Notebook entry
Sgt. Paul Radley a turnover, $250 million tombstone next fiscal
year, $100 million ongoing, $500 million upcoming soon
Journal entry
Woke up and stood watch. Went to Tombstone.
The Major really went there to hash out the details of the move,
arrange Kalimars o move the 40 foot containers, arrange flat beds for the track
hoe, bulldozers, etc. This is a lot of extra troublefor guys that the RCT wants
to use as provisional riflemen. One funny episode the Kandak commander blamed
some manufactures defect on the reason all of the transmissions were broken in
the dump trucks.
I found out the Maj James Blitz’s orders were somehow messed up or
incomplete and the he would be returning to the US on Tues. This meant that I spent most of lunch and the
early afternoon doing a turnover with Sgt Paul Radley. I gave him an overview of the problems that I
was facing and told him that I really needed to start with the personnel, once
I got decent personnel I could then move on to training them or sending them to
training. I told him that my section had basically regressed since I had
arrived because of personnel turnover. I
told him that the general signed but ignored PIRs, that they did not drive a
collection effort, that the information they took in was merely typed (because
they feel that is more official) then signed by the general then two hole
punched and put into a binder never to be seen again, with this in mind they do
no analysis, no production, and dissemination is limited to voice transmissions
over their one HF radio set.
After that I fought the battle of the inbox for a little
while. Did some coordination with the
CLB guys who are going with us on the move and then eavesdropped on a meeting
that the G-4 was having. Apparently the
us army Corps o engineers briefed that it is in the midst of $100,000,000 worth
of projects for helmand and nimruz, about to kick off another $500,000,000 in
projects and they are going to be spending $250,000,000 on camp Shorabak, the
corps headquarters alone. They will also
be dealing with the operations and maintenance of those contracts until 2014.
When the mentors asked who was going to be training them how to use and
maintain the facilities that they have the rep smiled and said, you guys. I
cannot believe this shit. Especially when some of the projects are to
rebuild/move shit that is already in place.
Just like the millions that are being poured into Camp Garmsir even
though it is only a temporary facility.
I also chased down the billet and ID number of an Afghan soldier
detained for associating with the TB the Corps is going to talk to MGen Malouk
and figure out how they are going to treat this guy.
Came back, ate chow, took a picture of the giant lot of trucks.
On the ride back from the trucks dinar asked me “are people in
America like they are here? I mean you can feel how much they hate you when
they see your dark skin and when they find out you are a Muslim. It feels
terrible.” I told him that people are scared of what they don’t know and if he
goes to a place where they never see a brown person, then he could run into
trouble, but if he sticks to some of the bigger cities where he will not be
special then it would not be a problemexcept possibly at airportss. I felt pity for him as he said the next words
“you know even in the remote parts of Afghanistan people are understanding and
forgiving, they have lost sons to the Taliban, sons to the Americans, and they
understand, sons die in war. When I go
back to them they tell me ‘you are so lucky to be working for the Americans’
and I say yah, I don’t have the heart to tell them.”
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| photos of the hundreds of trucks just baking away in the sun at the higher headquarters. Each one paid for by the American Taxpayer |
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