WEEK 20

March 19-25, 2007

Let me tell you about our recent spate of weather. It has been simply gorgeous. As a matter of fact, I have officially received my first sunburn of this year (the back of my neck, yeah I know, but it still counts). We have had extremely sunny weather with the temperature in the 60s and 70s. It has been beautiful. I am clearly hoping that the pattern continues this exact trend through July and that all of the prognosticators are dead wrong about the temperature reaching 110-120 degrees this early summer. 75 is OK with me.

Because of our lovely weather, CD and I have had the shop doors open during the day. The natural light is much better to work by than the fluorescent light we have been accustomed to in our cave. With the doors open, a pair of finch-like birds has decided to build a nest inside our shop. Being the agrarian that he is, Dobbie coerced me into letting them build their nest in our shop. He has bonded with the birds in a way and has subsequently named them Jack and Jill. No, they are not perching on his finger and he is not communicating with them through whistles. They are simply constructing a nest out of mud and twigs up against the ceiling on the side wall.

The Special Forces team that occupies Camp Ouellette with us has finally left and a new one has replaced them. This new team is much more personal and friendly and on the whole, younger. The youngest, Joel, is 21 and is already a Staff Sergeant. He looks at me like I am an old guy. Actually, his father is only a couple of years older than me. Me, an old guy! Admittedly I have 172 grey hairs in my goatee, but I have yet to consider myself old. I can still out-run 90% of the people on this base and can probably out-run Joel. I enjoy guzzling a cold beer and still enjoy painting towns purple with my young wife. How could I be old? Just because I am older than the new First Sergeant and Sergeant Major doesn’t make me old. I’m still 25 years younger than my father!

Although I am sure Benito Juarez would have preferred me celebrating his birthday over an ice-cold Corona, I am sure he was OK with me celebrating with a South American rum. I had hoped to take his birthday off (as I suppose most people in Mexico did), but unlike those Mexican workers I had to meet the grind head-on and toil laboriously in an unyielding effort to complete a mission here. No, I have never met Benito Juarez personally; however, his day is enough inspiration for me to enjoy a drink with CD regardless of the reason. I even went so far as to have a second. Whew, what a raucous celebration we had here in B Hut 55!

You know those pop and soda cans that we have back there in the U.S. of A.? They are generally 12 ounces by volume although you can find a few in the 16, 24, and 40 ounce varieties. Well, here ounces mean nothing. Obviously everything is in the metric system and no can here would be unruly enough to end in an uneven number like 355 ml. The cans here are all the same diameter, but just have different heights. For example, I have only seen Mountain Dew in 300 ml cans (a little over 10 ounces) while the rest are around 330 mls. I have a couple of cans in my fridge that are 240 mls. The problem with this disparity is adjusting the amount of rum and or whiskey. Throw a couple ounces of whiskey into a glass, add ice, and pour in a 12 ounce Coke and you have yourself a party! Here I go through the same ritual and dump in my 330 ml (11.2 ounces) Coke and the party is different. I like whiskey, but when mixed with Coca-Cola, it has got to be right. I am forced to pay attention to the volume content of the can. One drink might be with a 330 ml can and the next could be a 300 or a 240. Imagine my dilemma. Yeah, you purists out there are wondering why I am ruining whiskey by adding Coke to it. It’s because I am conserving. There’s no Class Six store within driving distance.

Privacy here is non-existent. I knew it would be coming in, but I would love a little privacy every now and then. Showering, using the bathroom, and even hanging out in my room are not private. The showering thing is obvious and you probably understand what I am going through in the bathroom. My room is 72 square feet of efficiency and I can close the door and pretend I have privacy, but you can hear everything that occurs in the hallway and in the rooms on either side of me. Fortunately no one snores a lot so that helps and everyone keeps their TVs and music down or wears headphones, so I cannot complain much about that. The only privacy I can seem to acquire is out on a run. It’s just nice to get away from things for a little while and think about what ever I want until some local driver runs into me with a shuttle bus. Ah, the privacy.

