I forgot to pass this on, as a visual aid

Update: The Final

Well, this is it: The final Update from Afghanistan. This is my last
in-country Sunday. It's been over 6 months and I've spent the last two
nights training my replacement. He seems like a good fellow. He's
aware and he understands the Excel work that is required for the job.
It's more than I could have hoped for, actually.

When I was little, my Father, my Papa, would frequently work late.
We'd often have dinner without him, or at least start dinner without
him. When we did, we would always pray, pre-prandial-ly, "... and
bring Papa home, safely and soon." It was our prayer and our sincere
hope that we could all be together. Homecoming was a part of our
nightly ritual. It is a part of everyone's ritual. We leave to home to
achieve things, and then we return to where we belong.

In every mess hall, galley and dining facility, on every military
base, camp, or outpost, there is a table. It is always set and it
waits for the return of our Prisoners of War and our Missing in
Action. It is set, it has a flower and a candle, it has silver-ware,
it is ready for the day that our people come home. This idea, this
concept of the home-coming, is an integral part of our military
heritage. It is recognizable, across all branches and creeds. We all
want to come home and we all want to see our brothers and sisters in
arms come home, too.

While I have been out here I have been a part of a team of people
whose goal is to get our Marines, Soldiers and Sailors back home. We
have been successful far more often than we have not, but there have
been men that have not made it home, on our watch. We all know that,
we have all seen these Heroes. And it has sweetened our own joy at our
homecoming, while also leaving the taste of sadness in our mouths. We
will make it home, but the collective, the entire WE will not.

Maybe I am thinking to much about how things end, today. I found out
that a good friend of mine died in a car accident this week. He was a
guy who taught me a lot about leadership and being in the Navy. He was
younger than me, but he had been around more in the Navy and had been
in leadership positions from the start of his career. He was our
Adjutant in Corps School and then I was deployed to Cuba with him. We
were both Squad Leaders in the same Platoon in Field Medical Training
Battalion. He was 26, I think. Something like that. Younger than me
and usually very sure that he was the coolest person in the world. But
his confidence in his own abilities was a real strength to him. Even
when we all knew he was wrong about something, he wouldn't back down
and eventually everyone would acquiesce. That sounds like it wouldn't
be a positive leadership attribute, but through force of personality,
he made it pretty good. It felt like the whole team was learning from
it.

Anyways, going home, getting home, no one left behind… these are
things that we believe in as a unit. We believe in it because we are
all, on occasion, away from home, away from those we love.

We believe that we will succeed in our mission. That we will bring
peace to the region. That we will bring all our men and women home,
safely and soon.

Below is the spoken part of the ceremony of remembrance:

Let us remember the men and women prisoners of war from all branches
of service that are too often forgotten. Let us remember them.

The table cloth is white, symbolizing the purity of their intentions
to respond to their country's call to arms -- so that their children
could remain free. Remember.

The lone candle symbolizes the frailty of a prisoner alone, trying to
stand up against his oppressors. Remember.

The black ribbon on the candle reminds us of those who will not be
coming home. Remember

The single rose reminds us of the loved ones and families of our
comrades in arms who keep the faith and await their return. Remember

A slice of lemon is on the bread plate to remind us of their bitter
fate -- if we do not bring them home. Remember

There is salt on the plate, symbolic of the family's tears as they
wait and remember.

The glasses are inverted. They cannot toast with us tonight -- maybe
tomorrow, if we remember.

The red, white and blue ribbon is tied to the flower vase by a yellow
ribbon that was worn by thousands who awaited their return. Remember

The faded picture on the table is a reminder that they are missed very
much and are remembered by their families. Remember.

As we look upon this empty table, do not remember ghosts from the
past, remember our comrades.

Remember those whom we depended on in battle. They depend on us to
bring them home.

Remember our friends. They are the ones we love -- who love life and
freedom as we do.

They will remember what we do. Please honor and remember them.

Another Great Article About Our War

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/ambushed-afghanistan/all/1

Update 25

People keep saying that I ought to put these together into a book, and
while I like the idea, I am pretty sure that desire alone is not what
it takes to get published. I appreciate the confidence, but I don't
really look forward to the day when I am told that if I had just
applied myself I'd have had a book deal. What's that self-pitying
tone? It must be time for an Update!

I think it is time, or at least that we have come far enough through
this together, that I can start talking about coming home. Everyone
here has been talking about that return journey for weeks now and the
topics that are cropping up again and again: What will I eat? How many
times will I have sex with my spouse? What movies will I see? How many
strangers will I attempt to have sex with? (That's more the single
guys, but you can see where it would be pertinent after 6 months of
not.) It's not all hedonism. Lots of people see the end of their debts
and the start of new lives. People are leaving here and going to new
duty-stations. Some of them are going to new schools, new professional
jobs within the Navy. There's a lot of hope on the backside of this
trip.

Closing it out, we're all tired. Everyone is tired of having spent 7
months away from home, six months doing the same job every day,
without breaks. I've worked every night for 6+ months. That's a long
time to do that. Getting home will be happiness, but we still have
about 2 weeks of being here, being close together actually. We're all
moving into open-bay tents, all the men, all the women, two tents.
It's good, in that it is closer to home, but it's rotten in all the
regular ways that these things are rotten.

We're not going to get to go back to the tents after work tomorrow
morning. They are fumigating the tents where we all sleep at about
0730. Everyone has to be up and out for a couple of hours after they
do it, till the tents are habitable again. It's a good thing for the
folks who'll be here in the summer, and it's not bad for the rest of
us either. The fellows and I will all be going to breakfast together.
It's the first time we've done that since the day we got here. At that
point we were starving for American food. 2 weeks on a British Army
base, eating the sorry excuse for food that the Brits eat, some real
bacon was heaven. It's less of a treat now, but it'll be nice to get
to hang out together.

I watched Serpico this week, which I'd never watched before. I
actually watched it, coincidentally, on the day that Sidney Lumet
died. It's a good movie. It's about the idea that institutions that
have authority need to be also brought under scrutiny. And I think
that that's true. I think that there is value in that idea. I think
that the institution that is the US military is inadequately
scrutinized. This last week there was nearly a governmental shutdown,
and the military, those stalwart exemplars of volunteerism and duty,
whined and cried at the idea of postponing a paycheck. Now, I will be
the first to admit that missing a paycheck stings. But I've also
worked a lot of places, worked a lot of jobs. You might say that I am
well-rounded or you might say that I am bad at a lot of jobs, but
either way, that experience has offered me the opportunity to know
that a postponed paycheck just means a little lean time. And a little
lean time is not the end of the world.

I appreciated the sense of humor on display, lots of Soldiers and
Marines making "Will Work For Food" signs, offering to sell MRAPs,
etc. That's all in good fun. But we're all men and women, with the
emphasis on maturity. We're individuals who volunteered to put our
lives on the line, and while I can appreciate being frustrated by not
getting paid for it when that's the deal, you're telling me you're
willing to die for your country, but only if the paycheck shows up on
time? We're not a mercenary force, or we shouldn't be. It's
unfortunate that it appears that we cannot retain a professional
demeanor in our nation's time of difficulty.

And that brings me back around to Serpico. It isn't that there isn't
enough money in the DOD budget to pay troops, even with a pay-period
skipped. The money that the DOD receives is fantastic. But so is the
waste. The same show of enlisted and junior unprofessional-ism that
was on display last week, on Facebook and MySpace and Tumblr and
Flickr, is evident in the spending practices of the official levels of
the DOD.

We have an excess of money for this year? Let's spend it on
wide-screen TVs. We have a budgeting officer who saved the Department
$10,000? Fire him and find a way to spend that money before anyone
finds out that we didn't need it, or we won't get it next year. It is
fraud, waste and abuse. But it is consistent with the way business is
done in the military. And that means that we need a Serpico. Or, maybe
we need more than that. Serpico was one guy and what his testimony did
was help expand the Internal Affairs divisions in police forces
everywhere.  That's the benefit. That's what needs to happen.

Leaving here just helps to see what it looks like. There are flaws.
I'm sure that that's not a shock to anyone. Huge organizations are
notoriously inefficient. The military is just another one of those.

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please visit:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Update 24

Lately, more and more, people confuse the terms sympathy and empathy.
It's become a common mistake, an accepted usage, to say that you
empathize with whomever. In fact, more likely than not, you actually
just sympathize. When you sympathize you are imagining what they might
be feeling, and that imaginary feeling is used to gain an
understanding of the mental and spiritual space the other person
occupies. Sympathy is one of the best things we can express for each
other. It is the intentional  effort to share something that cannot be
shared. It is an effort towards familial feeling.

Empathy, on the other hand, is actually feeling what the other person
feels. It is almost impossible. If you could do it, you would be A.)
miserable and B.) some sort of super-powered being. In order for me to
feel what you feel, I have to be the same as you. I have to be
literally able to experience what you experience. Sure, there might be
similarities occasionally, but not often. Everyone feels differently
because they are from different places and have different frames of
reference. It's hard to even sympathize, if you really think about it.

