Reveille was at 0400. I slept in the turret the night before, alternately folding my feet under my legs and draping them out the front; metal screws poked into my back if I shifted wrong. No pillow, no pajamas, just take your boots off and go to sleep. Not the best sleep I’ve ever had, so when reveille sounded, I didn’t mind too much. When I woke up it was difficult to see; fifteen minutes later I could easily see the vehicles on the outside of the perimeter.
We did a brief for the personnel heading down to the river and left around 0500. By the time we got to the first site, the sun was up over the horizon, and the local population was up and moving around. We drove into town with our MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) and 7-ton vehicles; the security team pushed out to provide overwatch while the mineroller swept the approach to the river. A few minutes later, the overall mission commander informed me that the site was ready, and that we could dismount and perform our reconnaissance at the first site.
The river was a lot cleaner than we were expecting. When we briefed the mission, our CO and the Colonel above him that we briefed were very concerned about the Marines going in the water, worried about what diseases they would contract by going in the water. We got there, and it was just like looking at a river back in Oregon—cleaner, even. The rocks were growing algae and there was no trash on the river bank. The Marines waded in.
Immediately to the right of the approach were some cliffs overlooking the river. As the Marines waded around in the water, the local nationals gathered on the cliffs to watch. It was mostly men and children; I don’t remember seeing any women in the village. They were all dressed in traditional Afghan garb—long robes with trousers underneath and thick turbans swathed on their heads. The men all had bushy beards; some of the children had smaller caps on. They had no chairs but squatted comfortably as they watched us, sitting back on their heels. I don’t know how they do it—I know my legs would go numb if I tried for longer than a few seconds.
We completed our reconnaissance at the first site and made our way up to the second site. It looked much like the first with cliffs on either side of the approach to the water, except the closest compounds were a few hundred meters to the south. I did actually see a couple of women at this site, albeit from a distance. They are easy to recognize because they have veils instead of turbans and their clothes are more brightly colored. The veils I saw did not appear to resemble the heavy burqas I’ve seen in pictures that Saudi women are forced to wear; they were the same color as the women’s clothes. We also saw a flock of goats grazing near the base of the cliffs on the river.
The third site was the same—cool, clean water with few local nationals around. By mid-morning, the air was getting hot, so the cool air coming off the river felt nice. I did see one gentleman a few hundred meters north of the site. The overall mission commander had a translator speak with him, and learned that he was waiting for a ferry to take him to the other side of the river so he could go to the market.
It’s been pretty hot here lately. The past couple of days have been in the mid-110s during the day time, and no lower than low-80s at night. We’re all looking forward to September, when it should start cooling off around here.
Thanks for all the comments and e-mails! I always love hearing from everyone back at home. I’ve adjusted to life here, and don’t miss the states quite as much, but it’s still very stressful out here, and hearing from you makes my day that much brighter.
18 July 2010
15 July 2010
Welcome, Judah!
So, the big news of this week (as I’m sure you all know by now) is that Amy had her baby, and I am now a proud Aunt! I now have a picture of Judah posted by my desk here in my office, and my screensaver scrolls through what pictures I have of him. I wish I could be in Oregon right now, but I am getting by with pictures.
Probably the largest sacrifice that Marines (or anyone in the armed forces) makes is their time with their families. (The second-largest one is sleep…but sleep can be caught up on. At least in my job.) I know several Marines that are on their fifth deployment, each spanning at least 7 months. These Marines have spent more time away from their families than with their families in the past few years. One of my Marines’ wives will give birth to their first child while we are here, and I know there are more in our Battalion in that situation. Some Marines receive “Dear John” letters from their girlfriends (I hated that movie), others will come home to find their spouses have left them for someone else. (Very sad, but I personally know Marines this has happened to.) The old joke that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife it would issue one is just that—a joke—but there is that nugget of truth hidden in it. The Marine Corps is very hard on families and relationships.
Depressed enough yet? Makes my whining about not being there for the first days of my nephew seem paltry. Overall I’m doing well, though. I’ve gotten plenty of pictures e-mailed, just got a letter in the mail, and am anticipating a couple of packages in the next few days.