The other night I went for a walk in the rain. I’m not sure why, but just felt compelled to do it. I went out without a hat or my rain parka and walked south towards the PX, grabbed a triple espresso, and walked back. For some reason that just seemed relaxing. It wasn’t hot and it wasn’t cold so getting soaked to the bone was OK. The gate guards looked at me a little strangely, but I was smiling and I guess that is the magic password or gesture to walk into compounds. Who needs IDs?

How much do you think it costs to clean a porta-potty? I have no idea either, but mucho grande denaro is my guess. Let me illuminate you on one of my recent observations. We have porta-potties on Camp Ouellette that get “cleaned” a couple of times a week. I know this because we keep the gate locked and these guys have to get us to let them in. Porta-potty cleaning truck number 11 is the one that visits us. Four guys are in this truck. Two of them are locals and are the ones spraying, cleaning, and pumping while two upper management dudes drive the truck and fill out paperwork. Four guys for one truck! And, the truck that visits us is eleven. Eleven out of how many? Does every truck have four guys? Since they are all KBR workers, I’m guessing the locals are making $1000 a month while the truck driver is probably pulling in $5000 a month and the truck supervisor is probably a $7000 a month kind of guy. That’s $14K a month in salary not to mention the $200,000 pump and spray truck that is being amortized over five years, the fuel, water, cleaning supplies and other miscellaneous items. Some quick calculus finds the $14K salaries, $3500 for the truck, and probably another $2K in all the other costs for a total of $19,500 a month. How many porta-potties get cleaned by this one team? 150 different potties a week? That sounds about right. So that means it costs roughly $330 a week to clean a one porta-potty. I could get my whole house cleaned for less than that a month back there.

You may recall a couple of months back when I referred to completing some of my 44 goals that I arrived here with. I’m pleased to announce through tremendous effort, zeal, concentration, and all-out determination, I have completed 7 of them. It’s been hard. I should have come with goals like, oh, I dunno, send my wife a card. But I didn’t. I showed up with goals like getting my weight down to 175 pounds, build lean muscle mass and get my body fat down to around 12%, improve my run times to consistent sub-seven minute miles and other things like that. 37 to go and they don’t get any easier. I’m hoping to click a couple more off in the coming weeks. I’ll keep all-you-all appraised.

I’m shutting this one down early because I am so late in getting it out. The picture I have included is along my normal run. Occasionally I take the camera with me and this particular morning, water froze on the concertina fence line that borders the mine fields the Russians emplaced during their stay here. The mine fields almost completely surround this base and our progress in removing them is a very slow and tedious process.

Check back next week when I ramble whimsically about an hour in the bunker, discuss my process in the Dari language class, and excite you about our little personnel changeover.

Baamaane Khudaa,

Craig

WEEK 19

March 12 – 18, 2007

We’re having that Tacoma weather thing going on right now. Rainy with highs in the 40s; you know the kind of late winter, early spring days. It is difficult to see the mountains surrounding us because of the cloud cover and the fact that most of the clouds seem to be hovering around the mountains. It would appear that the mountains are being deluged with snow while we are getting the wetter variety of moisture falling from the sky. While I really do not mind the rain, it is causing discontent in our vehicles.

Our most recent batch of vehicles all came with sunroofs. Only two have factory installed roofs which mean the remaining are Hajji installed. On the surface this may not seem such a bad thing except all the Hajji sunroofs leak. Not one or two of them, but all of them. And by leaking I mean a virtual faucet on full-tilt flow. I really do not know how they have captured the ability to direct all the external water and rain into a channel that runs under the sunroof lip and into the front driver’s and passenger’s seat, but they have. It must be a gift. We would be better off walking in the rain as opposed to riding in our vehicle. Why not use the vehicles with the factory installed, non-leaking sunroofs you ask? Great question! Those, by a random act of divine intervention, were the first vehicles we dismantled and the interiors are completed removed. We never considered an inability to stay dry inside and therefore wound up leaving ourselves the leaky vehicles to drive.

