A Holiday Greeting

There are occasionally little reminders that this is not a normal place.  The cafeteria, more commonly known as the DFAC under the ancient law from Deuteronomy adopted by the military that says that absolutely everything must be referred to by an acronym, preferably one making no sense, is the "dining facility" ("D-FAC").  They put on a special meal for Christmas Day and will do so again for New Year's Day.  It will almost certainly be a roast turkey, which is pretty good.  The whole spread is quite nice, though it's offset by the fact that breakfast is shifted to 0600 - 0800, meaning you have to get up quite early on your nominal day off or wait until 1400 to eat.  Luckily for us, this week's day off, Friday, has a visitor from Washington, so it's a work day.  Tomorrow, New Year's has another visitor, so it's a work day, too.  Anyway, the DFAC was decorated with all sorts of Christmas decor, which was somewhat out of place.  What did stick out like a sore thumb were the candy buildings.  They were very impressive - nothing along the scale of the monumental Candy Cathedral I made for Christmas 1991, which weighed on the order of 40 pounds - but they happened to be candy churches - with crosses.  You don't see a whole lot of crosses in Afghanistan, as a rule.
There were also menus printed on card stock, stolen from another regional command, with a photo of the White House Christmas tree on the cover and a greeting from one of the military commanders.  Most of it was your normal best wishes stuff.  The ending was not one you frequently hear: "Happy Holidays, and Air Assault!"

Baraki Barak

 Part of the reason I didn't take any photos from the helicopter was that visibility was terrible; it was just an abysmally gloomy day even by Afghan winter standards.  Part of the reason was that it was too damn cold, as this shot from the district center outpost in Baraki Barak shows.  And partly it was because the flight back was in pitch black darkness.  We came out of the last meeting, at a tiny outpost in Wardak, well after sundown.  Such outposts aren't lit up at night - that would make them easy targets.  So they are absolutely dark.  You can't see your hand in front of your face - literally.  Someone with a tiny light on his helmet appeared out of the darkness and led us to the helicopters.  We could hear them - they couldn't have been more than twenty yards away - but you couldn't see anything.  One person in our party started wandering toward the choppers and a soldier hurriedly grabbed his arm and led him back, presumably because he was headed right for the back rotor, which would have hurt.  Anyway, after we loaded up, the Blackhawks were flying completely dark.  Plus, with the earplugs, the roaring of the rotors and the rush of air, you couldn't hear anything.  So with no sight or sound (well, white noise), all you had was the sensation of movement as the chopper took off and headed back to Kabul.  It wasn't until you saw the lights of Kabul approaching, and then later the flares to distract enemy fire, that your eyes started helping you out again.  And then landing in the same damn dusty field.   The second photo is also from the BB outpost; it's an Afghan water delivery truck, gaily painted.  The water that had leaked from it was an ice slick when we walked by.  From Wardak I did not take a photo, though I was sorely tempted to do so by the dirtiest sign I have ever seen in an office setting anywhere.  I thought it might have looked inappropriate to take a photo.  I know it would be inappropriate to post it on this blog.  They also had up on the wall a board where they tracked the usual stuff - vehicle maintenance status, weapons, supplies, etc - and also "Animal Kills."  The score when I was there was Cats 9, Dogs 3, Mice 1, Cobras 0.

Travel Day

 Today I spend all day on Blackhawks, leaving from the compound a few minutes' walk from the Embassy, where the two choppers land in a barren field and blow dust on everybody.  Then we go to Parwan, where we fly over an almost completely barren terrain, pockmarked by the occasional mortar crater.  We fly over a concentrated stretch of thick, tall smokestacks from kilns, used, I'm guessing, to make bricks.  We're in Parwan for quite a while, but I have no photos from there for various reasons.  After that, we fly down to Logar Province to two places there, and then a stop in Wardak, and then back to Kabul.  It's a cold day.  We weren't flying very high, so I had a good view.  The streams and rivulets that run down from the mountains are either completely empty or lined by white ice.  The larger riverbeds themselves are completely dry and are just beds of rubble.  All the irrigation channels - and there are irrigation channels everywhere in Afghanistan - are frozen over.  The snows haven't come this year; the entire country is suffering from a drought, and so the mountains don't have much white.  All the rivers, all the streams, all the irrigation channels are fed by snowmelt.  If the snows don't come in the next six or eight weeks, there will be no rivers and no water in the irrigation channels, and the country will have a disastrous agricultural year.

