Canook Chinook

Suspended over Afghanland on six fragile rotor blades, I thought the rotors seems miscoordinated, then felt a new shimmy, and noticed hydraulic fluid flowing through the padded ceiling at the back of the aircraft, despoiling the uniformed men and material who were crammed into the cramped cabin beneath.

Remember the training, I thought to myself. It was brief, as the bird was damned loud. Besides, the flight crew would take care of any bad guys (there was nothing an unarmed civilian could do anyway, besides spew curses). “Keep your feet flat on the floor in front of you,” they said, “and not bent under the seat. In case we come in for a hard landing, you don’t want to break your legs.”


On paper, it all sounds easy enough – get off a plane in Kandahar, get inundated with information by stakeholders who need additional facilities, develop a comprehensive solution, and write a big report. This has been our experience on past missions, so how hard could it possibly be?

Where do I start?

Probably shortly after the moment we touched down, when we discovered that our ride was no where to be found and we ended up billeted in the RSOI tent. From that point, it’s been continuous to some degree up to and including this morning.

You see, our work here will plan facilities for not only the Kandahar Air Field, but also for five of what are called Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs. These FOBs are scattered across Afghanland. You can reach them by ground transportation, but they say it’s better to fly, mostly because it’s safer to fly and, in theory at least, it takes less time. Maybe hypothesis is a better term, as I’m not sure if the “Faster Transportation through Air Travel Theory” has ever been proven.

Setting foot on these other bases is on the important side of our mission here. With boots on the ground, we can discover much more about any site than we can in a briefing, or in someone else’s report on a place. To our detriment, we have had neither briefing or report on these FOBs, so the *only* way we were going to collect data was to go there and collect it ourselves. If we were successful, we would learn site and base specific information such as the placement and capacity of local utilities, the amount of stuff that has to be moved or demolished to use the site, and how our proposed usage coexists with the neighbors.

We’d take some pictures, of course, to show to the folks at KAF and slap into the report. [Reports love pictures. In fact, I’m pretty sure we can boost our grade from a B+ to an A- just by inserting a few good pictures. Then, after we load the charts and graphs,… Extra Credit, Baby!]

So, armed with an Electrical and a Wet Civil, I waited patiently outside of the hooch in the early morning light for our ride to the Whiskey Ramp, where we’d find our helicopter. Our Colonel did the driving, and only had to turn around twice, exuding confidence in his passengers. Our Captain, who arranged for this flight and would be joining us, only had the slightest clue as to where we were headed. There was plenty of exuding by the time we got dropped of at the wrong tent. It’s a good thing I insisted that we leave early.

What we thought was the “correct” tent, was actually another wrong tent and, after spending a half hour or so doing nothing, we boarded a Coaster Bus and headed to Whiskey Ramp, me wondering the entire time where we might have actually been all the while we thought we were at Whiskey Ramp. Likely at some other named alphabetical location, like Charlie or Foxtrot, or Has the Captain a Clue? I mean, he coordinated this bird ride. Shouldn’t he know where we’re supposed to be?

The bus soon dropped us off at another ramp, where there were a half dozen Chinooks and a few hundred PAX (as we passengers are called) standing by. There we stood, and stood, all the time the day heating up. All the time wearing our Kevlar hats and ballistic vests, waiting for our orders to gear up and load the helo. Finally, this order came, and we trooped single file onto the expeditionary level apron and up the ramp, past the machine gun, and into the back of our transport. There, we sat along the fuselage, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps forty of us, with our gear piled up to eye level on the floor between the two rows.

Spirits were high as we began the taxi. We were already late in our scheduled departure and still needed to make two somewhat hot stops on our way to our destination. Once my team got there, we’d have about two hours to kick rocks and root around before we had to be checked in for the return flight. There was plenty of air rushing through the cabin between the open gunnery doors to the front and the back door, which remained open during the taxi. We smiled and took a few pictures.

You could hear the motor and rotors whine as they picked up speed and started to lift us up above the airfield. Then the attitude change, then the shimmy, then the fluids, and we dropped about a meter back onto the tarmac with our broken helicopter, limping down the apron to a slow stop. Thus endeth the mission.

