Downhill slopes and ugly babies.

     This morning, I hit the halfway point of my GSA tour.  The Commanding General, my boss's boss, last week, jokingly told me he referred to the Individual Augmentee experience with the Army as the "Navy Appreciation Tour."  He seemed to understand our common sentiments completely.

     Most people experience the mid-deployment blues, figuring that it's been a rough first half, and there's just as much ahead as their has been behind.  This being my fifth deployment, I'm not shocked at that feeling, and actually, rather than feeling down, feel sort of exhilarated. 
     The second half of deployment always seems to go by quicker, by now it should be well understood what the job requirements are and professional and personal expectations have either been met-or accepted that they never will be.  I've managed to pass all those milestones and am looking forward to my next milestones: the next pay check, the month of March, ordering my new car, the end of Winter, and the three-quarter completion mark, which coincidentally begins the long string of halving-halves, until you begin to count the hours rather than the days, similar to the way in which a proud mother still refers to her child's age by months, "I'm very proud of him, he's only 60 months old." (No one else is impressed, understanding full well the kid is five years old and is barely able to stand up-right without drooling on himself.  Why is it that the age of ugly children and car leases are the only lengths measured in months of such scale?  I digress.)  The point being-it's still an accomplishment and still an obvious point of pride.  In that light, I'm the proud father of 2762 hours more of Afghan joy-that's 114.4 days for the rest of the world who looks down and just sees an ugly, foul smelling baby.

Follow the web-based deployment countdown tracker here: TerraNaut's Countdown to Returning Home

No news is good news in Afghanistan.

     It has been a long time since I've last posted-I realize this and also submit the truthful adage, "No news is good news," in Afghanistan, but it's been a daily struggle of boredom and chaos, frustration and tranquil acceptance, and thankfully, the deployment clock doesn't stop to move the chains after a first down or incomplete pass. Lately, it has gotten brutally cold-Parwan Province is a frozen tundra of ice shappen mud, sharp and jagged, morphing under foot and scarred with the pattern of criss-crossed tire tracks.  We've seen snow: a foot or two at a time, and for the day it falls it casts a peaceful gloss on this brutish land.  When it snows, the screams of bombers' afterburners and the endless logistics caravan of C-17s is either muffled by the snow or completely halted if the visibility is so far reduced that is prevents takeoffs and landings.  The snow falls, the dust in the air vanishes and the planes stand still.  The almost nightly barrage of ludicrously poorly aimed insurgent rocket and mortar fire shot at Bagram is postponed to a later time.  I think somewhere in our collective human genetics, the concept of the Snow Day is ingrained.

     Fast forward to the next day-the skies are clear, the persistent dust cloud hanging in the valley and mountain passes hasn't yet returned, the fighters, bombers, and heavy transports are flying again, with hurried successive departures as if making up for lost time.  The snow has melted and again turned the earth into a saturated clay bog with the tactile suction that will hold your boot treads firm as you lurch forward in place with statuesque movement below the knees when attempting to walk as if to challenge your very defiance of gravity.  Today was one of those days.  This weekend's snow has passed and with it brought the mud underfoot of this eleven year war.

