Month 7 Day 5

Notebook Entry
None

Journal Entry
Yesterday didn’t end it just bled into today. I went to the gym a second time half out of bordom and half because Lt Jim McDermott said to me that I was looking puny compared to what I was at OCS [a school that I went to years ago]. He is right, but it was still a dick-head thing to say. I had to get on a bus to the Kuwait international airport in a pair of trousers because I was not allowed to wear my shorts. I changed back out of these loaner trousers on the way to the airport and when I arrived, lo and behold there were plenty of locals there who were wearing sandals, shorts and short sleeved shirts. Cultural sensitivity is one thing, but it is generally sensible to [know] the culture that you are purportedly being sensitive to before presuming that you can cast a sensitive air. The presumption [that] a conservative society is basically just like the American south is one (or perhaps several) presumptions too far.

So the airport that oil built was spectacular. The shopping complex was nice, the architecture was impressive. The only hitch was that I didn’t bother to check the exchange rate prior to busying my donut at the caribou coffee. I think it ended up costing me about 15 dollars for that and a hot chocolate. I am dubious about the real need to arrive there at 2000 as we did I think It would have been more than sufficient to take the bus that went at 0100, but the lazy contractor who masked his small job with perfect grammar, enunciation and hid behind a wall of bureaucracy tried to pack every soul onto the bus that left earlier. It must have been a terrible inconvenience for him to wake in the middle of the night to give his thirty second liberty brief and them tell all of the passengers that “under no circumstances are you to return to K2.” [this was the holding tent where we were prior to processing] He is just one of the thousands of contractors who are feeding off of this way. I must admit it is pretty tempting to do the contractor gig for a year. There is a guy working in the S2 [Intelligence] shop on Dwyer who makes 1,000,000 per year for making statistics in excel. Yep, it would suck, no doubt, to be away again, but we could be free of all material concerns basically for the rest of our lives if we could pay off the mortgages.

Month 7 Day 4

Notebook Entry

None

Journal Entry
Used a British Water-closet shipping container.  Much more sensibly designed than the American Variety, no doubt a bit more expensive to. The toilets are askance in the head [restroom] so that your knees don't press up
against the door when you sit down.  Moved to the out processing tent, a sea of different US uniforms.  MARPAT, USAF (the outprocessors), ACUs, muticam.  After a while it seems to allay the purpose of a uniform.

I got into it with an Army Specialist intel analyst who thought [that since] we could train soliders with 19 on their ASVABs that we should be able to train Afghans.

 got to run time is up.

The power system on Qandahar Air Field

The Qandahar Board Walk, at left the hockey rink they have, up front Caribou coffee.  Is this even a war for them?

Gaping hole in the top of one of the tents that process us for leave.  God only knows how much the A/C bill is.

Month 7 Day 3

Notebook Entry
Combined Staff Meeting

Journal Entry
Yesterday I tried to train Rafi on MoD 14s, supply requests. Filling out that single page took the better part of 3 hours. I showed him the appropriate parts of the manual in Dari and looked up the part
numbers for him. It was all mystical to him. He has been in the Army  for 8 years and has never filled out a supply request form. He really did try hard to learn yesterday and I was proud of him. I showed him
the weekly progress report that I was going to show to the General and  he wanted me to omit the two days where he slept in, didn't show up and actively tried to prevent training. I'm like...um...no. I will be honest about what you do for good and bad. He conceded. HE said that he thought he woudl be gone by the time that I made it back. I gave him a hug and we parted.

I packed up my daypack and my laptop case with the stuff that I was going to need for the trip. The day packs seems to be just the wrong size.

Our flight was supposed to leave in the afternoon. I was belting out 'ain't nothin gonna break my stride' at the top of my lungs and then my flight was delayed. That broke my stride. We had to do the obligatory evening meeting with the staff and then ship out at 1900. I did get to catch an Afghan truck burying itself in a 2 foot ditch because the driver didn't know how to use 4-wheel drive. I chalked it up to inexperience, most of these guys have not been driving very long.

We had another drug pop, LCpl David Cloud on the 2nd so while we were prepping to leave Maj Valquist was explaining to Capt Arthur that he was going to have to sit fire watch. I wonder if the Major is going to sit any duty...

The flight actually left a little bit early. It was a C-130 the Marine pilot didn't seems to know anything about parabolic curves, he went up, immediately snapped the nose horizontal to the deck, then when it was time to descend he pushed the nose hard until it felt like we were in free fall. This is accentuated by the fact that you don't have any backrests in C-130s.

