Month 10 Day 8

Notebook entry

11 reports given, one report from the Afghans, want to believe, work with Salim on presentation, John Soltz's award, Salim weather, CJ Radin

Journal entry

All of the guys at the RCT were stoked about the numbers that I was able to come up with for the leave flights.  It is really funny that no one gave a shit about the numbers when they thought they didn’t say what they wanted, but when they said what they wanted, then they cared.  I hope that I don’t become like that.   I fought the natural human tendency when I was making the numbers to believe that they were wrong because they did not confirm my preconceived notions.  I always want to be open enough to an idea that I can see the facts and make a rational decision.  I feel like (though I do not have statistics to support this, but merely anecdotal evidence), that most of the guys around here make decisions based on what they feel and what they want to believe, not on actual evidence.  The METLs help, but they don’t go far enough.

I worked with Salim in the morning on the presentation for the commander’s conference.  He is really getting pretty good at PowerPoint.  I am proud of him.  We sat down and banged out some things that he thought were important to present to the commanders.

Most of the midday I worked on John Soltz’s award.  He had copied what Capt Nowak had written about me and made some changes.  It needed a couple of hours work to make it up to snuff, but I was happy to help, the guy has a high-school education even though he is technically an officer.

I worked with Salim on the weather in the afternoon.  I rolled into his room to wake him up, and it was absolutely rank, he doesn’t have any AC, he doesn’t shower with soap, and he doesn’t wash his uniform.  He sleeps in the middle of the afternoon when it is hottest, so when he wakes up he is covered in sweat.  It was so powerful that I couldn’t even go into the room with him.

Chuck CJ Radin came over to help him with his slides for the combined ops/intel.