Traveling

I hope to have a few photos to upload on Friday.  Tomorrow I am due to go to Bagram, Kunar, Logar, Wardak and, time and weather permitting, maybe Ghazni too.  If not tomorrow, then I have another trip to Ghazni due next week.  I anticipate another monotone, blood-curdling safety briefing for the helicopter.

No Country for Old Cats

The kittens that had been playful, tiny, and adorable, clambering around the chairs outside and begging for scraps of food, are now bloated, fat, dirty and foul-smelling.  They spend their days on top of, and sometimes falling into, the food trash containers, scavenging for a few thousand more calories.  One of the adult cats has suffered a serious injury to one paw and limps along with fur stained by blood and dust.  And poor Mr. Winkie has been made the poster child for a public service announcement on the internal TV station warning that the cats may have rabies and are carriers of disease.  I personally don't think Mr. Winkie is rabid; he is just perpetually foul-tempered, like many of the humans on the compound.  But there is his glaring one-eyed face, beneath the enormous black letters warning, "Cats Are Dangerous!"  At least he has his kids to take care of him.

Christmas Morning

Well, long ago I thought it was disconcerting and not really in the spirit of things to spend Christmas in Chile, where it was summer and the guy in the fur suit looked a bit out of place.  And Venezuela was tropical year round, though to give them credit the Venezuelans tend to put up extraordinary amounts of Christmas decorations and shoot off fireworks all night long.  But I think Kabul may top them in terms of not being your prototypical Christmas-y place.  For starters, there aren't really any days off, so what on paper seems to be a two and a half day weekend for us isn't.  Secondly, there just isn't much to do here that fits within the Christmas spirit, though the mosque prayer call yesterday at sundown was much more audible than usual.  Oh yeah, and it's a Muslim country, and that might have something to do with it.

We walked over to ISAF headquarters to get a cafe au lait at a coffee shop we call French, though it's actually run by Nepalese, but does tend to have French soldiers there.  That was pretty much the highlight of Christmas Eve for us.  We didn't bring any Christmas movies to watch, but even if we wanted to watch them on TV, unfortunately the AFN TV schedule is geared to European time zones, so everything starts too late for us to bother watching.  The compound is pretty deserted except for when the security forces are carrying out a shift change and you see a half-dozen guys with automatic rifles scurrying around.  But we did hang up our Christmas lights (one string of blue flower-shaped lights was all we had) in our apartment, and we put on Handel's Messiah in the background.  And that's that for Christmas for us.  Maybe next year. 

Dubai Airport Redux

It wasn't nearly as bad coming back as going.  From Kabul to Seattle, counting from taking the car to the airport to getting to our hotel, was 44 hours.  From Atlanta back to Kabul, even with the long layover in Dubai, it was maybe 30 hours or so.  We were allowed to babysit our last day in Atlanta, packing furiously during the times when the baby was napping, occasionally dashing frantically back and forth between the crib and our room.  That may explain why I have dirty diapers in my suitcase.  When we got here the shust was extraordinarily bad; you felt it with each breath, and it was only accentuated by the cold, dry weather.  The sky was completely obscured even during mid-day. 

We have begun to have problems with Dubai airport.  Even for a short layover, you have to go through immigration, and the last three times, even though we have valid visas, we have been sent to secondary screening and have to wait a half hour until someone finally stamps our passports.  They also stopped us at customs, though they waved us on when they saw the diplomatic passport.  It was surprising to see the degree of bustle at 3 a.m. within the airport itself.  All the shops were open, all the restaurants and juice places and coffee shops.  And the prayer room is co-located with the same doorway as the bathroom.

