I'll never let you go....

Literally, twenty minutes after writing all that crap about my awesome phone....I lost it. I have signs posted up everywhere, but since you don't sign up for a cell phone "plan" here, it's pretty easy to see how someone could swap a sim card and be on their way. Oh well.

So now I need a new phone. The funny part about it was that my boss had to buy my the phone. We went to the PX in Kandahar, and we both went to the counter, and I said "I like that one" and he said "now, owning a phone is a big responsibility. It's a priviledge, not a right." Yeah, yeah, I said, thinking about how cool I was going to look with my phone.....

Well, not two weeks later, I had wrecked it, and Dad was not happy. "If you think I'm getting you another one, you're way wrong". I just hung my head in shame. I'm sorry, I muttered. I didn't think......"THAT'S RIGHT! You didn't think! Way to go shit-for-brains!" as he poked me hard in the chest and then stomped around for a while, uttering inaudible phrases with the word "damn" laced here and there.

Well, maybe that's not exactly how it happened, but that's how it felt....Anyway, I did lose the phone, and now I need another one. Only, I live somwhere where phones exist, but only because they were bought 327km away and brought here. You can imagine the dilemma.

Actually, I was in a blind fit of rage when I lost the phone. I'm surprised my weapon didn't go missing in the process. Thank goodness for that. Far less forgivable to lose a loaded M4. Anger has been a mainstay of my existance here. The boss and I have decided that every person here has some sort of mental instability. It's that or level of stupidity so consistant across the board that we are in a constant state of bewilderment at the situations that we encounter.

I'd say that in the Army, the dumb a-holes have a tendency to inflate their importance while the mildly intelligent simply keep to themselves. This increases the appearance that you are on a ship of fools, while making you feel all the crazier when you try to argue with someone who is not making sense at all. Wes Rainey would know what I am talking about: you feel like you are in some sort of parallel universe where everyone is taking some pill that you are avoiding. I did stop taking the Malaria pill....maybe that's it. I havn't seen a mesquito since I got here, so I'm ok with that decision. Really, since I'm now taking neproxin, some kind of anti-inflamatory, for my shoulder, I didn't want to mix medicines. Another Dr. Ruth (Saunders) lesson: don't take a bunch of stuff at once. So I don't. Hard to know who to trust anymore, but I do trust her.

Last night, I had to kick a guy out of my office. I literally told him to leave. I was so close to saying: "get the F- out", but knew that would not bode well, so I spared him that one word. Boss was so angry about the guy's position and request and responses that he woke up at 3AM to work out, then ran 4 miles. Then this morning, he had a meeting with the guy and his LT to explain that they were flaming idiots and needed to get head out of ass. The LT went to West Point, so boss gave her the what-for: "you're acting like an idiot. Hard right, easy wrong. Guess which you're doing now? Siding with an idiot to avoid his outbursts. Grow up. Be in charge. Do your job. Earn what you are paid for. Stop wasting space. Represent what you were taught."

Pretty good, I thought. Too much emotion in all this. There should be no emotion in this job. It's cold, calculated, factual, quantitative. Get it done. This makes me pine for the combat arms.....but here, things get fluffy, somehow people's feelings come in to play, and now we have to ask politely instead of saying: "do it". I'm sick of hearing why it can't get done. That is far from an American attitude.

Out past our gate somewhere, guys are laying in trenches getting shot at in 9 hour firefights, and I have to listen to some cupcake complain about an 5 hour work-day. Seriously?

I recently took a road trip. Took us 11 hours to get from A to B. I rode in the back of this hulking steel beast that vibrated my skull when it idled. We spent 2 hours waiting for the Italians to unclog the one road in Afghanistan- they tried to move about 300 trucks at once and this did not go well. While we were stopped, a herd of goats disembarked the bus next to us, then were hurried back on when the bus started moving again. Goats and bus and driver were all shouting and reving at each other and it was utter kaos for moments before the goats were all herded back on the bus, the guy carrying his chicken made it back from visiting another bus headed the opposite direction, and a mad scramble of passengers left us fearing that they knew something we didnt. Alas, traffic was only moving, and sure enough it moved for about 20 feet before it stopped, with no sign of moving again, and so off came the goats and people and chickens and guys holding them.

Every single- EVERY SINGLE- bus we passed had about 500 bags of rice on top, and on top of the rice were 3 automobiles. Once when a guy tried to pass us in the desert, his car flipped three times. He got out and somehow.....somehow he righted it and drove away. They really do live a simple life here, and it has its merits. Of course, illness would not be something I would welcome along with the lack of worldly possessions, since that would include not possessing a shower, or a toilet you could sit on- yes! I am back in the land of the hole in the floor! I'm not going to try it, I don't see how the throne is not the obvious improvement over the hole. I would just imagine that to a certain extent, you would see an improved something and say: "well hell. That's a lot better than what I have been doing..."