We could have taken the spare Chinook, but felt that, due to all of the delays on the departure side, we’d have no time to actually leave the helipad at our destination. We’d collect no data, so why bother? We bummed a ride back to camp from a couple Canadians, then headed to the Dutch Café for lunch and some work.

Tomorrow, we’ll try again.

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Damned Dutch

If asked to judge my favorite shitholes, Kandahar would rank right up there. And it not just the southern breezes from over the sewage lagoon that lead me to that conclusion. No, it’s much more. It’s crappy and sterile all at once. Disciplined yet filled with indiscipline. Great fun one moment and abject boredom the next. Schizophrenic in the mornings and bipolar in the afternoons.

And to make things more interesting, NuSurge ™ will plant another ten to fifteen thousand persons here within the next year, doubling the local population and putting such a strain on the airfield infrastructure that it could collapse at any moment except that the momentum of the mission here just won’t allow it.


The job, then, the challenge, is to keep one step ahead of the imminent failure of this site such that the sites mission, to support the GWOT, is not compromised. It’s all very fast, as the troops are coming, very soon, and they’d better have roads, fuel, housing, dining facilities, waste management, and airfield improvements in place when they get here - and can it be completed yesterday? All told, our mission will provide preliminary designs for worth well over $500 Million at Kandahar Air Field (the KAF) and a few Forward Operating Bases (the FOBs) in the southern region of Afghanland.

This half billion, though, is not alone in its spendiness. The housing projects don’t include the actual housing units, as those are already being manufactured in Italy somewhere. The vehicle maintenance facility doesn’t include any of the tools or equipment. The hospital is a mostly bare shell. Equipping these various structures and sites can easily cost another $200 Million.

And then there’re the NATO and Coalition improvements to the base, as they try to treat the huge volumes of liquid waste that we generate here every day, or successfully route both 50 and 60 Hertz power to the old sections of the base, or to pave a few kilometers of dusty roads (the American Dream).

The result is constant change. Stuff is always being built here. Things are always being moved around to make room for other things. Facilities are enlarged. New facilities are torn out to make room for even newer facilities. It’s necessary, because more people are shipped in by a couple of planeloads each day and it’s not going to stop until we’ve successfully invaded Iran.

Or captured Bin Ladin.

Or something like that.

The rate of change is really impressive, though. Even outside of our Red Horse office, their construction yard morphs every day. In the two or three weeks since we hit the ground, they have encircled their 20 acre site with concertina wire (later adding sniper screening), erected a dozen office tents, drilled a well, completed this building, started another, and filled and refilled the lot with materiel. Every time I take a look outside, I see something different.

On the walk home it’s the same change everywhere, from housing to buildings, to new shops on the Boardwalk and a new NATO gymnasium, to 1,000 more CONEX boxes or another 5,000 feet of T-wall.

Keeping track of the changes isn’t as problematic as describing landmarks affected by it, as the references are in a constant state of flux. “Do you know where the American PX used to be? Well, it’s right behind that.”

The planning types here are in a constant state of war with the war making types, whose blind focus on expediency is the probable cause of a number of these problems. With the base growing so fast, command has never justified the time required to plan, and facilities just spring from the earth wherever makes sense at the moment. Planners get steamed, and then they stop caring, and master plans never get developed nor updated

It’s one of our frustrations, and another we can blame on the Dutch. I’m not particularly sure why they get the blame, but they do, so what the heck.

I’m sure the dust is their fault, too.

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Fly Killas

In our last episode, our hero was stymied by the client’s decision to sent one of our group CONUS. Despite the reasons that he may have done this, or the reasons the Company may have allowed it, it turns out that this member was our in-country Project Manager.

Hence, we’re leaderless. The proverbial ship without a tiller, rack without the pinion, state without the head, evening news without the anchor, shoes without the laces, snickered without the doodle, and somewhat annoyed and analogyless.


Some might ask, “what the fuck?” but I’m trying not to curse so much.

