Month 10 Day 7

Notebook entry

15 reports given, computer recovery morning and early afternoon, intelligence preparation of the battle space, leave flight cost, AC broken, flatscreen up on the wall, sign in roster, contractor ownership.

Journal entry

The morning was a waste.  I went to try to help salim reinstall the operating system on his computer, but GySgt Young had not prepped the comm guys properly.  They didn’t have all of the stuff they needed, so it took two hours out of my day for nothing. I had to cajole the ANA communication section into helping, get everything going only to find that the reimages were not there.  GySgt K got the stuff that he needed and updated it in the early afternoon. 

I worked with Salim on IPB again.  He is getting pretty good at remembering the three main areas, but now I am asking him for tougher smaller areas and he is having trouble.  I had him draw a map and label it as opposed to just going off of the powerpoint.  We’ll see tomorrow if that helps.  The A/C in the COC broke while I was there.  Being the resident magic-bringer I was asked to fix it.  I could not.  When I told the duty officer to talk to the GSU engineers about it he said if you tell them to fix it, it will take a week. I said ‘if you don’t tell them to fix it it will take a week from whenever you do.’ He just shrugged and said the guy might do it tomorrow.  That’s work ethic. This place is going to fall apart after we leave.

I also found out a little bit about the structure of the contracting companies. Many are nominally headed by Afghans so they can get more contracts from the government, but the board is all made up of American businessmen.  There is always a way for those who want to be entrepreneurial.

We are winning the war in the combined COC.  The Afghans now have  a big flat screen that they can write sigevents on.  Not sure how that’s better than a dry erase markers, but it sure is more expensive and complicated.  Brave New World anyone?

I found out how they cheat the sign-in roster, their signatures are basically scribbles and they basically write directly over the small marks that the S-1 puts in there to count them UA.

On the bright side.  I did some regressions on the leave flight and it looks like it actually does save the US money.  That doesn’t compare it against a more effective and consistent convoy schedule, but with what happened before.