     Late last week, a Marine heavy lift CH-53 helicopter crashed in the western part of the country, in Helmand Province near the provincial capital of Herat, the ancient Macedonian fortress city built by Alexander the Great on his eastern conquests through the Persian Empire.  The media reported it for a short while, it was mentioned in passing at our daily morning brief, but none here gave much thought to it.  Working with Special Force soldiers who have lost many friends-six nameless Marines perishing in a helicopter crash is not something they tend to dwell on or invest much emotional energy into.  The names of the fallen Marines were released today, I found out this morning in this article: Navy Times, one of them being Capt. Dan Bartle, USMC; United States Naval Academy Class of 2006.  Capt. Bartle was more recently a husband and a father, but in earlier days, a Companymate of mine (25th Company) and a squadmate of mine when I was a Plebe, my first year at the Academy. 
     His role to me was that of mentor-responsible for instructing me on the ways of the Navy and the ways of the military, and was directly responsible for teaching me what I needed to know to fly under the radar of the upperclass and to pass my academic and military exams and keep me out of trouble.  In short, he was my mentor at a time I needed one most.  I remember he originally wanted to be a SEAL-but wasn't selected and instantly shifted his focus to becoming a Marine Pilot.  He died last week doing just that.  I've lost two friends from my old Company already-both in helicopter crashes, two years ago, another Companymate, 1stLt Aaron Cox, Class of 2005, died in a AH-1W Cobra training mission in the hills outside of San Diego.
    Where these men will go now-pieces of their bodies recovered and returned to their families in blue-gray caskets, their souls to whatever their faith maintained as the final eternal resting place, and their names to the plaques lining the right most wall inside Memorial Hall, in the Rotunda of Bancroft Hall on the Yard in Annapolis.  I'm not in an appropriate place right now to mourn the loss of a friend and a Companymate.  Though I'm surrounded by others who have lost many friends themselves and many who may die themselves in future battles in places most Americans couldn't point to on a map or even pronounce aloud; the personal familiarity with death makes this is the last place on earth it might be ok to mourn.  Reflection is best done in front of a mirror or on a warm beach front sand dune somewhere-but not on a mountaintop in Afghanistan surrounded by it.  We were trained to lead men in combat and that's what Dan Bartle was doing with his last breath-this was our calling, this was our training, our mission, and our fate.  I'll look for his name on the wall again in Memorial Hall when I return to teach at USNA in the summer-the same place I went years ago, late at night as a Midshipman looking for inspiration during a late night study break during final exam week.  This has been a sad day, but I'm sure not the last.  I will continue to look for inspiraiton in the same places-but inspiration has come at a price: less conceptual and now more personal.

My past, our future, and the Shadow Mayor.

     In the time since my last blog post, I've turned 27, my third birthday celebrated on a deployment, along with my 23rd, and 25th; have continued to partake in a weekly tradition for Friday nights around Camp Vance, and found out some great news about my future.  In local news and weather, the air temperature recently has significantly dropped-we're in the mid-20s at night and the upper 30s during the day-I think it might almost be time to unpack some of my still stuffed-in-a-hurry seabags from NIACT/Fort Jackson to find my Army issued winter jacket-the kind that comes issued new in the manufactures packaging already smelling foul, one of those where the quality assurance tag should read, "Vomited in by Number 7 ."
     Having served greater than 30-consecutive days boots-on-ground in Afghanistan, I'm now legally entitled to government recognition and future benefits as a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.  Though I'm already a documented Iraq Campaign veteran, this increases (doubles) the potential for future benefits later in life, both from the Veteran's Administration-but also less well known things like scholarship funds for my future children, etc.  I have also been awarded the Afghan Campaign Medal (with campaign star),  and NATO Service Medal for participation in the ISAF mission. 


     Great news came late last week in email.  One of the biggest benefits of volunteering to come out to Afghanistan was that I'd be granted what the Navy calls "one-on-one" detailing-where I'd get to communicate in person my desires for my follow on post-deployment assignment and get preferential consideration in the assignment process, rather than being thrown in to the pot with the masses of junior officers scheduled to rotate from their current duty station during the same fiscal quarter.  Duty assignments, as it turns out, are as much a money thing for the Navy as a man-power concern.  The reported cost to the government for moving an officer with dependents is around $10,000 per move, so the Navy's Bureau of Personnel can only release new orders in bulk as the earmarked funds become available, parcelled out by quarterly budgeting.  Therefore, unless granted one-on-one status, I'd be competing against 25% (one fiscal quarter's worth) of all other Surface Warfare qualified LT's rotating to a shore duty.
     Amanda and I drafted a grand strategy awhile back, a sort of contract to each other-listing three potential courses of action for our future goals including: work, education, location and timing, and even signed our names to it to make it official.  The ideal course of action, we agreed, would be to leave Virginia Beach and move on to a better location during my shore tour.  Annapolis, we also agreed-would be a great duty station; she could be close to family-I could get back into sailing and could teach at my Alma mater and share some accrued wisdom/hard lessons learned/war stories with some aspiring Midshipmen as well as both of us could attend school; Amanda for her RN license, and a Master's degree for me. 
     Last week, I submitted my shore tour request through one-on-one detailing, and just a few days later, I received the response: Selected as Naval Leadership Instructor, department of Professional Development, US Naval Academy, report date on or about July 1, 2012.  So that's that.  Annapolis bound!  Party on, Wayne; Party on, Garth.