We were trying to transfer terminals to get to our flight, so we followed the erratic signage to "Terminal E" for transfers.  Sure, you can take your own bag to the other terminal - that's what we did the last time - but we decided to see if it was better to pay the baggage handling service to do it for you.  Once we finally found the right counter - the directions we were given varied considerably depending on whom we asked - we were told the cost was $82.  That sounded a little steep, but I thought, it's late, I'm tired, it's a travel expense - why not.  Then the clerk told us, no credit cards, only cash.  Well, I still had it, just barely.  And then she said, Per person.  So we said, under our breaths, Screw it, carried our suitcases out the first airport, took a $20 cab ride to the second one, and checked our bags ourselves.  Then we spent the next five dead of the night hours drinking coffee and reading.

Notes from the Charikar Trip

The photos from the previous post don't illustrate the real impact of our walking through town.  That was because I thought it would be impolite to take pictures of people's reactions.  We traveled the under two miles distance in a convoy of 9 MRAPs, which, if you've never seen one up close, are much, much larger than any other vehicle you've ever seen, unless you routinely commute to work in an industrial mining truck.  They're significantly taller than a tank, about as wide, and depending on the model just as long.  They're not exactly low profile.  Anyway, you sit in the back and listen to the chatter over the headset.  In Charikar, I heard: "You're too distant.  Close the gap." 
"I'm trying.  I'm stuck behind a truck with cattle."
"Well, go around it."
"I can't yet.  There's a black SUV trying to pass on the left."
"Speed up and close the distance.  You can go faster."
"I'm speeding up."
"Watch out for the bunch of school kids coming up."
"They're cute."
And finally, "Little f**ker flipped me off!"

We flew on a Russian Mi-8 helicopter.  This wasn't the first time I've been on one - more like the fifth or so - but the safety briefing this time was different.  "If anything happens," we were told, "just tuck your head down, hope for the best, wait for it to be over, and hopefully someone will be able to tell you what to do next."  There were flight safety cards in all the seats; they were completely in Russian.  The word for "exit" (vychod in Czech, spelled differently but pronounced the same in Russian) was the only word I recognized.

Charikar Street Views

 Charikar is the capital of Parwan province, to the north of Kabul.  It's the same province where Bagram air base is located.  The PRT there is led by the Koreans, though the US has a small contingent as well.  The physical base of the PRT is enormous; it's new and not quite finished.  It's maybe a mile and a half from the city itself.  So we went into the city and met with the governor and some Afghan NGO representatives.  At the meetings, the table snacks included oranges, which I've rarely seen people eat during a meeting, raisins, almonds and walnuts, and small candies.  And of course endless cups of tea.  After lunch (lamb, chicken soup, rice, yogurt, spices, fruit, etc) we went for a walk down one of the main streets.  In theory we were going to walk through the bazaar, and I even brought some local money to buy things, but it turned out that there were only a couple of shops selling candy and nuts, a school, and a handful of other businesses, like this wedding shop or Hakimi's real estate office.  By the way, if you're interested in buying property in Charikar, the second photo has Hakimi's phone number in the window, in Dari.  The last photo might look like I aimed poorly, but I was trying to get the bird cages on top of the shop building.  There were lots of boys in the street (no girls at all, and I only saw two women, both burka-ed).  But the key takeaway for readers - has Hakimi's House Dealing got a deal for you.

Snow Leopards

 Way up north of the Hindu Kush - I think in this case in the province of Badakshshan, which borders China on the northeast of Afghanistan - there are snow leopards in Afghanistan.  And somebody set up a camera with a trip wire to take photos of them.  Actually, in the set of photos I was sent, one of them was definitely not a snow leopard; it looked like a beaver or something.  But occasionally the trip wire got its target.  And so here are photos of actual snow leopards in the wild, from somewhere up in the northeast.