"And take a look at this, my left hand is clean now...."

But I will say I applaud their ingenuity. 9 times out of 10, the American viewpoint is, "we can't do it.....we don't have a ____" and then these 5 afghanis show up and convince you to let go of the thing, and they put a stick, some wire, an old piece to a tire, some dirt....and they've fixed whatever it is. Evidence that if the mind gets soft from having too many tools, you lose the ability to imagine the possibilities with less. Thus, we keep up with the Joness and we think that what we have is not what it should be. Of course, that attitude doesn't exisits in trailer parks...so we know the life without is alive an well in our own country- but those people are still surrounded by what they can't have and want as a result. Sure there is a balance somewhere, but human nature can't be avoided. Thus: credit. Worst thing to happen to us. It eats at what should be our core values, and puts every one of us in a position of owing something to someone. Debt. Debts of time, money, stuff, emotion, friendliness, honor, character.

Eisenhower, where are you? Bring back the boring; too much excitement for one young adult lifetime.

Another Saturday night.....

I was forced to get a cell phone.

My boss told me it was that or I could never leave the office again. By office he meant tent. My "office" is shared by 6 other people, all of us shouting over the roar of the nearby generators/air handler combination units situated all of five feet from my head. And, remember, since this is a tent we are talking about, the walls do very little to reduce the deafening cacaphony of generators, road rollers, fuel trucks, helicoptors, and the litany of other rediculously huge equipment that, by the sound of things, threatens to run directly into our tent and out the other side, paying no heed to its inhabitants.

My phone is made by Nokia, so that might seem normal enough, but that is where the familiarity ends. Abruptly. First, the ring-tones are great: they are all the same as the American ring-tones, except they are clearly the lute and sitar versions of the popular tunes we all love Verizon for providing us. Then, there is the Arabic keypad. Text messaging became a real pain. Luckily, it uses the english numbering system. When I took it out of the box after purchase, it sounded like it had some loose parts inside, but sure enough, it works. One of my favorite features is that it has been wishing me a happy Ramadan for the past week.

Apparently, I can call the US with my God-fearing phone. I havnt tried it yet though, since I'm told they use a strange algorithem to charge you which has to do with the exchange rate between the US dollar and the afghani, the tax the Taliban places on the cell tower usage in Iran, and the severity of the current dust-storm in South Eastern Afghanistan. All of it comes out to basically screw you out of about $.75 per minute, so you can imagine I have little interest in using it.

Assuming it isnt prayer-time, the phone works really well. For the other 37 minutes of the day, I get crackly reception and bits and pieces of information from my contacts. The Iranians, who can hear each of us clearly, are well aware of all troop movements in Afghanistan, wheras I cannot get an answer to the question: "How many loaves of flatbread are being shipped from Kandahar!?!" I never found out.

Most times, I get to listen to a message spoken in Dari, or Pashtu...I certainly can't tell. I would love to understand the message, which very well could be a pre-programmed message: "If you are ever cought, my husband will cut your head off with a rusty sawblade!" I'm sure the voice is telling me something about the benefits of soap, or brushing one's teeth...or it could be telling me about a goat for sale, or where to find the one car that works, I'm not sure how I imagined it into some sort of public service announcement, but without television, maybe this is the only way to pass information around the country. Given my luck with it, probably not.

But there is this radio station that plays all day long broadcast from our little outpost. It's an effort to make good with the locals by giving them some bumpin' tunes to rock out with. Whenever I get the truck and do my 100kph baja race practicing across the expansive runway expansion project area, I love to listen to the wailing of a guy and his all lute band. I mean, these guys are seriously blasting this music, it is so intense. You can really feel the emotion in it, and the boings and bongs of the drums and the wavery guitar notes are creepily hypnotic. Then you roll right into the thunderous beat of what has got to be the modern Afghani pop music. Female singers! What could she possibly be saying??? "I see that you have lots of cows!!!, my father will be pleased with this arangement!!! I am lucky to have such a handsome cousin!!!!!"

But seriously, one of my favorite translators and I spent a couple days together on a project, so he told me all about his life. He was going to college in Pakistan to become a nurse, but as it turned out, the program was not great, and his love for the English language (which they all learn in Pakistan schools, without fail apparently), he realized that he could surpass the average income of his village's working male population by about 7 times by translating. He told me that his haircut and sunglasses would likely get him killed. He cannot go anywhere without fear that he was going to be killed for his association with the US. For example, one day a child with badly beaten legs showed up at the gate carried by his father. The father had worked one day shoveling dirt for the American army, thus his 10 year old was crippled. Way to go Taliban!

