Month 10 Day 12

Notebook entry

15 reports given, comfortable concentration camp?! Needto [illegibl]e so we get it next year, judges leave, can't get out of there on way, doctors award, commanders conference, executive officer meeting, Salim morning, Judge Advocate General.

Journal entry

I learned a bit from Friedan about not overdramatizing my case in my own book.  She describes womens’ lot in 1950s America as a comfortable concentration camp.  This greatly overstates her case and turned me off as a reader.  I think it will be necessary in my own book to draw parallels to things that people understand, but the parallels must be more judicious than this.  It may seem just as preposterous to the American public to think that their military is not entirely selfless as it does to me that being a housewife is anything like being in a concentration camp physically or in social psychology.  My book will also be different from Friedan’s in another way.  I am thinking about the chapter about now.  Maybe it will be called Doubt and Confidence. I am doubting just about everything, my purpose here, my own assessment of the direness of the situation, my very purpose on this planet.  Other people are confident, they may be ignorant, but they are confident. Here is the difference from Friedan’s book.  If she put chapter 13 [up front, then] everyone would put the book down because the claims seem outrageous, but a series of slow, small, steps must allow people to accept the more powerful claims at the end of the book.  Like a frog in water.  I wonder if my book should be different, if just after the stuff solution we hit not resolution, but just doubt.  It is a hell of a let-down, but it is accurate, and it is pretty hard to get more illustrative than that convoy. 

I went to the Lines of Operations sync meeting this morning.  The Colonel himself was there and said that we needed to make sure that we spent all of the money from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program fund so that we can get the same amount next year (if you don’t use it you lose it).  There was not talk of efficacy, just spending umpteen millions.  Local governance has the same problem we do in the ANA I guess.  A bunch of judges just go UA or take very extended leave, there is constant theft, etc.  The Colonel himself said ‘maybe we should just pull everyone out this summer we just can’t get these people to get out of their own way.’

I worked on the Doc’s award.  I’m glad I did I think other guys would have fucked it up.

Salim went to a detainee class in the morning at my behest.  I tried to get him to work on the slide for the commander’s conference, but he said the XO had told him not to use it.  Salim didn’t want to go see the XO because he didn’t have a hat, blouse or boots on, but eventually the XO called him in anyway and he had to go put them on.  I spoke to the XO about the HUMINT money, he said he told General Malouk, but nothing was happening. Sigh.  The Colonel in the meeting this morning was talking about how the HUMINT money was the General’s vacation fund and we need to tell him we are not happy with him stealing it…hmmm sounds like a job for….you, sir.

some of the buildings the contractors were putting up on Camp Garmsir

Another view of the buildings to be built