HOT!

Just to give you an idea of how joyful Las Vegas is in the summer... the following photos. The first was taken at about 5pm and it was 109 degrees. I had just gotten out of my car (parked in the drive) and I wondered how hot it was in the car. I placed the temp sensor in the car and it got up to about 146 degrees. I took it out and put it back into the shaded carport and got a high of 116 degrees around 6:30pm. Today it was even hotter. It is a dry heat, as they say, with a humidity that hovers around 10%, but as I write this at 9:30 pm it is still 100 degrees. It is impressively hot.
The first year we lived here one of my kid's plastic cars actually melted on the back porch (it was a black car)-- the little roof caved in on itself and the windows bubbled out. I was impressed.

Afghanistan News

This is good news, since the Pakistanis need to be involved, following yesterday's news of more Taliban attacks on US forces from inside Pakistan. Recent news has been bad and it is an interesting contrast from news in early June that described the Taliban as being on the "brink of defeat".

The region I will be operating in borders the Pakistani region known as Waziristan. This region is very much the wild west of Pakistan and it is also a major base of operations for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Vacation

I've been kind of lame with the blog lately, but only because I am spending every free minute with my family. I'll pick things up here in a few days.

I'm down to about one week in the USA left...

Calm #2

The second night in Boulder Utah. A little warmer, but the sun has just set over the Aquarius Plateau and the Tibetan prayer flags and wind chime over the garden are whipping in a northerly wind.

Today we attempted the Calf Creek Falls hike but aborted when the kids were on the verge of a 10am meltdown. We recovered gracefully with a short hike downstream on the Escalante River Canyon... found a small beach tucked in a riverine corridor of russian olive, tamarisk and cottonwood. Played in the clear water for hours. We chased minnows and snakes and forgot about the world beyond the canyon.

Not much of a hike, but we managed to lose ourselves.

Calm

The one electronic accessory I didn't bring on this roadtrip is the USB cable for the camera. I have great photos but no way to upload them. Pictures come later...

This moment has me sitting on a porch in remote Boulder, Utah looking south as early summer light fades over the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. I have my dog sleeping at my feet, a small glass of 2005 Beaujolais Villages at my elbow, and the sound of robins and wind in the cottonwoods. I'm waiting for the stars but it's a partly cloudy evening (moving slowly eastward across the sky) so I’m not hopeful. The war and the future and the Air Force and Las Vegas seem a million miles away. Tomorrow I’ll take my five year old and three year old children walking down these mysterious canyons that drain the western edge of the Colorado Plateau. We’ll be looking for smooth sand, cool water, coyote tracks and pictographs and I will be savoring every moment…

My destination

This is a photo of FOB ***** from a few years back. Looks kind of like Fort Apache from an old John Wayne film... or the Las Vegas valley without casinos and subdivisions. I've heard it's scenic, cool, and has running water.

News!

Today was a big day. I got an exact departure date (after July 4) and I found out that I am headed for some sort of forward operating base that is a short helo ride from Bagram AFB. About 60 miles from Kabul and 50 miles from the Afghan-Pakistani border—at about 8000ft in the mountains. From my initial info (gleaned from a second-hand email) it is a “good place to be” but that is accompanied with a warning to make sure that “if there are any personal hygiene items that you really like, make sure you bring them with you.” (Toothpaste?)

I sent out an email requesting more information about living conditions, what the work is like, what I need to bring… Hopefully I’ll get a more fleshed out picture in my mind. The next round of questions will be related to amount of travel outside of the wire, and frequency of rocket/mortar attacks at the location—my other two major concerns.

At the very least this gives me something to focus on. It will probably mean that I will be my own boss, and I like that. Should be interesting. I’ll keep you posted.

Yummy

I'll be dry for 6 months so I'm indulging in these during the month of June. If you can find them at your local beer purveyor you should try them out. They are brewed in Quebec, so it's my way of escaping to Canada...

Update

I'm back in Vegas and will resume posting this weekend. I'm just enjoying my family and staying away from anything else as much as possible.
I should find out my actual assignment within the next 5-6 days. Although I won't be able to publish where I will be assigned, I will at least be able to share whether or not I will be dodging mortars at a small FOB (which is what I am hoping to AVOID).