But my translator friend told me that his new dream was to go to the US and go to school. LT (06') tried to teach him some American phrases and pick-up lines. I told him never to say any of that- he might get in trouble. So then I learned that he was looking for a new life because his first attempt at gaining a wife had not worked out. The girl he was interested in was a good catch, but she just wasnt interested in him. I couldnt see why not, you've got to understand, dude looks like he belongs in California surfing the beaches.....but I guess his cousin just wasnt interested. So yeah, it's for real. I told him that in America, there were way more girls to choose from, so we didnt have to depend on our cousins in order to continue the species. He seemed to think this was a good thing.

So we have these 2010 model Toyota Hilux trucks. The Hilux is essentially the tacoma, but as you can imagine, they look way different. The old Hilux is very utilitarian. It is the quintisential pick-up truck. It usually comes with a 4 cylinder diesel engine, and it has been asked a thousand times a thousand why toyota doesnt put a 4 cyl diesel in the US. Any idea how many would sell??? Millions. Some reasonable number. More than the gas versions, because of the fuel economy, and the power. Face it America, the diesel engine is 33% more efficient than the gasoline internal combustion engine. Simple physics- complete burn! less heat waste!! But yes, it does burn "oil" thus the sooty exhaust. Clean it up toyota, and you've got a winning product. Volkswagen did it, why can't you??? Long live the Jetta, which by the way, I've convinced my boss he is going to buy one when he gets home. He was looking for a new car, was thinking about the Jetta, and then I gave him all the psycological benefits of the car- "how long has it been since I filled up?" you just stop caring about where you've been, where you are going... you don't mind driving people places, road trips become nothing to financially plan. His fear was a lack of stations that offer the fuel. Not an issue, I told him, as we played a game of HORSE in Kandahar. Boss played on the JV team at West Point, so he's not bad. We were both a little rusty, and a little under the weather due to the air quality there (40% fecal matter, I'm told. Is that possible?? wouldnt that mean you were literaly swimming in it?). Well, you can smell it all right, and we both got sick. Sick sick. Boss and I went to get some pills. He took his and downed two. I asked the doc a bunch of questions. "why are you asking all those question? These guys are professionals that's what they get paid to do, give you medicine for your issue." so I told him how my mom always told me, thanks to her mom, that you had a right as the patient to ask what the medicine was for, and to know what your treatment was going to be. Later that night, boss broke out in a huge rash and I laughed and laughed at his rash, all over him! See!, I told him, who was right?! Glorious triumph.

Later, as we lay groaning in a sleep tent large enough to hold 400, we huddled around his phone listening for details of the big convoy that had such important items as a 5 meter paver, and a rough terain container handler on it. The paver was a huge success. Lets talk about the paver.

The paver has a history. Months ago, a paver was flown into Bagram. The paver was put on a convoy, and that convoy was attacked. The paver was severely damaged. Back it went to Bagram. About a million dollars later, the paver was on its way again. This time, it got attacked again the truck drivers killed, and in a weird turn of events, the paver was stolen and driven several miles into the desert by the Taliban before it got stuck in the sand. Somehow, they put a call through to the paver owners and said that they would return it if the owners (an American company) paid a ransom. Ransom paid, the owners went out to get the paver, and found it completely destroyed.

Fast forward: we get the task of bringing a new paver home. You can imagine the elation of the company when we got it there safely. The RTCH was a different story: it was stuck on the trailer and wouldnt turn on. "Get that F-ing RTCH off that trailer!!" boss shouted when our guys told him they had given up. Off it came. Victory.

Photographs

My 4th of July tribute to photography. Pictures I took to support my claim of piles of airplanes.

A thousand words to follow!

This pile is literally one square mile. There is no way to capture the enormity of it.

I'd like to do a tribute to Jimmy Stewart with a limited budget remake of "Flight of the Phoenix", where I claim that I can make this thing fly if I can just get enough information from Kevin over the phone (Shouting to background:"Ryan, shut up! You don't know what you're talking about!"), Somehow, I put together something that flies from this pile of rubbish, and I escape Afghanistan. The trick would be that I would actually escape. New twist on a old film. So long suckers!!

"Three stinking mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease."

A turn for the wurst

Sadly, the band has been split up. And by the band, I mean the Christian rock ensemble that I joined at Fort Hood for the brief 7 weeks we were stuck in one of the more economically depressed areas of the Lone Star State. Let me be clear about one thing, I never thought I would be telling anyone that I had joined a Christian rock ensemble, but then, stranger things have happened. My church attendance did rise dramatically, and my prowess as a bass player was easily doubled by all the enthusiastic practicing we did.

The real hope for us, since the band was easily converted to 80s and 90s rock thanks to our rythm guitarist's enormous repertoire, was to play at an imaginary beer hall that we would create at our spartan home in Afghanistan, called "The Bunker". The proprietor of this establishment was to be our illustrious XO- Major Von Lutzkreig. His German heritage is not entirely obvious to everyone, so he spends the majority of his life telling us about his love for all things German, or Irish. I told him that it wasn't fair to claim both of the "cool" heritages, but he says that somehow he has the blood of both in him. He further declares his favorite bar to be the Bier Garden in downtown Portsmouth, and gets giddy around October of each year, where his drinking deserves the description: ludicrous.

