A Christmas Story: Use the Correct Voltage

Sometimes you just have to learn the hard way. Last week I received several packages in the mail, the combined contents of which included enough Christmas decorations to actually put me into the Christmas spirit. I got all excited and put the ornaments on the miniature tree, then took out the strand of lights and wrapped all six feet of it around the eighteen-inch tree.

Then I plugged it in and marveled at how festive my room looked, especially with the small-scale supernova glowing in the corner. It did occur to me that the tree was especially bright, and the bulbs noticeably hot, but I figured that's why you're not supposed to leave Christmas lights plugged in if you're not at home. Even ten minutes after lighting the tree, when the whole strand started to surge in intensity, I figured it was probably the generators putting out a little bit of uneven power. It took about two seconds of flickering for me to get a clue, that perhaps 220 was not the correct voltage.

I suspect the strand burned up about half a second before I managed to unplug it, although by that point it may have been in the terminal phases of burnout and disconnecting the power may have just put it out of its misery.

There are two lessons to learn from this. First, your average 50-bulb strand of colored Christmas lights will last about ten minutes running on a double-dose of voltage. This, in my opinion, is an impressively long time, especially since my other run-ins with the wrong voltage burned out a set of computer speakers and a printer in a combined total of about six seconds. Lesson number two: It is possible to burn out every bulb in a string of lights simultaneously. I wouldn't have suspected this, but then again, I'm not smart enough to avoid making exactly the same mistake three different times. There's also a third lesson here, which is that if you ask an Afghan Dari-English interpreter to buy you a replacement strand of Christmas lights from Kabul, you will get a blank look. I should have expected this too, but it gets back to the whole not smart thing.

The good news is that I was generously given a replacement set of lights before the interpreter could even get back from his weekend in Kabul, so I now have a 100-bulb strand wrapped around the same eighteen inch tree. I had hoped that a good twelve feet of Christmas lights on such a small object would have made up for the overwhelming intensity of doubling the recommended voltage, but no such luck. Still, it's pretty impressive, and my room is once again festive and merry.

Adding to the Christmas spirit is snow. The weather changed a few weeks ago, and we've now had several snow storms. There hasn't really been any significant accumulation by the camp or the office, but the peaks are coated for the winter and the camp has picked up the mentality of a bunch of elementary school kids staring at the clouds praying for snow. Driving around here is bad enough in good weather; if it's actively snowing, we do our best not to leave the camp.



I'll try to be more consistent about writing posts. If you have any suggestions, questions, or just pictures you'd like to see, let me know. Inspiration has been somewhat lacking on my end, so input is definitely welcome.

Keep in touch, and if I don't get back to this in the next eleven days, have a merry Christmas!

God Bless Mexico

No, I am not engaged.

Just thought I would throw that out there, since it seems to have been a popular question since I returned to Seattle from Mexico and since I returned to Afghanistan from Seattle. Mexico was absolutely perfect, Seattle was uncharacteristically sunny, and I had a great time with both Joanna and my family, but alas, no rings.

Mexico was everything I expected and a fair amount more. Most of our time was occupied with either sitting by the pool or sitting on the beach, and my only regret is that we didn't have more time available to sit around and actively do nothing. Believe it or not, after almost exactly two years of being together, the fifteen and a half days of my mid-tour was the longest continuous stretch of time Joanna and I have been able to spend together, and it increased the days we've actually spent in the same time zone by almost a third.

And now here I am, back in my room in Afghanistan, trying to fight the impression that the whole trip was a fleeting daydream that feels like it ended before it even had the chance to start. The good news is that I only have four months to go - maybe slightly less, depending on when our replacements get here - and after eight months (ten, including the two months that Fort Bragg stole from my life), another four really doesn't feel like that long.

Back to the mid-tour...

Among the many differences between the Army and the Air Force, the most recent to strike me is a vastly different approach to safety briefings. Before I was allowed to get on a plane and fly home, I had to attend a "reintegration" briefing, part of which dealt with safety and good decision making. The Air Force is big into safety, but they tend to be kind of diplomatic and even head-in-the-sand about it. Everybody knows people under 21 tend to drink, but I've only ever seen one Air Force safety briefing where a renegade senior airman got on stage and said "I know you're going to drink, so please be careful and don't do anything stupid". Usually it's more of a Don't Drink and Drive speech followed by And If You're Under 21, Just Don't Drink. It's like abstinence-only sex education...everyone knows most everybody is doing it, but they won't really deal with the problem.

Anyway, the Army is different. My alcohol awareness briefing consisted of the caution that when I get home, a six-pack of beer will treat me like a case would have before I deployed. Honest, concise, and true. Well, true for some people. They should have said that two beers with dinner would treat me like four beers would have before I left. Which is to say, I had two beers and a big bloody steak the first night I got home and, as Joanna can attest to, I was feeling pretty good.

Everybody says that you're supposed to come back from R&R motivated and ready to finish out your deployment. Trouble is, everybody is full of crap. I'm back, but I still find myself spending an inordinate amount of time here,



which is in the pool at the hotel in Zihuatanejo.

I've also discovered that a two week vacation apparently won't mellow me out and take the edge off of all the little annoyances that were irritating the hell out of me before I left. I had two blissful weeks without having to think about how obnoxious it is to be stared at by everybody, everywhere you go, all the time, or to have to swerve around people who knowingly refuse to get out of the middle of the road, so they can prove they know you won't run them over, even though it might be really really tempting sometimes. I spent my first seven months trying to rationalize the terrible driving habits and senseless pedestrian habits of the people around here - to include analyzing it from the perspective of exposure to defined traffic laws during early childhood development - and now that I'm back I'm starting to realize that no rationalization is necessary. Some people simply have no sense, and if that means they get clocked in the forehead with a side-view mirror, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Since I've started plunging into cynical ruminations on the nuisances of chaotic Afghan traffic, I'll leave you with this last picture of Joanna and I on the beach. I attribute the smirk on my face to Franco, our charming but somewhat overzealous waiter who was a little too fond of cheesy questions like "How is it, peachy keen or okey dokey?" It was a great afternoon, regardless of the expression on my face, and if anybody needs a vacation, I can't recommend Zihuatanejo highly enough.

Mmm...beer.

It's eight o'clock in the morning in the mountains of Afghanistan, and I would really like a beer. A cocktail would be good too, perhaps a gin and tonic. Wine would also make me happy. Actually, anything with an alcohol content higher than the one Bitberger non-alcoholic waste of an aluminum can that I drank for some reason almost two months ago would make me happy.

Before anybody recoils at the thought of an upstanding young gentleman like myself craving an early morning buzz, please bear in mind that I've been here almost seven months, and at this point I am somewhat overdue for a break. I'm a bit burned out, and fortunately I only have about five more days until I get on a plane and fly home for my fifteen day mid-tour leave period. I'll be splitting the time almost evenly between Seattle and Mexico, and at this point, the thought of sitting on a beach in Mexico going out of my way to do absolutely nothing is pretty much what's keeping me going. Realistically, there are any number of things keeping me going, but the Mexico-beach-scene is one of my favorite screensavers that I like to turn on inside my head when it's time to tune out and attempt to make the week end more quickly.