A one day old Afghan baby died in our hospital yesterday. When I came
on shift I saw that the baby was in the Emergency Department and I
tried, I willed myself not to know much more. The Sergeant that I
relieved told me that it was likely that the baby would not make it. I
willed myself not to know that. I tried really, really hard. I knew,
somehow, somewhere inside, that if I acknowledged it, if I let myself
know that there was a one day old boy in the hospital that I would
then HAVE to go and see him. And if I saw him I would be tortured and
I would torture myself and it would ache and I would be useless for a
couple of days.

After a couple of hours, they came and told us that the baby had died.
I did my job and marked down the time of death and the recording
physician and then I stopped my brain up. I wouldn't think or feel it.
I insisted in my mind. And I was successful. I have done a few things
in my life that required, for ease of living, comfort and even for
completion, not to think about them. I have a process, a mental
process wherein I put the things into a tupperware container on the
inside of my mind, I seal the idea and I put it in a stack. Then I
don't open it. It works. I know it sounds crazy, but it mostly works.
(I credit the idea to James Ellroy. In his book American Tabloid he
talks a lot about compartmentalization. That's how I think of that
process.)

I made it through the whole night. When I was doing my turnover with
the on-coming watch I told her that the baby had died. She nodded,
also sad. The guy who works nights with me said, "One less fucking
terrorist."

I thought of several responses. "You mean, '...one fewer.'"
"Why don't you shut the hell up?!"
"Wow, you're a heartless son of a bitch."
I didn't say any of those. I just shut it out.

Then, an hour or so later I was sitting in my rack and I could feel
the tupperware box opening up. I struggled with it for a while, but I
just had to let it go. I sat on my rack and felt really, really sad.
Not crying, not weepy, just sad. And I realized, I could find sympathy
for the family of the little boy, but even with an 18 hour difference
in life-span between my son and theirs I couldn't feel what they felt.
I can't imagine what they feel. I want to talk to them, sort of, to
tell them that I am so sympathetic. That I have a similar
circumstance. That I know what it is like to believe so strongly that
your son is coming, to feel him in your heart, and then to lose him. I
know that feeling, but I only know how I felt. I am sympathetic,
because I can strive to imagine their feelings, and I can use my own
feelings to help me imagine, but I can't empathize. Their grief is
their own.

And I don't want you to feel like I am harping on my son's passing, or
continually returning to it, as a source of public immolation and,
indeed, sympathy seeking behavior. I bring it up because I can't help
but feel like he is part of this experience. He is part of how I made
the decision to come out here. He is part of who I am and part of how
I see things. And I bring him up today because I feel his passing
strongly, in the wake of another boy who didn't get to be a man. In
the wake of another boy who didn't get to grow up, who didn't get to
see the world and have observations about it. And I know that it is
wildly unlikely that my boy and this boy, whom I stalwartly would not
see today, will ever meet up, wherever they are. But I'd like to think
that if they did, they'd be able to find something in common. They'd
feel a level of camaraderie, something beyond seeing each other as
terrorists or oppressors. Maybe they'd just see each other as fellows,
and maybe they could find a way to imagine life from the point of view
of the other. A little sympathy goes a long way.

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please visit:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Update 23

As much respect as I have for the Roman Legions, I have to say that I
am pretty glad not to have to wear a helmet with a brush on it. I
think that'd look pretty dumb. And, you know, the Update. For more of
the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please visit:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

This week has been more or less uneventful. Everyone knows that their
time here is short and everyone is more and more irritated with being
here and each other. There have been innumerable minor disputes and
the level of hurt feeling and animosity grows steadily. When I talked
to Margaret about it she said that it is all down to the attitude of
taking all the irritants you can without complaint, only to explode
later. She's right, of course. But there is also the whole aspect of
trying to maintain a familial cheerfulness. As the oldest child in a
family of 6 kids I can attest, attempting to remain in a familial mood
when actually irritated is the best way to foster a mutual feeling of
resentment. This feeling is now widespread among our detachment.

I'd love to say that I am exempt and that I am feeling only the milk
of human kindness running through my veins. Instead I am as annoyed as
everyone else. I am only spared in that I work nights and don't really
see anyone. It keeps me seeming pleasant. I woke up tonight to a
frequent irritant, there is a group who smokes cigars behind our tent
in the evenings. It makes the interior smell like a humidor. I wake up
some nights feeling like I smoked pack of Lucky Strikes and smelling
like a 90's trendy party. Since I usually just shower, dress and go to
work, I am not that annoyed by it. But the fellows who have to hang
out in the tent and try to go to sleep in the thickness and the
stench, they are not as cheerful about it. When I woke up tonight my
little sleeping area became an impromptu meeting of the angry about
smoke party. I sat and said little. (I know, it's hard to imagine such
an occurrence, but I did it.) There is a chance that there will be a
good amount of shouting at some point.

At work I received an e-mail from the girl who takes over from me in
the mornings complaining that she doesn't like the things that I don't
do. (I know, it's like proving a negative.) I wrote her back and told
her that any work she chooses to do extra is on her, she can't
complain that other people don't share her desire to do extra work.
She did not take it well.

I haven't been present for any of the many, many other minor disputes
that have popped up all over the hospital, but I hear about them all
the time. Lots of little negative feeling, all over the place.
And we still have to go to Kuwait, for our Warrior Transition
training, and then to our various Navy Mobilization Processing Site
(NMPS) locations. There are weeks left. (Not many, but weeks all the
same.) It's sure to be angry times in there. And we won't have the guy
who, on the way here, kept order. He's staying in Bastion, his orders
are for a full year.

Attached to this e-mail is a pdf from the local Public Affairs
Officers. They encouraged us to send it to everyone. I thought that
included you all. It's the local stories that they want to have
wide-release. They are approved stories, so they are positive to a
fault.

Hey everyone, go here and vote for Facial Hair as a Work of Art:
http://www.boingboing.net/submit/  Just hit the Plus. It's one of my
favorite things that my brothers have done. It's a project by Frank
and Drew, but I think that Rob put it together and posted it.

I can't think of anything else this week. I apologize. I'll try to hit
my word count close next week.

Update 22

There are a couple of new photos up on the blog site:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=80d40fa7d949fef8, if
you’re interested in that sort of thing. They are from a really
interesting thing I did this week.

The fellow standing next to me in the photo is a Chief of mine. He is
a really, really good guy. He was in Bethesda on limited duty orders
when I was there and they gave him the job of being the boss of the
Fleet Liaison Office, which is where I worked. I met him for the first
time on the day that my son died. I came downstairs from the Labor and
Delivery floor and he was sitting in the office, trying to figure out
how it all worked in the midst of the crisis that was my life. The
first thing I ever said to him was, “You’re an Explosive Ordnance
Disposal guy? Do you guys hate it when people say you’re the bomb?”

Anyway, he is out here now. He lives way over on the other side of the
base that is next-door to us. He took The Boss and I out to the range
with him this past week. He works for  the Counter-IED taskforce. They
are a group that trains ISAF (International Security Assistance Force:
Us, the British, Danish, etc. Basically, coalition forces and the
Afghans.) personnel to identify and destroy Improvised Explosive
Devices. It’s a strange task, in a strange place.

His day-to-day job is to train Afghan Security Forces to identify and
destroy IEDs. The issue here is that the Afghans don’t speak English.
Their counting system can be described as “One, two, many…” It is not
an exact science with them. In fact, if you look in an Afghan
dictionary for the term, ‘exact science’ you will find that you have
to first write an Afghan dictionary.

But explosive require a certain tact. They require at least a minimum
level of careful planning, mathematics and understanding to keep the
user from being transformed, from a latter-day Merchant of Death, into
a latter day cloud of moist, former-body parts. Now, given the
prevalence of explosive devices, some of a very high-caliber, that
litter the country-side here, we know that the people can be taught.
There is an audience for this kind of infotainment.

The actual audience that my Chief had for his student body was a bit
less impressive than the image you probably have when I say:
Afghanistan Explosive Team. What he actually trains is a rag-tag bunch
of 20-40 somethings with the attention spans of children. (Actually,
they were very like children in many ways. At one point they were
given a break, to smoke or use the bathroom. They spent it throwing
rocks at each other and running around a pile of plastic pipes. At one
point, due to a rock hitting harder than it was intended to, one of
them took off his Kevlar helmet and threw it at another’s head. It was
meant to decapitate. I think it only succeeded in bruising though.)
During the initial lecture, which is full of rules of thumb, since the
math is not going to be understood, most of the men were looking at a
dog that was walking around behind the translator.

The translator, that’s another great part of this, all of the
instruction is in English, which is then translated with a variety of
success, to the Afghan men. (Let’s make another note here, uniforms.
These guys are all wearing different military-style uniforms. They are
mostly green camouflage, though some of them are in digital patterns
and other in traditional. They are all wearing boots, whatever they
can find. One fellow who was about 4’ tall was wearing size 20 boots.
He looked like a clown and kept stumbling while holding his
explosives. It was unnerving. One fellow was wearing the nylon, rain
gear as his uniform. It can’t have been comfortable. Imagine wearing a
plastic suit on a 90 degree day, now imagine doing that while working
with explosives. He had little rivulets of sweat pouring out of his
plastic cuffs, into his boots. It was gross, but also kind of funny.)
The translators are not experts in explosives, they are just guys who
can understand basic, idiomatic English. The poor fellows who are
trying to learn are trying to learn second hand.

