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

Stealth

This week we got a taste of the weather to come.  It has been in the 90’s during the day all week long, with a bright, clear sky on most days (a couple days there was a haze that I am pretty sure was just dust).  I love the heat, I know I grew up in the cold northeast but I must be getting old before my time because I hate the cold.  A couple days this week I just sat outside for a bit to warm up my blood like a reptile.  I ran outside a couple evenings to get a good sweat going.  I enjoyed walking from one place to another and having my long-sleeved woodland green uniform radiate heat when I stepped back inside an air conditioned tent.  Of course as I write this the loudspeaker on the base issued a lightning warning so I guess there must be a front coming through.  Bummer.

Although I drive to pretty much every other American base there is in Kuwait I have yet to set foot in Kuwait City.  I get that opportunity tomorrow when I take part in a Morale, Welfare and Recreation trip to the Kuwait National Museum.  Some Arab nations have tried to build up a tourist trade (Bahrain certainly, as has United Arab Emirates with Dubai and Abu Dhabi ), but that is not the case so much here in Kuwait so there isn't a whole lot to see.  MWR has this trip, a trip to the Grand Mosque and one to the War Museum, where I am told that the Kuwait role in the expulsion of Iraq from here is embellished quite a bit.  Because that isn't much to choose from, all of the trips tie in a visit to a mall.  I think it is safe to say that even on my best day I am not a mall-type guy, but I am actually looking forward to this trip.  I don't want to buy anything or shop at all, I kind of just want to sit at a cafe somewhere in civilian clothes and hang out.  I won't be able to look closely at about half the people that walk by, but it will still be fun to sit.

MWR tries very hard to keep the troops happy with multiple events for every occasion.  There aren't many Irish expats running around Kuwait but we still had celebrations throughout Camp Arifjan on Saturday and Sunday.  We had a Navy cookout that included a visit from a leprechaun; he was pretty horrified by my mustache.  The whole shaved head/mustache experiment has been very, very interesting.  Lots of people don't recognize me at all, particularly those that don't see me for a day or so or that only know me in a particular context, like when I am in my uniform talking or when I am playing softball on the Navy team.  In the past people would see me walking around the berthing areas or in the dining facility and be able to recognize me out of uniform or off the field, but now they can't.  I bet I would be a good undercover agent.

Blue Water Navy

I had a pretty good week.  One of the things we have to do is make sure any vehicles the military uses are free from dirt, bugs and all that before they go back to the US.  The Navy maintains an afloat military presence here in the Middle East known as the Amphibious Ready Group, it is a few ships carrying an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit – Marines, helos, tanks, Hummers, guns, bullets, all sorts of cool stuff.  They are here for 6 or so months then they rotate back home.  Since you can’t keep more than 1,000 Marines trapped on ships for months as they will start going crazy and eating through the walls, the military runs joint exercises with other countries so we can practice beach invasions and show off our capabilities.  That makes all this Marine stuff dirty, so it has to be cleaned before they go home.  There aren’t a whole lot of locations over here where they can prop up these things to wash everywhere, you even have to pull the engine out of the tanks (it is modular so it is not as bad as it sounds), so ships occasionally come to Kuwait Naval Base.  Anyway, the USS Green Bay was here this week to wash all their stuff but I couldn’t tell you it was coming as that would have been an operational security violation and I would have been disappeared by the men in Fedora hats and dark sunglasses.

I used to work on the beach end of things in the Reserves, there is a whole part of the Navy that runs landing craft and secures the beach.  I was in an Assault Craft Unit, so our job was to ferry equipment and troops to the beach.  Our unit had LCM 8’s and also used LCU’s (think D-Day type things that hit a beach and drop a bow ramp), and then there were the glamor boys, the LCACs.  They are huge air-driven craft, sort of like those things the good ‘ol boys use in the Everglades, but these also ride on an air cushion that is inflated by their huge gas turbine engines.  We had a good-natured rivalry, they make a big deal out of the fact that the LCAC is more like a plane and we would point out that just like military planes they were broken more often than not.  This is all relevant because the Green Bay anchored off the coast and used her two LCACs to ferry everything to our wash racks at Kuwait Naval Base, so not only did this create an opportunity to get out on a ship for a visit, it meant we had to get an LCAC ride to get there.

