Must. Happen. Now.

When I started this blog, it was my intention that I would update it 2-3 times a week with short-ish posts. Obviously, it's not turning out that way--it's more like how I normally write, which is a whole bunch all at once, with long periods of time where I'm too busy/don't have ideas/don't feel like it in between. So this will be not just a long-ish post, but a bona fide long post. Feel free to bookmark and come back to it over the course of the next couple of days, because if your free time has been anything like mine over the last week, you don't have time to read it right now.

Okay. So I figure I'll start with how a normal day goes. I wake up around 0600-0630 in an air-conditioned room. In fact, we keep it so cool in here at night that I've started wearing a thin long-sleeved fleece-type thing at night to keep me warm enough. I typically fall asleep at night listening to music, and then I leave the earphones in overnight to block out the sound of the air conditioners. Showers come at night, because I don't like feeling gross when I'm sleeping, so once I'm awake I use the head and do my hair. We're not required to carry our weapons when we're using the head, so I usually make the walk in shorts and flip-flops. My brain usually turns on at some point while I'm working on my hair, which is good, because otherwise the days would be pretty difficult.

Once I've completed morning hygiene I head to the chow hall. Several days out of the week I'm either dropping laundry off or picking it up. I don't do my own laundry here--there are TCNs (third country nationals) that do it--and we don't pay for it--but it is a bit of a walk to the laundry drop-off/pick-up point. I usually do this in conjunction with breakfast, because the two are somewhat co-located.

Well, it's co-located with one of the chow halls. There's a small chow hall on the way to work that I usually eat at, and then there are a couple other larger chow halls that we prefer for lunch because they are air-conditioned. Eating at the chow hall is a process. First you clear your weapon, then you wash your hands. Above the sinks they have posters exhorting you to take your malaria meds (I do) and pictures of people that have died from malaria--Ghenghis Khan, George Washington--are you next? I'm not. Then I pull out my ID card and scan it, and stand in line to get food. Like I said, the food here is pretty good.

I check my e-mail once I get to work--I have both classified and unclassified e-mail to check--and start work for the day. And here we get to the fun part.

When our unit came in, we performed what is called a relief in place/transfer of authority, or RIP/TOA (rip-toe-uh). We had two weeks in country before this happened to feel our way around the base, and then the official RIP/TOA happened last Monday. Our two weeks to start weren't all that busy, which was good since we were trying to get our feet underneath us. And then on Saturday evening, right around the time I was about to leave work, I got two projects dumped on my lap. I looked at them, talked to a couple of people, determined that they actually didn't have to be done NOW, as initially appeared to be the case, and left for the evening.

Then I came in the next morning. Again, the frantic: something must happen now! Give me a name! So I said, okay...here's your name. Now what's going on? And the answer was: . . --Let me find out. So, it turned out that instead of sending my guy on someone else's mission (additional to the ones I had been told about the night before) I was planning the mission. At that point I said, well if that's the case, it's not happening today. Eventually everything calmed down, and things were settled for the night. But not before the day was pretty much over.

Yeah, so that's the second Sunday I tried to "take off" and failed. About the same thing happened today, although I am taking the afternoon off.

But what that meant was that I got in Monday morning with three brand-new things to plan and execute on them. And they typically say on them that you have five days to plan. But plan I did. We had the hardest time getting a hold of a point of contact for one of the projects, but I eventually did talk to them. Turns out the people that had originally requested the project were no longer there, and the new people didn't know much about it. But they told me to go ahead with it, so I planned it and briefed it to the Colonel yesterday. He had some concerns, but we've addressed them, and we're scheduled to start tomorrow. This will be my first time leading a mission outside the wire. In case you think that sounds scary, it isn't. It's mostly boring. And this particular mission we're doing right underneath one of the guard towers. It will be boring.

One of our projects--the one that we found out about last Sunday morning--will be fun. There's a patrol base not far from here that we're going to go make some improvements to. I took two of my Sergeants down there on Thursday--my first time outside the wire--and we took a look around. We can do a lot for them to make them safer and improve their quality of life, so both I and the Marines are pretty excited about it. It will take a lot of planning and coordination, but we have a little more time to do it. They'll have some Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers in the base for training up until mid-June, so we'll start after the ANA has left.

Our last project to plan for is a project here on base. My Sergeant in charge of the project wanted to start Wednesday, which was presenting a problem, not only because we need to coordinate concrete trucks for it, but also because of the briefing requirements. We're required to brief the Battalion Commander 48 hours in advance of starting a project. Which means the S-3 (Operations Shop) has to look at it roughly the day before, which means my company staff has to look at it roughly the day before that. So all the planning for a project has to be complete a minimum of four days in advance. So it's Sunday, and my Sergeant wanted to start the project Wednesday...yeah, that's not four days. I spent a chunk of the morning finishing up the brief so it could get approved by the company staff and the S-3 today. However, we couldn't get the concrete coordinated, and I told him we weren't briefing the project before we had the concrete coordinated, so it's going to have to get pushed off a day or two until we get those details ironed out. But that's fine with me, because we'll still easily meet the deadline, and it means I don't have to discuss the brief this afternoon when I'm trying to (1) rest, and (2) prepare for my mission tomorrow.

