Search for a routine

I am still getting into the swing of things here in the desert, trying to develop a routine.  I am very fortunate that I am responsible for multiple locations not just here at Camp Arifjan but also two out along the Arabian Gulf - Ash Shuaybah and Kuwati Naval Base.  That means I can be out and about, and I have been taking full advantage of that.  I also get a vehicle, a Pasaro.  Kuwaiti drivers are not the worst I have ever seen, that title belongs to Neapolitans, but they are up there.  Because Kuwait is this vast, flat desert there are few/no overpasses, so if you have to get to something on the left side of the highway you drive past where you need to go and make a u-turn.  The u-turns are official, but the left lane here is the same as the left lane in America except fast here means about 100 mph, so every time you make a u-turn you have to cross a lane full of crazy people to get to the middle or right hand lane.  When there is a wreck (and there are lots of them) the Kuwaitis tend to leave the crashed car(s) along the side of the road for a few days or weeks.  It makes driving around here exciting.

Then there is the desert.  This is the season when Kuwaitis take to the desert, they build these huge tent camps right alongside the highways because it is too godawful hot to go out in the spring, summer, and fall.  These camps are their weekend getaways; they have huge blowup castles for the kids, the older ones have four-wheelers to tool around in the desert and the extended families have cookouts and light off fireworks at night.  We have been getting lots of rain lately (we even had hail last night, who knew that could happen here?) so the desert is blooming a bit but it can't hide the incredible amount of trash everywhere left by the people in the camps.

There isn't much in the way of Christmas spirit.  Everyone tries - our tent workareas are all decorated and the leadership has given everyone that doesn't have a watch both Christmas Eve and Christmas off, which is very cool.   However, there is cargo moving through and so many of my folks have to work.  If they work, I work, so it will be just another day.  Besides, you can't put lipstick on a pig, this is a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas like the US does (come to think of it, no other country wonderfully commercializes Christmas like we do and that is why we rule) so it really doesn't have that electric Christmas vibe that I hope you are all experiencing right now.  The kids are all out of school and counting down the days, all the houses are decorated, stockings are hung by the fire with care, and on and on.  Not that this is at all depressing, it isn't in any way, it just isn't Christmas.  Maybe it is like Christmas in the Australian Outback might be, it is turned down about 15 notches or it is like a single candle trying to illuminate a dark empty barn.  Something like that, anyway.

On the bright side it is a good crew here, from the top down.  I am fortunate to have few personnel problems so far and the other officers, chiefs and sailors are fun to be around.  I am trying hard not avoid being biased towards the folks I brought from Ft Dix, but boy are they doing well.  It may be the fact that we are all bright-eyed and bushy tailed as we are the latest "wave" of sailors here.  There is the November crew, not that they came in November, they were the "N" Customs iteration and the military phonetic version of N is November.  They came in March and some left in September, some left this month and some leave in March.  The first "Oscar" wave arrived in mid-November and is here through May, then our wave, Oscar 2, got here in mid-December and is here into June.  There won't be another wave, Papa, until April or May.  Anyway, maybe we are all eager or maybe we just have a very motivated group, but it is nice to see them all excelling.  

My routine has switched up a bit, I am working out in the afternoons now.  All my life I have been a morning guy, figuring that those hours are mine to manage and the first thing to go is always the afternoon workout, either because of work or family obligations.  Here we have a critical mass of folks that do this crazy workout in the afternoon from 3:30-5, so there is peer pressure to not miss it.  Thursday we did, among other things, 150 step-ups, 100 reverse lunges, 50 squats, 5 minutes of push-ups, 10 x 30 seconds of pullups and a couple other things.  My predecessor is a physical fitness guru and has devised these workouts and now I ache all over.  Of course this fouls up my plans to call home as I am no longer getting up at 4:30 am, so we have to figure out that end of the routine.

That's it for now, off to a softball game.  Gotta keep busy...

AJ

Well, I am finally in Kuwait and starting the job I was picked to do.  The flight over was pretty uneventful.  Because we took Navy transportation we had to overnight in Scotland so the aircrew could get a rest period in.  A few of us took some time to walk around the town of Irvine, but we were only on the ground for 12 hours and a lot of that was spent checking into the hotel or sleeping.  We had a quick stop for fuel in Souda Bay, Crete then we arrived in Ali al Salem, Kuwait.  It is a smallish airbase with a Navy Customs presence, so they took care of us until we could get bused over to Camp Arifjan, or AJ.  The trip here was pretty depressing.  The whole desert along the sides of the road is just filled with trash of all descriptions.  The highways in America may have trash alongside them, but I guess the grass and trees cover it up a bit or maybe those Adopt-a-Highway folks actually pick things up.  Here there is no place for the trash to hide.

