Lost Cars & Being Lazy
Monday, May 1st, 2006Day 171
You can tell by the increasing intervals between my correspondence that I’m getting settled into the routine around here. I’m also getting lazy and, surprisingly enough, busy, now that the guys from the previous rotation have left.
So, I’ll start telling about all the things I’ve saved up and maybe get back into some type of routine.
A few weeks ago, the orders to promote our veterinarian to Major finally came through, so we had a little promotion ceremony and she bought the Beer!
Only, alcohol isn’t allowed for U.S. forces. Mostly. So it was non alcoholic beer, which tastes even worse than the real thing. Ah, well. She asked me to pin on her new rank, which was an honor. For the next couple of days, people would make a point of calling her ‘Major’, even if they weren’t really talking to her, just to watch her grin.
Historically pistols were specialty weapons. They were carried by officers as a mark of their elevated status or they were issued to troops who needed something a little handier than the standard rifle. Here though, virtually everyone has been issued a pistol. Most of us also have rifles or carbines but those usually get locked up unless you’re going out on a convoy. They get locked up because most people don’t want to carry them around, (a few of us don’t really mind, carrying a rifle seems normal), and because, when we go downtown to one of the Ministries, carrying a rifle is a touch gauche.
One thing that’s fun around here, is to try to catalog all the different varieties of holsters people are using to carry their pistols around. In spite of the military’s reputation, there is hardly any uniformity.
The military has a perfectly good standard issue holster for the M9 Beretta pistol. It’s Cordura nylon. Stout, practical, you can change it from right hand use to left hand use in about thirty seconds and it clips neatly on the standard military web belt.
But, the military has started believing its own advertising, or something. The holsters that we had so much trouble getting issued in Ft. Bragg are not the (old standard) holster. They’re the Han Solo/SWAT team/Special Operations/gunfighter holster that hangs low off your belt and straps to your thigh, tied down loooow.
So, MOST of the holsters that you see are flashing back and forth on people’s thighs, like a whole village of Texas gunslingers. Those holsters don’t work for everyone, or they don’t feel good, or something else gets in the way.
Personally, I don’t much care to have things chafing on my leg when I walk. Besides, if I get into a situation where I need a quick draw, then I need to get under cover MORE, and that’ll give me the 1.5 seconds it takes to get the thing out and working. So the fancy $80 holster they bought for me is sitting in my footlocker. I found a nifty little nylon belt holster, with a thumb break, down in the bazaar for $10. It’s convenient, it’s secure and it keeps the weapon with me ALL the time.
The ‘list price’ was $12 dollars, so you can see I don’t haggle very well. The one feature it doesn’t have, that most of the other bazaar holsters do, is a spare magazine pouch, on the holster itself. But I already had a good magazine pouch, so why spend the extra money? Everything fits neatly under my ACU blouse, so I can go into all the Ministries without looking uncivilized.
I think most of the nylon holsters are similar to mine, because you just don’t see them. The holster maker is down there in the bazaar every week and seems to be doing good business, so I assume there are a fair number of his products around.
The next group are also belt holsters but they’re leather jobs, with the magazine pouch on the leading edge or on the face of the holster. The leather looks nice but they’re kind of bulky and don’t hide under your clothes as well. If you do pull the blouse down over these, you end up looking like you have some sort of growth on your hip, until it works its way back out into full view.
We got shoulder holsters, in a variety of flavors. A few of the old standard military pattern, which is just one that hangs the pistol vertically under your arm from a strap, with another strap that runs across your chest and around your back. Then there’s the ‘Miami Vice’ style, like all the cool movie cops wear, with the pistol horizontal and pointing to the rear, and a couple of magazine pouches. The faux military has a multitude of straps, usually two magazine pouches under the opposite arm and might carry the gun pointing in almost any direction.
The leather holsters are standardized in either black or any tone of brown you can imagine. The nylon models are limited to black, green, woodland, tan, desert camo or the new ACU pattern. I’d try counting the different styles and colors but it’d be an endless task.
Maybe it’s the lack of uniformity in the holster arena that has (one of the many) Command Sergeants Major putting up dumb rules for the PT uniform.
