Decompressing in Germany

This should do it for blog posts, I think.  I am in Sembach, Germany as I write this.  It is a tiny Army base located in the middle of nowhere not far from the French border.  It is the first step on way to reintegrating into society, the thought is that we can come to this serene location and acclimate to a more normal way of doing business while we sit through a couple of workshops on stress.  They organized some trips for us – one to Ramstein airbase, home of the world’s biggest military exchange, one to Heidelberg and one local hike – and have events at night such as a poker tournament and karaoke at the bar.  They impose only a few rules on us: no more than 3 drinks per day, don’t leave the base, no fighting, but it is virtually impossible for a group of this size to adhere to even those minimal guidelines.  Any junior soldier or sailor is inventive enough to get around the three drink minimum by getting a non-drinking buddy to buy one for them, buying a couple bottles on the Ramstein trip or even ordering a pizza to be delivered and at the same time asking the delivery person to bring beer (my vote for most inventive).  With that comes alcohol-fueled arguing, although we have had very few of those.  In general the more senior enlisted have been very good parental figures and have taken care of the junior ones.

Heidelberg castle way up on a hill

The ruined Powder Turret at the castle

old stone bridge leading to the city

Getting here from Kuwait was a bit of a chore.  Even though the vast majority of people that leave Kuwait are stationed at Camp Arifjan, most of the passenger inspections are performed at Ali al Salem, which is about 90 minutes away.  Since we flew out of the military side of Kuwait City International Airport our schedule had us traveling the 90 minutes to Ali to get processed, then traveling another 90 minutes back to KCIA (which is only 30 minutes from Camp Arifjan) to board the plane.  Because everything in the military has extra time added to it we left Camp Arifjan at 1100 on Tuesday for a 0300 flight on Wednesday.  For those of you counting that is 16 hours to account for about 3 hours of bus time and maybe 2 hours of inspection time.  Of course that is best case and assumes the plane is there and ready, and it was not.  We actually boarded the buses to go to KCIA and sat there for an hour (remember this is run by the Army, and they are very good at sitting and not asking questions) before we were told that our new takeoff time was 1000 Wednesday.  Since that was only a delay of 7 hours we all just crashed on the ground in the inspection area, only to wake up and find that our flight was actually delayed to 0200 Thursday.  We managed to scam some tents with cots and slept for a bit, showered and tried to tolerate the 120 degree heat and a pretty healthy sandstorm before we reboarded and took off for Germany.

Leaving Arifjan.  Only 40 short hours later we were in the air!

It was a nice reminder of some of the things I will and won’t miss about this experience.  I definitely WON’T miss the complete inefficiency of virtually every military process and the occasional inability of the services to work together to achieve a common goal.  I won’t miss the separation from family and ‘Murica, especially being perpetually 7-8 hours ahead.  It made communications very difficult.  I won’t miss the lack of privacy, or the 100 yard walk to use the bathroom or shower.  I won’t miss the rigid adherence to chain of command that sometimes made it very difficult to do my job.  I won’t miss the sand and endless shades of tan and drab brown in the desert, or the collections of trash all over the place.  I definitely won’t miss the minimum-security atmosphere of life at Camp Arifjan, such as the requirement to have four separately signed pieces of paper to get off base in a place that is less dangerous than Mexico.  I WILL miss the camaraderie, the responsibility and authority I had, the opportunities to see things I had never seen before and probably will never see again.  I will miss brunch dearly and the good times we had on Sunday.  I will miss playing competitive softball again and doing pretty well as a team.  I will miss having that Navy swagger on a predominantly Army base.  I will also miss playing the very tiny part in a very large operation that at one point in time had a purpose.

All that said, it sure will be nice to go home!

Leaving on a jet plane

So here we are, the end of the deployment.  Lots of sailors have been counting down to next Wednesday, which is the day we leave Kuwait and fly to Germany for what the Navy calls the Warrior Transition Program  Coincidentally, this operation was located here in Kuwait right up until the point I arrived, so all previous Customs rotations got to “decompress” in small, hot tents sitting in the desert.  Sembach, Germany seems like a better deal to me.  They try to keep us on some sort of leash, you can’t just go out and roam the German countryside, but they do have some organized tours I am told, and we are allowed to drink 2 or 3 beers a day.  I guess they are trying to build our tolerances back up.