In the interest of avoiding my own conniption fit, I’ll skip the fetid meat of the matter and skip towards the bottom line. That being we needed a leader and nobody volunteered.

We have a few qualified candidates here – project managers, folks who know the type of report we’re writing, those with military construction and service experience – but each had enough experience with our client, and just in the first few days, to not want to be his primary POC, and ultimately be responsible for this flaming turd.

As for me, I was really hoping to play second oud on this job, but expediency finally convinced me to step to the fore and accept the role of “Project Leading”. Some day, the Company may assign the “Lead” role to me, but until then, I’m just leading.

I guess it’s something to do and, short of work, there’s little of interest at the KAF. Of course, I get haircuts whenever I can, mostly to enbjoy the smallest measure of human contact, even if that contact is by a gold toothed Slav who prattles on and on and on with her workmates, but those are just once a week. I read some, and walk about, and visit the British Gym most nights, where the guy on the bike next to me last night, if dressed in vinyl clothes would have looked just like “the only gay in the village.” I was amused, but that’s how I roll.

At work, we're in this stick constructed plywood box out in what they call "South Park", an exurb to the KAF. When we first got here, the unit who owns the place (Air Force's Red Horse) was still working on it, so open doors and windows brought in a ton of flies. As such, we keep busy with the two swatters in close reach on the conference room table to whack the buggers, sometimes killing three score or more in a day. With our eradication process advancing, construction complete and the air conditioner finally working, we're only killing a dozen or so each day these days, but were still at it.

Fly killing is our calling. Fly killers is who we are. Fly Killas is how we roll.

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Dustbunnies

If you’ve been following along, I usually go off on a rant about the project at about this time of the tour. If you’ve been following along, edge of the chair waiting for an explanation as to why I volunteered for another war zone in the GWOT, today is not your day. My apologies, as this one’s about the folks who travelled here with me.



We spend our days in a 16 foot by 20 foot conference room, surrounding a table built in place by the boys and girls of Red Horse. It’s a little larger and less densely packed than our first office in the I-Zed, but that’s not saying too much. Still, we each get three or four feet of table, which is just about enough to fit a machine, a mouse, and a notepad. Our main source of entertainment, besides the banter, is fly killing.

However, the longer we’re here, the fewer flies that make it into the office, and the less there are to kill. This is good in a couple of ways. One the one hand, we are less startled by the sudden crack of the swatter (two for a buck at the PX). One the other hand, there’s less dust stirred up by the swatting. On the third hand, there’s less fly goo collecting on our pads and papers.

In our VIP hooch, there’s three to a room, snorers and not. We’ve got a desk, but no chair, so very little work gets done there, mostly conversation about Tim’s sordid past (before we flew here), Glenn’s family (the bitch just had puppies), and various ideas as to what constitutes a good time. With the non-snorers, I’m uncertain. They’re the quiet ones.

Everyone drifts in and out of breakfast at their own pace, although there’s usually a few minutes when we’re all together. For lunch, we almost always take the 15 minute hike to the canvas Harvest Falcon DFAC together (barbeque brisket today, and not half bad), and moan about the job for a half hour. Supper is oftentimes smaller groups, as people use their evenings as they please. We all ate at the British DFAC Sunday evening, when rumors of fine deserts were confirmed (I also had a tasty vegetable curry).

Throughout the day, they are quick to joke, quick to sling personal insults, quick to besmirch one’s sexuality. It’s all good fun. Good guy fun, like belchin’ and belly scratchin’. So far, we don’t hate each other, but the assignment’s still young, and we spend an awful lot of time with each other.

By and large, though, they’re entertaining. Out of six, I knew five of them coming into this, and had travelled internationally with three, although never to a war zone. Two are from my office, three from the home office, and one contract hire from Idaho. Four are married. All are somewhat adventurous. Two are architects, one’s an electrical, one’s a wet civil, one’s a draughtsman, one’s a cost estimator, and one got sent home last week because the client’s sort of a dick.

