Deployed to Afghanistan for 1 month after basic training

As the title states, right after I graduated basic training in 2015 and I deployed to Afghanistan to relieve someone getting kicked out of the Army. My deployment duration? A month.

The only reason this happened was because I chose not to take Christmas leave. A specialist in rear told me it’d be better to save my leave and money since the guys would be back from deployment in a few months anyway. That made total sense to me. Well they ended up deploying me when I told them I wasn’t taking Christmas leave.

I was issued zero deployment gear and they forced me to take my training TA50 gear with me. I literally was wearing UCP still when I arrived in Bagram and was getting INSANE looks.

Anyways, I was dropped off at a bus stop on Fort Drum by a SSG who was getting chaptered out and he gave me zero guidance on what to expect and where to go but somehow made my way to Kuwait after finding an engineer company who showed up to the same bus stop because they were on their way to Afghanistan. When I got to Kuwait the engineers abandoned me and told me good luck kid. I walked into some processing center at camp arifjan and talked to a full bird colonel who had no clue why I was there or who I was with. After making like a dozen calls he sent me to Bagram where I was issued all my deployment gear and after flown I was KAF where I met up with my company and platoon.

My platoon had already been deployed for about 8 months and were extremely confused to see me show up. They figured why would this guy getting kicked out need to be replaced if they were going home in a month anyways. Additionally they had not even seen one ounce of combat so no CIB’s which my 18 year old boot mind couldn’t comprehend. I ran two missions with them both being setting up fuel and ammo resupply points. Zero combat.

Got back from deployment and most everyone got out of the Army. At this point I now was an E2 with a deployment patch. Everywhere I went I got weird looks and many people asked if I got demoted. Funny enough my PFC promotion got messed up somehow so I got passed in rank by other E2’s which made it even more strange. Ended up just finishing my contract and getting out as an E4.

I often think how bizarre the whole situation was as I wore the deployment patch because technically I earned it but when people ask the duration of my deployment it doesn’t make sense to them.

Anyone else had a similar situation?

Edit: My dumb ass didn’t know I could edit my post. I made some fixes and polished a little. Thank you everyone for the feedback and I’m glad to see other people can relate. Also sick to see people talking with each other and connecting.