Month 6 Day 12

Notebook Entry
General Observed training in Garmsir, 215 Corps Chief of Staff here with staff, Salim regarding database.

Journal entry
Went to the staff meeting yesterday morning. I was hoping to get the General’s ear after it was done, but he decided that he wanted to see all of the slides that the Afghans had prepared for an inspection by the Corps Chief of Staff. He predictably turned around to me and said please help the S-2 make a decent brief, I said I was trying. Rafi tried to protest, he told Rafi to sit down and shut up. I was late for the mandatory for the mandatory pre-leave meeting, so I flew over to the other side of base. The Camp Mayor stopped behind me after I got there. He’s like ‘you know how fast you were going’ fucking seriously, you are going to give me a hard time for speeding (I was doing like 80 kph in a 20 though I can’t be sure because my speedometer was busted, but who gives a fuck I was on the back side of the runway where no one was around). I was thinking, dude, you need to get a life, there is a war here, in case you haven’t noticed, I am a bit busy…Anyway, came back and we are in bail-out mode, the camp was grated wrong, and all of the water flowed back toward the HESCOs, not forward to the drain. He dug a about three trenches to try to get the water to drain, but it wasn’t happening very fast, and the rain was still coming. We brought out a ditch-witch, that broke. We are all covered in slop and worked from about 1000 to 1700 on the stupid thing and does one of the afghans come over to ask us if we need a hand, not a one. Its some kind of partnership…if they were flooded you know they would be asking us for help, like they ask use for help on every other issue. Its like, dude this shit isn’t rocket science grab a shovel and dig. They did come over, but it was to ask when their Chief of Staff was going to arrive on American Air. We finally got bailed out by a marine with a pump truck that pushed out 300 gallons per minute, we shot the water over the HESCOs.

The officers did the bulk of the work in the afternoon, not only are we generally more fit and able to carry on work longer than the junior Marines, but it felt good to do some honest toil. You could see the results of your labor, unlike working with the Afghans, where you have to try to train them on the same thing again and again and again. I left for about 2 hours in the afternoon to work with my Afghans. They had come up with the schedule that I asked them for, and they picked a class time, and they were able to plot some grids and enter some things into the database. It was really a pretty good day for me. I felt a little bit bad coming back and seeing my fellows still digging away, but they really didn’t want to go see their Afghans, and did enjoy the work for reasons already mentioned.