March Madness

How about that!  I looked up and there was March staring me in the face!  You know what amazes me?  No, not that Brave won Best Animated Feature over Frankenweenie, it is the fact that so many of my sailors want to stay here or anywhere they can get a Navy job on active duty.  The number one question I get is, “Can I stay longer?” followed closely by “Can I go to Afghanistan?”  Admittedly, we do not have a tough job like the special operators or the grunts going out on patrols, but still, it isn’t THAT easy and you compound that by being away from family and good ‘ol ‘Murica.  Some of my folks have already been gone for more than a year (although they got about 3 weeks of leave not too long ago), extended once and they wouldn’t mind if they could stay longer.  My attitude with the Reserves has always been that I wasn’t going to jump around and raise my hand, but that if/when the call came I would go without complaining as that is the deal.  This is a great job and I am surrounded for the most part by very good sailors, but given the choice I think I would rather be home.

Maybe that is partly because lately I feel like I have been buried by paperwork.  There is an art to this sort of thing, and although I am not bad at doing it, it is not something I really like to do.  I would much rather be out and about or just talking to other sailors in the tents.  There is a great scene in Band of Brothers (if you have not seen this series you really, really have to.  It is THE best series on war, camaraderie and sacrifice that has ever been made.  It will make you think about what you value and question if you could do what soldiers had to do during WW II.) where Cpt Dick Winters, this great combat commander, has been promoted to Battalion XO and is relegated to typing up after action reports and award write-ups.  To make it worse, his former company gets to go off on this exciting mission to help rescue some Brits.  Now, I am not in that sort of illustrious strata as the closest I get to combat is the internal battle over a second helping at dinner, but I have an inkling of what he felt like as I sift through 59 award write-ups or 37 E-5 evaluations.  Ugh.

So I got some family reaction from the story on near misses in the car.  It really wasn’t that bad, I can think of dozens of near misses at home, but in other fashions.  These were incidents that encapsulate what driving is like in this country, they are probably 50 years behind us in driver safety (I can’t even count the number of kids I have seen roaming around inside cars) but have all the benefits/distractions of modern technology such as cell phones, GPS, and lots of horsepower.  There are signs all over Camp Arifjan that Kuwait is dangerous for driving and that we need to be careful as they had something like 500 fatalities on the roads last year, which is quite a few in a country of about 3 million people the size of New Jersey.  I think I have mentioned before that they leave the wrecks along the side of the road for a while (As a warning?  As a distraction intended to lead to more accidents?  I don’t know.)  This was one we saw on our way back from the port of Ash Shuaybah on Tuesday.

This is a huge week for Kuwaiti holidays.  They celebrated National Day on Monday; that commemorates their independence from Great Britain in 1961, and Liberation Day on Tuesday celebrating the day Iraq withdrew from Kuwait in 1991.  The locals mainly took to their desert camps this week and launched fireworks, drove around on ATVs and I guess in general enjoyed a week off.  Unfortunately the past few days have brought wicked winds whipping across the desert (how about that alliteration!), I would guess gusts are up around 40mph.  Their tents all managed to stay standing, though; I guess they are used to this sort of weather.  It is hard to believe that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was only a little more than 20 years ago and that our invasion of Iraq was only 10 years ago (the tenth anniversary is right after St Paddy’s Day in fact).  This country was pretty much devastated by the Iraqi withdrawal - I remember reading about lakes of oil, hundreds of oil well fires and millions of gallons of oil dumped into the Persian Gulf.  When I was on the USS Kalamazoo we spent some quality time doing circles in the Gulf in 1992 and again in 1994 and I very clearly recall the mess.  There were still Iraqi mines floating around even in ’94.  You would never know how bad it was now, those marks have all been erased in Kuwait and replaced with plain old trash in the desert.

Oh, and I shaved my head for the first time in 20+ years.  All this as we roll into Mustache March!

And here is what Shannon thinks about my head.