Our pace has slowed down slightly since the first month and a half that we were here, but we still have missions here and there. Last weekend the news of the weekend was the river reconnaissance we did. I took a couple of Marines that are familiar with military bridging (from a different platoon in my company), and we went to a few locations on the Helmand River to determine suitability for bridging. The river was actually fairly nice, if fairly and fast-flowing. Before we went out there we were worried about how clean it would be, but it looked as clean (possibly cleaner) than any river in the US. And certainly cleaner than some of the beaches in LA.
Once I got back, I got to sit down and fill out all of the river and ford reconnaissance forms, and put together a brief for the unit that requested the recon. It was actually kind of fun, once I got started, figuring out the way to best brief it. Most of the briefs I do follow a pretty standard format and are designed to brief what will happen, not what has happened. This was just different enough to be fun, and by the time I delivered the brief I had gotten comfortable enough with the people I was briefing so as not to be nervous.
A logistics officer recently mentioned to me his observation that engineer school seemed to prepare its students well for briefing. I would have to agree; we did at least four formal briefs, and a couple of other informal briefs. When I got here, I actually went back to some of those briefs I did at school to figure out how best to brief my actual missions.
I hope that’s a random enough collection of thoughts for tonight. I do actually think about posting more often, but nothing I do seems interesting enough to talk about. And I can never say much about the things that are interesting.
Until next time.
Probably the largest sacrifice that Marines (or anyone in the armed forces) makes is their time with their families. (The second-largest one is sleep…but sleep can be caught up on. At least in my job.) I know several Marines that are on their fifth deployment, each spanning at least 7 months. These Marines have spent more time away from their families than with their families in the past few years. One of my Marines’ wives will give birth to their first child while we are here, and I know there are more in our Battalion in that situation. Some Marines receive “Dear John” letters from their girlfriends (I hated that movie), others will come home to find their spouses have left them for someone else. (Very sad, but I personally know Marines this has happened to.) The old joke that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife it would issue one is just that—a joke—but there is that nugget of truth hidden in it. The Marine Corps is very hard on families and relationships.
Depressed enough yet? Makes my whining about not being there for the first days of my nephew seem paltry. Overall I’m doing well, though. I’ve gotten plenty of pictures e-mailed, just got a letter in the mail, and am anticipating a couple of packages in the next few days.
Our pace has slowed down slightly since the first month and a half that we were here, but we still have missions here and there. Last weekend the news of the weekend was the river reconnaissance we did. I took a couple of Marines that are familiar with military bridging (from a different platoon in my company), and we went to a few locations on the Helmand River to determine suitability for bridging. The river was actually fairly nice, if fairly and fast-flowing. Before we went out there we were worried about how clean it would be, but it looked as clean (possibly cleaner) than any river in the US. And certainly cleaner than some of the beaches in LA.
Once I got back, I got to sit down and fill out all of the river and ford reconnaissance forms, and put together a brief for the unit that requested the recon. It was actually kind of fun, once I got started, figuring out the way to best brief it. Most of the briefs I do follow a pretty standard format and are designed to brief what will happen, not what has happened. This was just different enough to be fun, and by the time I delivered the brief I had gotten comfortable enough with the people I was briefing so as not to be nervous.
A logistics officer recently mentioned to me his observation that engineer school seemed to prepare its students well for briefing. I would have to agree; we did at least four formal briefs, and a couple of other informal briefs. When I got here, I actually went back to some of those briefs I did at school to figure out how best to brief my actual missions.
I hope that’s a random enough collection of thoughts for tonight. I do actually think about posting more often, but nothing I do seems interesting enough to talk about. And I can never say much about the things that are interesting.
Until next time.
25 June 2010
Never Been Average
The Chaplain shows movies on Friday night. Last week it was Clash of the Titans, which I saw while I was at Pendleton. I wasn’t too impressed, so I didn’t go. Today’s showing was Prince of Persia, which I went to. As I walked back from chow to the tent where the movie was being shown, I suddenly recalled scenes from M*A*S*H, where the characters sat on wooden benches, and threw popcorn at Klinger when the movies stopped rolling. I wondered if I would be sitting on a wooden bench--the chapel that Sunday services are in has wooden benches much like them. I was almost disappointed when I got there and found out I would be sitting on a metal chair. But not too disappointed, because it meant I got to sit on something with back support.
Prelude. I remember at one point, not all that long ago, sitting in a briefing evaluating the performance of a unit where a commanding officer was being told that his Marines were average. When the brief was over, he was angry. “Never in my life have I been average,” he snapped.
I promise this post will make sense at some point.