There's another more profound element of the beach and beer that I miss, but you'll have to bear with me for a second because it requires a brief explanation, and I'm going to try to use an example to explain it. When we first got here in April, everybody started to figure out that the internet at the Green House (and now the FOB) could support VOIP phone calls, which basically means using an online program to call anybody, typically at ridiculously low rates like a penny a minute. Since I have a Mac, I had some difficulty initially using my computer as a phone because of compatibility issues with Yahoo Voice, the cheapest and most common VOIP program. Instead, I would borrow my boss's computer. He's stationed in Japan, and he has a four year old daughter who's picture is the background on his computer. While I was borrowing his computer, the background picture was his daughter standing next to a tree on a street corner in Japan. Aside from the fact that his daughter is adorable, what really struck me about the picture is that there's one person in the background, across the street. She's a rather pretty woman pushing a stroller. The reason I found (and continue to find) this striking is that she's a woman, standing freely in the street, and not wearing a burka. This little scene goes a long way toward explaining why I want a beer right now.

I think what it comes down to is the idea of being able to have a beer if I so choose. Or the idea of a woman freely walking down the street without a society of men crushing her. And to imagine a beach full of nearly naked men and women roaming around, swimming, and drinking all at the same time? It's almost more than I can conceive of right now. There are going to be restrictions and prejudices everywhere you go, but what I've really begun to miss is the ability to do as I please without a culture bearing down on me. If I want to walk down a street and step into a bar, why should anybody stop me?

I know what a few of you might be thinking, which is that I'm veering dangerously close to some popular right-wing slogans, and that the next words out of my mouth are probably going to be that everybody around the world deserves a chance to drink the sweet sweet milk of freedom and democracy without being oppressed. In a sense, I guess that is where I'm going (I'm going nowhere near methods for exporting all that milk to foreign countries, though). However, I understand that progress, equality, and freedom take time, and that this place isn't necessarily ready for all of it. All I know is that I value those things, and I would really, really like a beer.

If you're going to work in the developing world...

...you have to be able to deal with poo.

Those sage words were spoken by our former USAID representative, and she has proven to be more right than I ever expected. As you might anticipate from a title like that, this may not be the most appetizing blog post you have the good fortune to read today. My apologies up front if anybody walks away from their breakfast or is bothered if I happen to let fly with an obscenity now and then. Shit happens; we'll all get through it.

I hadn't really thought about Amy's comment much more - she made it several months ago - until I read this article today: http://www.slate.com/id/2175569/nav/tap3/

Although like most Americans I generally go out of my way to avoid dealing with crap, the article threw into sharp relief the different types of personalities we have on this team, representing a pretty broad cross-section of consumers, from guys who think the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese is God's greatest gift to gastronomy, to people more on my end of the spectrum. I may not like seeing goats slaughtered on the way to work, hung on meathooks next to the road, and then slowly coated with dust and wasps until all that's left at the end of the day is a lonely yellowed chunk of something, no more identifiable than the origins of the aforementioned hamburger, but I can still harbor an appreciation for the fact that at least the goat lived a pretty respectable life up to that point. Unlike its American cousin, the McDonalds beef cow, at least the goat ate grass and roamed relatively freely, as opposed to being force-fed corn, antibiotics, and rendered byproducts of its brothers and sisters to make up for its grotesque and otherwise limited diet. Also, the goat didn't live and die atop a steadily growing pile of its own crap. That alone has to count for something.

So anyway, distasteful as a freshly butchered slab of goat or sheep may look while hanging next to a mud shop and enveloped in a cloud of bees, I can readily admit that if you stick that thing in a pressure cooker, roast the hell out of it, and throw it onto a plate of rice, it's a damn good meal. If you're into the whole organic movement, it's hard to get more organic than what I've seen around here. Alternatively, it's just as good if you grill it on a skewer and wrap it in a piece of local flatbread. Nine times out of ten, local foods like Palau (the rice and meat plate) and kabobs are immeasurably better than the processed, pre-cooked stuff they serve most nights in our dining facility.

That being said, there's still the McDonalds crowd on the team that shies away from anything more adventuresome than an occasional piece of local bread, and this is where the Slate article comes in. For better or for worse - at least if you can take Dr. Sepkowitz's word for it - it's not too hard to figure out who on this team has eaten more shit than others. And although I guess it should pain me to say this, I probably come out on the higher end of that spectrum.

The reason I find all this blog-worthy is that Dr. Sepkowitz appears to be quite right. Not that I've studied it scientifically, but the people around here who seem to get sick the most are the ones who most strenuously avoid the local food and stick with the processed, boiled, vacuum-sealed dinners the US military has the generosity to send to us. I've been sick maybe three times as a result of bad food since I got here, and I'm not convinced in any of those cases that the local food was at fault. I have my limits - there's no five-second rule in Afghanistan, as far as I'm concerned - but I suspect that the occasional trace of fecal matter in my next kabob won't be any worse for me than the "restructured beef patty" that might be the entree in my next MRE.

Two other thoughts come to mind. One is that the people who skip the local cuisine aren't just short-changing their immune systems; they're missing out on an element of the local culture that we have the incredible good fortune to be able to experience on a daily basis. Where else in Afghanistan can you drive down the street and have dinner on the back porch of a restaurant, while listening to the river flowing ten feet away?

The second issue is that the Panjshir Valley produces the best fruit that I've ever eaten. I can understand the Army sticking with strict hygiene standards about where meat comes from and how it's prepared, but we could buy nearly all of our fruits and vegetables locally, save a tremendous amount of money rather than shipping all the same stuff into the country, and the quality would be better. Money would go back into the local economy, the logistics tail required to supply us would shorten, and food quality would increase. The watermelon this summer...best I've ever had. The Army-supplied watermelon? I can't speak for how it tasted, but the whiteness and stringy texture told me all I needed to know. The one Panjshir peach I had the good fortune to eat a few months ago? No shit, no exaggeration, best peach of my life. The Army-supplied peach? Again, I don't know what it tasted like, but I'm pretty sure the big brown spot on the bottom wasn't an extra patch of juicy deliciousness. And then there were the local apricots...best apricots ever. They were so sweet and juicy that it took me a few minutes to figure out that the aftertaste reminded me of eating a raw sugarcube. It turns out - and I never knew this until the locals looked at me like an asshole for throwing away the pit - that if you crack an apricot pit open, there's a delicious nut inside that's kind of like an almond. Now you know.

I'll close with a story that makes me laugh, but also makes me kind of sad. I was trying to convince a visiting Army guy to try the local food, and he wasn't going for it. Finally he leaned over and half-whispered that he had been told in training not to eat food sources (like local vegetables) not approved by the Army, because they might have "been fertilized with animal shit". I started to tell him that fertilizer, by definition, pretty much is shit, but I quickly stopped myself. He (and an amazingly large number of others) can go on thinking fertilizer comes in pellets from a plastic bag you buy at Home Depot, and that meat is pre-made by a butcher behind a wall at the supermarket, shiny plastic and styrofoam included. Meanwhile, in response to the question posed by Dr. Sepkowitz at the end of his article, I'll go on eating just enough crap to keep myself healthy. You should join me.