Phrases of Interest

Landing in Kabul and coming back into the airport, as we passed the poster at the entry we read its slogan: "Welcome to the home of the brave."  That's pretty apt for here, especially as just a couple of days ago the Taliban actually managed to make a successful attack in Kabul itself and killed several Afghan security forces.
Anyway, this entry is for a hodgepodge of interesting jargon or things I've heard people said that don't merit an entry on their own, but are mildly amusing.
For example, I recently received a document to review that was talking about a "Governors' Eradication Conference."  Normally, I believe, it is not US policy to eradicate governors, much less sponsor conferences openly advocating such a move.  But then again, this is not a normal post.  I signed off on it.
I also was treated to a lengthy presentation by a military colleague on certain projects and activities they were carrying out.  Their plans for the next few weeks included a vast series of "vertical and horizontal constructions."  I figured "vertical" constructions were buildings of some sort, which they were, but I confess I did not immediately pick up that a "horizontal construction" means ... a road.
Finally, during a recent trip to Helmand, where we have a rather large presence of Marines, a group of us we walking in the night toward the dining facility (the DFAC, indistinguishable from a school cafeteria except for the increased frequency of food fights).  It wasn't just dark; the atmosphere had that shusty smoggy mist suspended in the air typical of many places here.  And the base is poorly lit, since lights make it easier for anyone trying to aim a mortar to get lucky.  One of my companions, noting a group of several Marines walking in front of us, helpfully noted, "You know, it's really hard to see them if they're wearing camouflage at night."  He was serious, though he realized a couple of seconds after we started chuckling that it sounded like one of the less intelligent things he had said that day.  To his credit, he shrugged his shoulders, laughed it off and said, "You get little insights, you share them."
And finally, a serious one.  At one meeting with a dozen or more tribal leaders, one was asked in what way conditions had changed in his (it's always a he) village from Taliban times to now.  And he answered, "The Taliban tell you not to talk.  The government now tells you to speak, but doesn't listen to you."

Sometimes, You DO Have to Live Like a Refugee

 We are now living in a country that, not long ago, had the greatest number of refugees in the world.  During the years of civil war and the Taliban rule, roughly 5 million Afghans - at least 20% of the country's population- fled to Pakistan, Iran, India or (for the handful of lucky ones) Europe or the US.  Most have come back - which means that Afghanistan is now one of the countries with the highest rates of internally displaced people, since millions have returned not to their former homes but to new starts in Kabul or elsewhere around the country.  So we understand the gravity, the importance, and often the tragedy of refugees and their search for a safe haven.

But this blog isn't intended to be a serious discussion of serious issues, and certainly isn't meant to touch on any issues related to our work.  One thing we learned during our trip back to the US is that Afghanistan is not the only country to know refugees, and that Pakistan is not the only country to have served as a haven for the homeless and uprooted.  America, too, has a long history of refugees and havens.  As the Statue of Liberty itself says, "Give us your tired, your poor, your curdled masses."  And in northern Ohio, they offer just that sort of haven - and not just for people.  Anybody could do it for people.  It takes a special place to offer asylum to dairy products. 
 

Frozen Buns

 And then we went to West Virginia, which had significantly more snow than did Ohio.  The day we were trying to drive out there were about 8 inches of snow accumulated.  But it was very beautiful.  We had bad roads for the first hour or so, but once we hit the North Carolina border, we had pretty much light traffic and clear roads all the way to Atlanta, so we were able to have a full day to rest before we had to catch our flight back to Dubai.

Frozen Lake

Lake Erie was frozen out for some distance, I don't know, maybe 40 yards or so from shore.  Luckily, we had no plans to go ice fishing or walk out on the lake.  It looked too cold.  This was the view from the parking lot of a certain restaurant which will remain nameless but where I once worked.  I was a short order cook, which is ironic to everyone who knows what a tremendously inept kitchen presence I am.  I made toast reasonably well, and I could sort of grill the various sandwich meats without incessant kitchen fires.  I made omelettes for the bar crowd at 3 a.m. and the fishermen at 5 a.m. for weeks before I realized that the stuff in the carton was beat eggs, and that it is theoretically possible to make omelettes from actual fresh eggs.  However, I was prone to the occasional lapse.  One night there was a drive-in order for 15 or so hamburgers from a group of drunken revelers fresh from the bars.  It was drive-in, so that meant work fast!  I worked incredibly fast.  I had those buns laid out, mayo and special sauce laid on, tomato and lettuce and pickles and who knows what else stacked high, and I whipped those burgers off the grill onto the buns, packed up those babies and stunned the already stuporous customers.  And about twenty minutes later, one guy came back and asked at the drive through if it was correct that one of the hamburgers had no meat on it.  He wasn't angry; he just was curious about our policy on what percentage of hamburgers are entitled to having meat and how many were vegetarian.  And that is why I will never trust that particular restaurant.  It entrusted me to cook for it; its standards are clearly suspect.