I had a project earlier today where some work my Marines completed was being inspected for completion. The inspector pointed out details that had been overlooked--nails that had gone through the plywood but not the stud behind it. Nails that had been done with a nail gun and not gone into the wood entirely, and then not been finished off with a regular hammer. I realized that I was good at holding myself to a standard of excellence, but actually fairly bad about holding my subordinates to a standard of excellence.
I’m too worried about being the bad guy, about whether they’ll work for me willingly or grudgingly if I come down on them to hard. About whether I have the stamina and endurance to stick around long after I want to because I am holding Marines to a high standard and they have not completed their task yet. But if I don’t do this, I am setting myself up for a career of having my Marines be just average.
I know some of my Sergeants are holding my Marines to a standard of excellence. A civilian inspector recently came to look at a different project some of my Marines had done, and told our Battalion Sergeant Major that the work was better quality than some Seebee projects he had seen. This was quite high praise. But obviously, I have problems in other areas.
Military commanders aren’t judged on what they accomplish. Their actions might be examined for strengths and flaws, as Gen McChrystal is learning right now, but their successes and failures lie in what their subordinates do or fail to do.
Earlier in the month I took some Marines out to a project site to drop them off. We had enough logistics vehicles that we went in two separate convoys, with me in charge of the second one. As I drove up to the entry control point (ECP) for the patrol base, I heard over the radio that a corpsman was needed at the ECP. I hopped out to find a Marine standing with his weight on his right leg; some heavy equipment had dropped onto his foot. (He broke some toes and suffered some pain, but will be fine. He didn’t get sent home.)
A couple hours later I fielded a stern call from our Battalion Commanding Officer, informing me that I was not their friend, and that I had better hold the Marines to a standard. That was something that my Staff Platoon Commander at The Basic School pounded into my head--if I didn’t hold to the standard that was established already, I was setting a new standard.
So, I think one of the biggest things I need to focus on now is holding my Marines to a high standard, and not worrying about whether they’ll like me or not. Not gonna be easy to do.
See? I told you it would all make sense in the end. Except for Prince of Persia. That was random. :-)
Prelude. I remember at one point, not all that long ago, sitting in a briefing evaluating the performance of a unit where a commanding officer was being told that his Marines were average. When the brief was over, he was angry. “Never in my life have I been average,” he snapped.
I promise this post will make sense at some point.
I had a project earlier today where some work my Marines completed was being inspected for completion. The inspector pointed out details that had been overlooked--nails that had gone through the plywood but not the stud behind it. Nails that had been done with a nail gun and not gone into the wood entirely, and then not been finished off with a regular hammer. I realized that I was good at holding myself to a standard of excellence, but actually fairly bad about holding my subordinates to a standard of excellence.
I’m too worried about being the bad guy, about whether they’ll work for me willingly or grudgingly if I come down on them to hard. About whether I have the stamina and endurance to stick around long after I want to because I am holding Marines to a high standard and they have not completed their task yet. But if I don’t do this, I am setting myself up for a career of having my Marines be just average.
I know some of my Sergeants are holding my Marines to a standard of excellence. A civilian inspector recently came to look at a different project some of my Marines had done, and told our Battalion Sergeant Major that the work was better quality than some Seebee projects he had seen. This was quite high praise. But obviously, I have problems in other areas.
Military commanders aren’t judged on what they accomplish. Their actions might be examined for strengths and flaws, as Gen McChrystal is learning right now, but their successes and failures lie in what their subordinates do or fail to do.
Earlier in the month I took some Marines out to a project site to drop them off. We had enough logistics vehicles that we went in two separate convoys, with me in charge of the second one. As I drove up to the entry control point (ECP) for the patrol base, I heard over the radio that a corpsman was needed at the ECP. I hopped out to find a Marine standing with his weight on his right leg; some heavy equipment had dropped onto his foot. (He broke some toes and suffered some pain, but will be fine. He didn’t get sent home.)
A couple hours later I fielded a stern call from our Battalion Commanding Officer, informing me that I was not their friend, and that I had better hold the Marines to a standard. That was something that my Staff Platoon Commander at The Basic School pounded into my head--if I didn’t hold to the standard that was established already, I was setting a new standard.
So, I think one of the biggest things I need to focus on now is holding my Marines to a high standard, and not worrying about whether they’ll like me or not. Not gonna be easy to do.
