Month 12 Day 4

Notebook entry

12 reports given, Gingley combined staff meeting, brother song.

Journal entry

I went to pick up Tony to go talk with the Afghans and there was an
interesting song playing on the Terp's TV.  It was a Tajik guy singing
in a Hazara accent about how Qanahari's and Mazari's shoudl all be
brothers.  The name of the song was "Brothers."  In the background
there were computer generated rebuildings of the Bamyan Buddahs and a
phoenix flying along.  An obviously ardent attempt to make one nation
where there has never been one.  The odd thing about it was hearing
Dinar's response.  He said "Don't ever learn to speak like that, It's
Naikpai's language." In truth it was not a different language, and I
could understand the guy fine, he just had a different accent.  I said
"it seems to be a pretty nice song, about bringing everyone in
Afghanistan together."
"Yah that's what it's about, but he's only singing it because he's the
spokesman for Roshan [a big Afghan cell phone company] he's don't it
because of business, in Afghanistan everything is about business.  I
don' know whether to draw hope from the thought that commerce can knit
together disparate peoples like in Europe, or to be sorry that
commerce is going to collapse after we leave.

The Afghan's 'got Ginglied' meaning Maj Hesco yelled at them this
morning.  They didn't have the slides ready for the combined
presentation in the morning.  Gunny K was called in to fix the problem
on the COC computers that Maj Hesco couldn't fix (although he was
yelling at the Battle Captain for being stupid and not being able to
do anything right even though he couldn't do it himself)  He was
smashing his fist into the table and slapped the CD drive shut on the
desktop.  With that kind of TLC, no wonder it doesn't work right.
Anyway.  I'm glad that I only saw him for a moment.

The combined staff meeting went OK, I hear.  I worked with the Sgts on
Operational Terms and Graphics, really a military dictionary.  They
accused me of 'hiding' it in their office filing cabinet for the last
few months (what a great hiding spot, they don't do any work, so they
don't know where it is).  They said this despite the fact that I have
pulled it out and worked with them on it about five times.  My class
was basically on how to use a reference book, what the table of
contents is for, how to search for the information you need.  By the
end I think they were getting it.

I came back and worked on a statement about CWO2 Soltz's award.  I
guess they want witness statements about his actions after his truck
hit an IED.

I tried to work on a bunch of other stuff, but the internet was being
pretty unreliable, so I basically just got frustrated with it.