If we are going to count, the important day is really the one I get HOME, not necessarily the day I leave one place for a slightly closer, slightly nicer place that is still pretty far away.  Plus I feel a little guilty in that I really don’t need the services as much as some of my more warrior-like colleagues who may be coming back from difficult tours in Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa.  Sure it was dusty here, and it was cold a few days back in January, but I am essentially returning from 6 months in a minimum security prison.  In addition, I was one of the lucky inmates that got supervised releases to travel outside the gate pretty much whenever I wanted.

Speaking of that, in the process of training the folks who replaced me (yes, it takes two because I was so scary good at this job…) we just may have used the training as an excuse to visit some locations that are borderline ok to visit but are not necessarily related to the Navy job I used to do.  It is one of the small perks of the job.  A couple days ago we stopped at a local mostly Americanized mall on the water.  It was kind of neat, it had a Cinnabon and a Dunkin’s but also a fish market and a meat market complete with hanging skinned goats. 

No skinned goats are visible in this pic so stop looking

The turnover to a new group has been interesting.  I was lucky coming when I got here in many ways.  When I arrived the Headquarters group (they get supplies, do the administrative stuff and are the life support for operations, which is where my company was) had been here for a couple months so they had procedures and processes in place.  Right now I am turning over my job and the HQ folks are as well, so there is a lot of churn going on as the new groups get used to new things.  Complicating things is that throughout history the outgoing group thinks the incoming one just doesn’t get it and will screw things up and the incoming one thinks the outgoing group was doing things all wrong and they have a lot of work to do fixing things up.  In reality none of that is true, but it can sometimes make for bad blood.  I am lucky because the two folks I turned everything over to are pretty cool, so it all went well. 

My pirate ship in the desert

I also took care of a last bit of softball business.  Our Navy team is known far and wide (at least when it comes to military units in Kuwait) as the one to beat.  Since December we have a pretty ridiculous record, something like 35-3, and during that time we have won two tournaments and one league championship while playing some really good teams.  Last night we played in our last final for yet another league championship and after a rough start pulled out a pretty convincing win, 23-14.  We walk away never having lost any meaningful games – the three we lost were in the regular season, and for one of those I was in Jordan – and our sexy uniforms are the envy of the league.  I have contacted ESPN to announce my retirement from competitive desert softball.

Champs

Next time I post I will likely be in Europe transitioning back to the life of a civilian as I sip from a beer.  I think my transition will go quicker if they have fruity drinks.

Army Strong

I apologize for the infrequent posting, it has been an unusually busy period here in Kuwait, mostly because I have had to react to things.  Some of the wounds were self-inflicted while others were imposed by authority figures far above me.

One of the self-inflicted wounds was a last-minute trip last Sunday up to Ali al Salem for another softball tournament.  We decided to go up early in the morning, play as long as we won and then come back.  Turns out we won the tournament, so we ended up playing far into the afternoon at a time of the year where the temperatures get up around 110 that far inland.  So not only did I miss my Sunday brunch, I also wiped myself out for the next couple of days.  On the bright side we have a pretty cool trophy to show off, I am trying to get a picture so I can post it.  The tournament was in honor of police week, a week I know well because back home I work right across the street from the hotel that hosts many of the major events in the DC area.  It is a constant source of irritation to some in the office as any time someone comes or goes from the hotel (which is quite often), the police organize an escort and cut off traffic all around the office complex.  Any ripple in the DC traffic ocean has the potential to grow into a tsunami (see what I did with imagery there?) as we are right off 395, but I am not sure the cops from Lexington, KY or Athens, GA understand how tenuous the situation is.  Bottom line is that rush “hour” tends to start earlier and last longer during Police Week.

For those counting at home that is 3 Sundays in a row that have been abnormal for me – one in Jordan, one with rain and work, and one with softball.  I also had to work this morning but thankfully the Army scheduled something at 0800 and so I was done well before the brunch deadline.