See? I told you it would all make sense in the end. Except for Prince of Persia. That was random. :-)
17 June 2010
Groundhog Day
Yes, I have reached that point in the deployment, where every day feels like groundhog day. Get up, go to work, stuff happens. Problems are solved, go to chow. Do it again in the afternoon. Go back to the barracks, watch some Stargate, take a navy shower (whereby you turn the water off every time you apply soap), go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Actually, today has been going pretty well, which means that I’m waiting for the ball to drop. A few of days ago I dropped about half of my platoon, a bunch of lumber and materials, and a couple pieces of HE off at a small patrol base to work for a couple of weeks. Getting them out the door left me exhausted, and of course I didn’t drink enough water the day of (insert obligatory Gen Petraeus joke here), so I spent Wednesday trying to re-hydrate and feeling like crap while doing so.
I did get some good news the next day afternoon. My platoon has been so busy that I was running out of Marines to cover all of the projects we have going right now. For example, yesterday after evening chow (which I ate around 1945) I stopped by a work site to see how they were doing. They only had four Marines working on the project (they were waiting for two more to show up) and didn't have any power tools, so I stayed and helped them out for a while. So the good news is that we’re getting reinforcements from the rest of the company. Now I’ll actually have Marines around to take care of all the little tasks that come up during the day.
Another bright spot to the past few days has been the world cup games going on. They start 1830 our time, which means for a couple nights this week I’ve sat down to chow right around the 60-70 minute mark, with the game running on the flat screens in the chow hall. There have been a lot of TCNs watching the games lately as well; last night I sat next to two gentlemen waiting for the Uruguay game to show at 2330. So it’s a fun atmosphere in the chow hall in the evening. Wednesday’s game was Spain vs. Switzerland and a well-played, exciting game to watch.
I want to thank everyone that has been sending me letters and e-mails. Letters especially put a huge smile on my face, and I try to answer them when I can. I will also try to post more, but when days start at 0600 and go to 2130, it's difficult to find the time.
Actually, today has been going pretty well, which means that I’m waiting for the ball to drop. A few of days ago I dropped about half of my platoon, a bunch of lumber and materials, and a couple pieces of HE off at a small patrol base to work for a couple of weeks. Getting them out the door left me exhausted, and of course I didn’t drink enough water the day of (insert obligatory Gen Petraeus joke here), so I spent Wednesday trying to re-hydrate and feeling like crap while doing so.
I did get some good news the next day afternoon. My platoon has been so busy that I was running out of Marines to cover all of the projects we have going right now. For example, yesterday after evening chow (which I ate around 1945) I stopped by a work site to see how they were doing. They only had four Marines working on the project (they were waiting for two more to show up) and didn't have any power tools, so I stayed and helped them out for a while. So the good news is that we’re getting reinforcements from the rest of the company. Now I’ll actually have Marines around to take care of all the little tasks that come up during the day.
Another bright spot to the past few days has been the world cup games going on. They start 1830 our time, which means for a couple nights this week I’ve sat down to chow right around the 60-70 minute mark, with the game running on the flat screens in the chow hall. There have been a lot of TCNs watching the games lately as well; last night I sat next to two gentlemen waiting for the Uruguay game to show at 2330. So it’s a fun atmosphere in the chow hall in the evening. Wednesday’s game was Spain vs. Switzerland and a well-played, exciting game to watch.
I want to thank everyone that has been sending me letters and e-mails. Letters especially put a huge smile on my face, and I try to answer them when I can. I will also try to post more, but when days start at 0600 and go to 2130, it's difficult to find the time.
06 June 2010
Preparing to Get Very Sandy
Monday was my first day that I actually ran a project “outside the wire”. A quick refresher: we all live inside a rather large base surrounded by large berms of earth and many guard towers. Any time you are inside such a camp, or even a small base, as long as it has protection from direct fire (gunfire), you are considered “inside the wire”. This means you don’t have to wear your PPE (personal protective equipment-- flak jacket and Kevlar helmet among other things) when you’re walking around, you don’t have to take special precautions when driving, etc. When you go “outside the wire”, you wear special uniforms that are designed not to melt, you wear your PPE, and you have to have security vehicles when you drive around.