As they say, there’re three types of people in the world,…

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Spent

At oh dark thirty, it’s tough to imagine being more exhausted. I’m at that time between a long, ineffective wakeup and the time when the coffee hits, and I am sorely tempted to head back to the rack and sleep the rest of the day. Hell, I’m already up. I’ll slog through another, and hope I can find an opportunity to recharge later on.


Not much email traffic on a Monday morning – only dealing with messages sent from the States on Sunday – so it’s not a total tragedy that the web is a dog this morning. It visibly disappoints some of the others nearby, who arrive alone or in twos, open their machines, stare at them for twenty minutes or so, and then pack up and shuffle off.

I’m often asked about the connection, since I seem to be on line, but few folks want to pay the five Euros an hour that I do to get connected. Most just take their licks and vow to return later.

I set up my early morning shop just outside of the Tim Horton’s, where my keyboard is illuminated by a streetlight from over my left shoulder and from the walk up window over the right. I could sit here in quiet frustration except for the connectivity questions, and the half dozen folks who ask “when does Tim Horton’s open?” By the time they do open the doors at 0600, there’s usually a dozen or two people in line. By 0800, the number of waiters is often tripled, as soldiers very politely queue, and chat, and hang out, and wait their turn.

I haven’t really figured out the why, as their coffee’s not that spectacular. Of course, at 0400, I’ll drink about anything, so I have been buying at the Green Bean, which is open all of the time. Green Bean coffee’s not spectacular, either, but it’s coffee when I need it. At Horton’s, or “Tim’s”, to those personally familiar with him, they have donuts. Not spectacular donuts, but donuts nonetheless, so I can understand why the Canooks are waiting in line. But the Bulgarians? Regardless, it’s the most popular place on the Boardwalk, and their cups and boxes fill the trash cans to overflowing on most mornings.

At 0600, I drop off my machine and head to chow at the Dutch DFAC, one of five (or maybe six), that reside at the KAF. Most of my crew will show up there eventually, and we can get started on the day – or restart for those of us up at 0400 – over a cup of some very nasty coffee that a machine spits out into non-insulated paper cups. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the machine coffee you find in truck stops (or outside of Iowa State University lecture halls) with the poker hands on them, but that coffee was much better. Whatever, I drink it anyway, as it will be the last cup I see until tomorrow.

Usually, the intensity of the work can keep me awake without further stimulants, but I’m starting to doubt my ability to pull this one off. If I can only make it through to 1800, there can be a nap. But there’s also the need to further coordinate the team at the end of the day. And I need to buy more time for the Dutch Net. And I have to stop at the PX for a new toothbrush, and get some chow, and probably spend some time at the gym.

And then complain about my lack of sleep tomorrow.

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Disconnected

If we had one thing to complain about here, it would be connectivity. My preference would be to have the low thread count in my sheets as my only complaint, but such is not the case. There’re the food and housing and ineffective client to bitch about, but at the top of the complaint heap is the very obvious lack of a fast web connection.


We don’t surf, Skype, IM, shop, download or do any other large bandwidth activities. Mostly, we just want to get our mail, which is how we keep tabs on the home front and the office. Our incountry group is really just a part of the project team. Each of us has a discipline counterpart or two inCONUS who should be acting as a resource for the problems that we can’t solve here, be it through lack of time or resources. With lack of bandwidth being the critical resource, though, it’s really tough to get anything from our reachback component, and we end up being further isolated.

That’s why we hit the rack before 2100 each night, because at 0400 every morning, we’re back up and heading to the Boardwalk to get the best performance out of the FreedomTel WiFi. On past assignments to this end of the planet, we’ve had access to the Government telecom. It’s fast. Really fast. The polar opposite from FreedomTel, which is like dialup on Prozac, more like telegraph than telephony. This trip, it’s up to the Contractor, us, to connect ourselves, and our options are limited.

There’s what we call the DutchNet, which is a for-pay service managed by the Dutch PX folks. It’s markedly faster then FreedomTel, but costs about five Euros an hour (keeps the riffraff off line) so it’s our backup service. Even with the DutchNet, atmospheric interference can destroy any hope of downloading our mail in less than an hour, and we oftentimes give up, tired of staring at an unmoving status bar.