Speaking of the Army, they along with higher-ups at the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command have been the bane of my existence lately.  For months we have been planning for two scheduled waves of sailors to relieve those of us that arrive in November and December.  The first got here intact but the second – more than 100 sailors – was cut as they were going through training at Ft Dix about three weeks ago.  So imagine that for a minute: you got the call, said your goodbyes to your family and employer and started on the road to Kuwait, only to be told when you are about 2 weeks from finishing your training that you are no longer needed.  I would be ecstatic, but in my experience I am an exception as most of the enlisted sailors WANT to be here for the money or the job or the retirement credit or whatever.  Four nights ago we got word that they were coming again.  Without those 100 sailors there were some major impacts, we would have had to close down one location and stop a number of services we now provide, so in retrospect we did a very smart thing and started informing higher-ups here in CENTCOM, who apparently were not consulted on the decision to send those sailors home.  Bottom line is that many of the original sailors are coming, but imagine THAT scenario: with two weeks of training left you were told you weren’t coming, so how seriously did you take that training?  And how messed up are their heads now?  They were coming, then they weren’t, now they are again.  I really, really feel for these sailors.  Some of them set up other mobilizations to other locations, and the Navy actually considered cancelling that other deal to make them come to Kuwait!  Thankfully we helped Big Navy understand how silly that idea was, and they also let what they called a few hardship cases go home.  This is where the military establishment just falls short – planning is not a strong suit.

And then there is the Army.  I try very hard not to get involved in bashing the Army as they are the warrior branch.  The Special Forces are an entity unto themselves, like Ferraris but the one where they only produced 300, so the common person not only doesn’t have one they have no hope of having one and may not even know they exist.  The Marines are the crazy souped-up roadsters and the drivers have big egos and attitudes; they have been brainwashed into thinking they can beat anyone in a race which of course is not true at all but a good attitude to have in a fight.  The Army is the massive fleet of beat-up pickups we rely on to haul things, take us to work, and generally get us around.  They get terrible gas mileage, break down constantly and the hood is the wrong color.  However, we need the Army –  they do the dirty work of fighting and occupying space, things the Navy and Air Force never have to think about.  The point is that I try to recognize the extreme cultural differences between the services as they are necessary for them to operate under the unique conditions each service experiences.  I think I once made the point that it is nice that you can get a battalion of soldiers to march 20 miles for no reason.  It would never happen to the typical Navy group, there would be three scrounging up trucks, 2 would point out an obscure regulation forbidding a forced march immediately following PT, 17 would whine and complain, 2 would claim medical issues and 5 would map out 5 quicker routes but never move because they would argue over who is right.

It is the Army’s institutionalized willingness to absorb pain and suffering without considering the strategic view that makes them a nightmare to work with.  Case in point: At some point in the future the Ali al Salem air base will close, so everything mission performed there worth keeping has to go somewhere else.  One part of the mission will come here to Camp Arifjan, but it isn’t yet clear where it will go or if it all comes here or even when it will happen.  However, one possible alternative involves the use of some buildings currently used as housing – soldiers live there right now.  Or lived, anyway.  Even though no one on this earth or any other has any idea if this one alternative will happen and it may not happen for months and if it does happen there are hundreds of other things that need to happen prior to the buildings being needed, the Army decided to immediately move all those soldiers out.  Some of them are going home in June, and even in the absolute best case the buildings won’t be needed before then.  However, because that one tiny task could be done they went ahead and did it anyway with no thought to the big picture.  That is the Army.

I don’t have any good pictures this week, so sorry for all of the words.  I’ll have something next week for sure.  

Jordan

I am a little miffed as I type this.  I have made pretty clear throughout the various blog posts that I think a routine is all important as I proceed through my deployment, and my routine for Sunday has been ruined by Mother Nature this week.  As I type this thunder is echoing overhead and rain is pitter-pattering on the top of my tent (I am at work, not in my room).  It has been like this since about 4am, when the Giant Voice speaker system woke me up to let me know that there was a lightning warning.  Since then the rain and storms have been pretty much constant.  This is wrong on many levels.  First, I am in the desert and it is May.  It is supposed to be hot and dry, not cool and rainy.  Second, it is Sunday.  Right now I should be outside basking in that hot and dry weather as I write letters home and frame out this week's blog, counting down the minutes until I leave for a delicious, wonderful brunch.  Instead I woke up early as the Giant Voice (the one outside, not the one in my head) kept telling me about lightning and Patton decided to be particularly noisy during reveille at 0600, and then I started thinking about work.  I blame the liberals and their so-called "global warming".  Bah.