Our project was pretty simple: a HESCO pit 14’ tall and 30’x30’ inside. EOD wanted a protected location to do some work with all of the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, that they find, so we loaded up, went outside the wire, and built some HESCO for them. The purpose of HESCO is to replace piles of sandbags. It’s essentially a chain-link fence that folds out in squares with a special textile on the inside to hold in the sand. You open it up, get it in place, and then use a tractor to dump sand inside it. Once you’ve dumped the sand inside, you get some Marines on the top with shovels or rakes to level it off. You can stack HESCO once it has been filled, and it comes in many sizes—from 2’x2’x2’ to 7’6”(H)x7’x7’. It’s much quicker and easier than having Marines with shovels stacking individual sand bags.
So that was our project. It was about 100m outside of camp, right between two guard towers. We had to drive a little farther than that to get from the gate to the place where we built it, but we never went farther than a kilometer away from the camp. So it was a nice little milk run—a practice run for me for all of the different tasks and procedures needed to successfully run a trip outside the wire.
It took two days. The first day went really well. The second day…had a few more hiccups. Our TRAMs (tractor, rubber tire, articulated something-or-other; what we were using to shovel dirt into the HESCO) will only fill HESCO up to 11’ high. Our first layer was 7’. Our second layer, yes, was 14’. So instead of our two TRAMs filling HESCO, we had one excavator filling HESCO. Turns out our excavator operator was not that experienced, so it took a little while longer to fill the top layer than it did to fill the bottom layer, even though there was twice as much dirt in the bottom layer.
It is by far not the operator’s fault. We are attached to 9th Engineer Support Battalion, which is based in Okinawa. Due to restrictions in Japan, the heavy equipment operators are not given many chances to practice moving earth around. So he was a little new to his trade, and it took a little longer. That’s okay. We lived.
We also had a nice little sand storm the second day. I was splitting my time between monitoring the BFT, which I told you about last time, and going out and checking on the Marines. When the sand storm hit, I had been sitting in the truck, reading The Face of Battle (very slow to start, but picked up once I got past the first chapter), and glancing up at the BFT every once in a while. This particular time, I looked around to my gunner and asked him how he was doing.
“Preparing to get very sandy, ma’am,” he told me. I looked out the front window to see that the sand storm was about a minute out. This was wasn’t nearly as bad as the one the night of the fire, and it lasted less than five minutes. But, yes, it was very sandy. We were a few hundred meters away from the work site at that point, so I couldn’t see the Marines at the work site while it lasted. Once it was over, I attempted to regain communications with the COC (Combat Operations Center) and couldn’t. I waited a few more minutes, occasionally glancing back to the work site, which I could see in my rear view mirror. When I didn’t see the excavator running after a few minutes, I went out to check on them.
They were fine, if a bit sandy. We got the excavator up and running again, and I mentioned to my PltSgt that I was having trouble getting comm with the COC. He wasn’t surprised; the atmosphere wasn’t very conducive to electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere. We kept working, completed the project, and returned to base.
Turns out we were out of touch with the COC longer than I had thought, and much longer than we were supposed to be. The BFT messages I had been sending throughout the day hadn’t been making it to the COC, which was a problem. I had been sending BFT messages back to our company offices (one at our camp, and one at another camp a ways south of here), and those had been making it through, and I had been getting messages back from them. But not the COC. So I learned a big lesson for next time.
This is the part I hate most about being a 2ndLt. I already put in time as a junior worker bee, and now I’m back to square one, making mistakes that I should know not to make. It’s frustrating, and every day is a learning experience. I like to think I’m getting better at it, and then I go and do something stupid that makes me wonder if I matured at all in those five years after college. Sigh.
Happy 29th Anniversary to Mom and Dad! You are amazing examples as both parents and spouses, and I could not be more proud of them. I love you!
Our project was pretty simple: a HESCO pit 14’ tall and 30’x30’ inside. EOD wanted a protected location to do some work with all of the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, that they find, so we loaded up, went outside the wire, and built some HESCO for them. The purpose of HESCO is to replace piles of sandbags. It’s essentially a chain-link fence that folds out in squares with a special textile on the inside to hold in the sand. You open it up, get it in place, and then use a tractor to dump sand inside it. Once you’ve dumped the sand inside, you get some Marines on the top with shovels or rakes to level it off. You can stack HESCO once it has been filled, and it comes in many sizes—from 2’x2’x2’ to 7’6”(H)x7’x7’. It’s much quicker and easier than having Marines with shovels stacking individual sand bags.
