Fly, boy

My current office is in an increasingly dusty/dirty construction trailer, sitting on one of many mismatched and broken chairs. The nicest looking ones seem ready to snap off at the pivot and the overall wheel radius is smaller than normal, so you take a chance in leaning back and putting your combat boots up on the desk. The second variety is too narrow except for the narrowest of asses, like taking a seat in your old elementary school. Fortunately, the arms seem to break off at will, making it a little easier to remove yourself. The third set has neither arms nor wheels, or rubber stops on the legs, so that the sound of them sliding across the tile raise such a screech that we banned them from use. Such is the nature of third world chairs, they’re pieces of crap.

Through the window is the construction of KCC Phase III, most of which is a block of grey, windowless concrete, three stories tall. Three or four hundred Turkish supervisors and Afghan workers scurry about, currently finishing up the mass concrete, assembling the pre-detonation/blast roof, and getting a start on the interior finishes. Their laydown yard is an inefficient mass of piles and stockpiles, trailers and equipment, scaffolding and assembly yards. Surprisingly, the Turks brought in a shiny new tower crane from China for the effort, which will leave country as soon as the work is complete.

In all, the contractor is using about every available open space on this end of the camp, taking care not to pile reinforcing steel on top of the mosque, inconveniently located on some prime real estate. Mosque coordination should work out for this project, but will be much more difficult when Phase IV enters the construction phase. Phase IV, my work, will double the finished floor space on this 15 acre camp, adding another 300,000 square feet.

During Phase IV, it just won’t be this end of the camp that looks like a construction site, but the need for suitable laydown space will eat up every nook and Afghan cranny. In the States, a contractor could schedule deliveries for the day he needed them, but that’s a little harder when your Russian steel gets trucked in through the stans, and your specialty parts move here through the Khyber Pass. Even if they got close, perhaps to a yard down the street, materials still need to spend a day getting through camp security, as we’d hate to have an exploding load of toilets.

It’ll be a mess, (the Phase IV work, not the exploding toilets, although the exploding toilets would also be a mess, it’s not the mess that’s the subject), but when it’s all over, we will have a huge administration center in the midst of Kabul. I’m not privy to what exactly we’ll be administering here, but I’m sure it’s critical to the war and peace effort and one that is absolutely unable to get suitably perform CONUS, where we have scores of wholly unsuitable military administration facilities.

Apparently, there’re some 1,000 persons on base. Our proposed improvements will allow for a population of 2,000 persons, with a surge population of 2,500. I can only imagine what a surge of 500 administrators looks like, probably a lot of flailing manila folders and Cat 6 cables. Sounds ugly. Even uglier if we don’t get the Green Bean erected in due course, as fru fru coffees are critical to unnecessary administration.

I never see all of the thousand we’re supposed to have today, except for some mass PT event yesterday morning when about 300 filled the courtyard. Otherwise, there are claims that the DFAC is too small, yet I’ve only stood in line once. They say the shower facilities are inadequate, yet I’ve never had to wait. They say that there’s a lack of parking, yet ten spaces are used for the basketball court.

No, my biggest complaint is that, despite being in the middle of Kabul, there’s no sight of the city, it all being hidden by T-walls and twenty-five foot sniper screening. I know Afghanistan is out there somewhere, because I saw it driving in and from the top of one of the existing buildings on our first day here, but the way this camp is configured makes me think that there is nothing besides the camp and the job to improve the camp.

Perhaps the next time, I’ll get to see more of the countryside.

The LOGCAP contractor came into the tent this morning to complete hooking up the air conditioning unit that's set idle since we arrived. I guess this means it's time to leave again. Wheels up in hours.



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My 200th post! Collect them all!

They sent me here with a new team this time, only two with prior Afghanland experience, but everybody’s worked in this section of the world before. I’ve got an electrical, two architects, and three civils, including myself, which strikes me as one civil too many. In the contract, I’m actually a “military planner”, but I’m pretty sure that only means “skilled kibitzer”. Mostly, they’ve got me assigned as team leader on this one, not quite as glorious as project manager, but I don’t have to deal with the Company accountants.