I am brave enough to publicly admit that I am a big coward. More on that later…

A week of contemplating combat stress...

I saw this in the Washington Post the other day. It reminded me of my recent time at Fort McCoy, where the sound of small arms and artillery from the dozens of firing ranges is almost constant and added to that are the sounds of various pyrotechnic devices (mortar and rocket simulators). I don't know what a battlefield sounds like, but probably something like that. That stuff is LOUD. I imagine that someone returning from Iraq or Afghanistan has problems relaxing and sleeping when they are demobilizing with that in the background, not to mention what it would be like for a Soldier with PTSD.


At the COSC course this week I have seen a wide variety of presenters from all three service branches. I've learned some useful things and I've learned that I already know a lot, which is comforting. At the very least, after having gone through this course, I won't go to Afghanistan wondering if there are things I don't know that the Army expects me to know. One of the take home messages is: wait until you get there because it is different everywhere. This is comforting on the one hand but disturbing on the other. It essentially underlines a major difficulty that the DoD has right now in dealing with behavioral health problems; that they are overstretched and don't have a coherent and integrated policy. Sound familiar?



There's been a ton of information presented this week on combat stress, PTSD, sexual assault in Iraq and Afghanistan, marital problems, drug and alcohol problems, suicide and homicide, but the overall message has been a metaphoric pat on the back for us, the wink, wink, good luck, goodbye, hang on for the ride, we are making this up as we go...

I know what I am expected to do, which is more than most people can say, I just don't know what the conditions will be. I have gathered that we go outside the wire a lot, visiting the Soldiers who are most at risk at their FOBs and COBs and radio relay stations. The scientist in me crunches the numbers, and is reassured. The chances of me getting blown up are pretty darn slim. Just to put this to bed, I hold on to thoughts of something like the Butterfly Effect, and imagine that my efforts in that theater and my words and deeds back at home will have triggered something meaningful, regardless of the trajectory of my life. That seems maudlin and dramatic, but that's okay. I suppose I'm forgiven for thinking a few dramatic thoughts about my own mortality in the context of shipping myself off to some foreign war, even though I'm more likely to die in an MVA on my way to the grocery store. What gets me is that somehow if you die on the way to the grocery store it is just dumb-tragic-luck, but if you volunteer to fight in a foreign land you have to take responsibility for the potential consequences of that extraordinary choice.

Obama...

However you feel about Obama, you have to admit that the man knows how to hit home runs with his speaking abilities (kind of refreshing, eh?)... Historical night.

Reconstitution

The Combat Stress course has, so far, been a PowerPoint-fest. On the upside I met some nice people, some smart guys flew in from Washington D.C. to present some hot-off-the-press research, and they finished off the day with a (**free**) Tex-Mex buffet and keg of Shiner Bock by the pool (it was Shiner Bock "lite" but it was free, so that made up for it being a little see-through.)

The research presented was from the most recent MHAT (Mental Health Advisory Team). This is an annual Army survey-based study of mental health issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly sampling "trigger pullers" or people who are putting rounds downrange, kicking in doors, getting shot at, and getting blown up on the roads. Essentially they found what you would expect: that combat deployments cause a ton of mental health problems for Soldiers, longer deployments are more difficult, repeated deployments cause more problems, and somewhere between 20% and 30% of Soldiers are coming home from OIF and OEF with problematic psychiatric symptoms.

One of the key findings from Afghanistan was that Soldiers reported difficulty accessing behavioral health assets in theater (psychologists and other MH personnel). A major recommendation that the Army has acted upon in 2007 and 2008 is to forward deploy doctors as much as possible to the FOBS in Afghanistan, so that they are more accessible to troops who are spread across the generally remote and mountainous battlespace.

The presenter was good-- made the data interesting. During the presentation the guy next to me tapped me on the shoulder and whispered to me:

"I guess now we know who to blame if we end up getting deployed to a 100 man FOB at 8000 ft in the Hindu Kush."

I said, "At least you won't get sweaty sleeping in your body armor."