The training is very clever, though. Obviously this is a field where
rules of thumb are encouraged. Rather than learning specific and
technically correct lengths and times, they are taught to count tick
marks and yellow dots. When they plant their explosives they are
taught to yell “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” three times, at different angles
from the explosive. They can yell it in English or Pashtu. But at some
point, the whole exercise comes down to speed of movement. You must
pull the pin and get away in a speedy fashion. If you’re going to yell
your warning, it shouldn’t be done slowly, after the fellow right next
to you has already pulled his pin. Obviously the instructors are not
insane and they give enough time, but this is not a crack unit of
ordnance experts they are dealing with and there are a few moments
when, as the medical person on the scene, I had some rivulets of sweat
going myself.

But it was a good day, no one got hurt. I got to hang out in the sun
and see some explosions. I got to hang out with my pal, my Chief. It
was a good thing.

We’re days away from April now, which means that we’re days away from
the beginning of the end of our tour. I should be home by May and that
is really, really good news. It’s all downhill from here. I’ll be
seeing you all soon. In the meantime, as we say to the Afghans, keep
your powder dry.

I am, perhaps, skinnier

A Day At The Range

Update 21

Just dragging, dog tired tonight. It was a long day, and I got to see
an old friend, but not sleeping is bad for my brain. What's that? You
don't care? Just get on with the Update? You've got it.

This morning, after work, a group of night-shift folks and I went to a
required briefing. It was the first of many, many post-deployment,
Warrior Transition Program briefs. This is a program designed to
lessen the strain of going from deployed life to home life, to ease us
past the bumps of possible PTSD. (Cultural note: Spellcheck wants me
to make PTSD into POTSDAM.) It's not a bad idea. As concepts go, it
probably has value, but in this case it was a waste of time. It was
run by a chaplain, for some reason, possibly because chaplains don't
have very much to do, specifically, the whole Warrior Transition
Program is under the auspices of the military chaplains.

So, at this brief, as part of the program, we went through 8 minutes
of guided meditation. (Yes, this is something tax dollars pay for;
take it up with someone, by all means.) I had spoken to the chaplain
before the brief started and he was telling me about his life and we
were talking about the Japanese earthquake and it was OK. He seemed
like a nice guy. He made some anti-fortune teller comments that I
thought made him seem a little be fundamentalist, which I appreciated.
But then he led us in a guided meditation. (Goofy New Age music and a,
"feel yourself relaxing" spiel.) And it made me think about the
differences between universal and specific.

(Private message: Rona, if you're going to hide out in the bathroom
and read this, at least restock the toilet paper.)

In the military, and in American culture these days, we try very hard
to be universal. Everything we say has to avoid giving offense, our
audience is an audience of everyone. Specific beliefs or standpoints
are not welcome, they detract from the universal nature of our hoped
for approval. There are things about this that are good, generally I
think that this gives us a very live and let live attitude towards
people and things. But there are problems with it, too.

If we are all things, if we universalize our message and mix
everything together into a multi-cultural stew, then we lose
specificity and sharpness. We blur things that might be important, if
clear, into opacity. The military chaplain is a good example of this.

The chaplain has to be a spiritual adviser to all religions. He has to
embrace being an ecumenical miracle. All faiths, religions and creeds
need to be able to be expressed by one guy. That's a real savings, in
a way, but it is a pretty lackluster individual who takes the job. He
can't express favoritism to his own beliefs, which means that he can't
be a specific assist to, say, the Methodists around him. He has to
also be a balm to Bahia and the interlocutor for Islam. And by being
all things to all people, he is then of little value to any of them.
He is no longer a man of specific Faith, but a man who can reflect and
random faith back at you.

To put it another way, and to reflect another aspect of military life,
the chaplain is like a Clif bar. He is always there, always edible and
while he might not taste like what you want to eat, nor might he
satisfy your actual hunger or desire for a meal, he is at least
something to put in your stomach for now. (And he might look like a
turd, the way that Clif bars always do,) There is value to a chaplain,
but not as much as there might be if he was one thing or another.

All things to all people is the same as nothing to everyone. It's a
sad truism and it worries me that it is something that the military
has embraced. It worried me because there IS a need for spiritual
guidance. We DO have people coming in who are in massive, massive pain
and want someone to guide them, in a spiritual way. It's an
interesting thing. You hear these guys come in, blown up, and crying
out in pain, and there is no one to help them. They say that there are
no atheist in foxholes, well there are REALLY no atheists in foxholes
that have been hit by an RPG.

In Bethesda there is a Franciscan friar, he is one of the chaplains
there and he is non-military, which means that he can BE a Franciscan.
He's a nice guy and when Margaret and I were dealing with our son
dying, he is who I went to, to ask about services and prayers and what
we should do. He, being a civilian, was not going to be at the
hospital overnight and so he offered to send up whoever the on-duty
chaplain was. It ended up being a military woman, vaguely evangelical.
She was nice, but militarily bland, with prayers to "whichever God."
She was less than comforting and we just wanted her to leave. Now, I'm
not a Catholic, I'm not a Franciscan, I just liked that there was
someone who really, specifically believed something to talk to.

 I guess what I am saying is that Universal is the bane of specific.
And as a result, Universal ends up being nothing. And I think that
people who are looking for something outside of themselves aren't
looking for Nothing. They are looking for something Specific.

Anyway, that's all of that. In other news, the team has left, tonight,
to go to England and train up our replacements. It's only a matter of
time now. Everyone here is very excited. This is one of those things
that, at the beginning of the process, we viewed as the last great
milestone before we made it home. There is still time out here, but
it'll be over before we know it now, and everyone is happy about that.

Update 20

There is a local national that cleans up, mops the floors and whatnot,
at night here. He looks just like an Afghani Abraham Lincoln. I call
him Ibrahim Lincoln. Another random musing? It must be time for this
week's Update!

So, this week would have been my son's first birthday. Due to
circumstances more or less beyond my control, it only was that
theoretically. Instead it was just a kind of a sad week, spent missing
home, missing my wife, missing a life-status that has passed/never
happened. And it made me think that one of the things that I haven't
really written about, not in any concrete way, is how much we are all
missing or wives and families.

Being in the Navy, in the Armed Services, means that there will be
times when you are away from your family, that's just a part of the
deal when you sign on. And it isn't anything new or more difficult
than anyone else deals with. But there is a specific kind of pay that
they give you when you're on deployment, a Family Separation
Allowance, that lets you know that they know that this is a hard thing
that no one likes.

Family is an important part of the military experience. In a lot of
ways, they encourage you to get married, have kids, buy a house,
settle down. These are all important steps, because the more settled a
Soldier/Sailor/Marine is in his/her private life, the more invested
s/he will be in the military process. It is good for people, good for
careers, good for the military.

But then there is this flip-side, this being away, being apart.
Missing you kid's first steps, missing so many birthdays and holidays
and being unable to help in every little thing that happens. My friend
Cahill has two kids at home. He has a daughter who is 3 and a son who
is 1. He missed both of their birthdays this year. We all missed
Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and now Easter. We all missed our
wives birthdays, our anniversaries, our parents' and siblings'
birthdays. We are all giving up that part of our lives, for this year,
this time.

And that's acceptable, we all accept it. But we don't really talk
about it with each other, and we don't really talk about it with you.
We say: "Let's go home.  Let's be done now." We say, "Man, it is going
to be good to be home." We imagine the circumstances and tell
mini-stories in our minds about when we first see our wives and kids
again. (We plan our first meals, when we get back.  We try to remember
what our houses smell like.)

It is a constant, nagging longing that is always at the back of our
minds. We chuckle and tease each other, we are quiet and filled with
work, but we're always thinking about our wives and families back
home. That's the collective.

To make it personal, I'll talk about Margaret. Well, first I'll talk
about something she would be annoyed by, then I'll use that to talk
about her. I like to tell stories. I tell them to myself if there is
no one around to listen. A lot of the time I will tell stories about
what would have happened to me if X, Y or Z thing hadn't. I attempt to
tell a story wherein the rotten thing I actually did, I didn't. What
would happen then? Who would I be? What would my life look like? And I
try to be as accurate as I can. (I do this all the time, but being
here, more or less alienated most of the time, means I have lots of
time to spin my tales.) I try to make sure that the things that I
re-do are really the way they would be. And what I always end up with
is a life that, while possibly a little bit better, doesn't have
Margaret in it. And that's not acceptable. So then I have to rejigger
the whole story, start again from another point. But if I am being
realistic, then I have to accept that the circumstances that led to
our being a couple, and then married and happy, were pretty
far-fetched and relied on an awful lot of long-shot, crazy decision
making.

