Bagram Air Field... WHY

Since the last time I was here, Bagram Air Field (known as BAF) has grown significantly. The most blatantly obvious change has been the creation of a magical place called “Warrior Village.”

“Warrior Village” is likely the place where Obama’s 30,000 “surge” Soldiers and other personnel will be herded to on their arrival here. Where under normal situations you would expect living conditions to improve, here it has not been the case. Warrior Village is a hodge-podge of personnel living all other the place. The systems have not yet been put in place to ensure daily (or weekly for that matter) activities such as maintenance and cleaning will be carried out. Who ever thought that making a shower trailer metal all over the inside was a good idea? Water + metal (steel?) = rust.

One thing I surely don’t understand is the bathroom (AKA shower/latrines in Army-speak). Most all shelter in this place is either in one of two forms: a tent or a trailer. Right now, I’m living in a large white tent. In Kuwait where I lived, we called these “fes” tents, short for festival, because they resemble festival or circus tents, only missing the emblematic red stripes (no, the irony of the similarities between this place and a circus has not escaped me). In this tent, roughly 130 women are living here. We don’t have beds; we have the typical Army issue kot. And it’s cold. Oh, it’s cold. The problem, or the main problem as there are many, with fes type tents is that they are not by any means an air tight shelter. When the weather outside is frightful, as in below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the air will come in. Around where the sides of the tent connect to the top canopy, there is, most all the way around the tent, a line where you can see the outside, and surely, they can see in. Conveniently, it’s at eye level. Coincidentally.

That having been said, today, during my after formation morning snooze, I awoke to a lady yelling. A gruff blonde, with a what I would call male haircut mainly because on first glance I thought it was a guy (her body shape and style of dress was rather indeterminate, I can’t help it), was walking down the opposite aisle of the tent, closer to the opposite wall of the tent from where I’ve set up shop. She was huffing about the tent being too warm, and upon inspection of the heater’s sad excuse for a thermostat, barked that we couldn’t turn up the heat as high as it was because we were all going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Now, some of you that may have seen the illogical possibility of this considering no matter what temperature you turn the heater on it should therefore emit carbon monoxide since it heats the air by sucking in air which it in turn heats, then blasts it into the tent. In addition, there are holes all over the inside of the tent, from top to bottom. There is no “air tightness” about this structure. I feel like carbon monoxide would be heavier than the air in general, and would therefore seep out the bottom of the tent, cracks all the way around the bottom of the tent. We’re all going to die someday. I’d rather die from carbon monoxide poisoning in my sleep than hypothermia while I’m awake. Let’s be honest.

I honestly don’t think that this one Wilms heater is even enough to heat this entire tent. I doubt it was designed for this use. This tent really is big. I would say probably a basketball court and a half and probably twenty feet in the middle high and five around the outside. The thermostat I was talking about before isn’t really a thermostat; it doesn’t actually know what the temperature in the tent is. Most nights, the thermostat dial is turned to an incredibly 40 degrees Celsius. I know all the women in here would not like to sleep in 40 degrees. All of us have sleeping bags, most of us with them over our heads while we sleep because our faces get cold. Mine does at least. Whenever women walk in, they take a detour to stand in front of the heater to warm the chill from the outside. The heater isn’t really even that hot; the air directly from it is very bearable. I wish I could somehow park myself in its path. Right now, I’m dressed in my sand colored fleece, a t-shirt, coordinating undergarments, socks that go up to my knees, and my “silky” thermal pants. I’m cold. Carbon monoxide poisoning, no problem. People are so ignorant.

Soldiers have been talking about this new Warrior Villiage concept. Most have been saying that we’re being segregated from the BAF Fobbits; separate the actual trigger pullers from the spoiled BAF flunkies because they don’t want us on “their” side, clogging up their DFACs, their PX, their MWRs. They have been setting up tons of stuff out here. A new DFAC is being erected right next to the current DFAC which people have told me was built to accommodate 500 Soldiers and there are 4,000. I think this sounds similar to my heater situation. Ugh, I need to get under my blankets. K. Really, I get it, there likely isn’t room on the other side for all of us. But they really put us out in the middle of nowhere. There is a bus, that takes 45 minutes to reach the other side because of the 15 MPH speed limit, but AAFES can’t keep the PX shop shelves stocked fast enough for the locusts to buy everything again. I just wanted a bottle of hair spray, no such luck.

