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.