Token Crazy Guy

I realized several days ago that my experience in Gulbahar (see "Everybody is an Engineer") actually followed a standard model for how these meetings with the locals tend to go. Last Saturday we had a similar sort of meeting with another group of villagers, for another project we're getting right to start construction on. It was essentially a pre-construction meeting to try to set realistic expectations about how much power they're going to get from this micro-hydro when it's done, and to try to get them to start some sort of rudimentary community planning to decide how to divide up the power once the project is complete.

Like what happened in Gulbahar, we expected to talk to a few elders, the contractor, and maybe some younger guys who would be involved in operation and maintenance of the equipment once the project is done. As we walked into the meeting, it became obvious that most of the village had showed up, because the classroom we were using for the meeting was overflowing with people. We said our piece and answered some questions, and as it became more and more apparent that we can't provide 100 kiloWatts just because the governor promised at the groundbreaking ceremony that we would install two 50 kW generators rather than the two 28 kW generators the site can actually support, the bickering and complaining rose dramatically. We were still able to keep some semblance of order and continue with the meeting, but I'm speaking from experience when I say that it's hard to shut up a room full of forty Afghan men once they've started having their own conversations.

Shortly after the noise level jumped, right around the time we explained that there would be limits to how much power each family could realistically take, Token Crazy Guy made his obligatory appearance. He started shouting from the back row, then he stood up and shouted some more. Apparently he has ten houses, and two light bulbs just won't do. He needs a lot more power than that, and if we can't provide it, we might as well not build anything. Even as he started ranting, other people were trying to calm him down, but he wouldn't have any of it. He shouted until he was pushed from the room, then we heard him shouting at other people outside.

Also like Gulbahar, although even more so this time, it was quite obvious that he was not representative of the group. People in the front of the room were laughing, and even the guys who were trying to push him out the door knew that he was one agitated crazy guy who probably does the same thing on a regular basis. Once he was gone, we were able to finish the conversation relatively quickly. The villagers all want 100 kW, but they know they're not going to get it from us, and I think we were able to at least start a dialogue that will enable this project to be used realistically and maintained by the villagers for a longer period of time.

So here's the general layout of how these meetings seem to go. I'll call it the Panjshiri Curve of Unrealistic Expectations, and I'm pretty sure that it could be modeled mathematically with some sort of equation. Here are the key variables: Length of time spent waiting for the project, which in this case was several years. Sense of loss and/or entitlement; at Gulbahar the sense of loss was significantly higher, this time entitlement seems to have dominated. Time of day (only really relevant during Ramadan); later in the day means more hunger and dehydration, so probably relatively more impact of tobacco and whatever else is available to be smoked, resulting in a lower threshold for excitability. Average age in the room; in this case we had a wall lined with old men, with Token squarely in the middle.

When you plot it out, the shape of the curve varies, but the common thread always seems to be the crazy guy who appears right at the apogee. In Gulbahar it was a steady buildup to his appearance, followed by a quick drop as the meeting rapidly ended. In Korovah yesterday it was a smooth ascent, Token's outburst, and a smooth descent back to relative calm. Sometimes there are multiple smaller peaks that build up to a really big one, such as when I tried to convince Haji Akbar and his villagers that assaulting the excavator operator wouldn't be the best course of action to get them help digging out from the mudslide that followed the June flood. Haji Akbar would show up, quickly start to shout, storm off or get dragged away by other villagers, and then reappear several minutes later for another show. That whole scene ended with him in the middle of the road shouting at anybody who would listen, and the rest of the villagers smiling and waving and thanking us for coming as we drove away.

What's the point? Again, I don't know. In a way these experiences are kind of amusing, and they make for good stories after the fact. I think we're also managing to accomplish something productive each time; it's a slow and gradual process, but if nothing else, at least when Token Crazy Guy starts his tirade, it helps everyone else keep things in perspective, so maybe it's for the best after all.

Everybody is an Engineer

Several days ago I experienced again one of the great frustrations I've encountered working in a place like this. We were at a project site meeting with the local elders of a village that sustained major road damage as a result of a flood on August 9th. This particular project site is actually outside of the Panjshir Valley, so it's technically outside of our area of responsibility as a PRT, but since it's just out of the mountains, and since it's the only road into the valley accessible to vehicles bigger than a large pickup truck, it's quite important. We took over responsibility for developing and overseeing the project because we have relatively easy access to the site, and if the road gets any worse or collapses completely, the entire valley is pretty much screwed for quite a while.





The immediate solution is essentially a long retaining wall spanning from the upstream shop to the downstream shop (it was originally a continuous row of shops, most of which fell into the river when the bank collapsed. Thankfully, nobody was killed). For anyone without a geotechnical background - pretty much everyone, myself included - retaining walls can be deceptively difficult, involved, and expensive, particularly when the ground might be saturated with large amounts of water. We spent several days developing and refining a suitable design for the site, while trying to keep the continually escalating cost within our budget. What we presented to the locals - who knew we were developing a project but lacked the specific details until we met with them a few days ago - was a technically sound and financially acceptable solution that will create two lanes on the road again and provide some protection against future floods. Obviously we can't build something that will save everything in the village from every conceivable flood event, especially considering the amount of damage upstream that could quickly get worse and cause problems at this site. Despite our limitations, what we designed is a good short-term solution that will help the village and the entire Panjshir Valley further up the road.

My conversation with the villagers took place in two acts. The first act was half an hour long and involved me telling them about our plans, our limitations, and what they could reasonably expect as a result of this project, followed by their explanation for why our plan obviously wasn't good enough, and how we should be doing things differently. This went back and forth several times, until my boss stepped in to try to disperse the crowd and only keep the key leaders involved. Then for Act 2 he took over and went through essentially the same speech - probably a little more diplomatically - countering the same objections over and over. To the villagers' credit, they did suggest alternatives and what they viewed as compromises, but none of them were technically acceptable (from an engineer's standpoint) and most of them involved some variation of us building a longer, shorter wall, then they would come back and finish the top of it, thereby saving money in a way that allowed a longer wall to be built. The problems with this approach are probably evident, but the most significant one I saw was the likelihood that they would never actually do their part. I had the brief urge to suggest they go first and build the bottom half of the wall instead, but that probably wouldn't have gone over so well.

Finally, after nearly an hour, the oldest guy in the group stepped forward and basically said, If you don't build it our way, you might as well not build it at all. This gave my boss the opportunity he was looking for, because he was able to take them up on their threat by telling them that was a great idea, we would save our money and be quite happy to see what they could build themselves. Of course he didn't mean it literally, but they got the point. They actually tried to keep the old guy quiet before he even finished telling us his thoughts, so I don't think he was representative of the group, but he gave us the chance to make the point, without coming across as petty or threatening, by using "we'll take our ball home with us and nobody will get to play" defensively rather than offensively. The point of the whole discussion, after all, was to negotiate an agreement, and at that point I think they grudgingly gave in to the fact that they would be better off with something rather than nothing. It wasn't all smiles and handshakes, but they were willing to go along with the project, which, considering the importance of the road, is really all we needed.

What really gets me about this situation is the underlying attitude involved. This is one of those situations where I have to remind myself that I volunteered for this job, and that I can't let myself get too cynical or judgmental, because I chose to be here and I owe these people more than to get upset about these things and to take them personally. I completely understand that I'm the outsider in this situation, and that the locals have personally experienced and should know firsthand how the river changes each year and how unpredictable the weather can be. The suggestion that the locals know better than we do how to build retaining walls and survive near a volatile river seems logical enough at first glance, but I've come to realize it's not entirely true. I've heard that suggestion in the few days since I talked to the locals about this project, and I've heard different variations of it from different groups of people around the valley.