At this moment, my machine is picking up ten wireless networks of varying strengths. However, most of them are secure and not accessible to us. We keep our eyes and ears open for options and hope something will show up.

I suppose there’s always the MWR tent down near the RSOI. It’s likely open at this time of day, so we could avoid the crowds that spill out of the door every evening of those wanting to use one of a dozen machines that they’ve got hooked up. However, time on line is limited to 30 minutes and the use of your own equipment is forbidden, so we’d never be able to effectively secure data. Just as well. The big users at the MWR tent are Soldiers and Marines, who need some way to get a message home.

We’re fortunate, I guess. We have connections, even if they’re slow. We have expense reports that we can use to charge five Euros at a time when we need something fast(er). We (I) even have a cell phone (although its number is a closely guarded secret).

On the other side, 10,000 plus fighting men and women have a dozen and a half free phones and a small bank of computers to use to update their families. They get paid shit and have to spend a year or more over here.

Which leads to the job, which is to make their conditions more tolerable. We won’t be adding bandwidth, but some of our subprojects will help to move them out of tent cities, and into a DFAC that isn’t made of canvas, and give them a few more bathrooms that actually flush.

Life as a Contractor is pretty good, by comparison.

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Cold and dark. Rain and mud and dust.

The days are on the warm side, quickly rising towards the 90^s these days at peak. The sun beats hard on the unprotected noggin, and scorches the neck and arms. The mornings, though, are still nicely cool, and a couple of sweatshirts are needed to keep in the body heat while I sit in an open space towards the middle of camp and type and try to surf.


I’d complain more about the dust, but that won’t take care of the dust. Heck, I’ll complain anyway, ‘cuz that’s what we do here. We also curse like drunken sailors here (making up for the lack of Navy personnel this far inland), ‘cuz that’s just guys being guys away from the moderating influences of home. The dust is everywhere and all of the time, unless it’s raining like a son of a bitch (that one slipped).

I had some errands after work yesterday – first a walk to the barber shop via one of the project locations. I wanted to see what level of demolition might be required once we get the site to accommodate our proposed improvements. This put me down around the poo pond (I could have said shit pond , but contained myself) (d’oh!) where you can probably imagine the smell if not the scene.

Just off wind is the barber shop, where I cranked the tunes while waiting an hour for one of three chairs and one of three Slavic barberwomen, who chatted and laughed in their own tongue while I reminisced about other, more comfortable barber chairs in other, more comfortable surroundings.

Now armed (or headed) with an appropriately short mop (one on the sides, three on top, don’t you dare touch the beard), I started the walk back north, trying new short cuts that would direct me to the PX. I had a list, and found a third of it. Then added another third, made up of the stuff that looked good at the time. This is a typical PX experience. I would have liked a broom, but settled for a six pack of Lowenbrau N.A.

And “settled” is the term, as Lowenbrau has never gotten good, with or without alcohol.

While standing in line at the registers, chatting with an Army Sergeant, we noticed an increased tap, tap, tapping on the metal roof of the store. Since it’s a rather large space, we couldn’t tell if it was just a couple of big raindrops, or actually a shower. As it happened, it was neither. Instead, my first step outside greeted me with 30-40 mile per hour winds that nearly ripped the door from my hand. The rain was sideways at this time and treated my shopping bags as little sails.

I pressed on, as it was only a kilometer or so back to the hooch. Around five steps into it, I was pleasantly soaked to the skin and unpleasantly bootsodden with rather sticky mud. More specifically, it’s loess. Less specifically, it’s oozy, sloppy, but not too slick. However, it was everywhere, as Kandahar Air Field does not drain, ever. When it rains, water puddles everywhere. When it rains big, like on the night described, the puddles are really big. Wading through them seemed the most expedient solution, so pressing on was pressing on. And I let the winds in my Lada bag sails guide me home, where I strung some of the 550 cord I just picked up and draped my sopping clothes to dry, sitting on the rack and sipping on a lukewarm Lowenbrau N.A.