I have made some Army friends (it is, after all, an Army base), and I couldn’t think of a better way to show the superiority of the Navy than by getting some of them a ride on an LCAC and a tour of the ship, so that is what we did.  It was a nice taste of the actual Navy after dealing with the desert stuff for the past few months, and my Army buddies were suitably impressed.  We then brought all of the Navy officers I work with here at Camp Arifjan out on Saturday, but our crew had done the inspection job so well that the ship was able to get underway a lot earlier than they initially planned, so I could only get everyone an LCAC ride and not a ship tour.  A major bummer, but on the bright side I got a nice cup of Dunkin’s coffee; Kuwait Naval Base has one of the few DD’s in Kuwait.  Interestingly enough, the franchise is owned by a member of the royal family here in Kuwait:   http://dunkindonutskuwait.com/dd_uae.html

In other news, my roommate left for another job last week and I will be without one for at least the next couple of months. I initially wasn’t going to move things around because frankly I am perfectly satisfied with the living accommodations, but then I started looking at the room critically and noticed that we had not been using the space efficiently - there was a whole area that was just storage for junk, for instance.  I spent some serious time tossing out stuff that had been here for at least a couple years, sweeping and dusting (you would not believe how much dust accumulates in the desert, or maybe you would…), and rearranging lockers and now I have a nice sitting area in addition to my bed and desk.  It is the little things…

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.

Brunch

Another Sunday is upon us, this has been a relatively uneventful week.  I did have my second near-death experience on the roads, I suppose.  The first one happened a couple weeks ago as I was driving back from Ali-al-Salem.  A flatbed truck carrying some sort of metallic shed structure merged onto the highway the next lane over and up ahead of me a bit.  I guess the driver forgot to secure the shed or maybe he tied it down with floss, because as soon as he started coming up to speed that thing slid off the flatbed and on to the highway.  I had to swerve a little bit (good thing I took the Army’s defensive driving course – don’t brake, just swerve) and got around it safely but I don’t think a car a couple back from me was as fortunate.  Today as I was merging on to the highway (and flooring it because you need to get up to speed quickly here) I noticed something up at the end of the merge that you typically don’t see in the U.S.: a car backing slowly up the on-ramp.  I don’t know what he was thinking, but it was so out-of-the-ordinary that it took me a beat to react, as if someone was giving directions in non sequiturs, but we made it around him safely and proceeded on our way.  The remains of a horrific crash were right next to our exit, a reminder of how crazy the people are on the roads.

One of the great joys of Sunday is brunch (breakfast and lunch combined!).  A lot of us look forward to it all week long.  Sunday is typically our slow day; people sleep in, go to Church, take long showers (known as a holiday shower on ships) and take it easy.  By far the highlight is brunch at the Zone 2 dining facility.  It is the furthest one away from where we are, but it is soooo worth it.  They have the normal lunch meal - anything from Salisbury steak to spaghetti - plus there is usually a roast turkey (once there was prime rib!), then there is breakfast with eggs made to order, French toast sticks (or Freedom sticks) and waffles made right there on the waffle iron just like at home.  Once that is all consumed there is ice cream and cake, the one day where we all dive into dessert.  One of my enterprising sailors invented Waffles Garcia – take the waffle, walk over to the ice cream bar and get the guy to load up a scoop or two on top, put on toppings and voila! a gastronomic delight.  It is such a great meal I don’t eat anything else all day long.  When we finish up we usually head over to the Zone 1 exchange (military for store) to window shop or pick up odds and ends we may need, get a coffee at the Green Beans and then head home.  Speaking of Green Beans http://www.greenbeanscoffee.com/ I am going to put in a plug for them over Starbucks.  They are major supporters of the military and have locations in many of the major overseas bases and FOBs (forward operating bases), in fact they pioneered the use of 20- and 40-foot containers with plug-and-play coffee shops inside, which is what you need at a lot of these remote places.  Tracy sent me a video of the two founders discussing some of their principles and difficulties they overcame: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuK1uX4KDmE

