Meetings not Missions

Well the last few days have been almost nothing but meetings and very few missions. We have had some lively discussions with our ANA since they felt themselves getting backed into a corner about taking leave and pass. The amount of corruption in this army and country as a whole is no secret. We have been cranking down on the officers which normally take an enormous amount of leave every year. They are only allowed 30 days of leave a year, and they typically use that up in a 3 month period.

Well 2007 started a new focus from us as ETTs on them. Holding them to the leave limits since the enlisted soldiers are rarely allowed to take leave while the officers are gone all the time is important for this army to succeed. Every time they have tried to skirt around us, come up with an excuse or slip out, we catch them. We force them to bring us proof and we make their administrative section code them awol and take pay if they are not on approved leave. This has all been in the last 31 days. They skated by in all the years past, but those days are over,,,,at least while we are here.

So the other day the ANA Chief of staff (top General in their Army) dropped in for a surprise visit. Of course these geniuses complained to him about how mean the ETTs are and how we make them hold formations and tell them when and when not to go on leave. Actually we donâ€™t tell them any of that. We do make them hold formations, because that is what an Army does. We are here to mentor them on how to be a good army so that is what a good army is supposed to do. They can take leave all they want, all we do is report it. Well since these Einsteins decided to raise the visibility of this issue, they now have many more besides us watching them. The ANA Chief of Staff is a true warrior. He has attended the US Army Ranger School, Special Forces Qualification Course, Airborne school, and spent 6 years being tortured in a Russian POW camp. He knows how an Army is supposed to be run, and was not the sympathetic ear they thought he was going to be. Instead he chewed so much officer butt you think it was made out of bubble gum. He jumped on them for the officers taking the TVs and not allowing the soldiers to have them. He jumped on them for the officers having the body armor, helmets, rain gear, winter jackets, winter boots, and making sure the soldiers got it first. Essentially he was an ETT dressed in ANA uniform. These are all the things we tell them all the time that they need to do, but they ignore us.

Another problem this unit has had is that most of the NCOs have not been paid properly since being in the Army and they are very upset. I have been working this with them through their channels for a while, but is has been stalled higher up and these guys have no emphasis on this matter. The officers get paid correctly, so that is all that matters to them. The NCOs are the backbone of any successful army, and we continue to stress that here. When a E8 1SG stands in the pay line and gets the same pay as one of his E5 team leaders, he gets pretty upset. Well this problem has been going on for about 2 years and these guys have had enough. So we have got all the leadership together and made sure officers and all know this is our teamâ€™s #1 priority so we can pay these NCOs what they deserve and they stay around. I cannot believe we have not lost more of them by now, but they have stuck it out hoping it gets fixed. Well that wick is getting short and so is their patience. As the mentor for the CSM of the unit, I cannot watch as they are unable to pay these NCOs properly anymore. I have MAJ D totally behind this as he knows it is not fair for them either. The NCOs in the Kandak appreciate us and know we are doing this for them and they will never forget it. They will do anything for us that we want or need if we can make this happen for them. That loyalty from them is what I need as I fight to help them elevate their status as leaders and NCOs in this army, which typically only recognizes officers as leaders. I gave the ANA channels their chance, but they have been unable to fix his problem. So now it is my problem.

I donâ€™t want my son coming here, or me coming back, or anyone else because this Army cannot progress forward. The only way to try and keep that from happening and truly work ourselves out of job is to follow the advice of Joan Crawford. â€œLove mixed with the right amount of discipline is the perfect recipeâ€. If you canâ€™t take the advice of Mommy Dearest on how to show tough love, then who can you take advice from.

Sandbox book to benefit my favorite charity

The Doonesbury guys at the Sandbox are doing it again. The Sandbox is a website that the publishers of the Doonesbury cartoon strip setup a while back for deployed soldiers who want a central place to share blogs. People that are deployed can send the webmasters their blog entries and then the editors of that site pick ones they think are good entries and they post them on the site. It is actually a very popular site that attracts a lot of people. The site started on October 8th, 2006, and since then they have had over 130 posts from over 50 contributors, to include yours truly.

