400 Days

The number of days on my orders. Now of course the deployment will most definitely be either less than or more than 400 days by a few days or weeks, but it is still an ominous amount to think about. In 400 days:

• 7 Cycles of Basic Training can be done start to finish
• 1.1 Years of School can be completed
• You could get pregnant, have a baby, and be 4 months into another pregnancy
• A mortgage of 1300/month would have 17,000 paid on it
• 1.5% of the average life will be lived (based on 72 year life)
• 3.3 Semester-long study abroad terms completed
• 3.3 Air Force deployments will cycle through
• 1.9 Marine deployments will cycle through
• Moore's Law will predict that electronics (processing speed, camera pixels, etc) will increase by 56%
• $288B in costs will be incurred to the US on the Iraq War (over 10x what the auto industry wants, almost half of what was covered by TARP)(source Washington Post, September 22, 2007)

And of course so much more in our friends', families', and acquaintances personal lives.