Weather News

We are halfway toward Atlanta.  However, the snow hit last night.  Right now about 6-8 inches on the ground in southern West Virginia, but it's looking like the snow continues on the interstate south through the mountains in North Carolina.  This will slow us down quite a bit on the way to Atlanta.  What's worse, the temperature may rise enough today to melt some of the snow, but it will refreeze and make the roads icy overnight.  Theoretically, it should take about seven hours to get to Atlanta.  I'm thinking it will take a bit longer.  Except for the occasional excursion in Prague and Germany a couple of years ago, I haven't driven in snow in nearly ten years.

Lake Erie

We are on the northern coast of Ohio, and Lake Erie is frozen, at least for the first 40 or 50 yards from the shore where the snow has accumulated on top of the ice.  If I venture outside today, I may take a photo of it.  However, it's like -10 C, and windy, so I'm not planning to go outside unless I have to.  The big blizzard is supposed to come by Sunday morning.  I hope no earlier, since we're due to drive 8 hours on Saturday.  Back to Atlanta on Tuesday, and then our return flight on Thursday.

Dubai City Tour

Selected excerpts, part two.

A Bus Tour of Dubai

 Selected excerpts.

Dubai Signs

 The sign noting that it is prayer time is from the City Centre shopping mall.  I didn't see a mad scramble for the prayer mats as the call went out; most people seemed to just go about their shopping, wearing Western clothing and other secular business.

The second sign probably isn't very legible, but it's the best shot I could get after dusk.  The third line reads, "No kissing or overt displays of affection."  The fourth, closely related, reads, "No dangerous activities."

They take their mall behavior seriously in Dubai.

Seattle Sights

 Birds and ferries and a skyline.  Pretty much sums it up. Seattle was a very clean city - especially considering all the sea gulls and potential damage they could have done.

Finally on the Ferry Boat

 After hearing about it during the summer training, we finally made it onto a ferry boat.  There was no fairy captain to be seen, though I didn't look all that hard, to tell the truth. Anyway, we found this ferry in Seattle, and had no choice but to hop on and see where it would take us.

Reinpigs

 Here's something you don't often see in Kabul: pigs, dressed up like flying reindeer, on the top of the market, in this case Pike Street Market.  This is probably due to the ravages of war for the past 35 years or so, because otherwise, I bet you'd see this everywhere in Afghanistan.

Seattle's Culinary Delights

Seattle apparently wasn't always famous as a city that knew how to market its brands.  Coming as we do from a land where animal chips are more commonly used as winter fuel, we decided not to sample these cookies.

Experiments in Hats

 Failed experiments, I should hasten to add.  On the bright side, the only one suffering immediate embarrassment is our granddaughter, and she is highly unlikely to remember this when she is older, and if she does, we'll say it was the other grandparents who did it.

Sleeping in Seattle

I will post some of the weirder pictures we took in Seattle as soon as I get out of the airport, which is where I'm typing this.  Good free wifi in Seattle Airport.  Anyway, we have photos of pigs dressed as reindeer, which is something you don't often see in Afghanistan, as well as a particular cookie - I won't spoil the surprise by giving its brand name here - that could have benefited from a better name.  We had pretty good weather in Seattle, and the sky is completely blue as I type this.  Plus, we slept very well.  And we had lunch at the dockside cafe where Rob Reiner and Tom Hanks ate in Sleepless in Seattle.  Not that we recognized it or anything, but the counter had little plaques that said "Tom Hanks Sat Here" in the movie, so that tipped us off.

City of Love

During the down time in Dubai we went to the Derei City Centre, a shopping place (actually, the entire city of Dubai is basically a shopping place), though we mainly went there to try out the metro and get some lunch.  We took some photos of weird stuff, but I'll get around to posting those later.  As you enter the mall the door has the usual "None of This Stuff" signs to warn you against inappropriate behavior.  You must not wear inappropriate clothing, which includes T-shirts with unacceptable messages.  You must not be shoeless.  You must not engage in "dangerous behavior."  Finally, you are told in no uncertain terms that "kissing or other public displays of affection are not allowed."  So that pretty much scotched our plans for the mall.  Buzz killers.