For the Army PT uniform, he states that it will consist of “a gray short sleeve T-shirt AND a gray long sleeve T-shirt AND black gym shorts AND long PT pants.” Emphasis is mine, but the stupidity is his.
If I read this right, you have to wear BOTH shirts and BOTH pairs of pants, but no shoes or socks. He didn’t even specify the uniform parts had to be the actual Army Authorized pieces. Dweeb.
And, speaking of dweebs, my battalion had our first injury last week. The good news is that it wasn’t due to enemy action. The bad news is that you just can’t get much dumber. Seems there was a diesel tank that needed to have its level checked. Our hero took the cap off and, apparently, was auditioning for a part in a Roadrunner cartoon, because he ‘flipped his Bic’ for light to see by. Yeah. Truth is stranger than fiction. He should be OK, but they evaced him to Germany for treatment.
I finally sprung for one of the rifles down in the bazaar. We’ll see how long it takes for it to get home. It’s a Mark III Snider Enfield, in .577 caliber. (The bullet is nearly 6/10 of an inch in diameter, for those of you who are firearms challenged.)
Basic brass is available for loading, and new ammunition is sometimes available, so it’s going to be a shooter.
Next, I’ll have to look at one of the Martini carbines. They’re a little spendier, though, no need to jump into anything.
Day 182
One of the guys came up from Bagram last week for a meeting. It seems to be getting harder to get on a convoy if you need to go somewhere, so he had to come up Friday for the meeting on Saturday. The only convoy on the schedule was a bunch of MPs, so he hitched a ride with them. He got to ride in the rig that had broken air conditioning, which is always fun when the temperature is in the low 80’s and you have to wear body armor. We could probably patent the process, though, for weight loss clinics. The hot Humvee weight loss program……… But how would you get the customers over here? Hmmmmm.
Anyway, he did the meeting and then we belatedly were notified that another meeting, on Monday, also needed his presence. So he stayed an extra night.
We kept the billeting simple. Instead of trying to get him a room, which is nigh onto impossible, I just got a spare key to my room and put him in the spare bed. I only HAD a spare bed because my room had been condemned, but that’s another story.
So he stayed through Monday to attend the PTS meeting. The Program Takh-e Sul is similar to the Chu Hoi program in Viet Nam. Amnesty for those anti government types who come in, turn in their weapons and swear not to fight anymore. It’s apparently a pretty good program. They hoped for up to 500 fighters to lay down their arms last year, instead they had over 1500. And that’s with only six offices in the whole country that run the program.
On Sunday night, I pick up the log book for the car we’re going to use the next morning and we hike over to the ‘back 40′ parking lot to get it. It’s. not. there. It’s not in the overflow parking. It’s not parked in any of the reserved spaces back nearer our offices. I DID see two other of our vehicles out in the ‘back 40′, so we went back to the office. Fortunately, one of the NCOs was still there, so we just got the log book for one of the vehicles we’d seen and took it ‘home’ for the night. (They found the original one the next day. KBR had done some maintenance on it and turned the log book back in without telling anyone that they just left it in the fueling area, where it isn’t supposed to be.)
We headed back to camp the next morning, picked up another officer on the way and then our interpreters at a gate, where we waited for the guy who was going to lead us to the conference because we didn’t know the way. (Our interpreters did, but the guide wanted to ‘make sure’. Besides, taking directions from an Afghan while you’re driving can be nearly as frightening as riding with one.) The guide showed up late, which gave time for one of the Colinels who works in our offices to stop by and wonder why we were going to this particular conference in uniform. He had organized the same conference last year and the command specifically did NOT allow uniforms in the conference room. Also, no weapons. Well, none of us HAVE any suitable civvies and we didn’t have anyone available to stand around all day and guard our weapons in the car, sooooooo, guess we’ll just show up and find out if we get bounced out or not. The guide finally showed up and we headed off for the International Hotel.
When I first got into town, on one of the little excursions that we make, someone had pointed the hotel out to me and specified that this meeting was happening there. They had the wrong place, good thing I didn’t try to find it myself.