They do have Episcopalian/Anglican services out here, so I've been making time on Sunday mornings to go. Both last week and this week as I've been reading the words to the liturgy, and thinking about them, it's struck me how different they seem here, even though they are the same words. Before, when I was in the states, I knew that they were the same words that had been used by Christians across the world for who knows how many years, but they were still just the words I read from the Book of Common Prayer every Sunday. Yeah, you substitute Form VI for Form II for the prayers of the people, and sometimes you do Rite I instead of Rite II, but when it comes down to it, it's the same.

I think it's the radically different environment that's prodding this thinking. I think back to St Luke's in Grants Pass, or All Saints in Pasadena. One's a tiny church on Oregon, the other a huge church in Los Angeles. But they were essentially the same environment. Cushioned pews. Stained glass. Men, women, and children in Sunday clothes. A choir in robes. An organ, with someone playing both before and after the service.

Today I was the only woman in the service. There were no children. There was one civilian, but everyone else was in uniform and carrying a weapon. There's a British Royal Marine that attends, and the civilian is a TCN. The priest was wearing a uniform under his robes, and the choir was a little box that played the organ for us. (We sang Holy, Holy, Holy today. It was nice.) The building was a tent, but still (fortunately) air-conditioned. The inside has some wood paneling with crosses on it--it's difficult to describe but actually a pretty nice environment for Afghanistan.

Today when I came in the priest asked if I could do one of the readings, and since I really enjoyed doing that back in Grants Pass I agreed. It was the second reading and from Romans 5, about suffering producing endurance, endurance character, and character hope. I'm going to need a lot of endurance to get through this deployment, so it was a nice passage to read. But it gives me some comfort, especially last week, to know that the people I know in Grants Pass and Los Angeles are reading and hearing this same passage, just a few hours behind.

Anyways. Back to the daily routine. Yesterday (Saturday) was not an uncommon day, when at 1900 my SSgt kicked me out of the office. We hit dinner on the way back to the barracks, and then parted ways. I'm working my way through Stargate SG-1, which makes for a nice little escape at night--that or some sudoku. I picked up a book of irregular sudoku puzzles at B&N right before I left and am loving them. Instead of standard 9x9 grids, they have puzzles with multiple grids, puzzles that include diagonals, puzzles that don't give you any numbers to start with but do give you sums of groups of numbers...much more fun than normal sudoku!

A note about facebook. E-mail is actually pretty easy to get to, and I can usually get to this blog in the mornings or at night. But facebook is just about impossible. So if you want to get a hold of me, then shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment. If you leave a comment on my FB page, I'm not going to see it. I think I'm going to try to get on once more to post a note with my address here in Afghanistan, but I make no guarantees, and after that I'm not going to even try.

If you have any questions for me about what it's like here or what I'm doing, feel free to (again) shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer within operational security concerns. Don't be surprised if the comments don't post right away, because I have to approve them first.

That Was Wind

Remember what I said about boring being good? Sunday night was anything but boring.

Before I continue: no Marines were killed, all injuries were minor. At no point was I or any of my Marines in danger. So, yeah, I didn’t take a shower for the one night (I could have, but my better judgment overruled me), and breakfast was an MRE the next morning, but I’ve had worse.

I left work late Sunday afternoon—it wasn’t my intention to be working Sunday afternoon, but things always come up, so I was working Sunday afternoon. As I left work, I saw smoke rising in the air just off to the northwest, probably a tenth of a mile away. It was thick, black smoke, and looked like someone had lit a pile of tires on fire.

By the time I’d walked a little closer to see what was going on, the fire had grown significantly. The fire had started in a supply lot, where a lot of boxes were stacked up close to each other, the wind was blowing hard, and it hadn’t rained since we’d gotten here. Marines were already on site directing traffic, and I could hear sirens as emergency vehicles came in from multiple directions. One civilian vehicle didn’t want to stop for the emergency vehicles, so a Marine shouted at it to stop and walked over angrily. It stopped.

I watched for a few minutes then headed back to the barracks. The wind was blowing the fire away from the main body of the camp, and my Marines were all at the barracks, at the other end of the camp. By the time arrived at the barracks, 10 minutes later, the flames were shooting up 50-100ft in the air and the cloud of smoke was huge.