I was informed by my contact from the site that they are putting together a book to be published of what they consider some of the best stories and pictures. The exact text from the message is below.

â€œAndrews McMeel Universal — the company which syndicates and
publishes Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury — is going to publish a
collection of The Sandbox this fall. It will be a trade paperback
original. All of the advance and all subsequent royalties (in
perpetuity) will go to Fisher House. This is the same deal Garry set
up with Fisher House for THE LONG ROAD HOME and THE WAR WITHIN, the
two books chronicling B.D.’s recovery. Those advances and royalties
also go to Fisher Houseâ€

Anyone that reads this blog knows that the Fischer House is something close to my heart. I am impressed and glad they are even doing a book at all, much less that all the royalties are going to go towards the Fischer House.

I was also told that every person who has something published on the Sandbox website at gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/ will receive one free copy of the book. Anyone that has a blog entry published in the paperback book will receive 3 free copies of the book.

Of course I have no idea what the name of the book will be or many other details since it is still in the concept stage, but as I do and am allowed to publicize it I will be sure and mention it here.

Coming and Going

Well things here have been lively for lots of reasons. People are high-strung, nerves are getting short and people are starting to get irritable with each other. A rotation of ETTs are about to leave and they are getting excited about that. A group of us (to include me) are getting more and more happy about this happening, because we ara the next rotation to go. Of course, like I said nothing is for sure until it happens, but I am down to double-digits until I should be leaving this country. You canâ€™t help but be excited about that, I donâ€™t care who you are. Yes, we could also get extended, but the chance of that is very slight. At least it is right now. As Pelosi, Clinton are taking tours here and NATO issues major warnings about this spring, who knows. But for now, who cares.

There has been some movement on the team today also. We have been pretty short on ETTs due to R&R Leave, Emergency Leave, and the movement of people. Today my man, Face had to leave here to head to somewhere to get some minor surgery done. He will be gone for a couple of weeks and we will all miss him. It sucks that he wonâ€™t be going back to the States for this and will have to go through surgery by himself, but he will do fine. I just wish one of us could go with him and keep him company. He will be in our thoughts and prayers everyday until we hear from him and know he is ok. So we took him to get on a flight today, which took us down a person. However we also finally picked up Puss today. Puss had been home on leave, but because of the major troop movements here (to include the extension of the 10th MTN) he kept getting bumped from flights. He had to spend like 3 days in Kuwait, then 3 days in Qatar, and then over a week in Baghram. One thing about being on leave, when you leave home all you want to do is get back to your own room and FOB as soon as possible. It is very frustrating to get bounced all over and not be in your own bed. So after being gone a long time, we finally got to see Puss today and it was good to see him. We got some more movement happening soon with other guys but I will talk more about that later when it is the proper time.

It is starting to get warm here and I think Smoke may be right, winter is over. Today I wore my regular patrol cap instead of my polar-fleece winter watch cap for the first time in several months. The snow is steadily melting and I think break-up is here. The ground with no gravel on it is a mud-soup mess all over the FOB. Everyone on our team is participating in a pool for predicting the date our FOB will be attacked next. It is getting warmer and with warmth comes the enemy. The pool costs $10 for each date picked. If the attack happens the closest to your date picked but not past it then you win the pot. Some guys researched Muslim and Afghanistan holidays to come up with their dates. I went by the dates picked and the amount of moonlight that will be available to pick mine. It will happen, there is no question so if I can pick up a few bucks, why not.

