D.R.A.M.A.

March 9, 2010

My silence of the past week hasn’t been due to any absence of interesting material, in fact, far from it. I have walked into an office political storm that, heretofore, I thought had only been talked about in caricature. Yowsa. So…

I landed on Monday, March 1st. After I’d been issued my plated protective vest and helmet, I was sent over to transient billeting. I was put in a tent loaded with 200 bunk beds. Sleeping in a tent with 399 other guys is honestly the part of this whole deal that I figured would be the most grating. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the bunk beds had actual mattresses on them. In Iraq, I had a metal bed frame, but instead of springs and metal links supporting it, there was simply rebar. Instead of a proper mattress, I had a foam rubber pad. That was actually comfortable for the first fifteen minutes, until it compressed. For the next year, I pretty much slept on lightly padded rebar. Thus, a mattress is a huge selling point.

Still, I had plenty of time after I’d been given my bunk. I hitched a ride on a FOB (Forward Operating Base) shuttle over to the other side where the offices are. The FOB is huge and the shuttle ride can take 45 minutes, with the extraordinary traffic here. At any rate, I managed to make my way over to where my office was purported to be. Fortunately, it was there.

I walked into the building (and actual 1 story building! Not a tent!) to chaos. Someone asked me if they could help me. I introduced myself. There was a low rumble of what seemed like excitement. The boss, Tom, a gregarious yankee, scooted up. He was very excited. “Hey, everyone! This is Andre. The new guy!” I awkwardly waved and said hello.

Tom took me outside to talk. He was very excited that I’d arrived. They were/are grossly undermanned and he’d been waiting for me to arrive. He arranged for me to move into the tent next to the office. He mentioned that I had an “impressive resume.” I’d not heard that one before.

The office has, including me, five Americans, the rest are Eastern Europeans (the majority being Bosnian, though we have Macedonians and Albanians…well, Albanian Macedonians) and Asians from the Philippines and Sri Lanka and India. I call the office “The Olympic Village.”

Tom took the time to tell me what my job is, at least for the moment. I work in Air Operations. We are responsible for all in-country travel of company personnel. This is accomplished by rotary (helicopters) or fixed-wing (airplanes). Fluor has a contract with a helicopter company so we have much more control over flight times and manifests (what people and what cargo are going where) than we do over fixed wing, which is typically run by the military. For fixed wing, we can only request the people and cargo we’d like and they tell us whether we can do it. The majority of our planning is for rotary. Fluor personnel are not allowed to travel by ground in Afghanistan. They can only fly. Since Bagram is the larger of two bases that fly people out of country, we are the largest air operations in the country. It is chaos.

I didn’t start work until Wednesday because I had to go to one day of in-processing. I was having the worst case of jet-lag I’ve ever dealt with so I went to bed at 7pm the night before. I was in the office at 5:30am. Tom came in and set down what he wanted me to do. First of all, the basic, obvious part was that he wanted me to learn as much as possible from the other coordinators. There are four of them, three Americans (Stephanie, Holly, and Chad) and one Bosnian (Emir). Ordinarily, foreigners don’t get the supervisor positions because they are cheaper to hire and it isn’t necessary to pay them the same as Americans. Tom had gone up the ladder to get Emir hired at a higher level (still paid less than an American, but much more than other Bosnians).

One would think that Emir, who with the rest of the Bosnians in the department had been working for a sub-contractor $2700 a month (still fantastic pay considering the average annual income in Bosnia is $2980. $2980! A YEAR!), would be extremely appreciative that Tom had convinced Fluor to hire them on at approximately double the money (so approximately 20 times the annual salary in Bosnia). Hell, if someone hired me for a job that paid over 20 times the US average annual income, I’d definitely consider touching his/her leg inappropriately, if ordered to. I might even offer. (Annual US individual average income is $35499. To get paid as well as a Bosnian comparatively, I’d have to be paid $709,980. I am not paid $709,980.) Beyond that, as mentioned, Tom had taken a lot of flak to get Emir paid even more than that to be a coordinator. Emir was not appreciative. Emir was pissed off that Americans got paid more. Very pissed off. Tom had been rather blunt. He told Emir, “I don't know what to tell you. Deal with it or crawl back in the womb and get born again on the right piece of real estate.”