Hoist a real one for me, would you?

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Routine

The assignment itself isn’t particularly routine, but that doesn’t mean that routines can’t develop while on assignment. Sure, it’s only been a couple of days in country, but I’m starting to see a trend. My day starts somewhat groggily at 0400 every morning to process mail on the Boardwalk. There’s some free WiFi here, but it slows markedly once more than a half dozen guys get on it, so arrival very early assures a tolerable speed for an hour or so. If I’m lucky, none of the users will be processing big files or video Skyping. At that point, I just quit trying and start working on these screeds in Word. There’s good coffee on the Boardwalk, and horrific coffee in the DFAC. I really didn’t want to start buying my bean water, but it may become part of my routine. That, or give it up – fat chance.



The DFAC’s don’t start serving until 0600, but our driver won’t pick us up until 0830, so that block of time still needs some fleshing out. Breakfast sometime, perhaps with some of the crew, then maybe read a while until the Hemmingway collection runs out (it won’t last five weeks, I’m sure). Get ready for work.

Our assigned office space is a conference room a few kilometers south of where we sleep, on the edge of camp, but facing the expansion areas. It’s a stick constructed single story box, with plywood sheeting in and out, one by fours covering the joints and serving as the primary trim shape. I doubt it took Red Horse (they’re like SeaBees for the Air Force) more than a couple of days to build it. It’s their space, though, and we’re Army Contractors, so we use it at their pleasure, and pack up and out as required.

Our driver is actually a USACE project manager with other stuff to do besides carpooling us around Afghanistan, so I think he’s about to cease taking us to lunch. As such, we’ll need to walk about a mile to the nearest DFAC, a series of wood floored, arched tents that serve the same fare as the other more permanent looking DFACs around the camp, only colder.

Work, meeting, discussion, presentation. Repeat until departure. How much more routine can you get?

Get kicked out of the conference room before 1700. Team meeting at 1800. Chow. Work. Sleep.

As of today, we seem to be working 10’s and 12’s, leaving five or six hours a day for whatever. Chow is a part of it, but at crowded times, it’s considered good form to give up your bench when you’re done eating. We’ve hit most of the PX’s already, so there’s no point in going back. We rotate between the various DFAC’s for fun, but that won’t last. There’s only so many miles you can walk in a day. I’d expect some boredom to strike soon, but am hoping that the work picks up instead. We’ll see.

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Connections

Trying something different today. Despite the lagging lack of sleep, I got up about a quarter to three, packed up my machine, snagged my watch cap and headed to the Boardwalk in an effort to find an internet connection. Two of our crew joined me and, to noone’s surprise, we found two more already there, camped out at a couple of the undeniably dusty tables set up near the Tim Horton’s. Sadly, Horton’s doesn’t open until 0600, so I’ll have to wait a while before I get my donut. The Green Bean is open at this hour, as is the Pizza Hut, so coffee (or a pie, I suppose) is available. I’ll go with the coffee, I suppose, then hit the DFAC at 0600.

It’s a bit cold, though. Perhaps 50^. Oh. And dusty (anticipate the theme).



This Boardwalk is an interesting construct. It feels like it’s been here forever, yet you can see the current expansion. Situated conveniently along the main drag, the City Planners (used *very* loosely) have carved out a rather large block of space, I suppose about four hundred feet on a side, and built a wood boardwalk (duh) about twenty feet wide. Along the perimeter are the aforementioned coffee/donut/pizza places, as well as a number of small gift and clothing shops, mostly housed within old CONEX boxes. The open space is the real appeal, I think. Plus it’s a non-work environment.

In the middle is mostly rock. Maybe it’s a parade ground. Maybe a good place for Presidential photo ops. Perhaps they’ll bring in some Afghanis to play that National Game of theirs with the horses and goat carcasses. One National Game they do play here is hockey, as the Canooks built a small hockey rink. They play in sneakers with a tennis ball sized balls, sticks, gloves, pads and nets. Damned entertaining, but we’re short on entertainment here.