Our vehicle purchasers specify vehicles with sunroofs because of the ability to pop the electronic goodies out through the roof for better connection when needed. This is pretty essential when trying to send and receive information from desolate locations, so the locals are only too happy to add the sunroofs to the vehicles we want to buy (they really don’t know why we want sunroofs). They also do not understand that white plastic film that vehicle manufacturers put on body panels and such prior to shipping. The locals must think it is some kind of added protection and leave the plastic on the outside and inside of the vehicles. As an example, we have a 2005 white truck that has a sunroof. The white shipping plastic was left on the outside of the vehicle even when the sunroof was installed (this no doubt facilitates our leaking problem) and has been collecting moisture and dirt and other assorted debris between the plastic and the paint. I’m sure you guys can imagine what the exterior of our two-year-old truck looks like. I have been removing the plastic here and there, but the sun and elements have fused it to the paint and removing the flapping shards is not as easy as you might think.

It is wonderful to have an internet connection in my room; however, it really sucks between 1800 and 2300 local. Everybody and their brother are online during those times and it simply bogs down the ability to send and receive email and make calls via VOIP. I feel like I have transported back in time when I purchased my first dial-up internet connection late in 1997. On a good day, we would be screaming at 11kbs and be thinking: “How could it get any better than this?!” How cable has changed me. I cannot even open email most evenings because the connection is so slow that my browser refuses to open. It knows it can’t show me anything for a while so it doesn’t even try.

My super 220V, 1.6 cubic foot, $40 fridge is too small! I easily have three cases of beverages in my room and can only seem to cram 14 bottles or cans of beverages in the fridge at one time. It’s a little frustrating. I’m feeling like a stock boy in a supermarket because I am constantly restocking my fridge (and by constantly, I do mean daily). I’ve also been playing with the temperature control. When it was 20 degrees outside (and when I didn’t have ice trays), I had the temperature setting at low. Once the ice trays were added, I turned up the dial to freeze the water. Unfortunately, this also froze the upper row of beverages as well. Back down went the temperature dial and now my ice doesn’t freeze. Couple that with increasing outside air temperatures and I have had to slowly (notch by notch) turn up the intensity in chilliness. It’s a balancing act that I have yet to perfect. I’m currently considering getting another super fridge to put next to this one. I am rationalizing that I could use one for beverages and one as a freezer. We’ll see what happens.

One of my teaser items from last week was random acts of kindness. When Brian N was here, he called it: “Paying it forward”, and in other words what he meant was doing a good deed for someone now would reap you a kind deed in the future. I like the idea and it kind of falls in line with my upbringing, so I have been making a concerted effort at random acts of kindness. This notion is fundamentally flawed in a place like this. These damn foreigners do not seem to understand the program. They violate your personal space, rarely hold doors open, run in front of your vehicle at the last second to cross the road, and other things like walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk. I know this is Afghanistan, but Uncle Sugar owns this slice of heaven we call Bagram and we have instituted American policy here. These other nations (with the exception of the Brits and Aussies) are freeloaders using up our taxpayer dollars just so they can say they contributed to the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT). I’m getting off-track here, so I’ll return. The locals are generally easy to deal with and are normally very gracious, but even they rarely perform a kind deed for us interlopers. Nope, the random acts of kindness thing only seem to work among other Americans. We seem to get it. A quick smile, assisting with heavy or cumbersome items, offering the entrance through a door first, and myriad other kinds of things. It’s as simple as Dobbie throwing my laundry in the dryer because he happened on the scene before me. He doesn’t expect anything in return. I thank him, but also know that I will have a future opportunity to assist him in some way. It just works.