Tom told me about all of this my first morning. Apparently, someone had passed on salary information to a website, so all the Bosnians knew exactly how much everyone makes. The issue of not being paid as much as the other American coordinators had apparently been simmering, but my arrival blew it up. I found that all to be distasteful, but outside of my control and thus care. I was here to do a job. What it was, well, we weren’t quite sure, but I was going to learn what I could. Additionally, Tom wanted me to review our operations and do common-sense checks and trouble shoot. There is no question the office needs improvement. Chaos.

My first two days, I came up with a number of areas where I had questions. I didn’t think I was doing anything revolutionary, just asking why the personnel in the office were doing what they were doing, but Tom was quite pleased. Tom being quite pleased with me did not make Emir happy. Emir and the other Bosnians were arguing with Tom often, and in a manner I thought was inappropriate for employees to talk to a supervisor.

Tom took me out to the flight line (where the helicopters and airplanes land) on my second day. Emir and the Bosnians were furious, claiming that the helicopter company personnel were kicking people and cargo off the helicopters simply because they didn’t want to fly and because they hated the Bosnians. When Tom and I went out there, that wasn’t what came across at all. What came across was that the Bosnians weren’t respecting the helicopter company’s rules, designed to keep people safe. The Bosnians weren’t weighing passengers and their equipment and annotating those weighed on the proper paperwork. Aside from that, the Bosnians were cursing and yelling, hardly tactics designed to get the helicopter company to help them out.

Tom calmed down the situation, ordered the Bosnians to follow the rules, and we got the people and equipment on the helicopters. As we walked away, Tom told me, “That’s going to piss off Emir even more, because I embarrassed him.” I asked how Tom had embarrassed Emir. “Because I showed that it was relatively easy to solve the problem so he thinks I’ve shamed him.”

I didn’t know what to think about that kind of attitude. It just seemed damned childish to me.

The next morning, I saw Tom and Emir arguing. Shortly thereafter, Tom came into the office. “Change of plan. André, you’re no longer on review. You’re in charge of the flight line. Emir has decided to quit.”

Day three and all of a sudden, I’m in charge of the operational portion of the job. Awesome. I was dumbfounded that someone making 20 to 30 times the average salary of his country would quit that job over ego. I was also dumbfounded by the fact that Emir and his close confederates held me personally responsible. Emir’s brother-in-law, Ahmed, who Tom had hired as a favor to Emir, refused to work for me. Mirza K., a young guy, Emir’s good friend, was surly and confrontational. “I don’t report to you,” he told me when I went out to the flight line, “I work for Emir.” I had to have Tom make a department-wide announcement that I was in charge. Just how I wanted to make an impression. Sweet. (Sigh…)

Later that night, some of the other Bosnians came to me to tell me how happy they were that Emir had gotten fired and that I was in charge. Apparently, Emir had taken his authority to his head and treated the other Bosnians outside of his posse like second-class citizens. “We’re on your side.” Great, now it was being portrayed as me v. Emir. I was bewildered. All I knew is that I’d gotten hired for a job. I’d walked into a civil war.

The next couple of days involved Emir, who, though he had quit hadn’t left and now realized how badly he’d shot himself in the foot, was still around, going to Tom to repeatedly tell Tom how I don’t know anything and that everything was going to blow up. It’s true, I’d only been there for a few days. I didn’t know the details, but, ultimately, a) it wasn’t an overly difficult job to grasp, and b) I don’t have to know the details; I have to know how to make the people who do know the details do their jobs and make sure we meet our objectives. That, I can do. That is management.

Anyway, I was the bad guy and the hero. Ahmed refused to have anything to do with me and Mirza K. was argumentative. Eddie and Mirza E. kept telling me how smart and wonderful I am. The rest of the Bosnians hunkered down to see how everything else played out.

Fortunately, I was able to institute a degree of planning into the process that standardized things and, other than out-of-nowhere changes, we’ve run smoothly. The helicopter company has bent over backwards to help because I listened to them and integrated their rules. Tom has been happy because flights are typically going out as planned, and when they aren’t, it hasn’t been because of operational issues.

After five days, Emir finally flew this morning. Thank Jesus.