Arrived in Qandahar. It remains the odd little third-world base that we left it. A web of power lines on cement poles directing electricity to destinations unknown. The base is still as active and oddly cramped as it was when we were here six months ago. The Marines are all anxious waiting to go home, some waiting to see family some waiting for the coalition females to look less attractive (ugliness is only a plane-flight away). The Brits are waiting for the end of their three months so they can go on leave, the Canadians are waiting for
Stephen Harper to pull them back. The rest of the coalition members goals are as obscure as their languages. They go to whatever staff job they have, go eat at the French, Luxemburg (their chow hall is probably bigger than their country), or British chow halls use their immaculate gym with BSky and euro-pop playing and then return return to their berthing. I wonder what they think of this. If they are just waiting out their time hoping to get a better deal from the US out of NATO. The Afghans are here too this is the 205th Brigade, the
one that has been around for over 5 years now. Ostensibly much more prepared and trained than our guys. We pulled to a stop on our movement to our berthing and a couple of afghan vehicles drove by, as
the Afghan HMMWV slowed both it rear doors swung out and stopped jarringly perpendicular to the vehicle. The Afghan driver continued, oblivious. So this is what you get after 5 years of drivers courses
from us, nothing.

Went to sleep in a crinkly tent wondering whether this was all is my head or if things were as they seemed-exactly the same as when I left. We are not getting anywhere.

Help me, I don't know how to drive!

Edited to Add:

I know that my movements are a little jumpy, I go from one place to another, but I could not write about events in the future for fear of security breaches.

Month 7 Day 2

Notebook Entry
12 reports Work with Salim and PowerPoint Brief

Journal Entry
None found

Month 7 Day 1

Notebook Entry
No reports given, Rafi PowerPoint, and Google Maps training, Regimental Combat Team here for class, Decision not to fill sustainment, Black Hole Presentation General

Journal Entry
Had CCOC [Combine Combat Operations Center] watch in the morning. Rafi worked the day prior in my absence and tried to come up with a good presentation that in his mind mimicked the one that he had seen me do for the General. He had clearly worked hard on it, but it looked like something that a second grader had come up with, lots of squiggles and bright colors. He knew that it wasn’t really up to standard, and wanted my help-VICTORY. I told him that it was fantastic and that would be more than happy to help him. I gave him a copy of my presentation, he said he would plot the SigActs on it. The internet is currently down for the Afghans because MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force] tightened up the firewall and they have basically kicked the Afghans back off the network. I showed Rafi how to use Google Maps on my computer. He found his house. He went into a long speech about where he lived, how close it was to the river that separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, he showed me the village just north of him where Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary figure in Afghanistan was killed. He showed me an old castle, a hill were he would go to ‘drink whiskey’ on hot summer nights, the small Islands in the Amu Daria, where the smugglers transport drugs from Afghanistan and alcohol in. All the while he was learning how to navigate the map. All of Google's tools are so intuitive that just like an American he figured it out quickly. Thank you Google. The gunny then decided to play a joke on him while I was gone and tell him that the volcano in our AO [Area of Operations] (Rafi oddly thought it was a tornado, or maybe Dr Noori screwed this up) was actually a black hole, a singularity from which no light could escape. Dr Noori, the linguist a real piece of work an Afghan ‘doctor’ who worked as a pharmacist in the US and uses more English words when speaking in Dari than I do acted like he knew exactly what the Gunny was talking about. Salim and I went to the General to tell him what we did in Nawa. Salim came in and said we went on a couple of patrols, taught a couple of classes, it was no big deal. I’m like dude, really, I just briefed you about what to say and you get stage fright from this pompous little Mongol. Ah well, I told him what we really did and how we would appreciate his help pushing the kandak commanders to do patrol debriefs.



The Ministry of Defense in their wisdom has decided not to fill any of our supply requests. They will only field gear for new units, not existing ones, even though we were only created last year and are not up to Tashkil on equipment. Thanks. Its not like my guys break stuff at the cyclic rate (we just had an electrical fire yesterday that burned out the fuse box because they were plugging space-heaters into the sockets and leaving the doors open). This shit is all Magic to them. They have no idea how anything works. They are fucked when we leave.

That's 210 thousand liters of diesel fuel in one bag.  Wow, I can't imagine the gas bill.

The nascent Afghan National Air Force.  Terrifying, simply terrifying for all who fly it.