     Rapidly becoming a weekly tradition at Camp Vance, Bagram, Friday nights are the Camp's cigar night.  Really, quite a nice social break from the break-neck pace of work, it's affords a chance to relax around a roaring fire, fueled by stacked wooden forklift pallets.  Weekly, the same familiar faces are always there-nearly forty or fifty folks of all different ranks and services-and our numbers are growing each week, socializing without regard to rank.  It's too dark to really see rank insignia, and it doesn't really matter out there.  It has a 'Cheers' type atmosphere; everybody knows you're name, and they're always glad you came.  I've got a humidor here that gets some pretty good use as the H. Upmann Petit Corona cigar (JFK's, a former fellow Navy patrol boat officer; PT 109), brand and size of choice) makes for a great gift in return for professional favors rendered and in recognition of a job well done, as well as being stocked with the Montecristo #3, my personal favorite.  This weekly event, not officially sanctioned by the command, is hosted by a character known as the 'Camp Vance Shadow Mayor,' in sarcastic homage to the Camp's Mayor (the Army's term for the ground support battalion's officer-in-charge of sanitation and public works) and 'Shadow'-a term always used in intelligence briefings to describe the Taliban's non-recognized parallel government establishment in each region, as in, "The Shadow Governor of Such and Such Provence."  I'm not a fan of the Taliban by any means... but I am a fan of my Friday night cigar.  Long live the Shadow Mayor of Camp Vance.

Insurgents, Insults, Idolatry.

I do realize it's been some time since my last post; there are mainly two reasons: some days are too busy to commit the time to write, other days are so slow I figure no one would want to read about what I'm doing in the first place.  In the time since my last post, I've gotten a permanent place to live, moved into my new office, been attacked three separate times by Taliban mortars and rockets, oddly enough, even right now-while I write this, the indirect fire alarm just sounded telling us to put on our Kevlar vests and helmets in anticipation of another night time raid.  I've also started doing work in earnest for my new bosses and have already butted heads with the immovable object: Army culture.

My living quarters, my CHU (Containerized Housing Unit, pronounced as 'Choo'), is literally just that-an electrified, corrugated steel shipping container, prefabricated with an artificial wood floor, a hand made wooden door on hinges, and a small air conditioner.  I share this space with two others; an Army Second Lieutenant and an Afghan translator with an obviously anglicized name, "Sam."  The Army officer works the night shift in the personnel office, so I generally never see him-the Afghan and I share the same schedule.  Our small space is subdivided with plywood walls, actually affording some semblance of a private space.  This space, though small-is still luxurious and vast compared to the small coffin and blue curtain combination I was afforded living on a very small Navy ship on prior deployments.  I'm happy and appreciative for the space I do have.   The greater base outside the walls of our monastic camp is rather chaotic, dirty, and bleak, and there are few reasons to venture beyond our own camp's walls.  I've been forced to work outside the camp just enough to understand the jokes on the unofficial humor site for Bagram Airbase: http://www.ilovebagram.com .  Check out the site from time to time, it updates daily with reader submitted posts about life here.

I've developed somewhat of a daily routine; the work schedule is predictable mostly, with the occasional very late night or very early morning, but its nothing that I can't handle.  I'm assigned to the headquarters staff for the Special Operations Task Force; my boss, essentially the Executive Officer is a SEAL Commander (Navy) and the big boss is an Army Special Forces Colonel, a la "Apocalypse Now" (replace Mekong River delta for Hindu Kush mountains).  It's a rather interesting community of Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and even a few Afghans that live and work on the camp, supposedly a "Joint" command, but Joint, as my boss explained to me, is really just a nice way of saying "Army led."