I’m not sure what policy changed either. This tent is filled with women from Kosovo. Normally, the Army wouldn’t allow us and TCNs to all be put together in a tent. I know that these ladies are probably filling voids in various positions such as food services, as our DFAC manager at FOB Airborne was from Kosovo, but what is the deal? It’s one thing when they put us with normal US American citizens such as the interpreters that came in. In this tent there are Czech Soldiers, Kosovars (all I can remember is Kosovar Albanians from that conflict, I can’t remember what people from Kosovo are actually called…), and tons of American Soldiers.

Oh, and the lady next to me STINKS. I’m sorry, but she does. I try to be culturally sensitive, but through the lens of my red, white and blue glasses: “shower, please.”

Seriously...

I just got pegged with an apple on my way to the DFAC. An apple. Seriously, who throws an apple?! The night was completely dark, and all of a sudden an apple exploded on my knee. It actually hurt quite a bit and made a funny sound, like an empty plastic bottle hitting my knee. I really don't have the patience to deal with this crap.

Frustration.

After a year in Afghanistan, I feel like not much has been accomplished. But, one big but, is that nobody back home really reports on the real Afghanistan. It's nice to see shows like the "Today" show here in Afghanistan; its not really the "real" Afghanistan. They interviewed a bunch of people in Kabul, Kabul isn't like the rest of the country. People in Kabul have money, food and housing for the most part. Out here, I guess they have a lot of things, but it's not like Kabul.

I keep having dreams about blowing up too. Like... RPGs, IEDs, anything. It's odd though. I mean, I die all the time. For some reason it doesn't freak me out. Last night I had a dream about RPGs, or what I thought in the dream that were RPGs. But, clearly, as soon as I woke up, I was like wtf, that sounded like an arty sim (for those of you not in the Army, that's an artillery simulator, used in training to sound like some sort of artillery, makes a whistling sound). Real rockets don't sound like what you'd think. The first rocket I heard sounded like somebody ripping nylon. Like, "Ziiiiing!" I can't explain it, there are toys that make the same sound. Actual artillery sounds nothing like an arty sim either. Sounds like you might expect, the air breaking above you, like swinging a yo yo around your head. I only say that because somebody was doing that and it got close to my head... A while back, I had a dream about an IED on the FOB of all places. It was located in a metal pipe that for some reason was on the FOB. I looked in it and saw what looked like a bomb of some sort. Then I got blown up. The odd thing was that when I woke up (because I always wake up when I die in my dreams, I don't know what that says about hell but...), my arm and shoulder were asleep. That's where I got blown up. I suppose most of my left side was blown off in the dream. Morbid as hell. Think if I actually got hurt in this war how bad the dreams could be? Ridiculous. Writing all this crap down helps though.

When I was on leave I was a little messed up too. I don't know why really. I haven't been out really that much, but I think that might have something to do with it. I haven't had the time to get comfortable out with the people. Anytime you're in a crowd over here, it's a scary situation. The bad guys don't care who they blow up. They'll put a suicide bomber in a crowd just to blow up as many of us as possible. The few patrols I've been on have been in places that haven't been real crowded. It's been so long since I've been in say the mall or Walmart. I know I haven't really been shot at before or even been IED'd, but just fearing for your life so often gets to you. When you're actually out there, you don't fear for your life, it's more like after effects. When you're doing your thing out there among the people, you don't have time to worry about your life, you have time and capacity to do your job, not much else. After the fact, you're like "shit, that could have been bad." When in New Zealand, probably one of the safest places on Earth, I was hearing shots, thinking about the fastest way out of the building, just a little more than a little bit paranoid. Not sure if that's PTSD, but it made me feel like a psycho. I'm sure as time passes, I'll relax a bit more.