What we have is dust, and a lot of dirt. It will probably kill this machine before I get back.

We’ve got a PX, too. Actually, there may be three or four of them, but I haven’t ventured too far in the 40 hours since I got here. There’s six DFAC’s I hear, three of which we’ve visited, all of which serve passable fare, as expected. Hopefully, they will have less runny eggs this morning.

As for the plan to get connected,… I guess if you’re reading this, I got connected sometime. For two hours last night I let the machine churn, but never got anywhere. This early morning, I’ve had better success, but have yet to see the New Post page on Blogspot. I haven’t given up yet, but may retreat to a warmer location for a while.

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Laggard

It must be the ninth of April. Hard to be sure, though, with the jet lag following a couple of days of travel. Add to the confusion is the fact that Afghanistan has a time zone a half hour offset from the bulk of the world. Makes one think, though – since every place has a local noon, we could really have an infinite number of time zones, which might make watching your favorite shows on Fox more confusing, but at least lunch would always be in the middle of the day.



Such are the thoughts of one devoid of sleep. The flight over the pond was lightly attended, so I did get to spread out over three adjacent seats on the triple seven, but Boeing has placed a metal lump on the bottom of their armrests that lands in the small of your back when curled up, so the sleep you do get is only worth about forty percent of the time spent asleep. Look into that, John.

Once ‘cross the pond, we spent the evening at some al fresco Irish Place a little inland in Dubai, then retired to our totally fabulous suites at the Crowne Plaza. I swear, it was almost as big as our first house, and I didn’t have to rewire it, either.

Then, a ratty old jetliner for the 90 minute hop to beautiful Kandahar Air Field, KAF, which is very likely very close to beautiful Kandahar itself, but I never saw it from the middle of the plane and while concentrating on my proverbial cookies. From around 20,000 feet, it felt like the pilot was standing on the brakes while simultaneously dropping from the sky. Damn cool.

Our ride didn’t show, though, so another of us and I used what resources we could scrounge to try to track him down. Ultimately, we failed. Fortunately, yet another of our storied crew had better success, and we found ourselves in the client offices and ready to start the process, or not, because we still needed housing, and a map to the DFAC, and additional badging. That would come, but it would take the rest of the day.

By 2000, we had settled into our 200 man tent south of everything and downwind of what the base civil engineers call the “poop pond”. Now, I may have trained as a Civil Engineer, but I didn’t take a lot of Sanitary classes in school. What I think “poop pond” actually means, is a pond full of poop. At least, that’s what it smells like when the wind is blowing towards your tent. Today, though, we got new accommodations, four man rooms with a bathroom down the hall. Luxury, for the KAF, and we’re damned lucky to have it.

Now, if only our connectivity were better.

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I've Got a Secret

Maybe. I really don't know. What I do know is that they (meaning your government) whould rather I not post to this format during my brief tour of Afghanland.

I may still, but I'll likely not include the level of project details that I would not have bored you with, anyway. Got it?

As of this moment, I'm not even sure as to the level of communication we'll find in country. There's sure to be the Government's secure internet connections, but I'd rather not have anything to do with that. In Baghdad last time, we used their insecure internet connections, which were available in every hooch. This time, though, we expect the hooches to be more primative (i.e. tents) and our reports to be scratched out on recycled copies of Stars and Stripes.

For now, I dunno. Tomorrow, I'll start to figure it out.
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Deployment

It's getting harder and harder to go to war and they don't let just anyone play these days. No, there are fitness requirements and preventive medicine requirements and training requirements and form filling requirements. Holy crap, the forms!

We left Mudville during the wee hours, with only a HyVee #3 and a bad cup of coffee to tide me through to St. Louis. And tide it didn't , so we stopped in Hannibal for a couple of those hotdogs off of the roller thingies at the gas station. Mmmm, now *that* tided me over to St. Louis. The plan was to get a light, nutritious lunch before reporting to the UDC (or Unit Deployment Center (the acronyms begin)) for the formwork. This part of the plan worked fine, and could easily have played right into the third part of the plan, which was to eat our fill of the very unclean and godforbidden barbequed pork prior to heading to a place where they actually believe that pork is unclean and godforbidden, but we know better. Pig is merely the other white meat, just like a McNugget, but oh so unclean. Mmmm.

