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.

Until we meet once more here's wishing you a happy voyage home.

NIACT Class 12-001's last weekend in South Carolina passed without incident. Saturday morning's training was cold and slightly disorganized, getting off to a late start. We discussed more tactics, including advanced personnel searches and detainee procedures. After planning the details for our Final Battle Problem exercise, I spent the remainder of the day in downtown Columbia, enjoying some of the local cuisine and entertainment provided by the Halloween costume wearing students of the University of South Carolina on their way out to the bars.

Our final Battle Problem, the convoy exercise, wasn't nearly as exciting as I hoped it would be. As lead vehicle commander for a column of four HMMWVs and two MRAPs, my crew was able to spot each ambush and simulated IED along the 7-mile exercise route, but our driver was one of the instructors who dutifully stuck to the exercise script, so even if we spotted the threats, he'd still ignore the order to stop the truck, inevitably rolling into the hazard for the sake of accomplishing the pre-determined training plan. The day was a long one-my spine felt throughly compressed under the weight of my body armor after spending hours and hours standing around inside a simulated FOB (Forward Operating Base) waiting for the convoy exercise to actually begin. Just as abruptly as it started, the exercise was over.

The following day was spent drifting in and out of sleep through some over-preached and dumbed down legal briefs by an Army JAG. His brief was nearly pointless. Rather giving the latest updates on Rules of Engagement (ROE) or Escalation of [Lethal] Force (EOF), we received nearly three hours of instruction on the UCMJ's rules for searches of US servicemember's personal property and how it relates to the Fourth Amendment. I'm still curious as to whether or not he knew that we were headed to Afghanistan the following week or if he just assumed we were staying at Fort Jackson for the long haul. The rest of the day was dedicated to the through cleaning of personal weapons, the M4's and M9's we've been training with and lugging around in the rain and sand for these last few weeks. Not a single speck of carbon residue from cordite gunpowder, not a grain of sand, nor a single drop of moisture or oil could remain inside the nooks and crannies of the weapons before inspection by the Drill Sergeants. CLP (Cleaner, Lubricant and Protectant) is the standard military issue solvent used to clean and preserve small arms; I learned the smell of it almost ten years ago during Plebe Summer at the Academy and I haven't forgotten it since. CLP is a lightly viscous, light weight machinery grade oil that is slightly yellow in color and has a petroleum odor like that of zippo lighter fluid. For normal operation of a weapon, a light coat should be applied to every moving part, but for inspection, it simply wouldn't do: I put down the CLP and wiped down the inside and outside of my rifle with Windex. Though the rifle looked spotless, without any lubricant, it would make a nice mantle decoration, but fail miserably as a weapon. As soon as I passed inspection (after the third go-around with Staff Sergeant Byford), it immediately was brushed down with CLP again. Inspection passed, check-in-the-box. Move on with life.

Just like that, Navy Individual Augmentee Combat Training was done. No fanfare, speeches, ceremonies, or anything else to mark the occasion. We've been left to ourselves for an evening off and a day of rest to take care of any loose ends before our flight out. I took care of a few financial matters, finished packing my bags, got a hair cut and enjoyed an Arturo Fuente cigar with a classmate of mine followed by a quick phone call home to Amanda.

My class will depart the country shortly and will be split up in the next few days to travel to various part of the Middle East and perform in a wide array of missions. The barracks are now lined with the tell-tale olive drab sea-bags and desert colored uniform items.


"...Anchors aweigh my boys, anchors aweigh, farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day. Through our last night ashore, drink to the foam; until we meet once more here's wishing you a happy voyage home..."

Location:Camp McCrady, Fort Jackson, SC