Dogs can grow beards all over

Finally found the time and resources to do an actual post here and I actually am not entirely sure what I'm going to write about. I could write about Afghanistan but at this point it seems kind of redundant, there really isn't much new I can say here. I went out on my first mission last night and it was uneventful to say the least. Not that I'm complaining; I'd rather be bored and have everyone come back home in one piece. We went out and set up a traffic control point and searched civilian vehicles that came down our road. I really can't go into too much detail about our mission but if you watch the news I'm sure you can gather who/what we're looking for out here.

The other day I had to exchange my SIM card on my hadji phone out here for some reason or another and the Afghani running the store thought it would be a good idea to either re-sell my old SIM or use it himself to make calls to the numbers that were still in my phone book. A couple nights ago my mom got a call from that number and recognized it as mine but there was an Afghani on the other end of the line instead of me. He ended up calling her several times and after a bit my mom began to worry that I had been captured by the Taliban. Long story short, she ended up getting a hold of me and telling me about the phone calls. Needless to say, I was pissed off to no end. Something you need to know about me: I'm really easy to anger and that day was no exception. My supervisor grabbed me as I was heading out the door with a loaded weapon and explained to me that I needed to take the issue to the 1st sergeant and our intel officer and do things the right way.

The situation is handled now but I'm still angry about it. My family worries enough about me without some random Afghani making calls to them and scaring them half to death.

Other than that day-to-day life is pretty mundane. I've made a game out of pissing off army NCO's because they tend to get their panties in a bunch over really stupid stuff. I got cussed out by one the other day for doing my job. I know sometimes I can rub people the wrong way and come off sarcastic or maybe just "less than sincere" but this was NOT one of those times (until he pissed me off). The guys honestly said to me: "Do you know who the f- I am?" like he was some kind of badass. The guy was an army staff sergeant, the equivalent of a rat turd compared to who I'm used to working with. I honestly did everything I could to make him understand that I was just trying to do my job but he apparently didn't like my attitude when he told me only an S6 (Comm guy) could work on a military computer and I told him I was an S6. Ok so I might have sneered and looked at him like he was retarded but honestly, when you see a dorky looking guy like me carrying around a notebook that says CLASSIFIED on it while working with computers, wouldn't you assume that he's the tech guy? Aparently he thought that I shouldn't be in his area and sent me back to "whoever [I] report to."

So I calmly informed him that I would be sending someone of higher rank over to take care of his problem and to have a nice day. Well... actually I think I might have muttered something to the effect of 'go f- yourself' under my breath instead of 'have a nice day' but it's a little hazy and I'm not sure of all the details.

I guess my supervisor went over there and kindly informed the army staff sergeant that I was S6 and could go anywhere I damn-well pleased and if he got in the way of my work again that he wasn't getting his comms set up and would have to tell his commander why he couldn't do any of his work. See, that's how a supervisor takes care of his airmen. Granted I was also informed that I needed to keep my attitude in check, even when dealing with incompetants and morons but that's ok. I can take a lecture when I deserve one and I did.

Some old posts

This is some stuff I wrote while I didn't have internet connection. It's not too out of date so I'll throw it up here and try to do a fresh one tomorrow.

Par for the course
30 June 2009 @ 16:18 Kabul local

So, first impression of Afghanistan: Dusty. We landed in the middle of a mild sand storm and I’m still trying to fish the grit out of my eyes. From what I could tell there are some mountains not too far off. I know they’re not too far off because I could see their silhouette in the dust storm. Everything here is brown by the way, which is really depressing. God could have made the desert an interesting color like orange or blue or yellow. This isn’t even an attractive shade of brown. It’s like you ate a cheeseburger, threw it up on tan carpet, and then let it sit there for two months and set. Not fun.

We got off the plane and immediately to a briefing that was one of the biggest wastes of time in my life. I’m glad our Army counterparts were still in Manass because if they had come on the same flight as us and had the same briefing we would have never heard the end of it. The air force guy that gave the briefing had a stutter or speech impediment of some kind and took about 15 minutes to get through a one-page brief. After that we off-loaded our bags and caught a bus over to our tents, which took about an hour. Traffic here on Bagram is a little bit like Main Street in Calcutta during a soccer riot. I’m pretty sure we ran over 3 people just trying to get out of the parking lot.

So now we play the waiting game once again. We’re clear across base from anything relevant and our chain of command has no idea what’s going on when. We’re supposed to be told where we need to be when in about an hour and a half but I doubt that that is even going to happen. It’ll probably just be our commander saying “Stand fast, we still have no idea what’s going on. Be patient with the system here and embrace the suck.” I’d be surprised if it wasn’t par for the course.

