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