Month 4 Day 27

Notebook Entry
25 reports given, Taught PowerPoint, Samir too busy to work on weather. Instructor course commences.

Journal Entry
I worked with Samir in the morning on making a PowerPoint presentation for the General. The General specifically requested that a shura-rollup be presented to him on PowerPoint. Samir was lost, he basically wanted to type a letter and put it on the wall. The simple is hard…he was ‘too busy’ in the afternoon to work on the weather stuff that I had for him. I had a conversation with Capt Arthur. On the 26th he and Maj Valquist went up to LNK to hear General Paul Watson (the MEF Fwd Commander speak). He brought all of the advisor teams in the AO [Area of Operations] together and said that they had all failed and that in his whole 500 year Marine Corps (the man looks like Methuselah) career he had never failed. This is after I spoke to the Corps AT a week ago and they were saying that they almost never saw General Paul Watson, and apparently whenever General Malouk does not get the answer that he wants from his advisor team he just goes to General Paul Watson and gets it. They do the same bullshit up there as Col Schmitt does down here. They want to feel like big candy-men, or they think that giving the ANA a bunch of shit will actually help us leave. They are the problem, and they have not bothered to ask what needs to be done to fix it (change the incentives and measure AT success by what we are able to get the ANA to do, not what we can do for them), nor do the careerists have the balls to tell them that. Maj Valquist would never stand up to Col Schmitt and say ‘sir, you are wrong.’ Am I any different. I have mentioned the TV and how it has not gone unnoticed, I was told it was a loan.

Edited to Add:
The TV I mention here was a 52 inch flat screen that was meant for the Afghans (a stupid decision in itself) but found its way into one of our tents and was connected to a DVD player.