I think that there is an inevitability to she and I. I think that, in
spite of all of this time apart. I think it in spite of everything
else in the world indicating otherwise. I know that without her, I'd
still be that guy who lies about people's lives in order to avoid 4
hours of work. I know that without her I would probably be a very
different person, going about a very different life. I know that
because I've spent the past 5+ months without her. And I see the
changes in myself. I can see the things about me that have remained
and the things about me that try to resurge without her.

I listen to her, in our phone conversations, figuring out how to live
with me gone. Figuring out how I do the things I do at home. (So many
times she has told me that things I did when I was home that she
thought were insane idiosyncrasies, now make sense as she has to do
them for herself. That's not to say that she is not still convinced
that I am full of insane idiosyncrasies, just to say that some of them
are now revealed as practical measures.) I listen to her starting her
business. Making strong decisions and being this terrific woman. I
can't even describe what a bizarre thing it is, to listen to your
wife's life and be a total spectator while she goes around being
amazing. I know from how she has impacted me that she is wonderful,
but to hear it from the perspective of her dynamism in the world… it's
mind-blowing, humbling and a lot of the time, lonely.

Being apart from your wife and your family, it is a good way of taking
your measure. It shows you how you are and who you are and if you are
at all given to introspection, who you were and who you have become.
It is a hard thing, but it makes me love my wife more. It makes me
appreciate what she has made me into and who she has become. I think
that we all, the deployed folks out here, can agree that the way we
live when away from home makes us miss both the comforts and the
people that we are without. But it also reminds us of what it is like
to live in squalor. And anyone who has ever been a single man knows,
squalor is what happens before you're married. (Or when you're on
deployment.)

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please
visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Update 19, totally frivolous

Do you think that Mission Impossible 4 will start out with Tom Cruise
asking Ving Rhames' character, "Remember that crazy dream I told you
about, where I got married and there was a rabbit's foot?" Otherwise,
I am not sure how they are going to get him out of being a married
spy. That's right, it's time for another Update.

Also, a crazy video, which I should mention that I can't see,
http://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/air-strikes/the-mother-of-all-jdam-attacks/792774915001/?ESRC=dod.nl

It is pouring down rain here in Afghanistan tonight. Really impressive
pouring rain. One of those blattery, spattering rains that seem like
they are coming from all directions at one. Since all of our
buildings, actual buildings, not tents, are made of corrugated tin, it
gets noisy.  The tents are their own problem. All that stretched
canvas, with plastic layers underneath, it is both noisy and damp.
And have I brought up that there are no worms here? I know that this
seems like a creepy thing to obsess over, but there are seriously no
worms. I've never been anywhere when, after it rains, there are not
worm trails about. How does this soil work? How are there areas where
things DO grow, without worms? I am really freaked out by it. (And for
the two sci-fi nerds out there, this makes me wonder how the
sand-worms of Arrakis were supposed to work. Here I am, in a desert,
no worms at all. How did they get HUGE worms on Arrakis? I know,
space, planets, aliens and sci-fi, but seriously, it seems to fly in
the face of what I now recognize as an immutable fact of life: there
are not worms in the desert.)

I have spent the evening ignoring responsibilities. I mean, I did my
job, which was easy enough. My school work is mostly complete;
probably it is complete to the level I plan to complete it. But I have
been avoiding writing this Update. I am not sure what to talk about
tonight.  I have spent most of the week working on school, which is a
good thing. (A great thing, a wonderful thing.) But it is not the sort
of thing that leads to fascinating Updates.

For a second I thought that I could really squeeze out some thoughts
on worms, but I think that I have tapped that well. What is left?
Well, we are firmly entered into the final pages of this journey,
there is certainly that to talk about. We're almost into the 40 days
left arena, which feels good. Everyone's heart is a little lighter
with the thought of leaving. We are all discussing strategies for
packing and carrying the least weight possible. They really do give
you a lot of weight to carry for these missions. In most cases, I
imagine, it is worthwhile. In our case, we never used 85% of the gear
we were issued. It was good to have it, I suppose, but we really
didn't get to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the products.
(Plus, while I was packing things up for shipment home, I found a few
items that I have no idea where they came from. They are in my bags,
which I packed, so I must have gotten them somewhere. They are useful
items and they look like issued gear, but I have memory of being
issued them. That's strange, right?  Oh well, they are packed up and
ready to be returned, if they are extra then perhaps Uncle Sam will
make a profit.)

I don't know if I have characterized a deployment this way previously,
but it is a series of bad smells. There is the pungent man-odor of the
tents which never get aired out. There is the moist and cloying stench
of the latrines that are never flushed properly… (Think of every
female comedienne's routine about men, then imagine a place where
there are hundreds of men and no women. That's what a deployment it.
The segregation of males and females is a really good thing in lots of
ways, but hygiene is not one of those ways.) There is the hospital
reek of disinfectant and blood and then there is the general dusty
stink of Afghanistan. I was working on a theory the other day, the
idea that the point of all of this malignant odor is due to a
calculated strategy. If you were ever taken captive on a base,
blind-folded and walked out, you could tell where you were based on
the various stinks you encountered on the way. When you smelt BO and
farts, you'd know you were near the tents and could call out for help.
It's probably not accurate, but it would make a good scene in a movie.
 Sneakers 2: The Afghan Campaign.

In return to the world news: There is an annual Baconfest in Chicago.
I will miss it this year, but would anyone like to guess where I will
be in April of 2012? That's right, BACONFEST!!!

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please
visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Update 18

I spent the week really down. I couldn't think of anything to write
for school all week. I stared at my homework and just felt dumb. Then
today I woke up in a really good mood and did a week's worth of all my
subjects in about 2 hours. So, Update time.

Let's talk about current events. So, there is all this talk about
funding for the military and reducing the forces. People are worried
that it will hurt the troops, or hurt our war-readiness. To some
degree, these fears are genuine, but let's break it down a little bit,
from the in-the-military perspective. There are two kinds of military,
garrison and operational. And there are combinations of the two.
Garrison operations, that's like the hospital in Bethesda. Or it's
like what I did in Okinawa, it's having an office and not being in the
field. In a way, it is what I am doing now, too. I am deployed, but to
a garrison unit. We are on a base, we are not out in the field and no
one is shooting at us.

Military funding works in a really bizarre way. Places like Bethesda
have so much money that you can't believe it. Partly that's important,
there are really excellent medical procedures that happen there that
require top funding. The ability to pioneer in the field of medicine
requires money. However, there are also flat-screen HD TVs all over
the place. That adds to the concept that we're a top-tier hospital,
but it is also a pretty effective waste of tax-payer dollars. The way
that budgeting works in garrison is something like this: Each October
a budget comes out. There are X dollars for the fiscal year. If you,
as a department, spend less than $X, your budget the following year
will be less by that amount. Consequently, around about August or
September each year, every department spends whatever money they have
left over on anything that they can remotely call a reasonable
expense. Sometimes, depending on the department, you can find some
truly extravagant items. You know that it's a budget-blowing time when
you suddenly get office chairs that are $600 each. Or the
aforementioned flat screens. If anyone does an audit and finds things
like this, it is considered Fraud, Waste and Abuse. It's a really big
deal. But just like in real estate, where developers have boats named
First Draft, it is usually not caught or disputed. That's just how
budgeting works in the military.

When you're in an operational environment, it is a little different.
Well, at least with the Marines. I have no idea how it works with the
other branches, I have never been operational with them. But the
Marines always get the oldest equipment and the least money. As a
result, they tend to be really good at re-purposing and innovating
with what they have. But even there, especially the Navy side of the
house, there are some total wastes of budget. I was on a field
exercise in Okinawa and we had stretchers. They were old, probably
Vietnam era, stretchers, but they were built to last and would be
expensive to replace. They were collapsible and, when we requisitioned
them from the supply compound, they were collapsed. When we got to the
field we found that most of them were missing the bolt that locked
them in place, when expanded. The mindset was that we could throw them
away and get new ones. (Though we would not have gotten NEW ones, we'd
have gotten the same Vietnam era ones, but not broken.) I looked
around the site and found a repair kit for something else that had
bolts that would work, talked to some Chiefs and got permission to fix
the stretchers using the bolts. I spent pretty much the whole day
doing it, but saved our unit some untold number of dollars in the
process. It was a simple matter, but not one that anyone was willing
to go through the trouble to take care of otherwise.

All of this to say, I am not sure that budget cuts would be a bad
thing. The military doesn't budget well. It is a government operation.
It is inefficient and poorly manages its money. If it were a
corporation, it would go bust within 5 years. I think that a little
belt-tightening, if managed correctly, would not go amiss. Now, there
is no evidence to support the idea that we WOULD manage budget cuts
correctly. Much more likely, people would still get their $600 office
chairs, but at the same time they wouldn't be able to afford
ammunition for the troops in the field. It's one of those things, the
people who have the greatest claim to financial gain are not
necessarily those who are most in need. But that tends to be true
across the board, right? It is one of the faults of the capitalist
system. (Which as we all know is the worst system around, except for
all the other ones.)