Sadly, part three of the plan went to shit, as the highly recommended pork shop near the hotel was closed on Sunday, as were ninety percent of the forty restaurants near the hotel. We eventually found a very nice Northern Italian place, but the thinly sliced proscuitto was no match for my salivatory images of pulled porcine products. Perhaps we can find something in the District of Columbia tomorrow during the layover. Being south of the Mason Dixon Line is a good sign, but I believe Washington is know for the other kind of unclean pork.

Ah well. Life is full of disappointments. Deal with it.

Not particularly disappointing, but sort of annoying anyway, were the forms and training that occurred between parts one and three of the plan. [Let's call it part two, just for kicks.] Blood pressure and temperature checks for the crew, to make sure we haven't died since leaving our doctor's offices last week. Then the fingerprinting and hostage training - part and parcel of the same event. In the fall of 2003, a DNA test was all they required, acquired through one little drop of blood. This time, a form for the prints, a form for complex personal security questions, and ninety minutes of video.

One of the team joked that we failed the entire scenario, as we were successfully held hostage and required to watch the damned thing, by our own people, no less.

Well, a few more forms tomorrow, then wheels up in the late afternoon.

It's unknown at this time what sort of communications capabilities we'll have on the ground, but that's part of the adventure.
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Watch This Space

There's a couple of old saws at play here. The first being that no international assignment is assured until you're on the ground. The second being that, no matter how long they tell you that you'll be gone, the time away from home will be doubled.

Are these beliefs in conflict?

I received my final medical result this morning, "Our company physician has approved you for deployment." This certainly looks easy enough, but was not even close to that. To go to a war zone these days, even the lowly Contractor has to be a healthy physical specimen. Full physical. Full range of innoculations. Blood tests, lung tests, hearing tests. Eye exam. Dental exam. Pokes and prods. I bet I spent three full days on the process.

And at each step, I was afforded the opportunity to fail - to *not* receive the physician approval.

In the background is the project, and contract, and politics, and war. Any of which could self-destruct at any time. As each day passes, though, this trip seems more assured,... but I'm still not on the ground. In the mean time, I'm hanging out at the Home Office for a few days, meeting the team and doing some prepatory work. Some of the team still has some medical crap to deal with, some are trying to figure out how to pack for five weeks on a military facility, and how they will hump all of their crap one they get there.

My first rule of thumb - no bright colors. As such, my entire wardrobe should allow me to blend in with the surrounding dirt at a moment's notice. Second rule of thumb - imagine there will be no restocking. It's hard to say what will be available at the local Post eXchange, so clothing, tools, and incidentals need to be thought out early and conveyed in full. The big decision is to define everything that you'll need to be self sufficient, less food and water, for an extended time away from everything. If it's not with you at the start, you'll probably need to do without, as there won't be a Walgreens on the corner. On the opposing end, anything uneccessary that makes its way into your kit will have to be humped around for weeks.

I've got a pretty good list, though, refined through the years, that makes this a little easier. It still needs little project specific tweaks, but I end up being mostly efficient. The downside, if it really is, is that I've brought few Home Office appropriate togs with me, and my dirt colored wardrobe doesn't quite match the ties and suits that roam the corridors here.

Aaah. Whatever.

Second saw, time away. When they first sold me on this work, it was for a 39 day gig. Once they had buy in, they loaded the front end and delayed the return, maintaining the number of days in country, but upping the total days away from home to 47. Last week, we were asked to spend two weeks towards preceding the submittal at Corporate, adding another 12 nights. All told, 39 days expanded to 59, or about 50% more than the original bargain.

Typical.

To answer the original question, there's no conflict. Sometimes projects get cancelled for any number of reasons. Most times, they go on for longer than anticipated. Right now, I think this projects a go. Right now, I think the time there will fly by.
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