The Heat

The iron grip of the Iraqi summer finally seems to have broken. Looking back, it was the day of that dreadful sand storm, the worst I experienced while in Iraq, that was the turning point. After that day, the daily highs dropped and hovered just above 100F. It was a palpable difference from the seemingly endless 120F days of high summer. Slowly, there were other signs: early morning and late evening weren't oppressively hot, the cold water tap wasn't hot anymore, I had to actually start using the hot water while taking a shower.

Last Sunday, when I returned from my TDY to Qatar, walking around BIAP and Camp Victory wasn't that uncomfortable, even while wearing body armor and lugging around my assault pack. I later found out the high for that day was actually below 100F.

This week, the highs have been been all below 100F. It's the first time we've enjoyed double-digit temperatures since spring, it seems. It feels wonderful. We've taken to eating lunch and dinner outside now and marvel in the simple pleasure of not sweating.

Caught Sleeping

This is one of my favorite photos from my tour. I didn't take it, nor was I there when it was took but it's two of my coworkers. The guy on the left the gal on the right's team chief.

Has Been

My friend, Mark W. sent me a hard drive full of music early in my tour (strictly a backup of selections of his music collection to be stored with me in case of a catastrophic earthquake in California, you understand). It's larger than the hard drive on my laptop and way more than my iPod could ever store so I've been perusing it for new music.

Just before leaving on this trip, I loaded William Shatner's 2004 album, "Has Been." Everyone knows about his kitschy spoken word album from the 1970s, "The Transformed Man," which has such hits as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Tambourine Man."

"Has Been" was produced by Ben Folds who I believe wrote a majority of the songs. There are guest appearances from Aimee Mann, Lemon Jelly, and even Henry Rollins. I am here to tell you it is sheer, unadulterated genius. I love it.

The title track's music is set to a spaghetti western soundtrack riff, complete with mariachi-style trumpets and percussion that sounds like a horse's hoofs. Shatner's narration confronts three strangers who he thinks he heard call him a has been:

You talkin’ to me?
You talkin’ to me?
You callin’ me ... ‘Has Been’?

I've heard of you, the ready-made connecting with the ever ready
Yeah, 'Never Was' talkin’ about 'Still Trying'
I got it, 'Forever Bitter' gossiping about 'Never Say Die'

What are you afraid of? Failure? So am I
Has been implies failure, not so
Has been’s history
Has been ... was
Has been ... might again

I ended up listening to most of the album while making my daily walk between the billeting building and the conference building. Great stuff.

So Say We All

Present at the conference are a group of people I first met last March on my first visit (and TDY) here. Among them is my friend Francis, one of the smartest army officers I have met. Period. He is assigned to Afghanistan. This would be the last time, for the foreseeable future, to see each other given the impending end of tour in October.

Francis writes an occasional newsletter/missive, distributed exclusively via email, called “The Litany” which is bitingly funny if you 1) are in the military, and 2) know anything anything about military planning. Having only been a planner for the past year some of the dialog transcends my poor understanding but, given Francis’ excellent writing style, the gist is always clear.

Many of his colleagues have told him to turn it into a book. Already at twelve chapters, The Litany is well over one hundred single-spaced pages long. Reading it has taught me a bit about what is means to be a planner, what to avoid, how to compensate for bureaucratic inefficiencies, how to look at operations, how a well-written order should look, and how to stay sane. He usually ends each chapter with the phrase, "So say we all," which is homage to Battlestar Galactica. He also is a fellow blogger.

Thanks, brother. Stay safe.

As Sayliyah Again

So I’m back at Camp As Sayliyah. It’s much cooler (only between 100F-110F) and less humid than the last time I was here in August. Everything here -- the surroundings, the enlisted kids on four day passes, the Toyota mini-buses driven by Third Country Nationals -- is same as before. The familiarity is strangely comforting. I’m here with three other people from MNF-I, two of whom I met along the trip down here.

This time the trip wasn’t bad; it just happened to run overnight which made it extremely inconvenient. We left Baghdad at at 0030 on 22 September on a C-130 with not too many passengers and flew to the western airfield of Al Asad where we dropped off some passengers and then proceeded southeast to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Because there were so few passengers, I was able to lay down on the canvass like “seats” on the plane and actually fell asleep. I woke up some time later freezing my ass off as the cumulative effect of the plane’s air conditioning and altitude combined to make the cabin quite chilly. Lacking a blanket, I grabbed my body armor and laid it over me in a sort of ersatz, thirty pound blanket. I was able to get back to sleep. As I dozed off, I remembered my friend Lance’s Five Rules of Airlift:

1. Eat when you can
2. Sleep when you can
3. Piss when you can
4. Crap when you can
5. And always, always, always, bring a jacket

I had heeded the first four rules but failed utterly on the last one since I had wanted to travel light. Lesson learned.

We arrived at Al Udeid Air Base around 0430 on 22 Sep. By the time we met our ride and got to Camp As Sayliyah it was 0530. I grabbed an hour’s worth of sleep in my assigned shipping container, went to breakfast, and then rolled into the conference where I had to give one of the opening briefs. Fortunately, I remained coherent and the brief was well received.

The Last TDY

So I'm headed out on one last TDY to Qatar. I'll be out of pocket for the next day or so on travel. Expect another whiny post about why traveling in theater sucks so bad. Despite the advent of bad travel, it will be good to see the people on this trip; I've worked with them remotely since last January. A good bunch they are. I'll miss them when the tour ends here in less than thirty days.

Dust...again

The dust is back with a vengeance. Up until today, it had been enough just to blot out the blue sky. This afternoon, I went to my trailer to get some cold medicine at around 1700. By 1730 it looked like this:

.