July 5, 2009
Finally made it to Gardez. Our commander put us on a plane to Salerno, a FOB on the Pakistan border to try and get a flight to Gardez on space available. It took us 5 days to make it here but we did it. Over the course of that time we were rocketed twice which was an experience. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, but they did mess up one of the buildings on the FOB.

Gardez is pretty cool. It’s small and there’s pretty much nothing here but the scenery is gorgeous. Maybe it’s because I have a place to lay my head for the first time in over a week and my own personal room for the first time in 3 months but I think I might actually like it here. I’ll probably change my tone after living here cut off from the civilized world for a couple of months but right now I’m not too disappointed. I’ll have some cool pictures to upload to my facebook soon so you all can see where I’m living and what it looks like.

But I’ve been awake for over 36 hours straight right now and I can feel my eyelids beginning to droop so I’m going to crash for the night, that is until somebody feels like they need to come wake me up for some reason or another.

Hell and High water.

I was originally going to post a response to one of the comments I received but after a few days of having fun with my wife and my friends I decided I'm just not in the mood to deal with the idiots that clog the pipes online. I leave tomorrow to go wait for my plane to depart sometime in the next week or so. I'm not going to see anyone I care about for the better part of a year and it makes me sick to my stomach to think about. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little bit scared. I'll probably be fine but everyone my age has a feeling of immortality about them. Tragedies always happen to someone else.

But honestly, that's the last of my worries. The hardest part about doing this isn't my own mortality staring me in the face. If I was afraid of dying I would have taken the easy way out and claimed that I was suicidal or depressed or something less legit that would have gotten me disqualified. I know I wrote about wanting to get sent home when I first got to Camp Atterbury but I wasn't feeling well before I got on my medication and just wanted to be home where I could fix the problem and go on with my life. I still don't want to go over but I feel physically better and know that I can complete the mission without being a liability to anyone else.

The hardest part about doing this is leaving my wife behind, leaving my friends and family behind, and leaving unfinished all of the things that I want to accomplish with my life at the moment. It feels like writing a big paper for school, one that you feel adamant about and is very important for your grade, and then the power going out for the foreseeable future. Sure, you'll be able to get back to it as soon as the power comes back and your instructor will understand when you see him next but it doesn't make you feel any better about it at the same time. Now that I'm home I have a better picture of what I want to do but it has to wait. The interests of the United States are waiting on me to get over and do my mission.

However, if I took all of that out of the equation, I'm actually a little excited to get over there and do some good for whatever it's worth to the people of Afghanistan. I know there will be good times ahead and it won't be all doom and gloom. There's dangers ahead of me that most of you that read this won't ever see in your life but in the grand scheme of things many Americans face death on a day-to-day basis and don't even know it. How many times have you been driving down the freeway and merged into the other lane and not seen the car there, almost hitting it while doing 70 miles per hour? You don't think twice about getting in the car again after that, even though you just escaped almost certain death. It will be the same with me. People willingly put themselves in danger on a day to day basis without knowing it. I know I'm probably downplaying what I'll be facing but hey, it helps me sleep at night.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a chance that I might not come back from this but there's a chance that I might not come back from the grocery store too.

I'm not the most religious of people. If there is a god then I think he's probably sitting back and watching the show. How else could he let things like what's going on in the middle east and North Korea happen? Mankind will destroy itself and it's quite possible that it could happen in my lifetime. What god would create life and then give it the power to destroy itself? But if you are religious, which I respect, then pray for me. Pray for everyone that's going with me. The unit that we are relieving lost 2 people last year. 2 out of 80 is a small percentage but that is 50% of somebody's marriage and 25% of somebody's immediate family and those are way bigger numbers. I have a good team and I want every one of them to come back to their friends and families. So pray for them.

So if you will excuse me, I'm going to lay down with my wife and do my best to express how much I love her and how much I will miss her in the 9 months to come. I'm not the best at expressing my feelings, mainly because I'm a man and I wasn't gifted with a woman's ability to do so but I hope that she knows how much she means to me and that I will go through Hell and high water to come back and see her again.

Changes Come

All the names, call signs, and unit names are completely made-up to protect the individuals involved and maintain security of possibly sensitive military information.

