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 It's not too out of date so I'll throw it up here and try to do a fresh one tomorrow.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.