As Tracy and virtually every sailor in my company have reminded me, I really should not complain.  I was delinquent again in posting a blog entry last week; that is because I was trapped in Aqaba, Jordan for 8 wonderful days.  Part of our mission includes inspecting what we call multi-modal cargo, it gets transported via multiple channels, like a plane to a ship, or rail to a truck and it goes to other countries in the Middle East.  I have had sailors in Oman, UAE and Jordan pretty much since I arrived, although the Jordan work had recently dried up so we pulled everyone back from there.  However, the Army had some cargo they wanted shipped back two weeks ago and requested support.  We have to send two people for safety purposes and I nominated yours truly to go along with someone else from the company.  One way to save money when flying military folks around is to put them on the regular military flights that move around all over the world each day.  There is a flight that connects Kuwait to Amman, Jordan so it was a no-brainer to throw us on it.  Unfortunately it is only a weekly flight, so we were destined to spend at 7 days there, and that turned into 8 when the flight got delayed a day.  While there we had to pay for a hotel and got our daily per diem so I not sure anything was saved in the long run, but it is best not to think about that.

Anyway, we were able to fit a pretty aggressive sight-seeing campaign in and around the little bit of work we had to do.  Jordan is a really interesting country, cursed because it is without oil in a petroleum-rich Middle East, bordered by crazy neighbors (Iraq, Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia) and a huge ally of the US, mostly because we give them buckets of money due to their strategic location.  There is obviously a big focus on the problems in Syria right now, northern Jordan has been overwhelmed by refugees and although many countries have promised Jordan aid, few have delivered.  This centrality theme goes back to ancient times, Jordan was a big transportation and trading hub and so has been settled for thousands of years.

Petra is the big-name attraction, you can read about it here.  Just getting there is pretty cool, we traveled on what is called the Desert Road; it runs along and up a ridge of sandstone mountains.  We then drove through the new city of Petra, built into the mountain, and finally arrived at the entrance to the old city of Petra.  To even get to the ruins you have to walk for a little less than a mile in an old wadi, or dry river bed, called the Siq.  It then opens up opposite the most famous part of Petra called the Treasury, carved right out of the rock.  The whole place is like that, all sorts of tombs and houses just carved out of the rock over a period of centuries.  It is pretty awesome.

The Treasury

View back up the Siq, approaching Petra

Me resting

View inside one of the tombs with a cool ceiling

The Urn Tomb

We also got the opportunity to see a place called Wadi Rum, snorkel in the Red Sea, and swim in the Dead Sea.  In addition we ate several nice local meals in Aqaba itself.  I feel fairly guilty that I was able to do all this while I was on deployment, particularly since most of the rest of the company was back in Kuwait working. 

Floating in the Dead Sea

Khazali Canyon at Wadi Run

multi-colored sands in Wadi Rum

While I was enjoying Jordan there was some chaos back in Kuwait.  Chief and the LTjg did a great job taking care of everything while I was gone, but budget cuts hit the Navy Customs mission and a fair number of sailors training at Ft Dix right now were told they would be demobilized and sent home.  That puts us in a bit of a bind since I was counting on those folks to replace me and others that will be returning to the US in June.  As with everything else we will make things work, but this last Navy rotation (everything gets turned over to the Army in the Fall) will have to work a little harder than we did.  It also meant that when I got back I had to catch up quickly and have been working through those issues, the work that piled up while I was gone and the daily things that pop up and need to be taken care of. 

Desert marksmanship

My dedicated and avid readers probably noticed that I skipped a week, my e-mail, Facebook and Twitter just blew up with questions on my whereabouts and health, then the events in Boston, Texas and DC took the spotlight away.  I was just busy, my normal quiet and brunch-based Sunday was a long workday spent preparing for an M-4 rifle qualification gunshoot the next day.  