And the money that we do have, the money that gets spent on big ticket
items and black ops budgets, that kind of stuff is really well spent.
Have you seen the electromagnetic rail gun the Navy has now? Have you
heard about the anti-laser? Military Research and Development gets a
bad rap, and a lot of the time deservedly so. There is a lot of money
spent on projects that never see the light of day, a lot of money
spent on vaporware. But when we do have a winner, it tends to change
the face of warfare. Generally, anything published here:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ is worth looking at.

And our Special Forces, the guys who are out there in the mud, really
facing down the big challenges, those guys are funded pretty well, and
will continue to be. They are out of a different pot of money
all-together. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/go-inside-the-56-billion-black-budget/)

The guys who you would be worried about are the Marines on the ground.
The grunts are always the ones who haven't enough money, who have the
old equipment and the worst deal. But they have that now, they had
that in the boom-times of the past 10 years. Partially it is good
strategy to keep those guys unhappy. They are incredibly innovative
with what they have at that point. Partially it is a morale issue. A
happy Marine is a bitching Marine. But partially it is just that even
with all the money you could possibly spend, there is never enough
money for war.

And I am not sure that there should be.

Ultimately a finding issue comes down to an issue of priorities. It
comes down to an issue of value. It comes down to an issue of
investment and returns. What is the benefit at this point? Is war
bringing us a valuable return? I am not sure it is. Let's say that we
wipe out the insurgent base in Afghanistan. Let's say it happens
before the intended pull-out date. Let's say that we leave Afghanistan
in as-good, if not better condition than Iraq. What will that have
achieved? What will that do for the US economy? What will it do for
the morale of the people?

The world at large can see the pie-graph of democracy increase, but
will it change the burnt-baby ratio in Afghanistan? Will the Jay Leno
man-on-the-street interview be less frustrated? I am not sure it will.
I think that maybe that's partially the fault of the military. We
spent our money on our chairs when maybe we should have spent it on
something more important. Maybe we wasted our profitability and
capitalism is right when it takes away a little of our budget.

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please
visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Update 17

So, I am just going to go ahead and assume that everyone is watching
30 Rock and wildly enjoying it. If you're not, you're missing out.
Whatever your personal feelings about Alec Baldwin, he is a timing
machine! And with that random statement, it's time for another Update!

So, this week has been rain central here in Afghanistan. We've had
more rain this week than I've seen in the whole time I have been here.
(How do they officially measure rain? Gallons per square foot? Gallons
per inch? Inches per gallon? Or is it in metric? Hexaliters per
centipede?) There are puddles that could probably qualify as ponds.
Some of the tents have flooded, though so far the tent I live in has
been safe. There has been thunder and wind and general storminess. But
one of the things that I was kind of expecting hasn't happened.
Whenever you see rain in arid areas on nature documentaries there is a
sped up film of grass growing afterwards and vistas of new vegetation
and animals that sleep underground for 11.5 months out of the year
waking up and shaking off their hibernation. (That last part might be
an exaggeration, but I'm not quoting or anything.) But here there is
just a lot of sandy mud and a stagnant smell.

When I was really little we rented a house in Chardon, OH. It had an
old stone basement that smelled like stone and damp, a mildew, cold
smell. The entire base smells like that basement.

I DID see a bird this morning though. It was a sparrow-ish kind of
flappy-winged thing. It was chirping like crazy and for a second I
thought about the birds in Rikki-tikki Tavi and how they flapped
around and freaked out when the cobras, Nag and Nagina, were around.
Then I looked around and realized that any cobras would be floating
belly up in one of the ponds and trudged on back to my cot. Having a
literary childhood is great in certain circumstance, but in others it
is just kind of depressing.

What other big news do we have for the week? I'm within 3 pounds of my
weight goal. This will get a little complicated, but I'll try to
explain. All of the scales here are metric, so my goal weight is 84
kilograms, in uniform. And the uniform weighs about 8 pounds. (That's
boots, two knives, a belt, whatever is in my pockets and the whole
deal.) So, right now I weigh 85.6 kilograms, which is about 3 pounds
from the goal. And the goal will put me at 176 pounds, without the
uniform. I'll be at about what I weighed in high school. When I left
for training I weighed between 210 and 220 pounds. It's a big change.
I've definitely lost the weight in the least healthy way possible,
mostly from not eating, but it's cool to have achieved it. 33 years
old and I weigh about what I did at 18.

School work is the other big thing this week. I'm taking 4 classes
online. I've been really surprised lately at how little sense of humor
anyone that I am taking classes with brings to online forum. We mostly
do our class participation by posting little comments, like on an
old-school BBS. In Writing class there was this huge conversation
about plagiarism and how important it is to avoid it. One of the
topics that everyone had to comment on was, "Avoiding Plagiarism,
Personal Tips." Everyone was supposed to give examples of how they
avoid plagiarizing. (I know, this is a 300 level class, this is what
you pay for when you pay tuition. The college system is a total scam.)
Everyone is posting these tips like: "I like to make sure that
anything I copy from another source has a reference within the paper."
I wrote, "Am I the only one who wants to copy someone else's answer?"
I got 6 responses telling me that that would be plagiarism.

We're about 2 months out from coming home now, and everyone is very
excited. They keep talking about how it's so close to getting home. I
keep telling people, it's another 3rd of the time. I try to remind
them of how long the first 3rd took. But no one is listening. They are
sending home all of their gear and acting like it is only a matter of
days. I am sympathetic, but I really think it's a mistake to give over
too much of your thought to leaving, we still have more to go and if
you don't want the final 3rd to feel the longest, it's best to embrace
the time we're still here.

I was sent this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011502203.html
A friend of mine knows the guy and describes him as having "gone
native." It's an old fashioned idea, and one that we kind of don't
think about anymore. Back in the day, British Empire times, it was the
height of embarrassment to have someone go native. But now, I think
that we almost approve of it. It's one of those things, like commandos
and guerilla warfare, where it's good if we do it, but bad if someone
else does. I think that it's one of the interesting facets of losing
the whole honorable warfare code. We still have things that we think
of as really bad, but mostly only if other people do them. I told my
friend that, given the Afghan sexual proclivities and their strange
pedophilic leanings, I'd be afraid to go too native.

Sort of a bits and bobs week, nothing that big happened and nothing
too shocking to report. I'll see if I can have a more comprehensive
topic next week. What with the rain and all, it was pretty quiet.
Thank you to everyone who Facebook'd or Gmail'd me a happy birthday,
it was much appreciated!

For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please
visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Your 16th Update

From a concerned reader:

Owen, given your state of mind this week, I was not surprised you looked back for previous writing.  However, people are interested in and curious about what happens in Afghanistan.  It is getting to be mundane for you, but is not for us.  Except for what you tell us, we haven't got a clue.  We would like to have a clue.  We are depending on you. 

Could you explain a few things in some detail? 

1.)Could you explain the process that brings wounded soldiers in and also the process that brings civilians in. You mentioned it once, but briefly.  I know they get blown up and somehow they end up on a table being repaired.  What happens? 

2.)Is there ever any word after they go off again? 

3.)The people you work with; how do they get there? 

4.)You are at a British hospital; why, and how does command work there? 

5.)Who's in charge and how are decisions made?  I am sure there are strategic matters you cannot relate, but ordinary things are fascinating to us here. 

6.) Do nationals work on the base? 

7.) Is it really so boring for your compatriots that tarot and Ouija boards seem good to fill the time.  Has that passed, yet? 

8.) Who are you working with? 

9.) What kind of people do what you do? 

10.) I note that it raining there this week.  What is the dust like after the rain?  Does it almost solidify like wet cornstarch or is it like mud? 

11.) What animals are there?  Do you see any living things other than humans? 

Seriously, there is so much we don't know and cannot conceive of.  Even comment on something like the article you sent out today - does it connect to what you do?  I imagine it means fewer civilian casualties, at least. 

12.) Am I right? 

13.) Do you ever patch up Taliban? 

14.) What happens to them? 

Consider asking for questions, too. 

So, as Vampire Weekend would say, I Stand Corrected. It's time for another Update.

I will do my best to answer the 14 questions there, and their implications. (Truth be told, both due to seasonal malaise and my innate rebellious nature, I am tempted to make them my grade-school minimums, 1.) Yes, 2.) No… etc. I will not go that route and will use complete sentences and everything. My Mother would be so proud!)

1.) When we were in England and they explained this part to us, I thought that it was really clever. It's and interesting system. There are two different helicopter teams that go and pick people up. One of them is medically extreme, they are fitted to do everything shy of surgery in the air. The other is more militarily extreme, they are set up to do minor medical care, but they are outfitted to go into hairy areas and pick up the wounded while also laying down suppressive fire. The folks that work these areas, both flight crews, are pretty impressive. They get to see some crazy things, as well as more of the Afghan countryside than most other military folks here.

2.) Actually very, very rarely. Believe it or not, once these guys get to where they live, the last thing they want to think about is the time they spent unconscious and miserably in pain in-country. Very rarely we'll get a letter from someone's parents.