Some of the things I've been trying to learn are the nuances of the Army culture here; some are standard practice Army, some are unique to the Special Forces community. I haven't been around long enough to know which is which and which customs are neither, just the habit of a bunch of dudes sitting around in Afghanistan that over time became the new standard.  The Army's customary etiquette is truly different from the Navy's, as both services have clearly developed individually in parallel vacuums.  The Army's reverence for certain positional authority rather than based on rank is totally contrary to the way the [surface] Navy does business. 
The Navy for example considers the Executive Officer (the second highest ranking officer at a command) as truly the second in command; here at least, it seems as if the Command Sergeant Major (CSM), the senior most enlisted man, is the second in command, and all must pay deference to him save the unit commander himself.  The Navy certainly respects the wisdom and judgement of the CSM's equivalent, the Navy's Command Master Chief (CMC), but in the end, the Commanding Officer might as well be God and its just understood and unquestioned that the Executive Officer is his prophet.  There are no other intermediaries and idolatry of other ranks is strictly forbidden. Things are different here; all difference of course in the nuances, but the nuances in life often are where the rubber meets the roadkill.


I've had the opportunity to get to know many Army officers that work here-within about two minutes of introduction, they all want to immediately point out to me the differences between our two services.  Each will inevitably say-as if somewhere in their Oath of Office, they raised their right hand and vowed, when meeting a Naval Officer, to robotically spew forth a tired reiteration of, "The Navy cares more about things and equipment and the Army cares more about its people," as they simultaneously strike a triumphant Washington-crossing-the-Delaware pose, look around over their shoulders and anticipate an eavesdropping peer to second their droning with a jovial toast, "Here here!"

I often stop and wonder why they all seem to think this, considering most know almost nothing about what I do in my real job, when I'm not filling a billet here the Army has either decided it can't do or won't do, as well as why they say this, and further more, are they actually fundamentally correct in the verbal spar? 

I have most certainly decided they are wrong-and not just out of simple parochial loyalty to my Naval Service.  Our machines work because our sailors work to make them go.  No sailor will do his job correctly if he's not having his basic needs met.  I'm not Superman, most days I don't bring my red cape aboard the ship with me, and I don't intend to climb the pulpit steps and preach a lesson on Maslow's Hierarchy Theory of Leadership-but it should suffice to say engines simply don't get repaired, courses don't got plotted on charts, and guns don't get cleaned if a sailor comes to work every day from a home where he can't pay his credit card bill to afford diapers for his child, his wife is cheating on him with his brother, he's got a court date for his second DUI in two weeks, or the filling fell out of molar while he was chewing on a pen during a meeting. 

A ship cannot sail itself, nor has any sailor that's ever been in my charge been neglected of my attention and care, in all matters of personal life: family planning, drug & alcohol counseling, financial planning, college education, career advancement, etc.  The list goes on.  I've been the one who brought my sailors a Thanksgiving turkey to feed his family, and I've been the first one to visit in the hospital when their children were born; I've been sitting side-by-side across from the loan officer at the bank, I've been to court houses, jail houses, MADD meetings, mortgage closings and doctors appointments.  But still as the record tells, supposedly only in the Army can an officer care about his enlisted man.

Not all is lost; the days do seem to go by quickly here, once a firm routine is established, I think now its mostly its a matter of keeping my head down; perhaps the rockets, mortars, insults, and time will simply fly right by.

Bagram bound.

After about four days of theater in-processing in Kuwait, I was loaded onto a bus and driven to a very large joint Army-Air Force logistics base quite literally in the middle of nowhere, sandwiched between the vast sand dunes and a herd of wild camels.  The practice of good Operational Security (OPSEC) does not allow me to name the exact base or location, but needless to say, the base was crowded and dirty.  Trash tumbleweeds bounced end over end down the alleys and sheets of sand were drifting across the broken slabs of packed crushed stones and mortar that made up the few marked roads on the base.  People were hustling in all different directions carrying bags and body armor; some were headed to or from Iraq, others to Afghanistan, and others still to parts of Europe or on to the United States.  Flights from this airport are all military transport and cargo craft.  

