Lady Gaga

I thought I'd try and post a little video that I shot on my buddies camera. The Polish have a piece of artillery they call Lady Gaga. It's like a 152mm shell they get from the Russians or something. Whatever it is, it makes a huge boom. Apparently the Polish really like Lady Gaga. If you don't know who she is, she's a pop star who makes a lot of songs.

When you watch the video, look to the left area of the screen after they shoot it.

Made it

We finally made it to FOB Warrior after a marathon long convoy. I wasn't even sure we were going to convoy, but we ended up needing some equipment. We stopped at a Polish FOB called Ghazni, which was pretty much a dump. We saw a lot of the countryside and some different cities. Afghanistan looks pretty much like a poor New Mexico. Other things I saw:

At Ghazni a Polish soldier doing gate guard in nothing but his underwear and flipflops.
Jingle buses with Corollas on top of them. The car wasn't that much smaller than the bus!
The only paved road/highway in Afghanistan.
A lot of camels.
A lot of sheep.
I got to ride on the back of an Afghan Police pickup for a little ways.
A Polish Prince.
A 400 year old British fort that I'm now living about 50 ft from.

Anyway, Warrior is still pretty primitive but it's not too bad. We have tents with A/C and my cell phone internet works. There's Polish and ANA here as well. That's about it for now, laters.

TCN's

For anyone that doesn't know, many of the contract companies in Afghanistan (like KBR), hire a ton of TCN's (third country nationals), to do everything from food prep to FOB construction. In Afghanistan it seems unique to me because they actually hire mostly local labor from surrounding towns, which they didn't really do in Iraq. So we have all this Afghans running around the FOB doing stuff like making my food. Some of these guys look at the military like we're the terrorists.

Why does KBR hire locally? And I thought there was a recession going on, so why not up the wages a little bit and import Americans? I'd say even Mexicans too, because we'd have good meals 24/7. With all the unemployed in the U.S., they hire these crazy looking guys with beard nets. Not too mention the Eastern European dudes, who run the computer labs and phones. You better have your ID card with you, or they WILL CRUSH YOU!!

Anyway, not much has changed, hopefully we'll be leaving soon from Sharana.

Australia

Well I'm still waiting to leave, and it looks like we might be here in Sharana for a little longer. So I guess I'll talk about what I'm going to do for leave...

Everytime you're deployed, you get 15 days of leave. The military will actually fly you anywhere in the world on their dime. And they don't count travel time toward your leave.

So I think I'm going to head to Australia and New Zealand. I'll probably go to Sydney first, and then see a few more cities in Australia. Flights to New Zealand aren't too expensive, so I'll head down to Auckland and see what Kiwiland is like. I don't know how hard it is to get around in New Zealand, but I'd like to visit both the Northern Island and the Southern Island. We'll see what happens.

Phone Problems

I'm still waiting to get to the next FOB. We've been at the transient tents for two nights now, and the matresses (if you can call them that) are basically just cloth and springs. I guess it could be worse, we could be sleeping on cots.

I found out that my bank had put a block on my credit card. I think it was because I bought that cell phone a few weeks back. On the transacation it said something like "Yar Mohammad, Kabul Phone Inc." I guess I would be a little suspicious too if a charge from Mr. Yar popped up on my credit card statement too. It's all taken care of now, so I can continue my purchases with Mr. Yar.

It's been getting to about 1oo degrees here. I think my home FOB isn't as hot because it's at about 7500 ft. Not too bad though.

Moving Again

Well, some of us are going to be help setting up a Polish base, so I'm moving from lovely OE. I'm actually in transition now at another FOB, but I'll probably be at my next FOB in a few days to a week. Gotta love Afghanistan transportation. Anyway, it's been interesting so far.

So far I've been to three different FOBs in Afghanistan, and they are all pretty shoddy. I'm comparing them to Iraq though, so maybe that's not fair. We'll see what is in store for us next, but I'm not getting my hopes up. We should be returning to our home FOB in a couple months or so; maybe thats a good thing or not. It's shaping up to be a quick deployment with all moving around, so that's good. I'll upload some more pictures as soon as I get settled in again.

Guardians of Freedom

I wanted to show a picture of some of the true defenders of freedom. These guys are really friendly toward anyone who isn't a hadji, AKA Afghan. It's kinda weird, but they bark anytime a hadji is nearby. Maybe they just smell the body odor that flows from all of the Afghan workers, and don't like it. They aren't the only ones, that's for sure.

I think the entire country of Afghanistan could use some of this.

Associates in Afghanistan

I saw this guy the other day with his truck. These are the Border Patrol Agents in Afghanistan... sort of. They're more closer to the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) than police. They help patrol the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. Apparently these guys are like goats; they will run up mountains to chase after the Taliban.

They obviously need to get some lessons on the correct way to spell "Boarder."

Here's a picture of the famous Afghan jingle truck. The military actually uses these to move goods across the country of Afghanistan and up through Pakistan as well. I guess they're called jingle trucks cause they have so many little decorations on them that they jingle when they move. I asked one of the guys why they put all that stuff on but he didn't have an answer. He also didn't speak english so that didn't help either...

Internet

Well, I finally got internet back on my phone. It's actually pretty fast and now I can upload some pictures.

This picture is from Baghram. That fence is the only thing seperating the base from the barbarians. What's weird is that people actually live in that mud hut thing. I thought they were ruins or something.

Back On

Well, I'm sort of settling into my new area. I've been trying to get into a routine; hopefully my schedule will stay somewhat the same so I will be able to.

I recently bought a cellphone that will soon be able to be used as an internet modem as well. It's still amazing to me that I get full bars on my phone here in Afghanistan, when the tower is on. In Deming, New Mexico, I not only had to switch cell phone providers, the current one I'm with has a ton of dead zones in the area. I'm living in one of the most corrupt, poorest countries in the world, and get better cell phone service than in the United States. Something is definitely wrong...

No spanish word of the day, I'm still trying to get Rosetta Stone to work.

Waiting

So training is over and we're just waiting on getting out of here. It seems that anything to do with logistics in Afghanistan is always slow. It's not like Iraq where they can convoy stuff in all the time. Here, they have to schedule a chopper to transport any goods or people for the most part. Oh well, still getting paid to sit here.

Anyway, I think I've decided that I'm going to Australia and New Zealand. I'm hoping to go in winter here so it's summer there. So we'll see what happens.

Bored

Still doing training, it's the standard death-by-powerpoint Army training. Should be done pretty soon though. I met a KBR dude from Bellingham, Washington... small world. The food here isn't that good anymore. They had ice cream the other day but I think that was because some high ranking officers were in the area. It seems like whoever runs the base tries to make things better when the brass shows up, it's like that army wide though. They see a general coming, suddenly people start getting promoted and get their pay problems solved. Interesting how things work...

Here's the spanish word of the day, it's deber. It's a verb that means should or ought to. ¿Que carro debo comprar?

Hey Casey, you should keep putting a Japanese word in.