This place is so sterilized; there's not even a couch to sit down on. Take that back, there is a couch, it's in the chapel. So one couch on the FOB. You can't live a normal life, watch normal TV (the Armed Forces Network or AFN is all that's around and they censor all the movies to make them PG essentially), wear normal clothes. Speaking of which, my skin is dying. I can't believe how dry it's gotten in the past few weeks since I ran out of my good lotion... Oh! Take a normal shower is on that list... The showers here are small as hell! At least we have them, I suppose. The showers that I use now almost always have hot water too! At least I smell good most of the time. :) I can't complain that much.

Obama Party Crashers

Coming from a family of people associated with the Secret Service, I find this funny.

For those of you who don't know, there are two types of Secret Service personnel: the uniformed type and special agent type. The men that I know who are associated are not the uniformed police type, which remind me of glorified rent-a-cop. The fact that these jokers made it past them, yeah, I get it. They didn't look dangerous, they looked like they belonged, they didn't set off any alarms, literally. So, they got in.

I was just wondering where they actually sat once in the party.

Irrational Fears

Does anybody stop and think about their fears? Why are people more afraid to fly on an airplane than to ride in a car? You never hear about people too afraid to drive their own car so they have to ride some form of mass transit, save maybe people with some sort of mental illness, maybe extreme anxiety that are too afraid to leave their house. The fear of riding in a car is Amathophobia, but these phobias as mental, not necessarily rational fears. When people are afraid of things that have no statistical backing, I start to wonder.

I had an acquaintance email me because of a rather cheeky comment I made to his wife, who was a sorority sister of mine in college. She had gotten swine flu, and I learned later was wrestling with her pregnancy issues. I don't know if she was actually pregnant, or was trying to get pregnant, but she was sick with swine flu wondering if she should take Tamiflu or one of the other anti-virals. At the time of my comment, I didn't know if she was really having complications. My comment was something along the lines of "I'll take swine flu, you take Afghanistan." I made this comment mainly because of the many somewhat medieval diseases that are present here: polio, TB and malaria, to name a few. Ones like TB that don't go away and are highly communicable are the most scary to me. Once you get TB, you've got it for good, pretty much. You can die a miserable, long death similarly to Doc Holliday with your final words being "well I'll be damned. This is funny." Of course in the more civilized world which we like to think we live in, we are shielded from most of these illnesses. Malaria, which kills millions of people a year has practically been eradicated from the United States. And then swine flu comes along and everybody is freaking out back home.

From my point of view, it is very irrational. My acquaintance's argument was that I was saying nobody was allowed, in my book, to be worried about anything, which clearly, I wasn't saying. But with the threats facing my health in this country, I'm seriously not worried about swine flu. From what I've read since, 4,000 die of normal flu every year in the US, but nobody has been worrying about that little statistic. A lot of people won't get flu shots or other vaccinations because of the 1 in a million chance that somebody might have a reaction. There is a reason why the diseases were eradicated in the US: vaccinations. School age children were required to get vaccinations to go to kindergarden. Sure, I understand that it would suck if my son or daughter had a reaction to a vaccine (a one in a million chance) and if that happened I might say to myself, "I should have been playing the lottery because my odds would have been good." I know. But what if my son or daughter got polio? One of my Dad's friend's had polio and you can clearly see that one of his legs is almost half as thick as the other. Needless suffering and pain and debilitation. Sure, when my Dad's friend was a kid in the 1940's they didn't have the vaccines. But now they do. I'm sure he wished he had it. What I don't understand is why people get so upset about people regulating their child's health, but not about how their taxes support clearly failing businesses with stimulus money, but that's for another rant.

Another anecdote on a similar subject happened while I was in Paris with the Baylor in Paris program. There was another student that worried constantly about toilet seats. She even carried around toilet seat covers to use around Paris when she needed to pee or whatever. Funny enough, her fear was of STDs. Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When she told me of her fears, I didn't say what was on my mind, but it was something along the lines of "Sexually Transmitted" is in the acronym for a reason: because you have to have sex to get them. The chances of getting anything from a toilet seat, anything at all, are extremely remote. I looked up this on google and found the following: "none are spread on toilet seats... bugs don't tend to live on cool hard surfaces" and "syphilis and herpes... can be spread by direct non-sexual contact with infectious lesions, so make sure there is not an infected person already on the toilet when you sit down." Well said. More unfounded fears, and seriously, if you're that worried, hover. Oh, and don't touch the light switch or door knob, those do carry diseases.

