Last Man Standing

A couple days ago I started a post that I wasn’t able to finish. By the time I started it the time was nearly midnight and after about 15 minutes I decided that I was too tired to continue. Given a few days to let my mind stew over the intended contents of the prior post, I think that I understand better what I was trying to put down on paper at the time.

It was a beautiful night in Afghanistan. The temperature was probably around 65F and a cool breeze blew over us. This was a departure from what had been the norm, 90F with a blow dryer-like wind blowing dust into your face. We were sitting outside our tent on the last night for the last original member of our cigar group besides me.

I remembered when I first arrived in country when he and the site lead at the time stood waiting for us near the airfield. As we distanced ourselves from the engine blast of the C-130 I looked over and could tell they were Scan Eagle guys. He asked me how I knew, and I responded that we all dress alike. He laughed and said he could tell we were the ones they were looking for because it was all military guys and two dudes dressed in civilian clothing, one being an out of shape, pale white guy. It was a funny conversation, maybe one of those that you need to be there for.

But it was conversations like those that have been few and far between in the past few weeks, maybe even months. Those light-hearted nights when we talked about women and food have faded into something far more morale busting. Our nights are now more or less venting sessions where we gather in our small circle and complain about this person or that one. It’s these times that make me miss home more and more with every given day.

Before, the day felt like it ended. I felt like I was able to escape the country and all the frustrations encountered in the job. Now our days drag on late into the night. We get pounded during the day for various reasons and then we complain about it at night. The only real escape we get is when we crawl into our respective bunks and start a movie on our respective laptops. I always think it’s funny when you look around the tent after lights out and there are gentle glows coming out of every occupied bunk.

Then there was the night we had a few days ago, which was nostalgic. I haven’t laughed about stranger things since my first week here. Don’t get me wrong, we still had those moments where we vented but most of the evening was spent reminiscing about old times. I can’t say that I was surprised since it was one of our last days and no matter how bad things are the end is only one restful night of sleep away for him.

Now that he’s gone I find myself the last remaining member of the team that I started with. I have one other person who will sit out with me during the nights and smoke but he prefers cigarettes to cigars. The nightly anger sessions continue as they’ve always occurred and my only escape continues to be my own personal movie night while lying in my bunk waiting for my last night.

From 35,000 Feet With Love

I’m sitting in an airplane somewhere over Canada at around 35,000 feet on my way back to the sand. I would have been over the US but I wanted to wait for everyone to go to sleep so I wouldn’t offend anyone with the half naked woman on my desktop… Anyway…

Part of me wanted to stay in the relative safety of my home, where I could sleep in my own bed. But a far stronger part of me is excited to get back out there. It’s not the same excitement that I felt the first time. The time before was like anticipating your first kiss. The adrenaline courses through your body and you wonder what it’s going to be like, what you’ll feel, how it’s going to be. A million thoughts running through your mind, except you have 30 hours of travel time to think about it. This time it’s different, I know exactly what to expect, I know what I’m in for and I know how tough it can get.

The monotony is what will drive you nuts. The seemingly endless cycle of days, strung together like a never-ending strand of white Christmas lights. Every day you’ll wake up to the same cycle, no weekends to break up the weeks, and no option for a vacation. Lights on at 0730, leave for work 0745, arrive at work at 0800, eat lunch at 1230, eat dinner at 1830, go home at 2000, go to sleep around 2230 and wake up the next day and do it all over again. I probably couldn’t tell you the day of the week most days, nor could I tell you the date. And at any point your day could go south and your lights put out, along with the rest of the strand.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned today how much I hate flying coach on international flights…. I’m going to take a little break before I go on a senseless tirade about the person in front of me…

Alright, I’m back… Don’t hate me, I’m going to be spending the next 5 months sleeping in a 20 man tent in the middle of the desert, I think I have the right to fly to hell in comfort. Unfortunately upgrading was going to cost more than I was willing to pay. Continuing on with what I’m actually writing for…

So I bet you’re wondering why I’m so excited about going back after all those bad things. The best way to sum it up is that I want to be there with the people. If you watch the news you get a view from 35,000 feet of the war, but if you’re there you get to know the people and you get to befriend the people. I come to love people pretty easily, not like “I love you, I want to marry you” love but more like “I love you man…” kind of love. If you love someone you don’t want them to be in harm’s way alone, and I’ll be damned if something happens to them while I’m gone.

So there you have it. I might be completely delusional but at least I mean well. Now all I have to do is survive the next 24 hours before I’m finally done travelling and back in the relative safety of our base in the middle of the oceanless beach…

Jeff the token Asian, the Operator, and the Builder, oh and the IT Guy

Somehow I got myself branded the local carpenter by my cohorts. Not only that I’ve also been given the title of computer guru given the fact that I have a computer science degree. Neither title is unfounded however since I did build some furniture around my house and I spent the past 5 years working on computers.