I understand that we're newcomers here, and that the locals have a better idea of the geography and the climate than we do. I don't think that means that most people have a better understanding of what structures will and will not work in situations like this. If they did, the previous flood wouldn't have destroyed most of the existing retaining wall. The most common "structure" around here is a stone masonry wall. With the possible exception of the one contractor we hired to rebuild this particular wall, I don't think I've run into a single person who has given any more structural thought to these walls (and much of their other construction) other than to expand the recipe by making the wall as large as the bank it has to hold back, generally with a shallow foundation (or none at all), poorly mixed concrete, and no reinforcement.

If you want a nice looking stone masonry wall or canal, Afghans - I should probably be more specific and say Panjshiris, since they're the only Afghans I've worked with - probably know better than anyone else on earth how to build it. It's just what they do. But if you want something that stands a chance of surviving a major flood, or that won't succumb to years of gradual undercutting and erosion and then eventually collapse and take a bunch of houses with it, more is required than just piling up a bunch of rocks, but nobody seems willing to acknowledge that because they've always done it their way. There are quantifiable, demonstrable physical realities to deal with, and there are ways to mitigate problems even if it means part of the wall is underground and you can't see exactly why it works better just by looking at it.

Like I said, I understand that if an outsider walked into my town and told me they were coming to help, but just to trust them, they know how it's done and I need to adapt and learn from them, I probably wouldn't be very receptive either. If the outsider was a 25 year-old "engineer" would looks like he's fifteen and couldn't grow a beard if he spent the next five years trying...you get the idea. I know why it's hard to accept, and we certainly didn't go down there telling them they were wrong and we were right. This whole thing gets to several much bigger issues: How much do people really want help? Is there any hope when people won't recognize a level of knowledge required beyond "we've always done it this way"? On a more abstract level, this actually reminds me of the fact that there are fundamental, unchanging physical laws that govern the way things work, and that rather than trying to mold them to the way we want to perceive the world (a problem certainly not confined to Afghanistan), it would be immeasurably better and more productive to try perceive the world in a way that fits the facts. It strikes me as resistance to reality, but I know that my approach probably appears the same way to them.

I know, I know, that's a really philosophical take on the fact that a bunch of people want to build a rock wall differently than we do. The fact of the matter - arrogant though this may sound - is that there are reasons why our way will work, even if they can't see it. And regarding the geography and climate, you would be surprised at how actively people can go out of their way to avoid acknowledging facts they've probably dealt with their entire lives. General Rajab worked for months and finally put the river back where it was, and it accomplished nothing. Next spring when the river rises, it's going to go right back to where it was originally, and all his time and effort are going to be an even bigger waste than they've already turned out to be. Similarly, the people the other day in Gulbahar asked us to have the contractor move the river to the other bank once the wall is done, even though as soon as the river rises in the spring it will go right back to the permanently low spot on the outside of the bend and will be exactly the way it was before.

What's the resolution here? I don't know. At this point, for me, the resolution is to work harder being more patient and more understanding. Not everybody is an engineer, and not everybody can (or even should) approach things from a strictly rational and scientific perspective. The best we can hope for is compromise, and for them to realize when the project is done that they and a lot of other people have benefitted as a result of trusting us and working together on this. It may not be perfect, but not much around here is.

Battlefield Fashion

There are quite a few things I’ve come to like about being deployed. Most of them have to do with the shared set of common experiences and the sense of community you get in a deployed environment. To go along with that though, the ridiculous political decisions tend to be magnified beyond all belief. I talked about some of those things in my Iraq e-mails, and this place definitely has its share of stupidity. Most recently has been the Air Force’s decision to issue new uniforms, essentially to keep up with the Army. I’ll caution up front that this is probably going to be a big rant session, and that there’s a good chance a few of you will think I’m making a huge deal out of nothing. There may be some truth to that, but there’s also some truth to the fact that even during a war, people don’t have anything better to worry about than whether the media will recognize me as an Air Force member when they take my picture. Bear with the history lesson; I think it’s worth giving you the background on this whole sad saga.

Several years ago the Army developed the Army Combat Uniform (ACU), in order to replace the older Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) and Desert Combat Uniform (DCU) that most of the services shared for quite a few years. BDUs were the woodland green and brown camouflage pattern that most people are probably familiar with. The ACU is a grayish-green digital camouflage pattern that’s a substantial change from BDUs in both appearance and functionality. I was skeptical of the pattern initially, but it’s surprisingly versatile and works well in urban and remote environments. Most importantly, the ACU is functional. It’s not designed for style, and it’s not the type of uniform that’s likely to be turned into an inspection item by an overzealous commander. There are pockets on the sleeves that would probably prevent a crease, and the boots are rough-side-out tan leather that doesn’t need to be polished or really maintained at all. All of the pockets also have Velcro rather than buttons, something else I was initially skeptical of but am now a convert to, since the Velcro and the ergonomic pockets actually allow things to be accessible, and although Velcro wears out eventually, it’s a lot less likely to fall off or be torn off than a bunch of buttons.

The reason I think I can speak intelligently about the Army’s uniform is that I’ve been wearing it for the past five and a half months, as you may have noticed from the pictures I’ve sent and posted to my blog. The reasoning behind Air Force members wearing Army uniforms is that individuals like me, working in joint “outside-the-wire” assignments, shouldn’t stand out from each other. Once the Army adopted the ACU, that left the Air Force in DCUs, and since so many Air Force people are filling Army positions for the foreseeable future, Air Force members doing these Army jobs stood out significantly on the battlefield.

For a while the Air Force resisted the idea of its people wearing Army uniforms, until somebody at some level came to the realization that being different in a hostile environment is probably a bad thing, and that it would be better not to flag all of these Air Force people as targets. There are differing opinions about just how much more likely it is that somebody might get shot because they’re wearing DCUs and everybody else is in a different uniform, but to me it makes intuitive sense, and it seems to have been at least a contributing factor in several Air Force members being targeted and shot while out on missions.

Recently, the Air Force did an impressive round of late-in-the-game bandwagon-jumping that has actually been almost four years in the making. The Air Force has been trying to develop a BDU/DCU replacement since sometime around 2004. The first version came out while I was at the Academy, and was a striped blue and green pattern that was absolutely hideous, both tactically and aesthetically. Thankfully, they scrapped the prototype and presumably started work on a better version.

The eventual evolution of the blue/green uniform was the Airman Battle Uniform (ABU). It’s close to the same color-scheme as the ACU, except that it’s “tiger-stripe digital” rather than purely digital like the ACU. It also lacks the overwhelming majority of the functionality of the ACU. Except for the new pattern, the only differences from the former BDUs/DCUs are five additional pockets and two pen pockets. None of them are particularly useful. As far as I can tell, they took the old winter-weight BDUs, added several non-functional pockets, and changed the pattern. Don’t forget, this “modernization” was a multi-year process.