3.) The folks coming in to work and those that are airlifted out after treatment here go by fixed wing aircraft. (Planes) There is a flightline on base that is where we flew in, that initial impression I had of Mad Max-style wildness, that's over by the flightline.

4.) The British Hospital is very much owned by the British. There is a Commanding Officer, new now that the new crew of Brits has arrived. And a British, what we would call Executive Officer, or XO. They call him their 2IC. (2^nd In Command) They are pretty nice Officers who have their own agendas and plans for the Hospital. We were specifically warned, before getting over here, that any suggestions we have, as Americans working in with the British, should be posed as questions rather than suggestions. It is a tricky relationship. As far as our detachment is concerned, we have and American Commander (O-5) who is the OIC (Officer In Charge) of our detachment. She is a surgeon and a really good one. I'm going to try to avoid using any names, but she has done some cool things before she came here. She was on the team that helped to design the Mobile Trauma Bay, which was an idea that came out of the initial stages of combat here. It was basically a huge 7-ton truck with a trailer on the back that contained a mobile surgery unit. The plan was that it would be up-armored and travel around, from battle-site to battle-site, dealing out healthcare. It was neat idea, but ultimately unworkable. It was too big and heavy to travel easily and too large to be anything other than a terrific target. One of the nurses that I worked with in Okinawa was an initial designer on the project. That's one of the things that people forget about warfare, there is a great deal of innovation and invention that is part of it. That Mobile Trauma bay is a great concept that we could potentially use one day. It's in the idea-bank and ready for the future. Anyways, Our OIC, then there is a Senior Chief, our Senior Enlisted Leader. He's a good guy.

5.) Well, as far as the Hospital is concerned, it all goes through the British CO. There really isn't a whole lot of decision making for the Americans, and as far as strategic matters are concerned, we are not a strategic asset. We're a support asset.

6.) They do, It's an interesting thing. We have what we call LNs (Local Nationals) all over the place. I think that I mentioned once that the US policy is that anything that is to be purchased, officially, should be purchased from an Afghan source if at all possible. So LNs make and serve our food, they are our cleaners and maintenance folks. Oddly, there is usually an Indian fellow that oversees, but the Afghans are the workers.

7.) The spiritualism phase seems to have more or less passed. I am glad for that. And yes, it is incredibly boring. I probably can't express it adequately, but there is NOTHING to differentiate days. That combined with the 11.5 hour difference with the States puts us in an odd limbo. We work and sleep and watch and re-watch TV shows. Our families are all experiencing yesterday, which makes today feel like it isn't real. The most mundane and minor things become a huge deal. I got a board to put under my sagging cot this week and it has been the source of about half of my conversations.

8.) Hmm, this one I will refer to that photo I posted a few weeks back. I am avoiding names, to protect the innocent, so that'll have to cover that one.

9.) Well, this one is tougher. The people who do what I do are a cross-section of wildly competent and wildly incompetent. I work at nights; I'm the only one here on my particular schedule. This fosters an incredibly alienated feeling. I tend not to be lonely, but I do tend to feel alone. It makes things difficult. I do not share anything with anyone, which means that I feel very, very disconnected and apart. So, the people who do this job are people who are different than I am? Or maybe that is just the nights speaking. I generally like people who work in military medicine, so they are mostly likeable? But then, I mostly like people. Maybe I'll just refer this to that photo, too. The kind of people in that photo, that's who I work with.

10.) This one is kind of interesting, The dust turns into sand. That's what it does when it rains. It's nicer than the sand in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Gitmo is the only place I've ever been that smelled really, really bad when it rained. I was always surprised, since it is ocean-surrounded, how bad it managed to smell in a rain storm. But it smells good here when it rains. The air is charged with positive ions and you can generally detect a spring in people's steps. It also gets warmer when it rains. I have no idea how that works. Are there any meteorologists reading this? Can you explain? Can someone forward this to Dick Goddard?

11.) There are no animals at all here. I occasionally see a hawk in the sky, really far away. There are a few feral cats. That's it.

12.) You might be right. It's hard to tell what the cause and effect of strategic planning is when it comes to casualties.

13.) We DO patch up Taliban. But beyond that, I really can't talk about it.

14.) Wow, I REALLY can't talk about that.

Does anyone have specific questions?

For more of the Afghan Updates, please visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Another non-Update

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/i-flattened-afghan-villages/

This is just a fascinating story about what is going on, for those who
wonder if we're winning.

Update 15

As a sort of comparison piece, I thought I'd show you some of what I
wrote when I was in Cambodia. Many of you will have seen it before,
but to some it will be new.
You can see more of it here:
http://thewayitwere.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

This was the second Update I wrote from Cambodia and it was at the
half-way point of that deployment. I think you'll see that a lot of
the feelings are similar, even though that was not a war-zone
deployment and it was only about 2 weeks. Deployments have a familiar
rhythm, where ever they might be.

Have you ever had a really bad hangover? Have you ever had a really
bad hangover and then had to sit in oppressive heat and take blood
pressures of smelly people all day? How about this one, have you ever
had a really bad hangover, had to spend the day taking smelly blood
pressures and then had the tent you are under collapse over you?
Welcome to my Friday!

Thursday night was a celebration of sorts. Dr. J, our veddy British
doctor, was leaving us on Friday morning and we were sending him off
in Cambodian high-style. By which I mean, there were almost clean
plates to eat off of and people who had had the foresight to bring
their own booze from home broke it out. The misty, finger stained
glasses at the restaurant were the perfect counterpoint to our fine
Scotch whiskey, and in true Navy style we shot the two fingers of 22
year aged Glen Fiddich. Then the good Dr. broke out his private stash
of Bacardi and we got down to a serious goodbye. It was in the midst
of telling a story that I realized that my tongue was no longer under
my control, and it was then that my friend Thompson and I decided to
stumble back to out tents.

Have you ever slept on a spinning cot before? It is most unpleasant.
The normal discomforts of camping are nothing until they are combined
by a really good, beer, scotch, rum-drunk. I may have thrown up some
rice, organ meats, random unidentified vegetables, the four massive
Angkor beers I'd had before the scotch and then all the liquor I've
ever seen. I may have thrown them up into a water bottle. It may have
been an unfortunate water bottle to discover when I woke up in the
morning. And when I say it may have been these things, I guess I mean
it was so. Not that I am trying to duck responsibility for my actions
or anything, I genuinely made the incredibly foolish choices that led
to this miserable end, but there were extenuating circumstances… I
really hadn't liked being sober the day before.

That morning started at about 0230. After having voided my entire body
cavity at about 1030 I fell into a fitful and feverish doze. At 0230
one of the other fellows in my tent lost his iPod earbuds and blasted
the rest of the tent with the supremely restful sounds of Minor
Threat, or perhaps it was Social Distortion. At any rate, the group
that played had a name that brings to mind the overthrow of
governments by violent means. They are a loud, obnoxious,
spirit-rending musical group and they were played at decibel levels
that explain this fellow's general inability to hear orders when
shouted at him. Finally we resolved the earbud issue and fell back
into the snooze that had been formerly denied.

Within 40 minutes the local roosters started crowing, their internal
alarm apparently set several time zones to the left of their actual
location. When they ceased crowing the rise of the sun in Alabama
there was a scant 20 minutes of rest before some spirited Cambodian
mistook our tents for the home away from home of American Idol. He
burst into frenzied song for 40 or more minutes, during which time I
lay in a stupor of illness and fever. While I prayed that the singing
would cease so that I could once more pretend that sleep was possible
I envisioned a massacre. I saw myself wielding a bloodied machete,
with the blood of a thousand roosters and all amateur vocalists, the
world over, staining its blade. If I had had a machete, and had not
been so given over to ensuring my continued breathing by intense
concentration, what a legend I could have been.

When the local Cambodian William Hung finally ceased his endless
rendition of "She Bangs Cambodia" I allowed my breathing to take over
and slept the 10 minutes that the local populace allowed before their
early morning horn and Caribbean steel drum chorus took over the
musical duties. Might as well try to sleep at CBGBs. I wrestled myself
from my mosquito netting and stumbled around in the remains of my
dinner while using baby-wipes to clean the more egregious filth from
the floor and my body. After a miserable shave and morning toilet I
ate some MRE bread and jam for breakfast, drank some luke-warm bottled
water and started taking morning vital signs.

The Cambodian people are not regular bathers. I have had experience
with people who rarely bathe. The detainees in Guantanamo Bay are not,
as a rule, the most hygienic of men. This did not particularly bother.
They have a spicy smell, those detainees, they are a human curry. A
rich mélange of spices and bodily oils. Afghanistani people are the
spice of life, however evil and insane they may be. Cambodians, on the
other hand, are like an armpit. Perhaps like an armpit that has not
learned to adequately wipe its bottom, if your mind can conceive of
such tortured anatomy. There is something in their odor that makes one
wish for almost any other scent. Pure toilet filth has it over
Cambodian peasant in the pure toilet filth is a distinct smell, not a
mixture of foulnesses. Perhaps I overstate this, but there is truth in
it.

