On Christmas Day 2008 I stepped off a plane at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. After sitting in a cube for the first five years of my career coding, I needed to "go work with some end users" and volunteered to help out the Marine Corps. I was working on the Army Battle Command software of the time, Command Post of the Future. I did not know anything about the military, the ranks, the culture, the protocols. When the first rocket attack alarm sounded (a false alarm), I hightailed it out of the combat operations center where I worked, giving all the seasoned and salty Marines a good laugh. This, and working my ass off coding for them, I guess gets you on their good side. I became part of the team and learned a ton.

About a month before I left in April, now slightly seasoned myself and quite used to the regular rocket attacks, I was coding up a personnel tracking system in CPOF. For the first time the operations officer could, in real time, know exactly where everyone was for whom he was responsible. It was towards the evening when about 80 meters away you heard the familiar THUD! followed by the alarm 10 seconds later. Not a drill and at this point annoying. Imaging being in the zone for hours, when suddenly you need to stop and run out to a crowded concrete bunker for hours. Damn! I was just about to compile, too. Well, being the operations center, Marines can't just leave. They have to continue running the war. So some them stay with the helmet and vest in case of a direct hit in the operations center.

Some time later I finally returned and say the assist operations officer, a very tall Marine Major (now LtCol) and one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, taking off his battle rattle. I notice a tomahawk on the back of his vest.

"Sir, what's up with the tomahawk?".

"This? Oh, I was platoon leader in Fallujah. Our designation was tomahawk and I was tomahawk-6." I smiled in genuine amazement which quickly turned to sadness.

"That is so cool! All I've done so far in my life is sit in a cube coding."

The Major stepped back and said "Wait a minute, you were just coding, weren't you?"

"Yes. The perstat program for the OpsO."

"Well, you were just coding under ENEMY FIRE. You are a COMBAT SOFTWARE ENGINEER!". He said with the seriousness you sometimes see in Marine Corps officers. It put the biggest smile on my face for the rest of my time there. On my last day, the team I worked with gave me a flag and plaque designating me a "Combat Software Engineer" which to this day is one of my most cherished possessions.