After almost six months in ACUs, I can definitively say they are the best uniform I’ve worn so far. They’re functional and ergonomic, and well suited to a hot desert environment. When wearing body armor, the sleeve pockets are handy, since every other pocket is covered by the armor. The collar is squared off, so that when it’s flipped up it wraps around your neck and seals out most dirt and debris, which makes body armor more comfortable around the neck and is particularly useful if you’re ever around helicopters as they land or take off. Possibly most importantly, it’s light and it breathes well. These are uniforms that see their harshest use in desert environments, so lightness and breathability are valued assets. All in all – and I’m not one to praise the Army too often – they did something right and produced a functional uniform in nearly every respect.

And then there’s the ABU. After a week wearing ABUs, I can tell you they were not developed by anybody who makes a habit of getting out from behind their desk, or who makes a habit of listening to people who do get out from behind their desks. The fabric, inexplicably, is the thickness of the old winter-weight BDUs. Strike one. The breast pockets, aside from being inaccessible without unbuttoning at least the top two buttons, are completely useless when wearing body armor. In places, they also add three layers of fabric (heavy fabric) to the overall thickness of the already hot uniform. Strike two. The pockets on the calves are about the right size for a cell phone, which I don’t make a habit of keeping accessible on a convoy. They’re almost the perfect size for a 30-round magazine, except they’re an inch too short, so you can’t button them, and as a result, if you try to run with magazines in the calf pockets, they fall out. Strike three. No pockets on the sleeves, except for a place to keep two pens. This was explained as a result of the Air Force trying to maintain its “heritage”, and since traditionally Air Force enlisted members have worn their stripes on their sleeves, the ACU-style shoulder pockets aren’t possible. Strike four. The list could keep growing, but you get the point.

The sleeve pockets warrant another critique, since I suspect enlisted stripes are only half the story about why they weren’t included on the uniform. As I mentioned for ACUs, there’s no practical way to crease the sleeve because of the shoulder pockets. BDUs had been adulterated to the point that the standard of how much “pride” a Soldier or Airman took in their uniform was how sharply the sleeves were starched and creased, so along with the rough-leather boots that don’t require shining, uncreased sleeves are actually a significant departure from previous style cues. I suspect the Air Force couldn’t bear the thought of all the flat-sleeved Airmen running around without sharp edges on their arms, because although the ABU is claimed to be permanent press and that ironing is neither necessary nor recommended, the sleeves and pants come with built in, pre-pressed creases that I’m hoping fade after a few washings. This is not indicative of a uniform designed with battlefield functionality in mind, and it makes me certain that the Air Force is significantly more concerned with fashion sense than functional, field-tested input.

As far as the heritage claim is concerned, the Air Force is full of shit. We’re the youngest service, and although our sixtieth birthday has us in the throes of an attempt to reclaim our “heritage”, we’ve been quick all along to throw out whatever has proved to be unpopular, as my time at the Academy amply proved. You want heritage? The Air Force used to be the Army Air Corps; give us ACUs with the Air Force digital tiger-stripe pattern. Hell, you can even sew on all the patches (or get rid of them, like the ABUs) rather than Velcro them, I really don’t care. Instead of being so wrapped around the axle about heritage (read: style), give us a functional battlefield uniform that will actually serve the “Airmen-Warriors” filling true battlefield roles. They’re also redesigning the service dress uniform to look more military-like, rather than the business suit trend that came around in the nineties. I’m all for that, because service dress is about appearance, and if they want to make a fashion statement out of it, that’s fine. Unfortunately, they’ve decided to make the same fashion statement with a uniform that has “Battle” as part of its name, and they’ve succeeded in creating something with none of the functionality that the Army and Marines achieved with their new uniforms.

As if this fashion-show game of catch-up wasn’t bad enough, here’s where it really gets stupid. Several months ago I received an additional set of Nomex ACUs, which are flame retardant, for use on convoys. This is a growing trend to help alleviate burn injuries caused by vehicle fires that can follow IED attacks. Nomex is hotter and less breathable than the standard ACU material, but having seen and helped bandage IED-inflicted burns, I can tell you that whatever minor discomfort Nomex might cause during a convoy pales in comparison to skin grafts and reconstructive surgery.

Now that the Air Force has provided us with uniforms that are fairly similar to ACUs when viewed from a distance, they have also decided that Air Force personnel on convoys should no longer be wearing Nomex ACUs. The alternative? Tan Nomex flight suits.

There are two safety issues at hand: blending in well enough not to be a distinct target (which ABUs accomplish), and burn resistance in the event of a vehicle fire (which Nomex accomplishes). For day-to-day operations outside the wire, blending in is the only relevant issue. For convoys, blending in and burn resistance are the two relevant issues, and there’s no correlation between the two. Why, if they have been issuing Airmen ACUs for the past year to alleviate the safety issue of being targeted for wearing a distinct uniform, would the Air Force decide that now that we have ABUs, we can start wearing another distinct uniform – the tan flight suit – during high-threat operations like convoys?

It’s important to note that a Nomex flight suit isn’t just another distinct uniform. It’s a distinct uniform that also turns me into a high-value target. I’m not an Intelligence Officer, but it shouldn’t take one to realize that jumping out of a vehicle during a convoy and looking like a pilot instantly makes my teammates and I more appealing targets. Do the Taliban know the difference? Maybe not, but it doesn’t matter. I guarantee they know what a pilot looks like, and even if they’re smart enough to figure out how unlikely it is for a convoy passenger to be an aircrew member, it’s still a propaganda win for them to capture or kill someone in a flight suit. If the next captive video you see on CNN is somebody in a tan flight suit, how many Americans do you think are going to take the time to understand the long and sad chain of idiotic decision-making that led to a civil engineer wearing a flight suit on a convoy?

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a worst-case scenario, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. The Air Force recognized it as enough of a possibility that they authorized ACUs for over a year, and now that we have ABUs, giving us back our “heritage” and “service identity”, all of the old safety concerns are forgotten and the Air Force decides that it’s okay for us to become distinct (and, I maintain, high-value) targets again. The inconsistency required to make this sort of decision is absolutely staggering. More troubling is the willful and knowing disregard for a previously acknowledged safety risk to Airmen traveling on convoys.

Let me take one more swing at this, in a more concise manner: Nomex flight suits have coincided exactly with the fielding of ABUs, for no reason other than a political decision made by people removed from the front-lines who are more concerned about style points and a sense of heritage that only seems to exist above the rank of colonel either behind a desk at Bagram or somewhere in the halls of the Pentagon. Is that a clear enough statement of my take on the matter? I hope so, because I can’t express my disappointment and disgust any more clearly.

While I’m at it, indulge me for a brief fraud-waste-and-abuse tangent. Aside from the incomprehensible decisions being made about the wear of these uniforms, let’s look at it from the standpoint of your tax dollars. I was issued four sets of DCUs before I left McGuire. Then I was issued for more sets of DCUs at Fort Bragg during training, along with four sets of ACUs. Then they gave me one set of Nomex ACUs, followed last week by four sets of brand new ABUs, which are now the sole uniform I am authorized to wear, except for the tan flight suit that they assure me will be showing up any day. That’s eighteen sets of uniforms in less than eight months, thirteen of which are now unauthorized and are to be disposed of in an operationally secure manner (which means they should be burnt, a unique challenge for the Nomex ACUs). Thousands of dollars per person per deployment is a tiny fraction of billions spent weekly to fight two wars, but this is the type of senseless waste of money the Air Force would do well to avoid, considering that we’re cutting 40,000 positions (in the middle of two wars, mind you) so that we can afford to buy new planes.