I read an article about helicopter parents on Time.com. It describes a situation like the one I discussed above but dealing with parents and children. It's a scary situation that kids can't be kids and are ending up being less worldly than even us, who are only about 15 years their seniors. I guess people my age are already having children; I'm 27 after all. And maybe my childhood friends have become the hovering parent without even realizing it. I really just want to get a plot of land and release my kids into the wild of a boundary of a couple of acres where they can ride bikes around and go to the local corner store, and go to the beach with some SPF 30 and not many other worries. I'm sure it's possible that I will become a hovering parent... If I see my children's success as a definition of my worth. It could happen I suppose.

They mentioned the word "gifted" and I wanted to share some memories of gifted classes when I was in 5th grade. I think it was called GT, for gifted and talented. In the school I attended in forth grade it was called "TAG," for talented and gifted. I remember wondering why I didn't get to go to these classes and why these students were somehow more "talented and gifted" than I was. Looking back on this point in my life, I guess I really didn't care about school. School was very boring and I could always get past with minimal effort. When allowed to get by with minimal effort in many things, I do. It happened with athletics and with school. But since then, I have learned that I do in fact enjoy working hard, when there is something to be accomplished that is within sight, a clear-cut goal. But when I monkey can do the job, I usually amuse myself with other things and read a lot. So, I never did well in school really. I think my high school GPA was around 3.4 because I rarely did homework and was generally bored. College was the same, I got a 3.0, minimum "acceptable" grades for college. You get automatic acceptance to many graduate programs as long as you have a 3.0 or over. I took some of the advanced classes in high school and so on. But as with the classes when I was pre-middle school, the classes didn't matter much. I remember GT classes allowed kids to look through owl pellets. That's right, owl hair balls. The bones and left overs of what an owl can't digest, similar to hair balls which cats can't digest. Lasting memories. I'm sure they did advanced math and reading and so on, but all I remember is owl hair balls.

Down the road, none of these kids have done any better than I have in college or life in general, which begs the question why waste time on these "gifted" classes. Because these kids were bored with "normal" classes? So was I. My 5th grade teacher told me I'd never amount to anything.

I guess I just want to always keep it in perspective, and I want others to do the same. If I'm not keeping it in perspective, I hope people will call me out on it too.

Stuff

I feel a lot better about myself lately. I don't know why. Am I happy without having reason? Not really. I'm annoyed at my friend Benny for whooping the LSATs ass. I'm really just jealous. He said all he did was take an LSAT course through Princeton Review.... unfortunately, they don't have those in Afghanistan! I am going through a online one, but that's slow.

Need help...

Realization of Past Mistakes that you didn't even know happened

Can you really ever escape your past? That baggage you carry around with you. But then you realize what you thought about a relationship in your past and realize somebody was trying to tell you that they loved you more than anything... and just had no idea how to make you understand that. I feel terrible after learning something about a past relationship. Apart from my own shortcomings during a relationship with an ex, I learned that they felt a lot more strongly than I ever knew.

Maybe it was the result of the beginning of the relationship, a weakened foundation. Maybe it was my defenses coming up, the tall, tall wall that I constructed around my heart while he tore his defenses down. I suppose that fact is the initial unresolved issues were our doom in the end, other than my pride and stubbornness over an unfortunate event that happened that I hardly admitted happened, even to myself. I have a mess on my hands, a mess of my own emotions.

Understanding better what happened, all those events that were left out or misunderstood, I feel so lost. I had ended a relationship (or thought I ended it, because apparently a huge fight and a "I dread every time you call" then a "we're done" isn't ending a relationship) that I didn't even understand. I certainly didn't understand the depth of love for which he felt for me.

Even if I wanted to fix things between us, let the past be past because I know there are a lot of great things about us, I realize that the negative ideas that everybody else has about us wouldn't likely let us move forward. Even though the end of our relationship wasn't completely black and white and it may seem... I guess it never is, though is it? But I hurt a bit today... I guess sometimes I miss him. I doubt after what he thought I did he misses me much.