So that was our project. It was about 100m outside of camp, right between two guard towers. We had to drive a little farther than that to get from the gate to the place where we built it, but we never went farther than a kilometer away from the camp. So it was a nice little milk run—a practice run for me for all of the different tasks and procedures needed to successfully run a trip outside the wire.
It took two days. The first day went really well. The second day…had a few more hiccups. Our TRAMs (tractor, rubber tire, articulated something-or-other; what we were using to shovel dirt into the HESCO) will only fill HESCO up to 11’ high. Our first layer was 7’. Our second layer, yes, was 14’. So instead of our two TRAMs filling HESCO, we had one excavator filling HESCO. Turns out our excavator operator was not that experienced, so it took a little while longer to fill the top layer than it did to fill the bottom layer, even though there was twice as much dirt in the bottom layer.
It is by far not the operator’s fault. We are attached to 9th Engineer Support Battalion, which is based in Okinawa. Due to restrictions in Japan, the heavy equipment operators are not given many chances to practice moving earth around. So he was a little new to his trade, and it took a little longer. That’s okay. We lived.
We also had a nice little sand storm the second day. I was splitting my time between monitoring the BFT, which I told you about last time, and going out and checking on the Marines. When the sand storm hit, I had been sitting in the truck, reading The Face of Battle (very slow to start, but picked up once I got past the first chapter), and glancing up at the BFT every once in a while. This particular time, I looked around to my gunner and asked him how he was doing.
“Preparing to get very sandy, ma’am,” he told me. I looked out the front window to see that the sand storm was about a minute out. This was wasn’t nearly as bad as the one the night of the fire, and it lasted less than five minutes. But, yes, it was very sandy. We were a few hundred meters away from the work site at that point, so I couldn’t see the Marines at the work site while it lasted. Once it was over, I attempted to regain communications with the COC (Combat Operations Center) and couldn’t. I waited a few more minutes, occasionally glancing back to the work site, which I could see in my rear view mirror. When I didn’t see the excavator running after a few minutes, I went out to check on them.
They were fine, if a bit sandy. We got the excavator up and running again, and I mentioned to my PltSgt that I was having trouble getting comm with the COC. He wasn’t surprised; the atmosphere wasn’t very conducive to electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere. We kept working, completed the project, and returned to base.
Turns out we were out of touch with the COC longer than I had thought, and much longer than we were supposed to be. The BFT messages I had been sending throughout the day hadn’t been making it to the COC, which was a problem. I had been sending BFT messages back to our company offices (one at our camp, and one at another camp a ways south of here), and those had been making it through, and I had been getting messages back from them. But not the COC. So I learned a big lesson for next time.
This is the part I hate most about being a 2ndLt. I already put in time as a junior worker bee, and now I’m back to square one, making mistakes that I should know not to make. It’s frustrating, and every day is a learning experience. I like to think I’m getting better at it, and then I go and do something stupid that makes me wonder if I matured at all in those five years after college. Sigh.
Happy 29th Anniversary to Mom and Dad! You are amazing examples as both parents and spouses, and I could not be more proud of them. I love you!
03 June 2010
Energy Conservation and the Marine Corps
One of the questions that came from my last blog post was why we kept the A/C on so strong in our room, as it wastes electricity and would make it more difficult to adjust to the climate here. It’s a perfectly fair question, although we haven’t had it on quite so strong recently; we’ve been putting it on fan vice A/C for the past few nights. Yesterday morning when I woke up, it was actually cooler outside than it was inside the room. In fact, it’s supposed to be below 100 for four days in a row, starting yesterday. You wouldn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but I have indeed gotten to the point where there’s a day in the high 90s and I think it feels like a nice day. This is how I know that I’ve gotten acclimatized.
Regarding energy conservation. In case you haven’t figured out, fighting a war is not exactly environmentally friendly. This includes energy use. For example, when we go outside the wire, like we did Monday and Tuesday, we didn’t turn our vehicles off, even though they were sitting in the same place all day long. There’s a couple reasons for this. First is that unless you have a purpose for being outside the vehicle, such as working on a project, you stay inside the vehicle and keep the doors closed. This is because the vehicle’s armor does a much better job of protecting you than your PPE, or personal protective equipment. So one of the reasons you leave the vehicle running so that the personnel inside don’t cook.