The Seattle airport is now known to us for a mishap.  As we came out of the ramp from the plane, I decided it was a good idea to make a pit stop.  So off I went.  While to my mind there was nothing unusual about the detour, neither in terms of type or duration of activity, apparently Jody thought otherwise.  When I came out she was nowhere to be seen.  So I figured, OK, she's made a pit stop of her own.  Knowing that trips to the ladies' room invariably take longer than those to the men's room - obviously, there's something far more entertaining to do in there, perhaps PacMan arcade games, or Sports Center is on, or something along those lines that is lacking in the male facilities - so I waited.  And waited.  After about 15 minutes, I started thinking, this is a bit longer than normal.  So I wandered around the small terminal to see if she might have wandered off to get a coffee or something.  After about the sixth time around the terminal and lurking around the entrance to the ladies' room, and with the growing unmistakable certainty that everyone in the terminal figured I was a stalker, which really wasn't fair based on this experience alone, and there's no way most of those people could have known the other relevant information that would have led to that conclusion, I thought to myself, it's been half an hour; perhaps she went to the baggage claim.  So I took the escalator down to the area marked baggage claim - and came upon the doors to the airport train.  There's no way she would have taken a train to another terminal, I thought; I've simply missed her.  So I went back upstairs, loitered around the entrance to the women's restroom until even the undecideds had decided that, yep, no doubt the guy's getting ready to commit some sort of sex crime, circled the terminal area a few more times.  By now over 45 minutes had passed since we landed.  So I thought, I'll go page her.  Turns out the place to page somebody is where the baggage claim area is.  So I took the train, and at the baggage help desk, I saw our suitcases.  Turns out she had long since given up finding me and so went fairly expeditiously to baggage claim.  Apparently, she is far less willing than I to be considered an airport bathroom predator.

Directions

We have arrived in Seattle, after a short trip of approximately 44 hours.  We started out in Kabul Sunday before dawn, spent most of the day in Dubai, flew overnight to Atlanta, and finally making it to Seattle Monday afternoon local time, the equivalent of about 2 in the morning Tuesday Kabul time.  Kabul Airport, for those unfamiliar with it, is not the world's most modern, nor is it filled choc-a-bloc with shopping and dining options.  But it was another difference that most struck me.  Since our plane was not pulled up close to the terminal, we had to take a bus to get to its place on the tarmac.  Nothing unusual about that.  So a bunch of us piled into the first bus, which zoomed off confidently toward the plane.  And then wound up in a corner of the airport past where the UN planes park, with no other plane nearby.  So our driver did something profoundly un-American, at least un-manly: he stopped the bus, got out, walked over to one of the ground crew and asked for directions to where our plane was parked.  Oh, sure, it worked, and we got there - though several minutes after the bus that had left after ours, meaning we were the last people to board the plane - but where was that sense of triumph after having steadfastly refused to ask for help, and driving around the tarmac for a few extra hours until stumbling upon the correct path?

In Dubai, since we had to re-check our luggage anyway, we decided to take a bus tour around the city, since we had about nine hours to kill.  So we did the unmanly, un-American thing and asked for directions at the information desk.  The young woman had no idea where we could buy tickets for the double-decker bus tour, so she called the number.  It was at least a 15-minute conversation, as she repeatedly sought to clarify exactly where the ticket sales point was, where the bus was, where and when we would return, etc.  She squeezed every last drop of information out of her interlocutor.  She hung up, smiled broadly, and began to explain what we had to do, when the phone rang.  She answered, and then a 10+ minute conversation in Chinese ensued.  Finally, she hung up, smiled, looked at us ... and then her smile vanished, and she stammered, "I forgot what they told me."  She then waved us in the general direction of the parking lot and said we would probably find someone there who would know.  This episode, to me, proves the futility of asking for directions, ever.

Fun times await us - while in Dubai, we get a book on towel origami.  We are about to wreak havoc at the house of every relative we visit during this trip.

Jody and the Helicopter

 Sounds like the title of a children's book. 

Bazaar Walk

More scenes from Garmsir market in Helmand.

Jody in Garmsir

 On a walk through the bazaar in Garmsir district, in Helmand province, during her latest congressional delegation visit.  I will let her write more details about it and the boy she gave a dollar to.