-Thursday, June 11, 2009

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any dumber; that the level of retardation here at Camp Atterbury had reached its breaking point, 1st Army and the other groups here managed to stretch the barrier just a little bit further and claim a new, previously unchartered, realm of stupidity in the name of military training.
First off, I have to say that I’ve considered the Navy as a whole to be a pretty decent branch. Yeah, they’re all sea-faring raging homosexuals but they generally seem to be equipped with a few more chromosomes than the army. It’s not the case here. The Navy teams (there are two of them here) have single-handedly managed to jack-up almost every bit of training that we’ve done with them. It took them 7 hours to sight in their rifles when we first got here. They managed to break some of the training equipment we were supposed to use so we had to reschedule for another day. The icing on the cake happened two nights ago while I was on night shift:

“Lancer main, this is Navy1. Over”
“Go ahead Navy1.”
“Umm… yeah, we were calling to see if you were hot-micing, over” (Hot micing in the radio world means that someone has the push to talk button pressed down so nobody else can communicate over the net.)
“Say again, over?”
“yeah, we were calling to see if you were hot-micing, over.”
“Well, seeing as I’m talking to you right now I’m pretty sure there isn’t a hot mic. Over.”
“Ok, well we were having trouble getting a hold of anyone and we thought that maybe our antenna was causing a hot mic, over.”
-Now, I will tell you that there is no possible way an antenna could cause a hot mic at all. Even if you have ZERO radio or comm experience you know that there is no way an antenna, responsible for transmitting and receiving signal, can cause a jam over the entire frequency.
“Yeah, there is no hot mic. Lancer main out.”
Earlier this morning I was outside my command post smoking when a Navy female said “Did anything happen last night?” (I’m on night shifts for a while) “I didn’t hear anything after 10pm.”

Me: “Uh… yeah. A few things happened. Do you want me to take a look at your radio?” Come to find out she didn’t make the 10 o’clock radio freq change and it was a simple correction. After I corrected the problem she says to me “Maybe they shouldn’t have put a cook in here to manage the radios all by herself.” Umm yeah, just maybe.

Today we got word that we are supposed to man an entry control point (ECP). That would be cool but we also have two missions to do over the course of the day and only have 6 personnel left over. So we have to figure out how we’re going to cover a 4-man position for 24 hours with only 6 people.
I watched a guy, totally sober, take a piss in public on a military installation.
One of the teams decided to close up shop halfway through the night and just go home. It took Brigade 2.5 hours to figure out that they had just left. Well, actually it took the 2 hours to get off their collective asses and send a runner over to their trailer to figure out why they weren’t answering the radio.

Did you know:

In Navy dorms/command centers where there is an ECP, you have to salute the colors, salute the officer “on deck,” and ask for permission to “come aboard,” even if you are nowhere near a boat?

On army posts the reflective belt is worn as a sash and not as a belt?
You only need 3 hours of training prior to instructing a full team of soldiers and airman for a week on a military tracking system?

Update 12 June 2009:

So last night I was manning the radio and one of the groups out in the field called in to brigade to have an ambulance come pick up one of their soldiers because he was bitten by a spider and was having a reaction. I’ve spent quite some time trying to determine which surprises me more: the fact that it took brigade one and a half hours to react and get somebody out there (roughly 2 miles away from the main post) or the fact that the cavalry unit that was out there waited an hour and a half for them to come. They would have had 20 minutes before I said “screw it” and called a van or something from the barracks to come get him and take him to the hospital.
I’ve noticed that I’m starting to reach my breaking point already. I’m snapping at people I shouldn’t snap at. I’m getting upset over stupid things, and I’m smoking WAY more that I usually do. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of sleep from having to work nights and people being loud during the day or if the constant barrage of idiocy has eroded down my composure. Either way, I’m afraid the wrong person is going to set me off and I’m going to react in a less than favorable way and get myself into trouble. It’s easy for someone to say “Dude, you just need to calm down and unwind” but there’s no time for that.
(*Just heard my commander say something that pretty much sums up this training: “It’s like watching old people die over there” in reference to the Brigade trying to conduct a training mission.)
I can already tell I’m not the same person I was when I left 3 months ago. I’m kind of afraid that I’m going to go back to my friends and family next week and they’re going to wonder who the hell I am. I guess that’s probably on everyone’s mind that leaves for an extended period of time but I never really thought it would happen to me. I’m not changed so drastically that I’m a completely new person but it’s a lot of small things. I have less tolerance for certain personality traits that I would otherwise ignore. My spectrum of emotions is Angry, Sad, Happy, or apathetic. I feel almost manic-depressive. When I find that I can muster up the energy to care about something it has to be at one extreme or another, else I tune it out.
There’s a lot of things I miss about not being here but it’s hard to define one I miss the most at any given moment. Sometimes I’ll be sitting outside and night and miss going on walks and discussing sports and movies and women with Andrew. Other times I just miss the freedom to go where I want when I want, even though most of the time when I was at home I just stayed at home as opposed to going out. I think I’ll be able to determine what thing I’ve missed the most one I go home on leave. On second thought, after typing that out, I just miss home.

News

So I think the Army's retardation is infesting the minds of the senior leadership within my little Air Force group here. I was told the other day that I'm no longer going to be doing my job overseas (which would have been Comm, for those who don't know). Instead, I'm going to be a Civil Engineer which, in the grand scheme of my mission, means that I'm going to be a building inspector. I'm going to be hiring Afghani contractors to build roads, clinics, schools, and general improvement projects and then inspecting them to make sure they're doing their job correctly.

