Military & Service · A Decembers list
Every place the service sent you, in order
The orders came down with a place name and a date, and you packed a duffel and went. Some tours blur together now. Others you could walk blindfolded, still.
This is the list where each one gets its own line: where, how long, and what you carried home.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down one tour — the base, the year, the guy in the bunk next to yours — and the whole rotation comes back: the heat, the mail call, the sound of the birds coming in.
Your DD-214 lists the dates and the ribbons. It does not say that you learned to sleep through artillery, or that a Filipino cook named the whole crew after states, or what it felt like to come down the ramp at Travis and not know what to do with your hands. The record keeps the facts. It throws away everything that made it yours.
Nobody sits down to write the memoir of their service. But a line is easy. One tour, one place, one year, and maybe a sentence about the man who watched your back. Do that a few times and you have the thing your kids and grandkids will never find in any file: not where you were stationed, but what it was actually like to be there.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The places, named plainly
Not just the country but the base, the ship, the firebase, the town you got liberty in. Camp Lejeune, the DMZ, a carrier in the Gulf, a forward operating base you can still draw from memory. Put down where you actually were, because that is what nobody else will remember to write.
How long, and what it did to you
Thirteen months, a six-month float, a year-long rotation, ninety days that felt like a year. Note the length, because time bends over there. A short tour can leave more behind than a long one, and the coming home is often the part worth writing down.
The people you served with
The sergeant who chewed you out and then covered for you. The corpsman everyone trusted. The kid from Ohio who never made it back. These are the names that fade first, and the ones your family will most want to have. Give each tour the men and women who made it what it was.
Where the service sent you
- Basic and stateside
- The first posting, the schoolhouse, the stateside duty station where you learned the job before anyone shipped you anywhere real.
- Vietnam
- The in-country tour measured in months and days, the mail from home, and the flight back that changed everything about how the world looked.
- Cold War Europe
- Garrison duty in Germany or a rotation to Korea, waiting for a war that stayed cold, learning a town and a language you never expected to use.
- Sea duty
- The floats and cruises, the Med and the Pacific, weeks of gray water broken by a port call you still talk about.
- The Gulf
- Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the sand that got into every seam, and the hundred hours that ended it.
- Later tours
- Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, or a humanitarian mission — the deployments that came with body armor, satellite phones, and a different kind of waiting.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every place your country sent you, and what came back with you
The orders scattered you across the world and then filed the paperwork away. Start with one tour — the place, the year, the name of the man beside you.