We received the newest wave of Customs sailors on the 11^th and have spent a lot of time since helping them get acclimated, distributing them among the various Customs companies and making sure they have what they need.  The group going to Afghanistan needed to get qualified on the M-4 rifle, so we had to set that up prior to their departure date.  I am no expert (well, actually I am an expert shot…) but I volunteered to help run the gun line and ensure everyone stayed safe.  Even though you could probably plunk down and shoot a rifle just about anywhere in Kuwait and harm nothing more than the trash blowing around, the major US range is located almost 3 hours away, up by the Iraqi border.  We traveled up to the Ali al Salem airbase the night before (Sunday) as it is much closer to the range and meant that we would not be completely exhausted before we even started shooting.  That was nice as a fair number of sailors that went through Ft Dix with me are still there, so we had some time to catch up and I got ice cream with strawberries and maraschino cherries on it.  The cherries are unique to Ali, so my Sunday wasn’t completely wasted.  On the down side we stayed in tent city, which means sleeping in a large open tent with any number of military people just passing through.  I was in an officer & Chief tent, which normally has its perks but I have come to discover that it also means these people are likely older, and older people are more apt to snore.  I can sleep through virtually anything, but that rhythmic snoring makes me crazy, so I did not have a good night.

Early the next morning we mustered everyone and headed up to the range.  Any outdoor range is really just a series of u-shaped areas where the u is a berm – a high pile of dirt, or in this case sand, designed to absorb the rounds that pass through or ricochet off of targets lined up on the open part of the u.  We wanted to get an early start because anyone on the range is required to wear body armor and a helmet.  It weighs maybe 40 pounds, and that can wear anyone out in 100 degree heat.  Anyway, we had a fairly large number of sailors to qualify, and even though they had all allegedly shot this particular weapon before I found many to be lacking basic knowledge, like where the safety is located or how to eject a magazine.  We were out there for 8-9 hours and at the end when everyone was done I had a chance to rip off a couple hundred rounds, including some on full auto.  That makes cleaning the weapon a pain, but that is one of many perks I get here.  Then it was a long drive back to Arifjan, and the last thing on my mind was this blog.  All I really wanted was a hot shower to wash off the sandy grit and dried up sweat.

The new sailors are integrating well.  I have always liked the fact that new sailors just tend to fit in easily with an already established group.  In my experience, and I am probably biased, the Navy has an easier time with accepting new people of various backgrounds and skills.  I think I have already mentioned that the Navy is miles ahead of most of the Army companies around here in terms of morale and disciplinary problems and that has tended to be the case whenever I have been in a joint environment.  Maybe it is because we don’t have a need for that strict battlefield chain of command and so are a little more laid back and tolerant of small deviations.  We also tend to be more lighthearted – the Navy unit up at Ali painted their emblem on the concrete wall outside their compound and while past units painted skulls or muscular fantastical creatures theirs is a pink unicorn with big eyes and a rainbow over it.  I am super jealous, that is one up on my huge wooden boat here in our Army compound.

USS Neversail

Come and get some, Al Qaeda

The most exciting news is that I get to travel a little outside of Kuwait.  I send sailors all over the place, including UAE, Oman and Jordan.  In the very near future there is a need to send a couple people to Jordan for a short mission, so I put myself on that list.  I have been all over Kuwait, this will be my first (and only) shot to see something else.  I plan to carve out time to see Petra at the very least.  There is potential impact to this blog, however, so please be patient.

One last note, if you get these posts by e-mail and then respond to the e-mail I won't get it.  The e-mail gets dumped into some electronic dumpster, to get me to see something you either have to leave a comment on the blog or e-mail me directly.

Dusty with a chance of dust

Had some SERIOUS dust storms this week.  The pictures really don’t do the storm justice as the before I have is not entirely clear – I’ll try to get one in the next day or two and update the blog even though it will violate my routine of only updating this on Sundays.  You also don’t get an appreciation for the colors.  When you look at sand in a normal state, say on a beach, it has a tan tint, right?  Now imagine that is all around you in the air in suspension – everything has that tan tint, so when you leave a tent with fluorescent lighting (with a blue tint since we have bulbs supplied by the lowest bidder) it is quite a shock to go out into this yellow world.  That dust and grit gets everywhere, in your mouth, eyes, nose, ears, and leaves a fine layer on everything once the wind dies down.  It also creates a haze in some buildings, most notably the dining facility.  For whatever reason the a/c setup in that building sucks in dust and swirls it around the place.  Sunglasses are a must, and lots of people wear dust masks or balaclavas (look it up).  Naturally my opinion is a bit different from most others – we breathe this stuff in every day as it is, this week we could just see it better.  Plus I am sure my body is fighting whatever toxins are in the air so I am only becoming stronger, which is bad news for evildoers.