The day I got back from setting up the new spoke, without even being given a couple days to readjust, I was asked to fix one of the computer systems. I didn’t even know how the damn thing worked, let alone know how to fix it. Of course since I like little challenges and I don’t like to give up, I tinkered with it for a while. Finally by some stroke of magic it started working again. For the moment I was the hero… Until the other one stopped working, then I was the monkey again. Go fix it monkey… Luckily this monkey is smart. I did just what I had done before and ALAKAZAM! It worked too. That’s how I got the official brand of computer whiz.

Then there was the wood construction. I have an attraction toward using tools, so when I found out we had a whole set of Dewalt tools here, I got to work. I started by building a bench out of an old pallet. The bench probably weighs close to 100lbs and is as solid as concrete. The nice thing about building stuff in the field is that a.) wood is free, and b.) function comes before form. After I built the bench, I was asked to build a table for one of the marines to use, then I was tasked to build another table for our new site lead. Most recently I got stuck building 2 stands to hang cables, and a series of shelves for storage. This has most certainly gotten out of control.

I spent the entire morning hammering, sawing and sweating my butt off out in the 130 degree heat trying to build something sturdy enough to hold the spare computers. Then I spent a few hours rummaging through a wood pile on the other side of the airfield, probably disturbing some camel spiders in the process. That sucked because pretty much all the wood had nails sticking out and the pile of wood was on top of a heap of moon dust, which dominates the landscape here. Moon dust is like really fine dirt, kind of like talcum powder but brown. Anyway, there isn’t sand in this desert, there is moon dust.

So, alone, I piled all the wood in the back of our pickup truck and drove it back to site. Leaving a few pieces behind along the road, which I had to drive back to retrieve. Since I spent 15 minutes trying to get one of them out, an 8 foot 4x4, which will come in very handy, I didn’t want to just leave it in the middle of the road. Now it’s all waiting for me outside, in the 140 degree heat, to hammer some nails into it to create something awesome.

FOBbin'

It’s been almost a week since I left our hub and moved to one of the FOBs, or Forward Operating Bases. My mission was to come down and install a new system and start operating to make sure everything worked correctly. It was a pretty big honor to be given the opportunity to do this and it says a lot about how my site lead felt about my abilities. Most of all I’m lucky to be far away from all the drama of the hub.

Life here isn’t exactly a vacation but I love it. We don’t have A/C in the tents and temperatures average around 120 during the day. It wasn’t affecting me until I volunteered to work at nights, which means I’ll be sleeping during the day when it’s like trying to sleep in an easy bake oven. My shower is an Igloo cooler strapped to the side of a wall, which sounds awful but is probably the best shower I’ve had since coming out here. In fact I might create one when I get home.

The more obviously positive things include the fact that work is within walking distance of our tent, which I share with the officers. I have time during the day to go to the gym, which is comprised mainly of handmade wooden weight benches and a potpourri of random metric weights. I’ve probably worked out harder here than I have in a long time. I’m eating better here than I eat back home, and I’m better hydrated since bottled water seems infinite. I shower with it (the Igloos), I brush my teeth with it, and I’ve even washed my clothes with it.

Life here isn’t bad at all. The people here are all very cool. I pretty much spend the entire day with the same 5 people and there’s always a story to share. Like I’ve said before, tossing a bunch of people in a seemingly negative situation acts as a catalyst for developing good friendships. We’re pretty relentless with each other, cracking jokes at each other’s expense and it only draws us closer.

I’m only here for a short period of time before heading back to the hub and then I’ll spend another few weeks there before heading back to the states to be in a wedding, which I’m looking forward to. I won’t be able to post this until I return to the hub since I don’t have internet access here, which is also a plus.

The Basics of Life

Being in an environment where you don’t have all the comforts of home you start to realize what you need to survive and the excesses that you lived with believing that they were necessities. In a song by Donavon Frankenreiter there is a line that goes:
“Try to sell something that just can’t be bought, say that it’s the latest and greatest but I know that it’s not, be somebody that you don’t want to be, didn’t even exist last year but now it’s what we need.”
It holds very true that there are a lot of things that society deems necessities that aren’t really needed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to go home and sell all my things and live on the basics, I enjoy my lifestyle more than anyone and with my new salary I won’t have to worry about not having things I want.

But, believe it or not, I didn’t take this job for the money. It was for the learning experience and in the 3 weeks I’ve been here I’ve learned more about me than my entire 28 years has allowed. I’ve learned that all I really need to live is good friends, good conversation and good stories, everything else is perspective.