It’s the darkest, reddest, strangest day I’ve seen here yet. Back in April, we would have called this rocket weather since the insurgents preferred to launch rockets in bad weather to reduce their vulnerability to air attack. Thankfully, the security gains since then have held. Today was dark, and even a bit spooky, but not dangerous.

Big Boy

I thought about what to write to accompany this photo which first was sent around via email last May. Consider it a study in contrast.

Ka-Boom

Hey, Mister Explosive Ordnance Disposal guy, if you must conduct controlled detonations on Sundays, which is the only day I get to sleep in, how about waiting until the late afternoon when everyone in the International Zone is actually awake and not at 0800 so that the resulting boom and shock wave doesn't shake my trailer to its foundation, scare the crap out of me, and has rolling off my bed and muttering the words, "Oh, for Fuck's sake!"?

Thanks.

9/11

For the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, our shop decided to conduct a flag raising ceremony in front of the embassy. Each of us purchased a few American flags from the post exchange store which we planned to raise and lower and then give out as gifts back home. We quickly tallied over fifty flags. We organized ourselves under the guidance of a Marine Corps captain, who had served at a few other US embassies. We walked out to the front of the embassy and stacked the flags, in their cardboard boxes, one one side of the main flag pole.

I was asked to say a few words to begin the ceremony. Not having had time to prepare, I improvised and said we were all here today to honor those who perished in the attacks and ensure that their sacrifice would be remembered. I mentioned the three locations, New York, Washington, DC and Somerset County, PA. I identified the brave choice the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 made, who chose to fight the hijackers. Because of their sacrifice, the target of that plane, US Capitol or the White House, still stands today. I then gave he command to the Marine captain to begin. It was 1545 Baghdad time, seven years to the day and time from when the American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

A flag detail consisting of an officer from each service and led by the Marine captain, ceremonially lowered the embassy’s flag. A separate group from our shop folded it and handed it to an Army major who stood holding it. A separate group, to which I belonged, took the flags out of their cardboard boxes and handed them to the flag detail who raised and lowered each flag.


Except for the commands, issued by the Marine captain, “Raise the colors!” and “Retrieve the colors!” the entire ceremony was performed in complete silence, something we had not rehearsed but, given the solemnity of the event, became at once appropriate. Those not involved in flag handling or folding ritually came to attention and saluted as each flag was raised and lowered.

The emotion everyone felt was unexpected. Military personnel coming and going paused, came to attention, and saluted. Department of State personnel paused, put their hands on their hearts. A British brigadier general, who had been dropped off by his detail at the front of the embassy, stood and saluted over the course of four flags raised and lowered. Others, who had wanted to raise their own flags, sheepishly came up to us and asked if we would raise their flags too. Our original fifty flags swelled to over eighty. The ceremony lasted well over an hour and a half. After the last flag had been lowered, I gave he command to raise the embassy's flag and then lower it to half mast.

In an unexpected way, it was a defining moment of my tour here.

Chicken Dance Redux

Back in November, I first wrote about the Chicken Dance which occurs every night in the North Ballroom of the Republican Palace/Embassy Annex at 2100. It's a sort of coda on the day's work where people throw things, indirectly, at each other for four minutes to the accompaniment of the "Chicken Dance" song.

My office section is infamous for the use of a crew-served weapon, a rubber sling, which can send objects hurtling at great speed across the ballroom. We have been counseled, on more than on occasion for its use. When this happens we lay low for a week and then bust it out. For a while, we were launching tennis balls which are just dense enough to make maximum use of the sling. We often aim for a balcony on the second floor that over looks the ballroom. The occupants of that office space have long since stopped complaining about the various objects that get thrown up there. As they say in real estate: it's all about location.

Being here now for eleven months, I've seen a lot of good and bad Chicken Dances. It's good when there is wide scale participation; lame when only a few people join in. Very recently, a co-worker handed me this photo of yours truly operating the sling last June. As I recall, it was a good Chicken Dance.

Relativity

A strange weather pattern blew through central Iraq over the last two days which abruptly dropped the temperature from 120F to about 100F. It’s strange to say, but 100F feels absolutely cool. Walking to and from work in the morning and late evening it dips into the low 80sF. It feels absolutely pleasant and foreign given the last, oh, 100+ days of searing heat. Who would have thought not sweating was so nice?

There are other, subtle signs time is moving forward, that the Iraqi summer’s iron vice is slowly easing up: the sun is no longer so high in the sky, it's getting darker earlier. Today, in the late afternoon, I took a shower after coming back from the gym and actually had to turn on a little of the hot water in my shower (there is no “cold” water in summer here).

I am in a restless mood. I have less than thirty days left in Iraq and I’m finding it hard to concentrate at work. I have finished training a co-worker to take over my projects and feel confident she will do a fine job. At this point, I want to just turnover responsibility completely but it’s hard to let go with just under a month left here.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at the detritus, books, DVDs, and toiletries collecting in my trailer and thinking about how to purge everything and start packing for the trek home. It will involve stops in Baghdad (Camp Stryker), the dreaded Passenger Terminal at Baghdad International Airport, a week in Kuwait, a stop in Germany, the east coast of the U.S., a week in San Diego, and then home by late October. Nevertheless, the psychological barrier is the start of that journey, in less than month.

I remember a year ago thinking, well, I’ll have the entire month of September to spend time with my family before I would have to leave home in October. Now, I want that same fall month to speed by so I can start the trip home.

It’s all relative.

Fobbert 02

More messing around with the Comic Life application on my laptop.