Before

After

Another milestone passed for me this week as the Red Sox started the season in Yankee Stadium.  It is hard to get excited for baseball right now, though.  The NCAA tournament is coming to an end, the hockey and basketball playoffs are getting ready to start up and frankly the Red Sox were not only horrible last year but not at all likeable.  The teams of my youth were fun to follow all through the 70s and even the mostly mediocre teams of the early 80s had guys like Yaz, Dewey and then Wade Boggs.  The 2012 team was just awful and this team has a lot of new faces that make it difficult to know what they will be like, and I have not been able to follow them through Spring training like I usually do at home.  Yet another milestone is coming up – the only morning game on the whole major league schedule – the annual Patriot’s Day home game played concurrently with the running of the Boston Marathon.  That is what is great about baseball, there are all these idiosyncrasies like that:  the Wall, rally caps, the designated hitter in one league but not the other, and the ivy on the outfield walls at Wrigley that keep me interested and intrigued.  Interested but not excited yet, although reliving moments like this are a start.

Oh, and one more milestone this week!  This is the last immediate family birthday I will miss!  Unfortunately the birthday happens to be that of my lovely wife.  On the bright side Kevin, Allison and Dylan will be there on the day and then Glen, Kristen, Leah and Kelly will be there during the weekend after.  I am sure the kids have everything well in hand…

The beast is gone!

Summer at the beach

The weather is now becoming full-blown heat, but that was expected.  What has been interesting is all the stuff that comes along with the heat, like the flies.  They were also expected, but what is a surprise is just how aggressive the darn things are.  Of course we have flies in the U.S., and I have seen flies all over the world (one memorable time we were approaching Alexandria, Egypt and a horde of flies descended on the ship when we were about a mile from the port and blanketed everything) but these appear to be a particularly nasty and persistent sort of fly.  They have no problem landing on your face and coming back for more when you wave them away, something that I don’t remember being the case in ‘Murica.  Maybe Big Flypaper has genetically engineered a particularly docile sort of fly for us so we don’t get too anxious and just blanket the countryside with pesticides to eliminate the pests, because that is what I want to do here.  There are these bee/fly looking hybrids as well.  If you know me you are aware that I am not a fan of bees, so a bee with the agility of an aggressive fly is pretty close to my worst nightmare, but these seem to be pretty harmless.

The coming heat also means the camping season in the desert has officially come to an end.  The “tents” ran the gamut from true Bedouin-looking tents to palaces with blowup slides, generators, huge outdoor TVs, ATV trailers and massive water tanks, and they started coming down about 2 weeks ago.  There was a pretty sizable camp not far from the main gate to the base, and I have enjoyed seeing people out and about for the past few months.  They would start arriving on Thursday nights (that is when the Kuwaiti weekend starts) and what I imagine was a large extended family would hang out and have a good time through Saturday night.  Anyway, it started to get disassembled not too long ago and now it is all gone, with a few exceptions.  Apparently it is just fine to leave all your junk behind – there are at least 4-5 couches sitting in the sand (and we have had a couple of rain showers, so they are trashed now), along with some rugs and large piles of trash that slowly get pushed around the desert by the shifting winds.

I have been spending more time at Kuwaiti Naval Base lately; there are some operational reasons and some personal preference reasons.  It has the only Dunkins I am able to go to, as I have mentioned before, and it is (by definition I suppose) on the water and this is just about the perfect time of year to be on the coast.  The base is right around the corner from a smallish Kuwait resort area and has a very nice manmade harbor with a small beach area.  If you go down on the beach you can see what is known as the “Wall of Death”.  The story goes that when Iraq overran Kuwait (it took only a few hours to take the country with the exception of Ali al Salem airbase which held out for a day, the whole Kuwaiti blindness to the looming invasion is very curious) they destroyed much of the Kuwaiti Navy.  The occupying army then took the surviving Kuwaiti officers at the Naval Base, lined them up against this wall and executed them.  The problem is that you never know with these sorts of stories, the wall certainly exists and there are lots of pockmarks (especially head-high) that could have been created by bullets and sections of the wall that DON'T have the pockmarks.  I tried doing some research on the internet and dug up mostly American references to the wall and the story is consistent no matter what American sailor I talk to, but there is a certain probability this is an urban legend and the wall was just used as target practice.