Take this unpleasantness on top of already being filthily sick and
repulsed by one's own smells and the day becomes an unpleasant
admixture of nausea. It's also impressive how, in a country absolutely
rife with skin diseases, parasites, amputated limbs, gross deformities
and dengue fever there is daily someone who combines all of these
features into so startling a visage that comment is forced from you.
In so much as there are general unfortunates and general combinations,
and the wearying morass of humanity parades before you without pulling
one up short for comment, the ones that really stand out stand out in
such a grotesque way. Your hand, reaching for their wrist to check the
pulse, draws back in horror and then, nerve overcoming distaste,
returning to the sore-encrusted member and squeezing for the
heart-thumping pulse. All the while your mind screams for release and
your hand shivers at the oozing pustules that are in its grasp. The
milky, desiccated eyes that stare, unlevel, out of the too cheerful
face, the toothless, rotten gum-landscape of their mouth.
Unforgettable, and yet always topped within the day by some horror
more grotesque. Dr Treves would have been beside himself here, so many
discoveries for the Academy. The poor elephant man would have been
only one in a crowd.

Miserable hang-over days are the longest ones, and it proved so on
Friday. Though I was sitting next to my dear friend Thompson I still
failed to appreciate the day as I have hitherto. Misery, heat, sweat,
despair, the four horsemen of a Cambodian hang-over.

In the early afternoon a wind kicked up. When I say a wind kicked up I
want you to imagine a scene from Pecos Bill, the tornado that Bill
roped and rode was not less forceful than the wind that kicked the
patient waiting-area tent off the ground and dropped it back onto the
poor Cambodians awaiting treatment. In the second of time I had to
react I started towards the people who were being endangered, which I
will always feel was a heroic impulse, but our LT called us all to
leave the tent area. In the moment of hesitation I was lost and by the
time I had turned back to help, all help had already been rendered. I
was only able to assist in the tent remediation, and even that I was
not much use. My friend Thompson managed to give a local woman heart
failure when he scooped her up from her peaceful seat and carried her
bodily out of the imagined harm's way. She was never in any danger
other than death by Thompson, but he wasn't to know.

After the eventual re-setting up of the tent there were many quiet
hours of vital signs, punctuated by kids with large upper arms,
friendly babies, pretty girls, and the occasional semi-human golem. We
saw 987 patients on Friday and it was a long, long day. When the
patients were finally gone we all had a medication sorting party until
around 8, at which point I took my fence-line shower, read some Paul
Johnson and collapsed into bed. The day over, I could finally reflect.
Never again, I decided, never again. I don't care how many British
doctors are leaving my life forever, I'm not mixing 151 and Glen
Fiddich for anyone. And let that be a lesson to all of you. Much love
as always and more to come.

For more of the Afghan Updates, please visit:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Not really an Update

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-marines-20110123,0,1057854,full.story

Due to DOD policy, I can't see this story. But I hear that it is about
the Marines that are out here, Unit 3/5. We treated some of these
guys, I guess some of the ones that are in the story.

Just thought it might be interesting.

Update XIV

Well, the downward slope has started, were past half-way and everyone
can feel it. Fewer than 100 days remain in Afghanistan; it's time for
an Update.

Everyone is feeling that our time is closing, though there are still
so many more days of monotony that everyone is also getting angry with
the place. Every day that passes brings us closer to home, but the
race is still long. I used to have a CO that said, "You don't stop
running with the finish line in sight, no matter how long the race has
been." He'd say, "No one drops their pack within yards of the hump
being over." He was really into us finishing what we started. I have
never been one for the back end of things. I am good at starting and
rotten at finishing. That's why I have the first two chapters of so
many stories written.

The short tempers are only exacerbated by circumstances. Due to an
administrative SNAFU our 3 vehicles have been lost to a contractual
failing at some higher level. This leaves us with many problems, the
most pressing of which is that no one can get the mail. We have
several hundred pounds of mail sitting at the Post Office in the
adjoining camp, but no effective way of transporting it to the
Hospital. This is particularly troublesome for me, I have started my
next semester of classes and I am sure that my textbooks are over
there. Now technically I can go over and collect my own mail, and I
intend to. The problem is this: To do that I will have to leave work
at 0700, walk over to Leatherneck without a coat, when we were in
training they told us that we did not need cold-weather gear, so we
are all without. We have a warm, zip-up fleece, but they Marines on
the adjoining base have issued an order that says that this fleece is
not acceptable uniform, and therefore we are not to wear it. So,
without a coat, walk to the other base, wait until I can get the
packages from the post office, which will be at their leisure, then
carry the packages back to this base. The early morning, when this
will necessarily take place, routinely reaches temperatures of -7
degrees. It will be an uncomfortable thing to do. But, and I hope that
my professors appreciate the trouble, duty calls.

The other latest development has been an interest among my tent-mates
in minor divination. They have ordered Tarot Cards and hold nightly
readings. They have order Ouija boards and commune with spirits. I am
becoming used to waking to chanted incantations. I have expressed my
discomfort with this practice, but as the only one who is on a
separate schedule, I already feel bad for enforcing my whims on the
majority. I have taken to waking annoyed.

Since this is devolving into a bitch-session, I will try to change the
subject. The surge in troops has definitely been having an effect on
the number of visiting patients. This past week I've seen two
separate, very impressive, double amputees. They were both bilateral
BKA. (This is medical slang for the concept that both gentlemen were
missing both feet. Below the Knee Amputations.)

One of the fellows came in, his one foot just a bit of bone shooting
out of his pant leg and the other hanging on by shreds of skin,
sitting up and talking to the doctors. I was pretty impressed. I can't
think that I would handle it as calmly. He came in with a fellow who
had taken frags of the IED to his face and shoulder. This second
fellow was carrying on, crying and wailing. I was impressed by how
stoically the fellow with no feet handled himself. He wasn't joking
around or anything, but he was strong and composed. It was probably
shock, but I thought that it was also telling.

You never know, of course, how you will go out. You never know how you
will react. Everyone hopes that they will bear up with stoic dignity,
but we all suspect that we'll be the sort to cry and whine, our own
wounds seeming so immediate and terrible that we can't concentrate on
those around us or the comparative hardships they face. (Given how
much I complain in print, I will doubtless be the fellow who complains
at the slightest breeze.)

They tell you, in boot camp and at Field Medical School, that you can
never know how you will respond to combat. They say that people who
are wonderfully strong in all other areas freeze up when the Fog of
War descends upon them. It is one of the things that young men fear
about themselves. But then there is this next test, as I supposed
there always is. If you do not freeze up, how will you handle being
wounded? And then, I suppose, there is always that final test, how
will you handle death? That question hangs around the fringes of
everything, as our Heroes come into the morgue.

Ultimately, how can I blame a bunch of young men for looking for
answers in even the bogus arms of Ouija Board spiritualism? When you
see death on a regular basis, even if you're not in much danger
yourself, you start to think about it more than is healthy.

Samuel Johnson said, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not
having been a soldier." I think that every Soldier thinks meanly of
himself for not having been a combat veteran, and every Soldier knows
that, whatever combat they may have seen, someone else saw something
worse. It is an inevitable game of one-upsmanship. I had the
Congressional Medal of Honor described to me like this once: You can
only get it if your act one-ups the act of the previous recipient,
that's why it is almost always given posthumously.

In order to receive our highest honor, we have to die in service.
Maybe that's why a man can so calmly talk to his doctors without his
feet. He knows that he has only had a minor brush with military
greatness.

Lucky Update 13

Chapeau' means 'hat.' 'Oeuf' means 'egg.' It's like those French have
a different word for everything!" -- Steve Martin (1978)

Obviously I am not breaking ground when I tell you that different
cultures have different ways. I mean, what flies in New York isn't the
same as what flies in outer, peasant Afghanistan. That's not news to
anyone. (I hope it isn't. If I am blowing your mind right now, you're
likely to not make it through the rest of this Update.) So in the
light of the previous, less than revelatory statement, I have been
thinking about patriotism.

I have been thinking that a country's embrace of freedom has a lot to
do with a basic love of place. I mean that freedom is a part of a
national identity. I don't know if I am trying to say that I think
that freedom is part of a country's self-esteem, but I think that
there is something about the who of a place. (I am not sure this is
even something the English language can express, so if this is
muddled, bear with me.)

This is where I am coming from: We had a patient this week, a young,
local national girl. She had been assaulted, physically and sexually,
by her brother. Now, I am not super conservative, I believe in
generally living and letting live. I like my characters flawed. Show
me an hour long drama on television with a lead character that you're
not sure if you're totally on his side, whose charisma outshines your
basic human ability to judge his actions, and I am enthralled. I like
my shading gray. But I have to say, you attempt to beat up and rape
your sister and you're going to have to really bring it, on the
personality side, to still be considered merely flawed and not evil.
That's a bad guy move, 100%.