The more time I spend around the Egyptians, Koreans, French, Polish, et al, the more I become jaded. Why are they here? Where’s the French PX. When’s the last time the Frenchies put a Mirage in the air? How are the Egyptians helping us with intelligence collection? Where’s their version of Q-37 Radar? When do these other nations man the gates and perform security? The only ones I see doing that are us and the Afghanis. At least the Koreans have a partnership with us regarding their DFAC, but after dining there once, I have had enough Kim-chi, Bok Choi, and dog to last me the next 20 years. Anyway, it wouldn’t be as frustrating to see all these other nations if you got a feeling that they were actually contributing.

We have geckos here. The truth that I have discovered is that they are not green, do not speak, and do not pitch GEICO Insurance. Our variety of gecko is tan in color and about four inches long. They do not scare off easily as it seems they believe they blend so well that you cannot see them. They also can run across walls and ceilings and prefer a little sunlight every now and then. We have one that lives beneath our cabinet in our shop. This gecko is currently missing most of its tail and comes out in sunny spots every other day or so. You can walk right up to it and stomp your feet, snap your fingers, take pictures, and call in an air strike. It twitches, moves a few inches, and then resumes a motionless pose. We have yet to name it and are considering something local that means strong-willed, ambivalent and or unafraid. My pick for a name with these connotations is Hillary.

I finally got a hair cut. Yeah, it was like two weeks overdue. I felt shaggy, unkempt, and well, kind of like a KBR contractor. As you read in last week’s novella, I was having difficulty in getting my follicles trimmed. I ultimately decided to be standing at the door of one of the barber locations the second they opened for business. It turned out to be the quickest three minutes of my life. Although, I was asked a question this time that I have never been asked before and that was: “Would you like your beard trimmed?” Uhh, no, thanks. I must have looked shaggier than Osama to this guy. I’m not sure how I feel about someone trimming my goatee, but since I can do that myself, I will.

I made a 20 inch by 30 inch foam board for my room and bought some stick pins to place pictures on. Pictures like Kris, the kids, some of you folks, and few of interesting things here. I have asked Kris for oodles of pictures since I left and finally received a few, but none of her. Yes, I know what she looks like, but it would be nice to have a decent picture of my bride here on my wall. She says she always takes the pictures; hence she is not in them. Our son is a star photographer and has offered to take pictures of his mother as much as possible. I can only assume the reason I don’t have any is because Cole has not taken pictures of Kris that she wants to send me. I’m sure he snaps photos every now and then of Kris when she is still in bed, making dinner, folding laundry, and things like that. Those are fine with me, but I need to convince the editor to send them. The bottom line is that I have four pictures on my board.

The extremist who decided to blow himself up when V.P. Cheney was here has really curtailed our ability to import barley pop. That coupled with the change-over in personnel that is currently underway means we missed having some hop soda on St. Patrick’s Day. Surely I broke out a little whiskey and celebrated, but I would have absolutely liked a couple of German beers to celebrate an Irish day of good will. You all understand of course.

I did get quite the surprise on St. Patrick’s Day! Kris sent me a box of foodstuffs that included prepared corned beef. She timed it to arrive on Saint Paddy’s Day! She finally used the food sealer for food instead of sealing face lotion, dryer sheets, or oatmeal. I was planning to go down to the DFAC for dinner and see what they had, but opened my box from Kris before doing so and was elated. I raced down to the shop, threw the beef into the microwave along with some noodles that she sent, and in a couple of minutes later was overcome by a wondrous aroma! I ate the whole package by myself. Fortunately she sent other packages, but made the quantity in each package more than enough for one, but less than two. This whole food experience made me forget about the beer. Now if I could only get Kris to send food like that weekly…

The picture I attached this week is of Craig D and me hamming it up a little in the shop. We were finishing up one of the vehicles and placed a camera on a table to capture this indelible image. Obviously you can tell the type of vehicles we work on here.

Check back next week as I divulge my study into beverage can sizes here, enlighten you with frank talk about privacy, and mystify you with the cost of cleaning a Port-a-John.



Craig