AJ itself is a huge city, but a lot of the residents have left.  I am told that at the height of the Iraq war this place was packed, there were 6-7000 more soldiers here than there are now, and everyone leaving Afghanistan or Iraq and rotating back home spent three days here going through what is called the Warrior Transition Program.  That is now located in Germany (so I have that to look forward to in June…) and of course there is no more war in Iraq.  We are also trying to do more work processing folks right in Afghanistan so they don’t have to make a stop in Kuwait.  All that means that life has slowed down a lot here.  The place has amazing facilities – two exchanges (like a mall), Starbucks open 24 hours, great gyms, a huge dining facility, all within walking distance or a shuttle ride if I want to go over to the other side of the base, but there is this slightly weird vibe here with all of the empty tents.  Maybe I will get used to it.

I give up a little in privacy.  I went from my own hotel room in Norfolk to a shared 4-man room at Ft Dix (there were only 2 of us in it and at least we could close the door) to a modified open barracks here at AJ.  The officers below O-5 and Chiefs get what used to be an 18-man barracks.  They stuck in a bunch of 7/8 height walls and sectioned off these 3-man spaces.  Each of us gets a bunk bed and about 4 lockers positioned around the bed to make a little room.  The lockers and walls don’t go to the ceiling, so while you have the illusion of privacy any noise you make travels throughout the space.  There are tons of items from past residents; I had two TVs and lots of random stuff (foot powder, Pepto Bismol, sheets, and a tourniquet among other things) left in my room, along with ¼ inch of fine desert grit on everything.  I am better off than the rest of the sailors; they are in a true open bay with no walls or TVs.  I don’t get the impression that folks stay in the barracks much, though.  They work, work out, eat, and come back to sleep.  Then the next day comes and off you go.  There is apparently a group that gathers to smoke cigars outside, you can get Cubans here so I might try that out.  There is an MWR tent that shows movies 24/7.  All in all, not bad.

Moving Day

Finally, after 37 days at Ft Dix the end is in sight.  

The FOB experience was not as I had anticipated and resulted in some Army deaths from verbal shrapnel.  We were out there with an Air Force class and it really seemed as if they had forgotten about us.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was when a chaplain didn’t show up on Sunday for services.  I don’t care one way or the other but I have some sailors that really rely on Sunday worship.  We had checked and re-checked just to make sure there actually would be services, but it turns out the Chaplain was in Ft Meade.  Since he didn’t wake up that morning and teleport, I had the crazy suspicion that the Army had known about this and neglected to tell our class, so I called just about everyone I could get the number for and complained, then wrote an e-mail and copied everybody I could think of, then I bitched out the training staff I could find.  After all my constructive criticism about how our training could be done better, this was the one thing that got the Army to listen.  I had a Brigade Command Sergeant Major find me the next day, a two-hour meeting on the FOB experience with the training and operations folks, and some phone calls with various Army folks once we got back.

Ultimately, listening is one thing and getting a monolithic organization to change is quite another.  Senior Chief and I went to a meeting with the two Brigade Commanders in order to validate that we had accomplished all of our training.  I had a captive audience so I let them have it in a respectful way (what can they do, send me to Kuwait?) after telling them that I held their instructor corps in very high regard.  They smiled and nodded at me like I was a crazy person, which I suppose is the way you handle an unhappy customer in any line of business.  I think they are happy we are moving on, I am told that we leave behind a legacy of extreme competence (we were always early and always prepared), that we were a fun-loving group, and that we (I) threw too many verbal hand grenades.  My Senior Chief is former Army, and he counsels me that the reason he left the Army is because it is an organization that delights in quickly marching folks 20 miles only to have them wait wherever they are for 3 days.  The Navy could never do that, there would be too many sailors asking why and trying to figure out a way around the march, and ultimately trading some tools for a van so they could drive, or looking up some obscure regulation that forbids marches of more than 15 miles on the second Thursday in March.  On the flip side, sometimes you need someone to just shut up and go take a hill, and that is where the Army excels.  It all comes down to understanding each other’s culture, I suppose.

After that everyone was free for the weekend.  Tracy and the kids came and got me and we went to Philly.  I had not been there since Tracy and I spent a weekend waaaayyy back before we got married, so last century.  It was great to see everyone, the couple hours we saw each other at Thanksgiving was just a taste and not nearly enough time.  We went and saw Christmas lights at Macy’s, historical stuff downtown and the Franklin Institute.  It was still way too short, though, and the whole good-bye for the third time really stinks.  After hearing all of the many balls Tracy has to juggle all by herself it makes my job seem extremely easy, even if it sounds like the kids are stepping up and trying to help as much as possible.  I told Tracy a story of one night at the FOB when one of the supply guys brought me back some strawberry ice cream with strawberries on top after he made a run back to the base and she told me I had better not get used to treatment like that, things will be very different come mid-June when I return.  I do like that ice cream, though.