I forgot to mention before, but when we came back from the ceremony for Smoke we brought a new terp back with us. Since we lost 3 back in Nov, we have been short and needed the replacements badly. So we brought Z (this is what I nicknamed him since his name started with Z and there was no way we could pronounce it) back with us and have been integrating him with us. I had him shadow some of the other terps for a while but now he is starting to terp on his own and doing well. Yesterday we got two new terps to bring us up to 100% on terps now. I gave one of the nickname Shot-put since his real name sounds close to that. The other one has a nickname that I canâ€™t say here and must change. It is not a nice name but it is also close in pronunciation to his real name. I have to come up with one soon or else he will be stuck with the temp one I gave him. Since we are back to 100% on terps, I went over tonight and re-assigned them to ETTs and positions that we slot them in. I moved a few around and kept some where they are because they are strong there. They love it when I come to visit and they always stop whatever they are doing to sit around and talk. We usually sit around in a circle with our legs cross and talk about all sorts of things. The states, my family, their families, things happening with the unit, etc. The US soldiers here have taught them many bad words and phrases so that usually gets its way into every conversation. They love joking around and busting on me and each other. I cannot believe some of the things they have learned and I sometimes wonder if we are teaching them anything good or just bad, sexual-based jokes. They are pretty much all good guys. There are some I like better than others, and I will miss them when I go home. But, I miss my family a lot more and my country too.

Until Next Timeâ€¦..

A popular blog entry

My posting the other day about the 63 things ( List of Gear for A-stan) that anyone deploying here should bring has generated a tremendous amount of traffic on my website. Before Sunday I averaged about 180 visitors a day. I think the most I had ever received in one day was close to 225. Well that is not the case anymore. Since that posting went live, the traffic on my site is mind-staggering. Sundays are usually the quietest on my website with the lowest number of visitors. On Sunday the 28th, I had over 4000 visitors on my site. Today (Monday) I have had over 16,000 visitors. Mondays are usually the busiest as I think most people check the blog at work and many do after being away from it over the weekend. 225 to 16,673 (which is where I am currently), with 99.%5 of them being first time visitors is crazy. Multiple sites have picked up on that list and posted links to it. Defensetech.org, digg.com, and many other sites are responsible for this huge increase in website traffic. As I look at my site monitoring tools, I see not all of the visitors are from the US. It seems that many countries which participate in the NATO effort here have people that are interested in this list of items. I am assuming that is because they have soldiers coming here and they also want to know what to bring.

Anyway, I would have never thought that such a simple entry (that I almost did not post) would be the most popular thing on here.

Letter from Ben Stein (Borrowed from Blackfive.net)

I picked up this information from one of my favorite blogs, Blackfive. I was not sure it was completely accurate, so I let it sit for a few days before borrowing this from them. As with the poem I posted recently, the story about SGT Hess and the mat company, and other items of good interest I wanted to share this will all of my readers so you could see another good example of a good American. I know there are thousands more out there that would say the same things in this letter, but I think he did a good job of putting into words what many people feel.

Open Letter to Our Armed Forces and Their Families From Ben Stein
Greetings From Rancho Mirage By Ben Stein
Tuesday, January 23rd

Dear Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, National Guard, Reservists, in Iraq, in the Middle East theater, in Afghanistan, in the area near Afghanistan, in any base anywhere in the world, and your families:

Let me tell you about why you guys own about 90 percent of the backbone in the whole world right now and should be happy with yourselves and proud of whom you are.

It was a dazzlingly hot day here in Rancho Mirage today. I did small errands like going to the bank to pay my mortgage, finding a new bed at a price I can afford, practicing driving with my new 5 wood, paying bills for about two hours. I spoke for a long time to a woman who is going through a nasty child custody fight. I got e-mails from a woman who was fired today from her job for not paying attention. I read about multi-billion-dollar mergers in Europe, Asia, and the Mideast I noticed how overweight I am, for the millionth time. In other words, I did a lot of nothing.

Like every other American who is not in the armed forces family, I basically just rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic in my trivial, self-important, meaningless way.

Above all, I talked to a friend of more than forty-three years who told me he thought his life had no meaning because all he did was count his money. And, friends in the armed forces, this is the story of all of America today. We are doing nothing but treading water while you guys carry on the life or death struggle against worldwide militant Islamic terrorism. Our lives are about nothing: paying bills, going to humdrum jobs, waiting until we can go to sleep and then do it all again. Our most vivid issues are trivia compared with what you do every day, every minute, every second.

Oprah Winfrey talks a lot about “meaning” in life. For her, “meaning” is dieting and then having her photo on the cover of her magazine every single month (surely a new world record for egomania ). This is not “meaning.”