There were probably more civilian contractors waiting for flights than military personnel; most of these are easily identifiable by the same ridiculous de facto uniform: tan, suede desert combat boots, rip-stop tan cargo pants, a dark polo shirt with all the buttons undone, and a company id badge swinging from there neck on a lanyard.  Additionally, almost all of them have a goatee and black polarized Oakley sunglasses.  If you can imagine a whole drone army made of carbon-copy replicons of this purely stereotypical, but also true-to-life, very accurate phenotype; that’s what’s running around in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, each making well north of $200k a year, fighting America’s wars on behalf of the US taxpayer’s wallet.  This is most likely why America is broke; but I digress…

The base in Kuwait was sprawling with military passengers and cargo traveling every which way.  Flights more often than not run late, or sometimes, not at all.  Flights are cancelled, re-routed, reprioritized or simply delayed for no other reason than the local national driving the bus to and from the tarmac to the terminal wants to stop and smoke a cigarette half way down the aircraft taxi-ramp.  As many travelers are denied their assumed seat on any number of flights, there are literally people who live in tents at the airport waiting, upwards of a week, for a flight with an available seat to take them to their next stop.  To accommodate these stranded travelers, a shanty town of hundreds of tents was erected by the Army; upwards of twelve strangers to a tent, underneath the parachute-cord braces that barely hold down the raggedy, wind torn, sand  and dust covered shelters.  I stood in awe watching one groan under the strain of a gust of wind.  In the back of my mind, I think I was secretly hoping for that Mary Poppins moment when the ground stakes would break off and the whole thing would be swept away to some magical Arab land of Oz.

My flight was cancelled.  I was facing the horror of being stuck in that place for an undermined amount of time, possibly sitting in this traveler’s purgatory/refugee camp for a few days.  As I was both cursing the Air Force and simultaneously trying to convince myself that spending a week there would only make a more resilient person in the long run, thankfully a new flight was added in the late evening and my name was on the flight manifest. 

Mashed into the body of a military cargo plane, lost in an amoeba of sand and mud colored uniforms, only broken by the occasional unbuttoned polo shirt clad contractor, we made the three and a half hour flight from the Kuwaiti desert to Bagram, Afghanistan.  The flight, as the crow flies, should only be a little over an hour, but Iran sits dead square in the flight path, and as they do not allow overflight of US military aircraft, the flight had to take a rather lengthy, circuitous route to its destination.  The wheels touched down to a hazy, cloudy night in the very early morning hours.  After getting my bags off a pallet in the receiving passenger terminal, my command sponsor met me and took me back to my quarters on a small, rather secluded part of the base.  Still partially on east coast time, partially on Kuwaiti time and in a strange new place, I found it nearly impossible for the remainder of that night-as well as the next day, and still the day following to fall asleep and stay there.  As it was still very dark in the mountains (Bagram sits in a small mountain valley in the Hindu Kush mountains in Parwan Provence, northeast Afghanistan at about six-thousand foot altitude, surrounded by snowcapped, towering mountains soaring to over twenty thousand feet),  I could see almost nothing-but hear and smell almost everything in a twisted, compensatory quid-pro-quo.  Strange screams of darkened combat aircraft taking off into the night from the flight line, smells of evergreen trees artfully blended with the waft of fermenting garbage, and the sounds of large diesel trucks crunching over loose gravel made the first nights long and the daylight hours longer still-trying to absorb all the instructions of my new bosses and learn enough of my job to stand on my own feet before my sponsor leaves for home and, all with a mild case of altitude sickness and sleep-deprived bloodshot eyes.

Thoughts on Kuwait.