We spent a bunch of time starting to plan for our replacements.  Three separate groups of sailors will come in and relieve us.  There are two for Customs and then one for the Headquarters group, the staff that is in charge and runs training, logistics, intel, that sort of thing.  The first Customs wave hits Norfolk on Monday, heads to Ft Dix after that and then comes to Kuwait to relieve about half of my company as well as others.  As they are on their way here, the second Customs wave starts through the meat grinder and they arrive at about the same time as the Headquarters replacements.  There is a whole intricate series of things that needs to be thought about and planned for ranging from where these folks will stay to how long it will take to train them and get them ready to replace existing sailors.  Then we have to figure out how to get the group that is replaced out of here efficiently.  In the past the Warrior Transition Program, the interim step for troops leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, was located right here in Kuwait so the logistics of getting sailors out was pretty straightforward.  It shifted to Germany in December, which could have been a pain in the neck as there is all this equipment we have to turn in before we go home, but the HQ folks have figured out a way for everyone to turn in the equipment HERE and not Germany, which is terrific.

We are in a pretty neat transitional weather period now.  The “winter” season is just about over and we are entering what the locals call the sarayat season as the weather starts to heat up.  For the next couple months there will be an occasional massive thunderstorm, something we had last night.  I was already asleep when I heard the Giant Voice system (the same one that plays reveille and Patton’s theme every freaking morning) warn about lightning strikes, and then I could hear the booming of thunder and pounding of rain on the roof.  After a storm passes it is often followed by winds and dust, and that is what we have now.  On the bright side this random weather makes for some very cool skies, below is a picture I took this week one afternoon.  If you look closely over the pipe sticking up over the right corner of the white building you may see a very small rainbow.

Patrick got his palate extender out and braces put on his top teeth, this is how he feels about it.

Champions of Kuwait

Sorry for the lengthy delay in posting.  My typical routine is to draft and edit these posts on Sundays, last Sunday I was up at Ali al Salem and didn’t get back until late and this whole week was quite busy.  But, that means I have some interesting things to relate.

I have mentioned that I started playing softball again while here in Kuwait.  We started out a little rough, losing our first game 18-2, but since then we have been on a bit of a roll.  Last weekend we drove up to Ali (some of the team was in what we lovingly call a Scooby Bus, see below) to play in a softball tournament up there.  It is an airbase, so the teams we faced were primarily Air Force, although a couple Army teams from Arifjan came up and the Navy Customs group up there also fielded a team.  We played 4 games over 2 days and just ran right through everyone, winning the whole thing.  That is why I didn’t post, we got back on Sunday afternoon and I just crashed as this old body got beat up a bit, including getting involved in a Pete Rose-like play at the plate (I was safe).  As you can see, these fields are just flat places in the desert with a fence around them.

Simultaneously the team was playing a season here at Arifjan; we entered the playoffs as the #1 seed and the finals were this past week.  Thursday night we won the league here, making us the champions of all of Kuwait (as far as we can tell, anyway).  Our team would just go on these streaks where we were unstoppable – in the final game we put up 13 runs in the first inning and we did similar things in other games.  Early in the year our defense won our games, as the games piled up we slowed down a bit and made some errors, but not enough to hurt us too bad.  So that is what I have been doing the past two weeks I have been deployed – playing softball and beating up on my body.  My legs are all cut up and my joints ache, so I took the past week of workouts off.

It isn’t all softball, naturally, this week we moved our tent.  Our little compound of three tents has to move, as I have mentioned before.  I usually prefer to just take the bull by the horns and go do things, so that is what we did this week with our tent, leaving the HQ element in the old location.  It also makes us the guinea pigs, we get to figure out the problems as it is easier for us to have a backup plan than the HQ folks.  All they have are those two tents while we have offices in multiple locations throughout Kuwait that we can use if we really have to.  If you have moved before you know that moving the big stuff is easy but the little leftover unclassifiable stuff kills you.  That is pretty much how it went, the internal walls (think Office Space in a tent) came down, the desks and computers and file cabinets all went into a large conex box (those 20 and 40 foot long containers that China uses to ship virtually everything you use), trucked over to the new place and we started setting up.  All that is left is that last little bit of random stuff that needs to be put away, the guys really did an amazing job when you consider they all have to do their regular jobs on top of helping with the move.  I have a great company.

