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.