Finally, this is the last day for the burden on my upper lip.  I can’t wait to get rid of it.

What are you looking at?  Get back to work.

The Big City

I went out into Kuwait City this week.  It was mostly a bust as the museum was closed for repairs, so we got to spend 5 quality hours at the Avenues Mall (http://www.the-avenues.com/EnAvenuesDirectory.cms ).  We had a wonderful steak dinner at the Texas Roadhouse that lasted for an hour and a half or so, and we walked around for another hour looking at Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle and a bunch of high-end stores that I see during my almost daily trips to American malls, then I sat for an hour at a Starbucks and had coffee, which left me with another hour-and-a-half to kill.  I wasn’t in the mood to shop for shoes so I walked around a little more (it is one of the biggest malls I have ever been in) and then sat outside for a bit. 

You can see my favorite Italian chain on the 2nd floor

They made the inside look like a street

Although the store and restaurant experience wasn’t anything different from going to the Tyson’s Corner Malls in McLean, VA, it was nice to get out and people watch.  Female apparel ranged from the almost completely covered niqab that leaves only the eyes, to the hijab headscarf, to fairly conservative western dress but uncovered, to slightly risqué.  There were some Westerners walking around in typical Western apparel and kids wearing all sorts of stuff and running around just like they might in any other mall.  The Kuwaiti men mostly wore the dishdasha, a long white cotton robe, or a suit.  There are also a significant number of Third Country Nationals (we call them TCNs or OCNs) in Kuwait – they are who we see on base every day doing things like delivering fuel, serving meals and cleaning the restroom trailers and it has been said that half of Kuwait's population is TCNs – and they wear all sorts of stuff depending on where they are from, mainly India and the Philippines.

After that trip I got sick as a dog, as sick as I have been in years.  It is no fun being sick at home; being sick on deployment really stinks.  The problem is that there isn’t any place to curl up and watch TV/nap/feel sick, you can’t wander into the kitchen and get a cup of tea, and the bathrooms seem very, very far away.  I was either in my rack, in the bathroom (which is a 100 yard walk/run from my room), or in the office as eating was really out of the question.  One day I slept from noon – 4pm and then again from 7pm to 6am the next morning.  My Chief and XO were great and basically kicked me out of the office for a couple of days so I could get better but it was not the most pleasant of times.  Although I don’t believe I was Patient Zero I am definitely on the leading edge of whatever this is, others are starting to drop as I improve.

I am sure the NCAA tournament is leading a lot of the news at home right now.  This is normally a big time of year for me, my brothers and assorted friends make a trek someplace in the US to watch the 2^nd and 3^rd round of the tournament while we play golf or other outdoor sports and do manly things.  We usually rent a house somewhere, rent a car or two and generally have a good ol’ time.  It is something I have been doing since 2003, my good friend Joel invited me that year and we have been going with small (3) and large (12) groups ever since to places like Tampa, New Orleans, Nashville and Miami.  There wasn’t an obvious southern city to go to this year so we went off the beaten path and picked Salt Lake City.  Had that played out I would have seen Harvard beat New Mexico, Southern give Gonzaga a run for their money and then the Wichita State Shockers knock off Gonzaga with their terrific mascot gamboling about (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2013/03/23/wichita-states-mascot-is-interesting/).  I understand the crowd was very much behind Southern in the first game and having seen them play before (I think in Greensboro, NC) I know they have a killer band that travels around with them.  As much as I love everything about the tournament – the upsets, the crowds, the mascots, the group I am with – it is yet another reminder of how things aren’t normal this year, so I have only been paying partial attention to the results.  Once again, war is hell.

Last year in Nashville