– Meaning is doing for others.

– Meaning is risking your life for hers.

– Meaning is putting your bodies and families’ peace of mind on the line to defeat some of the most evil, sick killers the world has ever known.

– Meaning is leaving the comfort of home to fight to make sure that there still will be a home for your family and for your nation and for free men and women everywhere.

Look, soldiers and Marines and sailors and airmen and Coast Guardsmen, there are eight billion people in this world. The whole fate of this world turns on what you people, 1.4 million, more or less, do every day. The fate of mankind depends on what about 2/100 of one percent of the people in this world do every day and you are those people. And joining you is every policeman, fireman, and Emergency Medical Technician in the country, also holding back the tide of chaos.

Do you know how important you are? Do you know how indispensable you are? Do you know how humbly grateful any of us who has a head on his shoulders is to you? Do you know that if you never do another thing in your lives, you will always still be heroes? That we could live without Hollywood or Wall Street or the NFL, but we cannot live for a week without you?

We are on our knees to you and we bless and pray for you every moment. And Oprah Winfrey, if she were a size two, would not have one millionth of your importance, and all of the Wall Street billionaires will never mean what the least of you do, and if Barry Bonds hits hundreds of home runs it would not mean as much as you going on one patrol or driving one truck to the Baghdad airport.

You are everything to us, as we go through our little days, and you are in the prayers of the nation and of every decent man and woman on the planet. That’s who you are and what you mean. I hope you know that.

Love,

Ben Stein

Flattered and Honored

I am very, very flattered and honored to announce that I have been asked to be a panelist speaker at this yearâ€™s MilBlog conference. Of course this is pending I am back in the US and off this deployment in time. I was asked a while back if I would be willing to participate on this panel and I gladly accepted. The website about the 2007 MilBlog Conference is andisworld.typepad.com/milblog_conference/

I have been asked to be part of the panel called â€œFrom The Frontâ€, which will be moderated by Matt from the hugely popular MilBlog called Blackfive. It looks like the blogger SGT Hook and Bill Roggio will also be on this panel. As a newcomer to the milblogging community, it is quite an honor to share the stage with such widely popular and good bloggers as these.

I really hope that I can be home for this, as I am sure this would be quite an exciting event to take part in.

Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes it eats you

Last week I conducted several training classes on mission preparation and pre-mission checks with all of the ANA leadership in the unit we mentor. I talked about this some in earlier blog entries, as one of the classes was interrupted by the suicide bomber. Anyway, being an ETT means training the ANA, mentoring them and then seeing them execute tasks based on your guidance and teachings.

The other day we ran a mission to a local village and I got to witness the fruit of my labor produce for one of the first times here. I actually watched a leader line his soldiers up, inspect them, brief them, and conduct most of the steps we taught just days earlier. For those few minutes I felt like I was actually making a difference here. I felt like they finally retained something to be used in real-life. It was a good feeling as that was the reason I came here and what I expected to be doing the whole time. I wonâ€™t stay too excited for too long as they have to sleep sometime, and there is no telling if they will remember all of that after a few days.

The days are counting down for us, but with the recent announcements of the 10th MTN being extended here, all of us know nothing is for sure until it happens. I am not going to get too happy about being a double-digit midget as some of the 10th MTN soldiers were in the air when the order came down. They got to spend a few hours with their families and then had to load back up and come back. We are seeing many of the guys we used work with again, having just said goodbye to them a few days ago. As you can imagine most are not happy, while others are just like â€œwhatever, what are you going to do?â€. So they all know the chance is there to stay longer and we do too. One of my best friends (Tim) is in the 1/34th BCT (red bulls) from the MN NG and they were just extended 120 days in Iraq. National Guard soldiers are active duty when here so we can always be extended too. Bad thing is that Tim and I were planning on our families linking up in AK this summer and doing some fishing together. He and I were stationed there together and he and I spent a lot of time in the rivers catching fish and camping. We were hoping to do it again, but that reunion trip may have to wait a while.