Having arrived early yesterday morning in Kuwait, following a flight from Columbia, and a stop-over in Fort Drum, NY and Germany, I've got a little down time to reflect.  We flew on a chartered 767 full of military personnel; our NIACT class side by side with a group from the Army's 10th Mountain Division and two military working dogs (MWDs).  The two dogs, young German Shepards, sat with their handlers in the cabin and behaved themselves well.  With everyone on board carrying knives and firearms, it was a good thing we didn't require a TSA screening.  We boarded the plane by rank (lowest first, boarding to the rear); the Lieutenants, Lieutenant Commaders and I wound up somewhere in what would be considered business class seating.  After the decent through the clouds, I peered out the window and saw a familiar sight: the clusters of flickering orange lights from the oil well flare-off towers from the off shore rigs in the Persian Gulf.  I've seen these many times, both from the water and from the air.  I had a bit of a flashback-for a minute I could have sworn I rewound the clock to May when I flew that same route home from Bahrain; not a particularly great flight-I was emotionally exhausted then from the deployment and worried about my career and the hurdles that lay ahead.  This time was different; I was surrounded by folks who were looking to me for guidance; this was my fifth deployment and the Persian Gulf and Kuwait have almost become my second home, having spent half of the last almost five years patrolling its waters and kicking rocks down its dusty harbor town streets. 

As the plane dropped lower still, I could see the Kuwait City lights and shore line; the buildings and street lights outlinend with glowing halos from the dust and sand suspended in the air, typical of the Gulf this time of year.  The plane landed, we debarked, and were quickly whisked away from the plane to a secure military part of the airport waiting for transportation to our forward staging area.  The desert palm trees swayed in the breeze and the air was heavy with the omnipresent dust.  I could taste the dust again, with its gritty texture between the teeth, the sting in the eyes, and the earthy smell of potting soil-I really haven't been away from here long enough to forget it.

We drove about two hours from Kuwait City to a forwarwd staging base.  This base is built on the location of a very large Desert Storm tank battle, infact one of the largest tank battles since WWII.  This has historically been the place that all new arrivals in theater headed to or coming from Iraq have transfered through-and its really only transients.  No one is really stationed here with the exception of the support staff (mostly National Guard) who run the physical duties of maintaining a base (power, water, security, logistics) and those who are tasked with processing and organizing those groups coming through.  Here we live in large tents, about 150-ft long by 25-ft wide, about fifty bunks to a tent and packed full of people and gear.  The tents resemble large greenhouses with an arched roofs.  The Navy portion of the base is far from the center and all it's locations of note and nightime hotspots: the base exchange, post office, dining facility, USO tent, and ATT&T calling center and internet tent.  We shower in a trailer (until the water allotment for the morning runs out and the storage tank empties) and the toilets are in upscale porta-poties (pastic walled stand-alone units, but with a porcelean urinal, and flushing toilet).  We share the base with those soliders on their way home from Iraq; many of them infact, soldiers who deployed in May thinking they'd be in Iraq until at least June of 2012, but as of a few weeks ago, most would be home for Thanksgiving and all would be home for Christmas.  Maybe now the Army can do it's own job now and not rely on Navy personnel to do the work they either can't or choose not to. 

We'll be here for a few more days taking care of administrative processing and acclimation to the timezone and weather.  Our schedule is intentionally left empty to allow for sitting around and catching up on sleep.  We average about one mandatory event a day; usually a briefing or some other task-but mostly we sit around and wait, passing the time until we can call home (eight hour time zone different to EST) or until the next meal.

A note on OPSEC.

Having arrived safely in Kuwait and immediately sent north to a forward base as a staging area for processing and further transportation eastward, I wanted to take a brief pause and talk about OPSEC (Operational Security).  In the next few days, I'll be traveling by a few different methods and will not be able to comment on the specifics due to requirements to protect those who are traveling with me and those who will follow the same route in the future.  For this reason, photographs may be non-specific and posts, email, and even the odd phone call might seem very vague.  For those back home, please do not discuss the specific details with others, especially by email or phone.  Loose lips sink ships; loose tweets sink fleets.  Thanks for understanding-I'll post when and what I can.