Afghanistan- March 10

March 4, 2010

1. Simply for the fact that the Bagram Air Field (next to Kabul) is surrounded by snow capped mountains, it reminds me of Anchorage. While it’s dirty, dusty, and muddy all around me, it’s nice to look up and see pretty skies and snow. Below the mountains? Well, it’s dusty here. I mean, really, really dusty. The past few days it’s rained though, so it’s been muddy. I mean, really, really muddy. The roads on the FOB (forward operating base) are mostly dirt and when it rains they erupt in foot-deep pot holes. There are shuttles to take people from one side of the FOB to the other. Luckily, I don’t have to go to the far side.

2. It smells here. It just does. What does it smell like? A distant septic tank. Iraq smelled like that. Dubai smelled like that. Afghanistan smells like that. You get used to it, but yeah, ugh. Still, it could be much worse. It smells like that because we’re doing our best to take care of the plumbing issues here. When I was first in Iraq, we had burn crappers. What’s a burn crapper? It’s a wooden outhouse where your deposit goes into a 55-gallon drum cut in half. When that drum got full, it got removed to a burn location. You’d fill it up with diesel, set it on fire and stir it with a long stick/pole. Poop on fire makes poop flakes/ash. It can be pretty until you realize it’s poop flakes/ash. The smell of diesel burned poop flakes is way, way, way worse than a distant septic tank.

We actually have toilets here (in containers like the backs of tractor trailers) and I’m thankful for them, particularly because we can flush the toilet paper. Often times in countries like these, you have to throw your used paper into a trash can next to the toilet because the plumbing is too small to handle it. Retraining yourself to throw toilet paper into a trashcan is a pain, and then when you go on vacation, it’s a hard/embarrassing habit to break. What I don’t like about our toilets is that they’re the German models. The Germans are famed as engineers, but they haven’t figured out how to make a decent toilet. These are the shelf model. Our wonderful American toilets are bowls with plenty of wonderful water to smother and mask the fumes. The shelf toilet has a shelf six inches under your posterior where your former meals pile up. There’s no water on that shelf. Thus, it reeks. When you’re finished and flush, a massive jet of water slams your deposit into the front of the toilet where it then slides down a drain. Other than people who like looking at poop, it’s a horrible, horrible system (well, it obviously isn’t water wasteful, but I don’t care). Make sure you shut the lid before you flush is all I can say. You don’t want to learn why so take my word on it.

3. I'm fine with my living conditions. My coworkers are of the opinion that we are living in the stone ages and bitch at every opportunity. When I first got here, they put me in the transient tents. Those tents have approximately 200 bunk beds. I'd heard horror stories, but the beds didn't seem so bad. They actually had mattresses. When I was in Iraq, I had a bunk, but no mattress. That meant that I put a foam rubber pad on top of iron cross bars. The foam rubber compressed after 15 minutes and I slept on iron cross bars for the next 10 months. A mattress is a luxury to me.

After they got us into the tent on the first day, we had free time, so I went to find where my job/office was located. I met my boss and he immediately had me moved to the Air Ops sleeping tent, right next to the office. I'm stoked about that because the transient tenting is on the other side of the FOB and it took a 45 minute shuttle ride to get to the office. The Air Ops tent is smaller. There are about 50 of us in there. I'm on a top bunk (not so fun as an adult), but I have a mattress. The heating duct, which runs down the center of the tent, blows on me. Not so pleasant when it's warm during the day; the tent gets to about 80 degrees and smells like wet hamster, but at night, when it's cold, it's nice enough. I'm fine with how things are. People bitch about the conditions, but that stuns me. We're in a war zone. I'm stoked about being dry and warm and (relatively) comfortable.

4. I'm a bad judge of food. When I don't have to cook it, I like it. We get the DFAC (Dining Facility). That's been fine for me. Because this is the biggest base in AFG, we also have a Burger King, Subway, Pizza Hut, Popeye's Chicken, and Dairy Queen. I'm not going to eat at those if I can help it. A) Why spend money when I don't need to and B) I'm trying to lose weight. The DFAC doesn't slop huge portions on us. I like that.

5. I finally found out what my job is. I knew my job title was Air Operations Coordinator, but no one in Greenville could really give me any information on what an Air Ops Coordinator does. I met my boss and it’s pretty straightforward (in theory). Fluor is responsible for many dozens of bases and we have personnel on them. My job is supposed to be coordinating their movement from base to base, most of the time when they are coming to Bagram to get on airplane flights to Dubai for R&R or getting back here from R&R and going back to their FOBs. That sounds easy enough, but there are untold moving parts and different departments who all have their fingers in the pie that it’s sheer chaos. The old phrase is “There’s more than one way to screw a cat.” (I’m pretty sure that’s the phrase, anyway.) We’re actually trying to come up with just one way to make things more efficient.

6. We get mortared here occasionally. I haven’t been mortared here yet, but it’s gonna happen. When I say occasionally, I don’t mean daily. I don’t even mean weekly. My boss said we’d been mortared maybe 20 times in the 14 months he’d been here. From my experience, mortars aren’t that dangerous, at least in likelihood you’ll get injured by one. Typically it takes a direct strike. If you get hit directly by a mortar, it was your time. If it weren’t the mortar, God was gonna hit you with a bus or lightning or something. We’re supposed to go to concrete bunkers if we get incoming. Usually, by the time you make it to the bunkers, the attack has finished.

7. Out of an office of approximately 50, there are only 6 Americans. The rest are Bosnians and Philippinos. I call the office “The Olympic Village.” The Bosnians are teaching me Bosnian cuss words. I wish I’d remembered the cusswords the Bulgarians taught me a couple of years ago in Alaska. One of the Bosnians, Eddie (well, in Bosnian it’s nigh-on indecipherable, so he just goes by Eddie), was an English Professor in Sarajevo drove me around the FOB. After a while he said, “You are not like other Americans. I know you for an hour and already I can tell you are very strange. We are going to be friends.”

8. General facts: The time difference is 9 1/2 hours. It's currently 6:30am on thursday, so it's 9pm on wednesday in SC. It's 4500-5000 feet here. They gave us all anti-malaria pills. After I had a mental breakdown (of sorts) in Iraq due to the anti-malaria medication they gave us (lariam), and it turned out we didn’t need to take that, I didn’t even bring the anti malaria pills this time. I was right not too. Malaria carrying mosquitos don’t get above 2200 feet. I’m not taking pills just because a drug company convinced my company to buy the pills.