The dust storm didn’t start for another 45 minutes or so. We had a small dust storm the first day I was here, the previous Sunday. Yeah, it wasn’t much fun—sand gets in your eyes, you want to stay inside. But as my SSgt puts it, that dust storm the week before was just wind. This was miserable. I was in the chow hall, a set of large tents. The sides of the tents started flapping, and the interior of the chow hall became dusty. As I headed out, two Marines came through the exit. I immediately saw why.

I couldn’t see more than five feet in front of me. I don’t know if the sun had set at that point, but it certainly appeared to have. I could see lights—headlights, flashlights of Marines seeking cover, but not much else. I knew where I was going—there was a wall and a fence that would channelize me as I headed back to the barracks. But I was walking into the wind, dust stinging my eyes every time I tried to look where I was going. I got about halfway there and heard a shout from one of the vehicles on the road asking if I wanted a ride. I took it, gladly.

They dropped me off at my barracks, where I picked up my goggles and neck gaiter. I checked with my platoon again; the power had been out in our barracks for a day and a half, so without A/C they were down to skivvy shorts, but happily watching Scrubs. The XO and I walked back down to the Battalion office to report that all the Marines were accounted for. We passed streams of Marines on the way heading away from the fire; there were a lot of billeting areas just across the street from the fire, so they had been evacuated. The Marines down at Battalion were watching the fire; it had started in the lot just across the street, so they had a good view. We were told the fire was approaching the fuel farm, which had the potential to make the situation much worse.

The XO asked around and found out that our reporting superior was up at the barracks. We walked back up there and reported in, then went back to our own rooms. Fortunately by this time the dust storm had settled down, so I took my goggles and neck gaiter off. I hung out with some of the other officers for an hour or so before I decided there was nothing more for me to do. We saw five large explosions and thought it was our fuel, but found out later they were oxygen tanks.

They shut down some of the camp services—there was no water or electricity in the heads the next morning, and the chow halls were handing out MREs for breakfast. We hadn’t lost any of our food or water (or at least not a significant amount), but the trucks that normally carry potable water had been used to fight the fire and had to be disinfected before they could take water to the chow halls again. They opened the fast food line for lunch—the daily special for lunch was flame broiled burgers and hot dogs, complete with a cool drawing on the whiteboard outside the chow hall. They closed down laundry for a day but re-opened it; turn-around time for drop-off laundry is normally 24 hours but they’re up at 48 hours right now.

Life goes on, returning to that uneventful routine. Sunday before all this happened, I headed down to the bazaar on Camp Leatherneck and picked up the entire Stargate SG-1 series to keep me entertained while I’m here. It’s got a second audio track—I can’t recognize the language but I did recognize the word ‘Abu’—but the quality is fairly good. I’ll see how long it lasts; maybe I’ll need to head back down and pick up Stargate Atlantis as well. :-)

Hot and Dusty

Hot and dusty. That pretty much fits the definition of Afghanistan.

We've been here for a week now; this is only the second time I've managed to jump on the internet. I've submitted a request to get my personal laptop hooked up to the wifi on base; until then it's touch-and-go.

Afghanistan might sound like an exotic place, but it's really not. I haven't seen a plant up close since we got here. It's regularly around 100 degrees in the afternoon. They water the streets every hour or two, but there's still a lot of dust kicked up all the time. In the afternoons, the wind starts blowing and blows a lot of dust around. Last Sunday, my first full day on base, we had an actual dust storm blow through. It was pretty cool--you can actually see the dust moving like a wall across the base. It's not a whole lot of fun to be in, though.

Other than the environment, things here are unremarkable. We have three projects scheduled, all construction. I was supposed to head out to a different FOB (forward operating base) to do a site survey for one of them today, but the flight got cancelled, so I'm not sure when we will go.

I was very surprised at the quality of the chow here on base. There's always a nice selection of fresh vegetables, and the entrees don't seem to be the same ones I would eat at the chow halls back in the US.

The main body just arrived a couple of days ago, I'm living in a room with seven other women, all Staff NCOs and officers. We have running water for showers, and there's an outlet in my room to plug my computer in.

Really, being here is a lot like working in the states, except we walk about 3/4 of a mile to work every day, and the afore-mentioned dust and heat.

Quick Update From Germany

A quick update on what´s going on. Around 9:30 Tuesday morning we were informed that our flight was leaving on Thursday evening, not some time between Friday and Monday as we had originally been informed. What resulted was a mad scramble to accomplish all of the tasks that we had originally thought we had two extra days for. Unfortunately, we had to cancel our family day that was scheduled for Thursday, but we managed to get all of the important things done.

I´m in Germany right now, our last lay-over before our flight is over. We´re not flying directly to Afghanistan, but an airbase nearby where we will wait for transport into the country.

It´s been a long time coming, but I am excited to finally be on my way! I will post as often as possible.