trying to...