And now that I’m on a roll, indulge me for one more tangent. Last week I was a driver for a one-day trip to and from Bagram, where I only spent about five hours actually out of a vehicle and free to roam around the base. Lest I offend the sensibilities of all the people on Bagram who have been wearing ABUs for the past six months (as opposed to me, the guy outside the wire who only get them a week ago), the first thing I had to do after we parked the vehicles was go to my room and change out of my Nomex ACUs. This won’t change once I get my flight suit, because the people who made that decision didn’t bother to acknowledge that without nametags, patches, or rank a flight suit isn’t a complete uniform and can’t be worn to the dining facility (or anywhere else outside of a vehicle), so if my convoy leaves around lunchtime, the last thing I have to do, in the midst of prepping and loading vehicles, attempting to grab some food, and receiving a convoy briefing, is to go to my room, change, and then run back out so we can leave.

Does it require any more than ten minutes to go change before and after a convoy? No, not really. It’s still infuriating though, because all of the money that has been spent, all of the policy letters that have been written, all of these hoops that we have to jump through now are purely for the sake of appearance. When the leadership and the public see pictures of us in the media, they can feel better about the fact that they know for certain we’re in the Air Force, so that the service gets the credit it deserves. Never mind that ABUs offer no functional improvements over the old uniforms, never mind concerns about being targeted, never mind the failure to issue (or, to the best of my knowledge, even manufacture) associated ABU items required for cold weather. Rest easy: We’re distinct again, and the Air Force is going to get the credit it deserves.

Khoob nay

The Dari expression for "No Good" is Khoob Nay, khoob meaning good, nay meaning no. The kh sound is pronounced like you're hacking something up, rather than with a hard k. Khoob nay has taken on kind of a profound meaning around my office, since most of us know little more Dari than those two words, and since we seem to invoke them so often. The reason I mention this is because of the picture, which, if you couldn't tell, is a recently poured concrete column on one of our projects. This column embodies the most profound meaning of khoob nay.



I'm sure everyone has something they can think of at work that gives them a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. As an engineer (a stretch, I'll admit, but my job title says civil engineer, so I'm a civil engineer, Dammit!), this column is one of those things. If it was just one column, it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately, there are about twelve more columns on this site, and the combined effect is something like a funhouse. Nothing is straight. Brick walls veer to the outside, columns tilt left and right, and nothing except the floor is truly horizontal or vertical. And let's not even get into the materials and techniques they used to construct these drunken columns, since basically everything they did was in violation of the contract specifications.

If you're curious, the building is eventually going to be a big hangar to house and maintain the equipment owned by the Department of Public Works. If you remember from a previous e-mail, this equipment may or may not actually exist, since it was charitably given away to one of the governor's buddies. As a result, this project may or may not actually serve a purpose.

Okay, that's me being cynical. It is a legitimate project, even if the Department of Public Works is lacking both leadership and equipment. It builds capacity, it gives them a place to store and maintain what little equipment they do have, and it should help to grow as a developing organization.

This type of thing is what makes the work around here challenging, because all this happened within the past week. I'm extremely fortunate to be on a team located in a place free enough to travel around and visit all these projects and catch these problems early. Other PRTs have to organize convoys and travel through IED-infested roads just to see project sites once a month, and I can't imagine how they are able to produce lasting projects. This building is actually a sort of success story, since if Panjshir wasn't so safe and the government so capable (if still somewhat mafia-esque), the columns would probably have gotten plastered over, nobody would have known the difference, and the lifespan of the building would probably be shortened to some degree.

For those of you wondering, the solution is to tear down and rebuild the columns, which is unfortunate, but better discovered and fixed now.

I'm still here

Don't worry, I'm still around, and no, I haven't given up on this thing after only a week and a half of posting pictures. Weeks go by like days around here, and up until about two days ago it was a busy ten days. The biggest event recently was the memorial service for the anniversary of Massoud's assassination, which took place on September 10th. We had two generals come, so I spent the day playing driver and security guard. More than anything else we've done since we've been here, I think a lot of people on the team were nervous about that event. It was by far the most people we've seen in one place - at least several thousand, probably more - and it was the type of emotional event where we suspected everyone might have been a little touchy. Fortunately, everything stayed quiet and peaceful.

Ramadan started Thursday, which wasn't such a big event, but I suspect it will affect the pace of work for the next month. I expect things to slow down, since it seems likely that a construction crew fasting for the entire workday (to include not drinking water) will cause a decline in productivity. To coincide with the start of Ramadan, our network at the office crashed. It seemed like a lot of the local communities shut down waiting for Ramadan to start, and since we couldn't get online at the office, Thursday was kind of an early start to the weekend, which was nice in a way. Things should be mostly back to normal tomorrow.

Not much else is new. The Air Force gave me four brand new sets of uniforms last week, and although that probably doesn't sound so exciting, it's exactly the type of political debacle that serves as fantastic e-mail fodder. Hopefully in a few days I'll have something posted about it. The short version is that a few years ago the Army did something right for a change and produced a functional and comfortable uniform that I've been happy to wear for the past six months, while the Air Force spent four years developing a supposedly comparable new uniform that turns out to be nothing more than a winter-weight version of our old uniform, with five more pockets, only one of which is useful in any meaningful way. It's a semi-pixelated, tiger-striped business suit masquerading as a "combat" uniform. These people never cease to amaze me.

Like I said, I'll post more about it in a day or two, with some pictures included.

Common Questions, Round 2: Where I Live

This first picture is a view of the camp from the small mountain behind it, and hopefully it will help answer another common question, which is generally some variant of what it's like where I live. In this picture you actually can't quite see the building I live in, but it should give you a decent overview of what the camp looks like and about how big it is. It's the cluster of buildings in the lower left corner of the picture.



In a previous e-mail I think I described the living conditions in the Green House, but since then - shortly after we arrived, really - we moved out of the two separate safe houses and consolidated the whole team into one camp. The camp we're living in now is officially known to the Army as FOB Lion (Forward Operating Base), although if "FOB" can considered a grandiose description of anything, it certainly overinflates the drama of the camp I live in. Most FOBs around Iraq and Afghanistan are fortified mini-bases, usually with perimeter security, defenses, and most importantly, KBR. We have transient KBR workers, so I'm not sure we officially qualify as a FOB. Regardless, we call it FOB Lion, or sometimes just Entes.

This picture looks along the front of the camp, at the major buildings. What you're looking at is the office building, the dining facility, and some of the guards' rooms with the wooden sunshade.



FOB Lion was formerly know as the Entes compound, since it was built and occupied by Entes, the Turkish construction company that built the main road. After much extortion and somewhat-forced extra work before being allowed by the governor to leave the valley, Entes left as quickly as possible, probably never to return. That's when we took over and moved in. The place needed some work, since 200 Turkish construction workers don't maintain a camp to the same standards we would have liked. One of those standards is a functional septic system; one of my first camp duties - and fondest memories, might I add - was supervising the cleaning of the septic tanks. In most places you can use a pumper truck and it remains a not-entirely-horrible task. We ended up using an excavator and a dump truck. I have a picture, but it's probably for the best that I don't attach it to this post.