Overall it went very well, I included some pictures of the progress.  As guinea pigs we did uncover some issues, our biggest one is phones.  We had old phones with wires like you have in your house, our new tent uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), basically using the bandwidth of the internet connection, which means our old phones can’t plug into the wall.  This is a bigger hurdle than you might think, as these phones are not just lying around so we still have a skeleton crew in the old tent manning a couple phones. 

On the bright side we have lots of new neighbors.  Our old location was pretty isolated as they are shutting it down.  Now we are in a neighborhood with about 16 or so other Army tents and more going up around us.  Lots of folks stopped by this week to say hello and welcome us, just like you might do to a new neighbor.  There hasn’t been a pie or an invite to dinner yet, but they do have a tent with four of those massage chairs in it and I can’t wait to try them out.

I appreciate all the kind notes and e-mails I get.  I can’t always respond right away, but I do read them all!  And now for your moment of zen...

Blowing stuff up

This has been a pretty cool week as far as the work goes.  The military in general has a huge budget, but at the lower levels there really isn't a whole lot of money flowing; it is very much a barter economy.  The stock in trade is the hook-up.  I have something or a service that you need, so you give me something to get it or to make it easier.  Since we are the gateway to get home we often have Army and Marine units that ask for hook-ups, and the smarter ones offer something in return.

There is an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit rotating back to the US in the near future that did just that this week.  These are the guys that clear IEDs and blow up weapons that are taken away from bad guys, so they have a pretty interesting collection of stuff they want to take back to the US.  Because of the risk they don't like to bring back all of their explosives, so they blow up what they have left before it is time to leave.  These folks are smart, they invited some of us to go way out in the desert with them and blow up some stuff.  I got to take things apart, stack explosives in a pit and press the button to make it all go up in a glorious explosion.  Fun for me, and now these guys will sail right through Customs because we are helping them with all the waivers they need and mark special items to make sure they are 100% compliant and can enter the US with no problem.  It just shows the relationships my sailors build with everyone else, I have some real talented folks here.  On the way back we ran into the biggest sandstorm I have seen so far, there is a road somewhere in front of us in that picture.

The Customs job doesn't just happen here at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, we also have a company north of here at Ali-al-Salim in Kuwait and at multiple locations throughout Afghanistan.  This week the three company commanders (me, the one at Ali and the one responsible for Afghanistan) were all together here at AJ for the very first time.  It was a great get-together, I see the one from Ali all the time but I had never actually met the one in Afghanistan although we talk on the phone and send e-mails and have several common acquaintances in the Navy.  They came through the training pipeline together about a month ahead of me, so we had some fun comparing notes and bragging about who is the best.  Since they were my guests I figure I win out.

There is some chatter that this is the week we hit 100 days since we left home way back before Halloween.  There are lots of people here that focus on numbers - days since we left, days in country, days remaining until we leave Kuwait, days remaining until we get home.  I have a theory on this - the brain has trouble interpreting large numbers and it creates this feeling of helplessness.  When I ran long distances I wouldn't count minutes or miles, I would count sitcoms.  A marathon is 8 sitcoms (or 10 if you bet someone you can do it without training), it just seems easier to bite off and chew than 26.2 miles or 4 hours or 240 minutes.  We have something like 130 or so days left here (I just had to count because I refuse to track it) and that seems like a lot.  If you break it down into something easier, like 4 full moons, then it doesn't seem so bad.  The sailors try to humor me on this, but counting is an age-old Navy tradition that I don't think I will be able to overcome.

Many of us will be up watching the Super Bowl early Monday morning.  It is such a uniquely important American event that the vast majority of the base will be very, very quiet during working hours Monday morning because everyone will be in bed.  What is interesting is that no other country really cares about this spectacle.  Baseball and basketball have caught on around the world, why not the biggest sport of all?  Patrick, Melanie and Shannon don't much care to watch a game (they'll watch the Super Bowl to see commercials and dad go crazy if the Pats are in it), is it because the rules are too complex?  Is it too violent?  All I know is that most of Camp Arifjan will be watching.