There are other reasons, too: the vehicle needs to be powered for all the comm and BFT (Blue Force Tracker, the program that shows where all the nearby friendly units are) to work, you need to be able to go somewhere at a moment’s notice, and you don’t have to worry about the vehicle not turning back on if you never turn it off. What all this amounts to is that for 8-10 hours, I was “wasting” a lot of fuel. But what would have happened if we had been attacked? It was highly unlikely—our project was literally right underneath the guard towers on base—but it was a possibility we had to be prepared for. We would have needed to maneuver the vehicles to keep the threat away from the personnel working on the ground; that time it would have taken to start the vehicle could have made a big difference.
That’s a pretty unlikely scenario; the more likely scenario is that one of the work trucks we took out there, such as the dump truck or the trailer to haul the excavator, wouldn’t have wanted to re-start. That would have also left us unable to pick up and move at a moment’s notice if we had wanted to. So fuel consumption is not typically something we worry about.
As far as electricity goes, we don’t worry too much about conservation—water conservation is a bigger consideration. Our electricity comes from generators (ie fuel) and “shore power”, which is a power grid here on camp. I don’t know where the electricity is generated, but conservation is not something that is stressed. We are encouraged to conserve as much water as we can—turn the water off when you’re soaping up in the shower, don’t leave it running while you brush your teeth, etc.
This is not to say that the Marine Corps does not discuss energy conservation. It’s actually a hot topic in the Marine Corps stateside right now, as it’s an important issue to our Commandant. The Marine Corps actually had its first building LEED certified last year. I forget exactly what LEED stands for (you can probably google it), but it’s an organization that certifies that buildings are energy efficient. And HQMC is looking at ways to make bases and operation state-side more energy efficient. But here in theater…we haven’t gotten there yet.
I hope that makes sense. Any questions—just ask! And thanks for the e-mails. They were a huge morale boost in the middle of this week that I needed.
Regarding energy conservation. In case you haven’t figured out, fighting a war is not exactly environmentally friendly. This includes energy use. For example, when we go outside the wire, like we did Monday and Tuesday, we didn’t turn our vehicles off, even though they were sitting in the same place all day long. There’s a couple reasons for this. First is that unless you have a purpose for being outside the vehicle, such as working on a project, you stay inside the vehicle and keep the doors closed. This is because the vehicle’s armor does a much better job of protecting you than your PPE, or personal protective equipment. So one of the reasons you leave the vehicle running so that the personnel inside don’t cook.
There are other reasons, too: the vehicle needs to be powered for all the comm and BFT (Blue Force Tracker, the program that shows where all the nearby friendly units are) to work, you need to be able to go somewhere at a moment’s notice, and you don’t have to worry about the vehicle not turning back on if you never turn it off. What all this amounts to is that for 8-10 hours, I was “wasting” a lot of fuel. But what would have happened if we had been attacked? It was highly unlikely—our project was literally right underneath the guard towers on base—but it was a possibility we had to be prepared for. We would have needed to maneuver the vehicles to keep the threat away from the personnel working on the ground; that time it would have taken to start the vehicle could have made a big difference.
That’s a pretty unlikely scenario; the more likely scenario is that one of the work trucks we took out there, such as the dump truck or the trailer to haul the excavator, wouldn’t have wanted to re-start. That would have also left us unable to pick up and move at a moment’s notice if we had wanted to. So fuel consumption is not typically something we worry about.
As far as electricity goes, we don’t worry too much about conservation—water conservation is a bigger consideration. Our electricity comes from generators (ie fuel) and “shore power”, which is a power grid here on camp. I don’t know where the electricity is generated, but conservation is not something that is stressed. We are encouraged to conserve as much water as we can—turn the water off when you’re soaping up in the shower, don’t leave it running while you brush your teeth, etc.
This is not to say that the Marine Corps does not discuss energy conservation. It’s actually a hot topic in the Marine Corps stateside right now, as it’s an important issue to our Commandant. The Marine Corps actually had its first building LEED certified last year. I forget exactly what LEED stands for (you can probably google it), but it’s an organization that certifies that buildings are energy efficient. And HQMC is looking at ways to make bases and operation state-side more energy efficient. But here in theater…we haven’t gotten there yet.
I hope that makes sense. Any questions—just ask! And thanks for the e-mails. They were a huge morale boost in the middle of this week that I needed.
30 May 2010
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.
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.
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