Anyway, we cleaned up the camp and moved in over the course of about two months. I'll admit that initially I was vehemently opposed to the idea of moving here. I saw no benefit in moving from a comfortable and established (although crowded) house to a stray-dog infested camp. As soon as I cleaned up and painted my room, I was a convert. Having my own room, a bathroom shared with one other person, and enough space to generally be able to get away from the unsolicited political opinions that spew forth from a select group of peoples' mouths each time the news comes on during dinner was enough to sell me on this place. Some of us are still a little nostalgic for the Green House, but I think that's mostly because it was such a unique living arrangement for a deployment.

As far as liesure activities, there's the internet, a big screen TV in the dining facility with an Armed Forces Network satellite connection, and a dirt trail around the perimeter of the camp. The trail is 630 meters long, and the novelty wore off after about the third lap. There's also a mountain behind the camp with a de-mined trail - stay between the white rocks! - to the top. It's about a 25 minute climb, and it makes for a nice workout. As far as mines go, the risk is probably low. The mountains around here, and particularly around the camp, have been grazed by nomadic herders since the Russians left, except while the Taliban was in power. That's not to say there might not still be mines around, but odds are a few unlucky goats and sheep have found most of them.

I'm not sure what else to add, since the pictures should kind of speak for themselves. If you remember the initial pictures I sent from the Green House, you'll notice that one drawback to the FOB is that the view isn't nearly as good, but if the price is not having to get up at four thirty in the morning to use the bathroom before work, I'm okay with it.

Here's about half of my bedroom. It's plenty comfortable for one person; all you really miss behind the camera is a closet and the door. The rusty pieces of metal on the top shelf are leftovers from the Russians, most of which were found on top of the mountain where the first picture was taken. There are fighting positions all over the mountaintops; you can always find spent shell casings, in some places there are larger caliber 30 mm shells (possibly anti-aircraft, I'm not sure), and depending on how hard you look you can usually find smaller things like grenade handles and buttons from Soviet uniforms.

Lucky Day

Generally speaking, being woken up in the morning by people try to arrange a medevac is a bad sign. We had a large group of distinguished visitors come late this morning, and early in the morning as people prepped vehicles one girl on the team was accidentally run over. It was kind of a bizarre accident, the sort of thing that you would expect to see on a TV show or in a movie. She was in the back of the truck, and when it started to roll because it didn't have the parking brake set, she jumped out, presumably to try to stop it, and then got trapped under it as it rolled backwards over her. It's the sort of snap decision she probably didn't even have the chance to think about.

Our medics assessed her at the camp, then a medevac helicopter picked her up and flew her to Bagram. The good news - the amazing news, really - is that apparently she is fine. She's already back in her room resting for a few days, and for now it looks like she won't have anything more than some huge bruises and a really strange story to tell.

Even inside of a day, now that everyone knows that she's okay and will be coming back, the attitude has lightened around here. It's kind of stuck with me, though, because it's a reminder of all the simple, stupid, and completely unnecessary ways that things can change before you even realize what's happening. Helicopters left their mark on me after loading and unloading medevacs at the hospital at Balad. Obviously it was a vastly different situation this morning, but watching another helicopter with a little red cross painted on the side and someone I knew inside take off and fly away wasn't something I needed to start my day with.

Point is, be careful. Think. Don't do anything stupid (yes Mom, I listened). Appreciate the people around you. Things change quickly, and I don't think I'm alone when I say that the last thing I would want as I'm waiting for the second tire to roll over me is to regret something I did or didn't say the night before.

News Stories

Here are a few of the news stories that have been done since the team got here. They've all been produced by Air Force media sources, so there's a definite institutional bias involved, but there are some good pictures attached to the article and a few short video segments.

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123064705

http://www.dvidshub.net/?script=video/video_show.php&id=27281

http://www.dvidshub.net/?script=video/video_show.php&id=24767

Paryan

These pictures are all from our trip to Paryan two weeks ago. It's the most remote district in the province, about eighty kilometers northwest through the valley, and it's a long, bumpy, four-and-a-half-hour ride in a Land Cruiser. This first picture is what I think is one of the most dramatic areas I've seen around here, where the road climbs up the mountain from the river and the valley narrows out and gets extremely steep. They're hard to see, but if you look closely enough at the small plain on the right side of the picture there's a Russian artillery piece laying down and the front end of a truck poking out from behind the hill. The truck has a rack of rocket launchers in the back, although they're not visible in the picture. The road home climbs up the mountain behind the plain with the Russian equipment.



Looking down from nearly the highest stretch of road. I'm not sure exactly how far it is to the river, but I think it's a couple thousand feet.



Donkey traffic jam way the hell up on the mountain. We let them take the outside of the road and passed them against the mountain, since I trust a donkey's footing up there more than a several thousand pound Land Cruiser perched on the edge of a questionable road. We also passed a group of camels, which was somewhat more nerve-racking, since camels are surprisingly huge, and the nomads around here can pack a lot of stuff on top of them - their children included - which makes for a lumbering, unweildy, and kind of unpredictable obstacle. I'll dig up and post a picture of a camel all loaded up; they have to be the goofiest looking animals I've ever seen, but they're kind of stately in a bizarre sort of way. Moving on...



One of our sixteen-room school houses. They're simple, but they're very nice buildings when they're done. The tent in the top right corner of the picture is one of several the locals are using for a classroom until the new building is done.



In a move described by Joanna as a "stupid American thing to do" - I'm not going to lie, she's a little bit right - we paid a guy a dollar to ride his horse around the field. It only had one eye, which I think contributed to it's desire to only turn one direction, but the biggest problem was just getting it to move at all. It was kind of fun, and I'm pretty sure the guy who owned it got a kick out of watching us ride around.

Answers to Common Questions

I may have described some of the same things in previous e-mails, but I wanted to try to answer some fairly common questions that people occasionally ask, and that I don't think I've ever explained very well.

For the first question, I'll start with the women. In the valley, almost all the women wear burkas when they're out on in public. I don't know how common that is across the entire country - I've heard that Kabul is more progressive and that a lot of women there walk around dressed conservatively (but not in burkas) and that some even drive. That certainly isn't the case here. It's hard to judge age, but I think pretty much every girl beyond the age of about fourteen wears the burka. Every now and then you'll see an old lady without one, but it's fairly uncommon, and they're all elderly enough that they can get away with it.

For the most part, if a group of women is walking down the side of the road and nobody is around, they'll pull the front of the burka back over their head and wear it almost like a cape, so that they can see. If pedestrians or a car are coming, they pull the burka back down and cover up. I can only think of one occasion when I saw someone who apparently just didn't care and stood openly watching us as we drove by. She looked relatively young, and since she was waiting at a bus stop, I got the impression that she wasn't from around here and that she was more curious to see us than she was interested in covering up.

There are a lot of cultural differences that I can accept without a problem, but the treatment of women around here is the one that I think I have the hardest time with. When the women on our team have had the chance to meet with the local women, the reaction from the women about the burka is typically that it's not really an important issue, and that they have bigger things to worry about, particularly health care. I understand that, but as an outsider, the burka is a ubiquitous presence that seems oppressive and degrading. If you can't even go out in public openly without being persecuted for not covering up, something seems seriously wrong.

