Notebook entry
“Day Skipped”
Journal entry
It was Jumah on Camp Shorabak. No work was had by anyone. I
caught up on a bit of sleep in the morning and had breakfast with the Danes in
the morning. They are a fun crew. They are the GSU mentors.
They are facing some of the same problems that we are. Their guys know
how to do the work, they simply refuse to do so. I learned a new word
'favell' this is the root of the english word farewell. Ah the
vikings, so many colonies so little time.
I worked out, caught up on some E-mails. Worked on my book proposal
some more, and then went to lunch. This time I met up with two guys who
worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers. One was a SgtMaj and one was a
not kidding civilian. The SgtMaj was an old Korean guy who explained to
me how to cheat the system, and really double-dip on retirement from the
military. He was saying that no matter how close you are to retirement,
you can get out, become a DoD civilian, buy the retirement scheme from them,
work for an extra ten years, stay in the reserves, get recalled to active duty,
hit sanctuary, force them to give you active duty retirement, go back work as a
DoD civilian and retire at 50. If this whole scheme works out, you will
make more money in retirement than you did while you were working at either job
alone, and once you hit 65 and start collecting social securiy/TSP/401k you
will make about 4 times your original salary. No wonder there is a
federal deficit. They also told me that in the northern region the USACE
is spending 2billion on facilities for the ANA alone, awesome. The old
guy was a little more sanguine about the spending. He didn't think it was
entirely money wasted, he thought some good would come of it, those he
suspected they were going to tear down all of the metal buildings and use them
for scrap and that we should be building mud-huts for these stone-age people.
In the afternoon. I came back worked on the book proposal some
more. Spent some time figuring out the costs of flying to one airport as
opposed to another, bought plane tickets for Thanksgiving (I think I acutally
did that in the morning). Anyway. Maj Tawoos wanted to meet with
the Corps G2 and have me come along. He wanted me to come for dinner, but
with my recent stomach troubles, I was not up to it. I told him I had a meeting
at dinner (I didn't), but after I ate I went to see him. We found him and
met up with Col Omar. The loud-fast-talking lout was sitting in his
room. Papers were scattered and quasi-stacked in bunches along the far
wall. On the left had side of the room there was a bed, on the right had
side there was a desk stacked with bottles and trinkets, clearly not used for
work. on his wardrobe there were pictures of him with General Wardak the
Chief of Staff of the army, an equally fat lout. We sat down and he did
what he normally did which is start talking before he started listening, he
complained about how hard he worked how he was up until 0200 patrolling the
base and making sure that everything is secure. Totally not his
job. I tried to bring up the one issue that Tawoos had asked me to, the
manning issues withing the Bde. I started to tell him verbally and he
said to write it down. Anyway I also tried to talk to him about the
teleconference and the utility of regularly scheduling it. He was oblivious
to that. He continued to ramble on and not listen. He said how he
was glad that Razaq was gone because he was corrupt. He said that intel
is like a business, to which I responded it was too much like a business, too
many people making too much money. He said he had a bunch of hotels in
Kabul that he owned and that he didn't need any money (both Tony and I wondered
where he got the money for the hotels from). Anyway, we left and went to
the airport.
There Maj James Blitz imparted some of his eastern wisdom on Tawoos
'it takes many years for a sapling to become a mighty oak.' Tawoos looked at
him like he was crazy and asked me if he was a Sgt after we were
finished. We waited for our flight to head home on the benches and talked
about the linguists who were worth a shit. We also talked about a cute
electric-blond LCpl who was working in the Airport. Tawoos said 'if we
have her in the ANA werry werrry problem. There would be fights between
the XO and the General about who she would work for and who she would sit next
to.' He wanted to know if we had combined sleeping quarters and I told
him that all young horny men separated from women were the same and that would
cause problems for the women, so we kept them separate for everyone's safety
and comfort. All men are like Tigers he said.
We got back and I hit the rack. Somebody left a Cosmo
magazine on my bed and I read a page about Ashley Greene before I went to
bed.
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