This girl came in and had to be guarded, had to be protected. She was
in more danger after the assault than before it. She was now eligible
for a death warrant, now she was considered damaged goods. And
contrary to all available evidence in their product-line economy, the
Afghan people do not allow damaged goods to live.

I think, though her final situation was not expressed to the
population at large, that she made it out of the local area and is
living a life that is as regular and safe as she can now. And that is
to the good. But it makes me wonder, how do you love a country where
this is the norm? And if you can't love your country, how can you
embrace its freedom? How can you pursue it whole-heartedly? Maybe you
can. I guess it isn't impossible. But I am not sure I could do it.

Now, I know that the US is not a bastion of righteousness all the way
to its center. I know that we have some dinge against our lily-white
character. George Washington held back from freeing the slaves due to
pragmatism. Our attitude towards the American Indian/Native American
population had some pretty dire consequences for their gene-pool.
We're not blameless in these areas. Paul Johnson, my favorite
historian, (How cool is it to have a favorite historian? Is it cool or
hopelessly lame? I am never sure.) wrote a whole book around the
question of whether America's virtues outweigh its sins. I think that
there is probably no way to judge it clearly, Justice is both blind
and pretty silent on most subjects, but I think that we are at least
trying.

For instance, when we as a nation find out that a fellow has assaulted
his sister, we generally don't take the fellow's side. We're usually
on the side of the victim rather than the victimizer. It's not a hard
and fast rule. We fail sometimes, but we strive. The Afghan people,
under their variation of Sharia Law, strive in another direction.

I have friends in the military who call the Afghans 'creatures.' They
do not consider them people. I think that might be a bridge too far.
But there are all of these things, all of these strikes against this
nation: This girl, the baby who drinks diesel fuel, the very strange
and very ingrained sexual practices of the men. All of these things
add up to an image of a place, a national character if you will. And
they make me wonder, how can you be patriotic about your country if
your national character makes Don Draper look like Galahad the Pure?

I know that when the US started, our freedoms were specific to white
men. And I know that that was wrong. I know that the situation in
Afghanistan is complicated. I know that the Soviet occupation was
terrible and that the excesses of an invading force led directly to
the excesses of Sharia Law as it is practiced today. (Incidentally,
how many death can we lay at the feet of the Soviet machine? There is
a very real way in which the Russian revolution led to the rise of
Nazi Germany, then there are the Gulags, then there is China and Cuba
and… eventually Afghanistan and the extreme justification of this view
of Islam. It makes me wonder what Karl Marx would think of it all. His
basic ideas went a long way in a direction I can't imagine he'd have
appreciated. It reminds me of Ricky Gervais bit about Hitler and
Neitzsche.) I am sympathetic to the idea that a host of evil led to
this world that the people of Afghanistan now inhabit. I appreciate
that there are complicated and long-term problems and that an economic
system of reforms could change a lot of the things that are accepted.
I am reluctant to view all of this as a spiritual problem, though that
is what my upbringing leads me to. But at some point I have to wonder,
how can we really free a people that live under this kind of bondage
to an ancient code? Even if we can give them the freedom to trade and
the infrastructure to build and the resources to exploit their natural
wealth, can we save the women, children and… the spirits, I suppose?
Is there hope?

I am not in the most beautiful part of Afghanistan. But I've seen
pictures and videos of areas that are gorgeous. Even the area where I
am has vistas. The sky here lacks the impressive, oppressiveness of
Montana's Big Sky Country, but there is no denying that the horizon
goes all the way to the ground. There are purple mountains majesty if
I look to the North. I can see loving things about this country, and
everyone loves the place they were born, to some degree. And again,
freedom and patriotism aren't a national self-esteem and I am not a
defeatist. I believe that this country should be free and that liberty
is an absolute good. I believe in the Rights of Man and in Natural
Law. But I think that Hobbes, not the tiger, is right when he says
that there will rise up brutal men who will control the weak-willed,
general populace.

I guess that I think that Afghanistan needs a few more Washingtons, a
few more men of will with the desire to do good, or at least to strive
for good. (And I think that I mean men. I am not trying to be sexist
here, but I think that the country is.) And I worry that without those
men this country will be cursed to fall back into the ways of the
past. But I have hope for their future. The US started out with some
pretty significant moral flaws and has striven through the years to
overcome them. I think that Afghanistan can do the same.

Update XII

I have been watching the first season of the CBS show The Unit. This
is a show about a secret, underground Special Forces Unit that answers
directly to the President, and their wives and families. It is an ok
show, not terrific or ground-breaking, but it's a smart premise,
created by David Mamet, and it speaks to something that I have been
thinking about more and more. If you are not in the military,
personally or by marriage, then you don't really get the military
life.

No that that it totally a bad thing. I am not sure that I'd want to
get it. I was watching the wives on The Unit and their interactions.
And of course they are over-heated and soapy, but they are also not
that far off. For all of the moments that stretch the idea too far,
The Colonel screaming at the wives that they will get their husbands
killed if they are not more paranoid, there are moments that are
really accurate. Moments where groups of women who have as a bond only
that their husbands do something dangerous, and then have to be
together and live together and sort out who they are as a group.

Maybe that's what it is, there is a specific group dynamic that comes
from not being blood-family, but being family that is brought together
due to circumstances beyond control. I have a friend, a really close
friend that I met in Okinawa, Japan. He and I write e-mails 3 or 4
times a week, for hours, if work permits. We go back and forth,
discussing everything from marriage to calling each other gay for the
slightest kind word. It's silly and male and great. We talk to each
other about things that we're trying to figure out how to say to our
wives. When my son died, I was writing to this guy about it. He and I
had been e-mailing for the whole time in the hospital. He's that kind
of friend. Like a brother, really. And that's from the military.
That's not from anything else.

Of the friends I grew up with, only one of them joined the military,
too. He and I had been close in the few years before I joined and now
that we are both in, our talks are as effortless as ever, but now they
have an added bond. We're not just the guys we were when we were in
our early twenties, we're also military guys. We have shared
experiences that other people don't have, and that they can't have. We
talk about deployments and things that happen on them. We tell each
other things that we don't tell our families, because our families
don't have the base-line understanding of what it is to be in the
military.

I have a younger brother. He's a Marine. Since he joined up, when we
talk we both know exactly what the other means. We're on the same page
because we're both experiencing the same things. I know what it is for
him, when he wants to deploy and wants to feel that side of the
military life. I know it because I feel it to. I know what he means
when he says that he isn't sure how to make his wife feel what he
feels. Because I know that you can't.

My wife, Margaret, says that she hears the most, to us, bizarre
questions. "Will your husband get to come home from Afghanistan for
Christmas?" To which she never really knows what to say. There isn't a
shuttle, you know? It's not even like taking the Concorde from London.
It's a lot more involved. And I am on a short tour, missing Christmas
is a bummer, but it is incidental. That's not the important thing. She
says that when people ask where I am and she says, "He is deployed to
Afghanistan." They look at her with faces of horror. She says it's
like she told them that I am on death-row and about to be executed. I
am gone for 6 months to a safe-ish area. To a military family, it's
not that big a deal.

We know what it is to live in a tent with people who don't let you
sleep, but who you would take a bullet for. We know what it is to sit
next to someone who drives you absolutely up the wall, but who you
would lay your life down for. Everyone knows this feeling, it's called
Family. But what you don't know is how that feeling can overlay people
who you have trained with. How you come to adopt, almost instantly,
people you would never otherwise spend 10 minutes with. But we not
only accept and embrace that stranger, we learn how to fight a war
with them and then we go out and do it.

And that brings me to the next point that I keep thinking about: When
I called home from Christmas my Grandma asked me, "Are we winning over
there?" And all I could say was, "Well, we're not losing." And the
reason that's all I could say is that we already won. I know that it's
a big joke now to say that. The whole Mission Accomplished banner and
all is a short, sharp, liberal laugh. But the fact of the matter is,
the Taliban no longer rules in Afghanistan. There are pockets of
resistance and we are here fighting a peace-keeping battle. But this
is Operation Enduring Freedom. We are assisting in the endurance of a
Liberty Under Duress. These are the birth-pangs, the travails of a new
country that will actually have the ability to choose its future.
That's an amazing thing to get to tell people.

So here we are, these men and women in the military life. We're all
forced together, a family we never expected nor chose, fighting to
change the world. And the world sees us as a strange and foreign cult
of anti-social misfits who are struggling in a war, 10 years on. But
that's not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as guardians of
liberty and freedom. We see ourselves as family, we see ourselves as…
well, I am not going to be able to say it better than Shakespeare, a
band of brothers. And for all the in-jokes and acronyms and the
general state of otherness that we project or seem to feel from the
American culture at large, we do this because we love that culture. We
do this because we love to see the American Flag flying on someone's
lawn, even if we know they don't take it down at sunset, like they are
supposed to. We love to see people gathered together and sharing time,
even if we only hear about it from our tent in Afghanistan. We do this
because, even though we aren't a part of America's normal life, we
love that life and are willing to die for it.

But not the members of CBS's The Unit, they have to be on again next week.