To go right along with that, the male-dominated nature of this place is apparent every day. Obviously you never see women, and even in people's homes the women are always separated. In five months here I have never spent any time in the company of a local Afghan woman. If they have a role larger than raising children (lots of children), I'm not sure what it is.

One of the most troubling sights I've seen happened a few weeks ago. We had a general who came to visit, so we drove him off the end of the paved road to try to show him why we need funding for new road projects around here. At our turn-around point I ended up standing by the vehicles while the general walked around the village. There was a group of girls standing on the other side of the road, all of whom were probably six or seven years old. They were just standing there quietly watching us - watching the Americans being a common spectator sport around here - when a boy about the same age walked over by himself and started harassing them. He said something that I didn't need an interpreter to understand as "go away", then he hit one of the girls twice. It wasn't a gentle tap. He hit her twice on the back, hard enough to make the hollow thumping sound you hear sometimes when somebody gets hit in the torso. Then he kicked her shoe down the road, which I guess was enough to convince them to leave.

You see kids fight around here occasionally. There are thousands of kids in each village; you're bound to see a scuffle now and then. This was different, and I think the reason why was that the girls just walked away. They didn't cry (including the girl who got hit) and they didn't protest, they just turned around and left. These girls were six years old, and they had already come to terms with the way they were being treated. And the boy seemed to think nothing of it. It's hard to be optimistic that older girls and women are any better off; kids learn about what's acceptable and how to act by watching what goes on around them.

That probably sounds harsh. I'm not accusing Afghan men of being wife-beating mysoginists. It's a different culture, and I'm sure that women are respected in ways that I just don't have way of seeing. I guess it's only an observation, one that I've had a harder time figuring out.

Okay, this has been a lot more serious than I expected, and it's probably kind of a downer. Hopefully the picture will help. We were on our way back from a five hour trip up north and the guy in the car in front of us was handing out stuffed animals and backpacks to pretty much every kid we passed. These girls were adorable, and it was one of the first times I've seen where no other kids were around, since usually if we give things out to girls a group of boys runs up as soon as they realize what's going on. A teddy bear may be pretty inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but its makes ten hours of driving worthwhile to see a group of kids so happy.

Shutol Flood Assessment

Every few weeks I have the opportunity to go on some sort of hike, either to tag along with our Civil Affairs team as they assess villages or to assist with humanitarian supply drops at schools or clinics. They vary in length and difficulty; some are relatively short and relatively flat, and some, like the one the attached pictures came from, are long and steep.

This particular hike into Shutol was the best that I've been on since I got here, and quite possibly ever in my life. It was the type of experience where I had the profound feeling of being in the middle of something that I would probably never get to do again. I get that feeling on a semi-regular basis around here, but it was particularly strong on this hike.

The intention of the hike was to do a flood damage assessment, since our previous hike into the same area had concluded with the biggest flood anybody had ever seen. We went in along the floor of the valley, traveling through several villages before arriving in Roydara, which is tucked back into a side valley that feels quite remote, even though as the pictures will show, it's only one ridgeline over from one of the most populated areas in the entire Panjshir Valley.

Once we got to Roydara, we stopped and had lunch with the locals, who suggested that we hike out along the ridgeline, since it would be "about an hour" faster than going out the same way we came in. This turned out to be standard Afghan time-telling. An accurate sense of time - accurate for a watch-carrying American - is not something you're likely to find around here. On most of our hikes, when the fat, slow, and lazy American asks how much farther it is, the lean, quick, 70-year-old Afghan answer is generally "ten or fifteen minutes", which usually works out to about an hour. The estimate that the hike out would save an hour wasn't entirely wrong, since the trip out might have been slightly faster, but what he neglected to tell us was that we would have to climb 2400 vertical feet in just under a mile and basically go straight up the mountain outside of his house.

That's when the hike got really interesting, because we just kept going up, and up, and up, and then all the sudden we got to this view, and all the pain went away:



Then a little farther down the ridge we got here.



It's not quite as edge-of-the-world as it might appear, but it was still an incredible view. The haze obscures the plains in the distance a little bit, but what you're looking at is the outside of the valley, towards Parwan and Kapisa, two neighboring provinces. Here's another one, only with us facing the camera this time. From left to right, it's the senior NCO for our civil affairs team, my boss (the chief engineer), me, and our Physician's Assistant, who goes by Doc.



This next one is looking back down into the valley that we hiked into. The village is called Sange Lakhshan, and it has obviously experienced some flooding in the past, because everything is built up high enough to have prevented any homes from being washed away during the most recent flood. They lost a significant amount of farmland, but that goes for nearly the entire valley.



This one looks north through the main valley, similar to the first picture, only with a broader perspective.



Finally, I'll wrap this up with what I suspect was an Afghan message to the Russians. This tank is in the single most unlikely location I can possibly imagine, although I don't have a good picture of it from a distance. If you can't tell from this one, it's perched on top of one of the highest peaks in the area. I have no idea how they got it there, but it couldn't have been uplifting to retreat from a region as the enemy was dragging (or driving) your heaviest piece of equipment onto the tallest mountain in the area. It's not the greatest picture of me, but it should give you some idea of the location.

Keeping up with the Turachiondos

Although I've been sending so-called "manifestos" on a semi-regular basis, I was inspired yesterday by my brother's fledgling blog, and I decided that I might as well start my own. Hopefully it will turn out to be an easier way to keep everyone informed, and although I'm a little wary of the power of the internet to distribute to the world every passing thought I may not have the good judgment to keep to myself, I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

More than anything, I find it hard to believe that I've been here for five months already. It's actually seven months that I've been gone, if you count my time at Fort Bragg, although I generally do my best not to think of that place. We're still in the thick of the summer construction season, so work has been quite busy, and since the fiscal year ends in a month we're also under the gun to produce paperwork for a bunch of new projects so that some of them might get funded if there's extra money at the end of September.

Despite being busy right now, it's likely that within about two weeks the pace of work is going to change substantially. Ramadan starts in mid-September, and it sounds like people generally work from around eight AM to one or two PM during Ramadan. On construction sites I don't imagine that even those limited work hours are going to be as productive as usual, since I can't imagine being too motivated to overtax myself if I couldn't eat or even drink water during the day. Point being, I think we're in for a change of pace in September and October, which is probably a good thing. Around the time Ramadan ends is when I suspect it will start getting cold, wet, and maybe snowy around here, so there are some definite changes on the horizon.

I think what I'm going to do with this - and I'm wide open for suggestions if anyone has any - is to try to gather my old e-mails and post them, in case anyone is getting nostalgic for some Iraq '06 cynicism. I'll probably use this as something of a journal, to keep track of what's going on here and keep everyone informed if anything interesting happens, or to answer any burning questions people might have. I still have several long e-mails about specific topics I'm working on, but as everyone knows by now, those are kind of slow in coming. They're not all manifestos - I'm trying to distance myself from the raving insanity implied by that term - perhaps screed would be more appropriate. Sometimes they're tirades, I can admit it. And occasionally even cynical rants. But manifesto? C'mon, that seems harsh. Whatever they are, people seem to enjoy them, so hopefully I'll have more coming soon.