When we got there, a big sign next to the front door depicted an AK with the big red circle and slash. Yup, no weapons, all right. Except that everyone was going right in with them. Turns out that the minister chairing the meeting was nearly blown up a couple of weeks ago. That might have made a difference. More people with guns can be a comforting thing sometimes. We were just required to keep magazines out, no problem. The only civvie clothes involved were worn by Afghans……….. Again, as at the Serena Hotel downtown, seeing the Force protection troops taking up their positions made things feel somewhat ‘normal’.
The International is out toward the West section of town, up on a hill. It was built around thirty five years ago, before the Russian invasion or the Taliban. It’s still a pretty nice, well maintained facility. It has great views of much of the rest of Kabul. The area right around it is all downhill, so you can watch people going about their business for quite a distance. Especially since our conference was up on the fifth floor. There was a fair amount of dust that day, so it was a little hard to see very far.
The day consisted of a few speeches and then small working groups to try to see what could be done to improve the program around the country. As with most public meetings in this country that are hosted by the Afghans, it started off with a reading from the Koran, and a prayer, by an Imam who was the spitting image of the little Egyptian wise man who translated the words on the staff head in the first Indiana Jones movie.
My small group had three of us Americans and varying numbers of Afghans, usually about six. We were focused on what kind of actions could make the PTS program more effective; they were focused on trying to get more equipment in order to do their job. We had to be careful to not deny them anything, but also to not promise them anything. Not as easy as it might seem.
One of our guys worked as a transporter in his office, going out and bringing back fighters that they heard wanted to come in. He claimed to have gone to school in Libya for seven years and was mostly interested in how to apply for a job with the Americans. The pay is no doubt better.
Our group leader was a dangerous looking fellow with a large build and a full beard that looked like it had been colored, because the outer half of it was red and the rest was black. He also had a split thumb on his left hand, essentially an extra bit from the last knuckle out. Two complete tips and nails.
They fed us lunch halfway through the day, which made it hard to stay awake for the rest of it, but we managed. Got through it without promising anything other than that the PRT in their area would look at the list they gave us and consider it.
When we left the hotel, the daily sandstorm had started, and it was still hot. Our guide was busy with clean up details but we didn’t want to hang around, so we left. A group of Force pro guys from our base offered to lead us back, but traffic separated us when we first got onto the street.
The course we had taken in was kind of windy and loopy, and, much of it had been on one way streets. Fortunately, I had a fairly good idea of where our camp lay, because I could see the American Embassy from the meeting room and I could see Television Hill. So I just angled ‘that a way’ until I was on familiar streets and we got back with no problem. (You can’t miss the American Embassy from any vantage point in town. It’s a great big, mustard colored building. I think that’s why they shoot rockets at it once in a while. It’s an aesthetic thing.)
The issues with cars weren’t over. The next time I needed a car, the same thing happened. Searched the parking lots, no car. By the time I was done searching, I was frothing. I never bothered to ask where they finally found that one. And then the next day, it happened again! I was just turning homicidal when the rest of the group with me found it, NOT where it was supposed to be.
It’s calmed down since then, fortunately.
Day 193
We finally got the previous unit headed out, on their way home. Mostly a pretty good bunch of people but a few quirks. COL W is a lot like Felix on ‘The Odd Couple’. The neatnick part isn’t a problem, but he just CAN’T stay still and relax. He’ll send an e-mail to someone down the hall and then be standing over their shoulder to see if they’ve read it before it actually arrives.
LTC P and LTC T are badge collectors. They both have the Combat Action Badge, which means they’ve been shot at, but the accounts of the incident make them look a little like Frank Burns on
M*A*S*H, when he got the Purple Heart for getting a ’shell fragment’ in his eye during an artillery attack. Egg shell, that is……. They were out doing some task when a rocket hit somewhere in the neighborhood. Somewhere within, oh, maybe a thousand meters, apparently. Instead of finding a bunker and staying low for a while, they apparently ran OUT of the compound they were in, (going CLOSER to the kill zone), jumped in their (unarmored Toyota SUV) and hauled tail. Not at all a glorious performance. BUT, they spent the next week writing it up to make sure they got the Combat Action Badge. For end of tour awards, LTC P is upset that he isn’t getting a Bronze Star. He apparently has a higher opinion of his accomplishments than his superiors…………. He could go to the IG, I hear they’re starting to force resubmission to upgrade awards if people complain……………. Oh, if I were only king for a day!