But DJ, what do you know about construction? I'm glad you asked. Nothing whatsoever. I mean, I've worked with my grandpa a little bit when he was building houses but nothing terribly extravagant. (*side note: they're playing German metal here at the all ranks club on post. Very annoying*) So what it essentially boils down to is that the military is more concerned with having a body in a position than someone with actual knowledge in the job that they will be doing. I really feel sorry for whoever is going to have to utilize these buildings because they are going to be all sorts of jacked-up.

Other than that I have a grand total of 10 days left in this hell hole. It's going to be refreshing not being angrily woken up by my first sergeant every morning. It'll be nice to be able to drive somewhere, anywhere, whenever I want. A few of my buddies are coming down from Michigan and we're going to party like rock stars. I think Carrie and I are planning on staying at a casino one night and going to Six Flags for a day as well. I can't freaking wait.

Never go full retard...

It amazes me that they actually give people live ammunition after making them endure a month and a half of their training. I really wish I could break it down for you in greater detail but there is just so much to cover that I'm not entirely sure I could do it justice in the short amount of time that I have to write this today. I guess I'll just try to touch on the key points.

First and foremost I hate the fact that we literally spend the entire day sitting around and whatever training location we happen to be at for 20-30 minutes of training. The most prominent one that stands out in my mind was our Gunnery training. They had us convoy out into the middle of nowhere on base and stay in what appeared to be a refugee camp for 2 days to drive a course with our heavy weapons mounted for a grand total of 1.5 training hours. I really wish I was exaggerating here but I counted.

Secondly these "instructors" have really told us some StUpId things. Two days ago we were at a location on post and they were giving us a safety briefing. Part of the safety briefing consisted of what to do in case of a tornado. That's fair, let's see what they have to say. These morons actually pointed to a 4 foot steel cylinder set into the ground and told us to take cover in there if a tornado hits. Haha, right. You guys go into that vacuum wind tunnel and I'm going to go ahead and lay face down in that ditch over there and take my chances.

We've been scheduled classes that end at midnight one night and another class that starts at 4:30 the next morning. We've been double-booked for training. We've showed up for training and they didn't have the key to the building we were supposed to be in so we had to wait for an hour and a half before we could even get in. At one point we were banned from playing organized sports because people were getting hurt, yet they had no problem putting us in a Hum-V rollover sim and having that beat the hell out of us.

My favorite so far was when we got told the gunner has to get confirmation and permission to return fire from the truck commander (the person who sits shotgun in the hum-v, usually a senior NCO or officer), even if we are getting hit from the 6 o-clock and it is humanly impossible for the TC to see where we are taking fire from. Screw this training, if we are getting hit my gunner sure as hell better be sending lead down range. I know we're there to win hearts and minds but if we're being shot put two in the heart and one in the mind. End of story.

I really wish I could give you an up-side to the training that we're getting here but I'm getting a headache just trying to think of something positive. I get to go home on leave 3 weeks from today and thank God for it. This really isn't my usual bitching either. This has surpassed stupid and gone full-blown retard and you never go full retard.

Oh Boy

Where to start?

I'm a week into Army PRT training and have been trying to survive that long without constant internet connection. Life is rough, let me tell you.

We wake up at the ass-crack of dawn every morning, sometimes we PT, sometimes we don't. Lately we've been in "hury up and wait" mode which essentially means we rush to be somewhere on time only to find out that there's 3 groups in front of us that we have to wait on. We literally spent 5 hours the other day sitting out in the sun doing nothing because they had garbage equipment that kept breaking for the group in front of us so we couldn't go.

I went to the hospital the other day.

I get bad migraine headaches; I've had them for as long as I can remember. It's just the way it's been. The other day (I can't remember which one exactly, they run together out here) I had the worst one of my life. I was shaking and hyperventilating because I was in so much pain so they called emergency and I got my first ambulance ride.

I saw an ER doctor and he recommended a medical evaluation board to determine my deployable status. Tomorrow I go see a neurologist and he may or may not start that process. Basically, I might be coming home.

Here's the thing: I don't want to leave my team hanging. I'm one of four comm. guys on this particular team. I've already started my training, I'm here, let's do it. I also don't want to have another episode like what I had in the middle of BFE Afghanistan where I'll be. But more importantly: DAMN I want to go home. I miss my wife, I miss my friends, I miss my dog, I miss the Thai restaurant down the road, and I miss not being here. I already have my hopes up and I'm going to try my best to get the doctor to send me home and the hell out of here. I don't care about the consequences, I don't care about anything else, I want to go home to my wife and my NORMAL job.

I don't know what I'll do if they tell me I can't go home.