Sunday, December 07, 2003

10:00 – Baghdad. As a strange follow up to the billeting rant, I’ll offer the following:

We had just finished dinner. We, being four of my five office mates, Skip having stayed behind. Miles, Jeff, John, Brian and myself found an open table at which to enjoy (or at least pretend to enjoy) the evening fare. I had the breaded turkey cutlet, potatoes in the style of Leon, some not overly overcooked green peas, a few fresh vegetables and what they call cherry cobbler. The cobblers are surprisingly popular, despite the fact that they are no more than pie filling covered with bran flakes and baked. Of course, a bowl of pie filling has its place, too.

There then developed some hubbub as I approached the Gurka who now guards the entrance to the new PMO offices. Some small investigation soon led to the discovery of, essentially, an all points bulletin – that the palace guards were to recognize and detain (for Force Protection, no less), none other than the infamous Laura from billeting.

At first, I figured that Chuck (who was conveniently standing at the door) had somehow found her image and cut and pasted the wanted poster, but then a call came through the Gurka’s radio to verify the mission’s validity. So I’ve still no reason why this action is being taken (except perhaps for dereliction of duty) but Haliburton has a ticket for her on tomorrow’s flight out of Iraq.

That’s one way to leave.

The most common, but not always most popular, method of exit is to await the end of your rotation. During the past few weeks, a large number of those who were early into Baghdad are starting to rotate back to CONUS. This generates a heap of confusion because it was never done before. At least, not done on any scale. Methods need to be developed to accommodate the return of TA-50s, country clearances through Kuwait and airline tickets for the return flight, medical debriefing, return of supplemental equipment and reassignment of billets. Presumably, all this will be figured out (i.e. streamlined) by the time I depart. One of the last things I want to do is spend a few days at the Pentagon or at Fort Bliss waiting for a TB scratch test to germinate (or whatever they do).

On this note John, one of our Planners, is scheduled to de-Iraqify himself on Wednesday. He was instrumental in the early planning [again, duh] stages of the project, and has worked himself out of a job. With his departure comes an increasing barrage of short jokes – legs don’t reach the floor, can’t see over his desk – reminders to all of his decreasing time in country. John’s been a stabilizing influence during his time here, a trait that we’ll need more of over the next few months.

He’ll be replaced with a new Company hire, some guy with “lots of prison experience”. Er, I’m not completely sure what this means, but I’ll be on the lookout for cell block tattoos.

Unrelated Tidbit: Garry Trudeau roasted us in the Sunday comics this week but, like most journalists, he shops for his facts at the outlet mall. In the last panel, he shows the bored PMO drone using a Macintosh. How wrong could he be? This is a 100% Microsoft Coalition.