Alas, the band has been split up, and our equipment is lost somewhere over the ocean. All we have is a crappy drum set and an out of tune acoustic guitar. Not much to work with, so we don't bother to try.

In other news, Ryan wrote me a note, which I appreciated greatly. Thank you Ryan for taking the time to give your thanks for my sacrifice.

Pile-o-MIGs

Surrounding our abode is the detrius from a ten-year conflict with the Soviet Union. By that I mean there is literally a pile of Russian fighter jets sitting outside our wall. The remains of their tents, or buildings, generators, boilers, hangars and an assortment of unidentifiable twisted metal gives one the impression that something significant existed here at one point. Thirty years in this environment has made identification of anything but the aluminium fuselages of the jets close to impossible. I don't dare explore thanks to the threat of landmines and cobras. I want to pretty badly.

The best description I can come up with is that it looks like New Mexico here. The mountains are weird looking, that is an understatement. Not that you would be totally surprised by their appearance; they fit within the realm of possible natural occurances, but they are just unlikely and odd to my North American eyes. The striations of color are attractive, and can be seen at a great distance, which makes me think of all the pictures of the Grand Canyon I have seen. As much as it freaks me out, I think I want to go walk on that glass walkway that stretches out over that Grand abyss. I though The Abyss was a great movie, and I really it deserves a second watch when I get home. In The Abyss, James Cameron, in early Avatar fashion, shows us what incredible a-holes humans are. James; how about instead of making a movie that implies not how humans MIGHT destroy the planet, demonstrates how George Lucas DID destroy both Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the span of three years?

Afghanistan is actually very colorful: who knew there were so many shades of brown?

Catch-22, as it turns out, is a terribly enjoyable book. It starts out a bit like Napoleon Dynamite, where you are wondering what the heck the He-Man doll on the fishing line has to do with the plot...then you watch about 30 minutes and realize it has nothing to do with the plot. Maybe it's more like moving to Alabama, and having to figure out how they do things there before you begin to feel comfortable with catfisting. After a while, you're assimlated, but at first it can be very frustrating. What an awesome mockery of the military this book is.

Yossarian lives!

Where the hell am I?

I finally moved on from _____ to _____. My previous whereabouts were subject to newsworthy attempts on the lives of the several thousand gun-toting individuals by no less than five (this is correct. four were taken alive, one was more "collected" than anything, in that his parts were scattered by aircraft gunfire. "Got him!" and "Look at his head!" were among the comments shouted by the pilots over the real-time video and audio feed of the event.) I myself was laying on the floor of a plywood shack when a rocket screamed in and peppered us (the shack) with bits of rock and metal. Thank you plywood for being ever so slightly dense. It's not as bad as it sounds, but it is true.
So, I gladly moved on to ____, but the travel is noteworthy. The area over which I flew is entirely flat, save for the completely out-of-place rock formations that rise ridiculously high out of the expansive desert. These are rocky, craggy, surface of the moon mountains, and they are unlike anything I have ever seen. At times, they give one the feeling that the earth simply split open and its insides were ejected out and froze in time. Other times, the mountains resemble a sea of rough waves colliding and and frozen in the midst of their conflict. It is no wonder that a person could hide there, and it is of great wonder than anyone could survive there.
I am in a land of nothing. Illustrated pictures of a biblical nature (recall bible school growing up?) are the closest suggestion as to the lifestyle here. Everything is made of mud. Our presense draws a stark contrast. These people have not changed the way they live for hundreds of years. I think I saw a tractor from the air. Parallel tire tracks criss-cross the desert from somewhere to somewhere else, I couldnt see the origin or destination.
This is a strange part of the world and looking down on its absolute desolation makes me wonder why anyone was ever, or is at all concerned about trying to enact authority. It appears impossible.

Learning to fly

I've spent a moment each of the past ten days reluctantly unpacking the meticulously jammed contents of my three bags. To comprehend the annoyance of this: everything I required to survive for longer than four days was at the bottom of each of these three bags. Needless to say, my room has exploded into a vibrant and disorganized collage of camouflage. I wish I could call it artistic, but there is nothing to be appreciated in this wholly utilitarian collection of functional items, the sum of which makes the owner an efficient dealer of death.
So the recent development is that we are actually going. Now I have to pack those bags again.
How to translate the pain of this process.... total weight of bags: 200 pounds- which I have to carry. Cramming on a plane with 150 other people, each with their own baggage, for 25 hours total. Flying East, where the sun is going to rise twice inside of that 25 hour period.

So, tell me about your vacation.