I don’t need the finest food or living arrangements or newest technology. I’m living in a tent with 10 other guys, eating food that’s below the grade given to prisoners in Mexico and I don’t have a television. But from my perspective I’m probably the happiest I’ve been in a while. We share stories over cigars every other night. War stories, stories from home, stories about past relationships, even stories from the day have more color than any shared back home. These people are truly interesting and, more importantly, interested.

Conversations flow like rivers, going from one topic to another seamlessly. We can start on politics and move on to women (we’re all guys) and then somehow we’ll start talking about which showers are the cleanest. I don’t know how it happens, it just does. (From this I realized what I want in a relationship, someone who I can converse with.) Few of us have the same background, or interests, but we get along just like peas in a pod.

We’re free from cell phones, daily news and, for the most part, office politics. We work hard throughout the day and my reward is sharing experiences and ideas with others during the night, which is by far the best reward I could ever ask for… and I had to go to a war zone to get it. It’s been the most enriching experience I’ve had so far in my life and I hope that it will continue.

Looking for Light

It was two nights ago that I had my first nightmare since being out here. In fact, it may have been my first nightmare in recent memory. It wasn’t a big deal, nor was it anything I’d consider foreshadowing, but it was terrifying nonetheless.

I woke up in my bed, freezing cold, confused and still in shock of what I’d just experienced. Not knowing whether it was real or not I started looking around the room for light, but it was pitch black. I thought I was dead, that a rocket hit during the night and took out our tent. I continued to scan the room until I locked on a small green light from someone’s laptop. I took that as a sign that I was still alive. (As if there aren’t green lights in the afterlife…)

I was still a little freaked out. A lot of doom and gloom thoughts raged through my head. My heart pounded like a cluster bomb fell inside my chest. I tried to clear things up with positive thoughts, to regain my composure. I started singing comforting songs to myself to quell the storm. It took about an hour before I had calmed down.

Afterwards I drifted in and out of sleep until the sun started shining through the vestibule of our tent. It was a real sign that there wasn’t anything wrong. But for a while there I thought to myself, well the afterlife really sucks, it’s cold, dark and scary… Have I really done that many wrong things in life?

AAANNNDDD Fast forward 2 days. I’m glad I didn’t post this yet because I found some irony in the third sentence of the first paragraph because last night we had a bit of a scare. It was around 1030PM and the lights were out. Suddenly there was a rumbling, whistling sound that roared from outside that shook our row of tents.

“What the fuck was that?” Someone said.

“I think I pooped my pants.” Someone else responded.

I had to go to the bathroom really bad so I got up and went outside. I found a group of others who were also awakened by the sound.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Rockets.”

Someone thought it was a good idea to set up the rocket launchers 100 yards from the living quarters. What we heard was outgoing munitions. Unfortunately for someone else it was incoming…

HOOKED!

Is the best thing you can hear coming across the headset from your ground crew when you’re doing a retrieval and the only visibility you have is what you see on the computer screen inside a little metal box. I’ve done about 6 retrievals, or landings, so far and about 50% of them have had me on the edge of my seat. Praying that this retrieval isn’t going to be the one where the bird bounces off the rope and hits the dirt. So far my prayers have been answered and I haven’t had one quit on me. The adrenaline isn’t just reserved for retrievals though, launches are just as hair-raising for me as one of the “new guys.”

A number of things can really screw you on a launch. One of the other new guys had a launch go bad and a bird hit the dirt. We’re not sure exactly what happened during the launch but by the time it came back to the site it wasn’t in one piece anymore. I’m trying to avoid the situation because I’d be pretty hard on myself if that happened, even though nearly everyone has had at least one crash. Mistakes are easy to make if you’re not diligent during your preflight, especially when you’re getting hammered over the radio by 3 guys trying to push you to get the bird off the ground. I’m usually pretty good about keeping my cool and doing all the initial prep work and knowing what to skip and where to skip to save time.

Missions are pretty easy. I’ve been fortunate enough not to have had any emergencies during flight yet. So it really is just like playing a video game. You just have to make sure that it doesn’t screw itself in one way or another, like flying into a mountain or something…. You’re aircraft does what you tell it to do from your little metal control box in the middle of the desert.

I have to say that this is probably the best job I’ve ever had, as promised by everyone I spoke to before taking it. We function independently from the corporate world, in our own little microcosm, sharing stories from past deployments, experiences in the military and experiences back home. We talk about what we miss, everything ranging from food and beer to women (all the operators here are male.) I could really go for a pizza and a pale ale right about now. Although having some girls around couldn’t hurt either…

I’m about a quarter of the way through the time before my R&R. The first thing I want to do when I get back is to go get some Black Thorn pizza, a pitcher of Schlafly Pale Ale and talk about normal life for a while. Although I’m sure I’ll be unhappy until I get to come back out here. Life out here is great, despite knowing that at any given time you’re time could be over, but that’s an awesome feeling in itself.