Our project manager, safely ensconced in the home office, needed someone to watch over the production team in country – to make sure they get in and out of theatre, find their billets, show up for work, bathe regularly, and don’t make nuisances of themselves. I don’t really have much of a technical role, which leaves me obligated with the task of cat herding.

Seriously, all of my team are experienced and skilled professionals. They know what’s expected of them and take the necessary steps to accomplish their work. They are self sufficient, but perhaps to a fault, which is where the cat herder comes in, to ensure that they don’t go so far off of the reservation that they can’t be recalled if need be.

Unlike cats, though, these guys don’t sleep for twenty three hours a day. Tim and I are up at 0400 to hit the gyms before the crowds. Jim’s up soon thereafter to get on line. The others stagger up and out by breakfast at 0600. We’re set up in our construction trailer office by 0800 and hard at it well into the evening, with four or five coordination meetings and group interviews each day, analyses and inspections, hypothetical discussions, theoretical and hard design, and just plain old bullshitting.

As more detailed information is needed and time allows, ones or twos will break out and pursue base personnel, make some measurements on site, or pester the operators of the various physical plants. Armed with a schedule of the day’s events and a detailed scope of work, they’re off and doing their independent thing. Actually, they’re a relatively good group, and they don’t need much from me. Like any good cat herder, I know that they’ll be in for supper.

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C'mon, people now,...

I hang a map of Afghanistan in my office at home, decorated with small yellow flags indicating the varying locations where I’ve got my boots dusty. In the past fifteen months, I’ve collected close to a score of little yellow flags, this past week adding one more at Kabul. Despite seeing large portions of the eastern side of this country, my tours have been largely by air, and our ride in from the airport was one of very few times that I’ve been over the wire on the ground.

At Sharana, we took an exciting MRAP ride through an adjacent scrub goat pasture to site an airstrip. At Mazar E Sharif, our private security force took us halfway around the perimeter into the proposed base expansion area. At Kunduz, we trekked a few miles through secure grounds to visit a local ANA compound. During that solo week at Kandahar, my twice daily commute was from the ANA Special Forces base into the airfield.

At Kabul, though, we deplaned at the Kabul International Airport, or KIA (irony or sick joke – I can’t be sure), with half a plane load of citizens and other contractors. We used the “new” terminal which looked old, despite having been built since the invasion, and cruised through immigration and customs, before finding some seats on the arrival hall, where we waited for our PSDs to give us a lift to the FOB. It’s not really a FOB. Certainly more FOB than COB, but the Kabul Consolidated Compound (KCC, or sometimes the New Kabul Compound (NKC)) is what we call “enduring” meaning, it’s going to be here for a long, long time.

I won’t. By the time we hit the ground, we were already into single digits before we split. This is a rapid fire, preliminary design effort. Simply drop out of the sky, scoop up as much data as possible, interview anyone who gets in the way, and find the next Kam Air flight out of Dodge. Piece of cake. It’s only Afghanistan, and this is my fifth trip here, so I think I’m getting good at this.

Still, though, bags can get lost. Tim lost his flying in. Rather a PITA, considering he had some tools and measuring devices packed away that were a requirement for the successful completion of his various tasks. Ultimately, he found his black Samsonite rollaway sitting next to the belt, along with all of the other black Samsonite rollaways. Let that be a lesson – or not. If you still have a black Samsonite rollaway, there’s no hope for you and your bag should get lost.

The loss of tools would have been a shame, though, as it would have made the job much more difficult. Despite their utility, these were on the heavy side, and we fully expected to be paying a few hundred dollars to the excess baggage fee fairies. On a lark, I thought I’d ask for “consideration”, literally, and surprisingly received it. I didn’t see a tip jar or anything, just left the agent with my thanks.

To my chagrin, the KAM Air flight from Dubai to Kabul departs at 0240, when the airport, much to my further vexation, was packed to the gills. The flight, though, was at about 60%, leading me to believe that not everyone wants to fly into Kabul, and for good reason, one of which is that the mens’ room floor is surfaced with some open cell, porous material, like a sheet of spun geotextile, instead of the more usual (and infinitely more sanitary) terrazzo. Icky bubba.

Anyway,… the ride to the camp was short and uneventful, despite our route on public roads though not quite teeming hoards of Afghanis. They were busy, of course, with their own lives, uninterested in the ramblings of some gringo engineer.
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