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

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.