Photos (really!)

Ok, the photos are really, really ready. The only caveat is that if you dig into them on Flickr, you'll see sizes listed which are incorrect. I shrunk them substantially to fit on my free account, but the size still reads as though it's the original off the camera. I have much more detailed images, but have not stored them on Flickr due to upload bandwidth limitations on the free account.

Now I don't know whether to clean up the blog by deleting all the references to my photo troubles, or to leave them here as a testament to how hard this was for me to figure out. I guess I'll leave them - what the heck. This is supposed to be an unvarnished account of what I see and do while mobilized.

Speaking of unvarnished acccounts, maybe this is a good place to point out that I can't publish all my photos - when I was photographing FORSCOM HQ, a security guy came out and told me it wasn't allowed. He didn't make me delete the pictures off my camera, but it was pretty clear that they didn't want people taking pictures for security reasons.

The smartass in me wanted to go back with a tape measure and start measuring the gaps between the concrete barriers and taking notes. I probably could have told them I was just boning up on my engineer skills, especially if I had taken along my copy of FM 5-34 (Engineer Field Data). I quickly got that irreverent impulse under control. So I kept the photos, but I somehow suspect they might object to my publishing them here....

Anyway, I can finally post photos, and the ones listed in the earlier entry can actually be viewed!

Mood: Triumphant
Music: Beethoven - Ode to Joy

Spoke too soon

Well, I'm not done yet, apparently. The html from the photos screwed up the formatting of my blog and now you can't see my profile.

*sigh*

I'll keep working on it. Photos may come and go until I figure this out....

Mood: Mildly Frustrated
Music: Mozart - Requiem ;-)

Photos (Finally!)

I have finally succeeded in posting photos to my blog. I didn't use the exact way any of the tools said to do it, because none of them actually put the photos into my text postings where I wanted them.

Perhaps in the future I can post my photos first, and then write the text around them. I'll try that the next time I have photos to post. But for now, I posted the photos to their own separate entries using Flickr, cut and pasted the html from these to the existing blog entries, then deleted the photo entries. Cumbersome, but effective!

The cool thing about posting photos from Flickr is that they have their own captions, which you can see by clicking the link under each photo. This takes you to Flickr and lets you see the photo and caption there.The enties that now have photos in them are:

10/1 - Ft. Benning, 25 Years Later
9/30 - 3rd Army, FORSCOM, USARC, and Breakfast
9/23 - Cleared From My Unit

Mood: Satisfied
Music: Handel - Concerto No. 3 in G Major

Ft. Benning, 25 Years Later

Sunday 10/01/06, 1600

I am now at Ft. Benning, Georgia. I was last here 25 years ago for OCS and Airborne School. In some ways the place is just the same, and of course it’s changed in some ways, too.

For example, I’m sitting in a Subway sandwich shop collocated with an MWR facility (game room, TV room, wireless hotspot) that is within sight of the Airborne School. Not only is that something new, but there are actually OCS candidates in here buying sandwiches and pizzas. I’d heard that the new Army was not as tough, but that’s going too far! We had to mount a major midnight commando operation just to get pizza delivered to the OCS barracks. :-) Perhaps it’s a privilege they were able to earn somehow….

I took a few photos of some of the Airborne training facilities. The jump towers from the 1939 World’s Fair are still here, and the other ground and tower facilities are just as I remember them. I am quartered in an area not too far away from there, and since it’s the weekend we are actually eating in a mess hall right next to the Officer Candidate School. Does that ever bring back some memories!


Ft. Benning - Airborne School Towers
Originally uploaded by hkp7fan.

I was driven down here from Ft. McPherson in a van this morning, and reported in to the company about 10:30. They got me signed in and assigned me a room, which I have to myself so far (although there are 4 bunks in it). RHIP in some cases – I have my own latrine (bathroom) including a shower, so for now I don’t have to do the communal shower thing. The wall locker is like a bank safe – definitely a change from the flimsy sheet steel lockers we had when I was here before.

I went to clothing sales and got an ACU pattern briefcase – I will now retire my old mapcase, which I brought with me to carry my paperwork around in. The mapcase will stay in the US along with whatever else I decide to leave behind. If I can find a tailor shop on post I’ll get a nametape sewn to the new briefcase. STRAC!

They have vans to drive us around, so I shouldn’t have to walk quite as much as I did at Ft. McPherson. I definitely plan to go back to clothing sales and look around – it’s much bigger and better stocked than the others I have been in recently. Of course, this is Ft. Benning, Home Of The Infantry. I’d expect it to have a good MCSS. I need a couple little items, like a sewing kit with the right color thread (although it will be for repairs only – the new ACUs do not require any patches to be sewn on; everything is velcro).

Tomorrow at 0800 I am supposed to meet one of the NCOs to go down and draw all my CIF and RFI gear. After that I’ll start going through the administrative processing (medical, finance, etc.). Then I’ll go through some training exercises to make sure I’m still up to speed on core warfighting tasks (I’m guessing they will include use of the protective mask, weapons qualification, immediate action drills, and who knows what else - whatever they want me to do). I don’t think I’ll be low-crawling through any barbed wire or jumping off the towers this time around, though. :-)

After I get done here I’ll head back up to Ft. McPherson. But for the next few days I’ll be here at the “Benning School for Boys”. (And it really is still that, despite the larger role of females in the Army these days). There are definitely women here, but in much smaller proportion to men than other places I’ve been in the Army. This is the Infantry Center, and since women still do not serve in the combat arms, they are less prevalent here. I’d say the ratio I’ve seen is roughly 30:1 or so, just going by the soldiers I’ve seen walking around and here patronizing the place I’m in. Go to a transportation, quartermaster, or medical unit, and you’ll see a much higher ratio of women. But the infantry is still a man’s world.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that hardly anyone is overweight here. I’ve mostly been hanging around reserve units and higher-level headquarters, and while everyone has to pass the PT test, I’ve seen plenty of people carrying around too much weight (they even make *me* feel thin!). But here it’s a different story. These people are young and fit, and the older officers and NCOs I’ve seen so far are fit as well. All these people look like what you’d expect the Army to look like – like something straight off a recruiting poster.

It’s cool to be back here. The cliché would be to say it makes me feel old, but it doesn’t. To be sure, I’ve had to smile a few times. One young man I saw was wearing a Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon” t-shirt. I’m sure he wasn’t even born when that album was released, and I was already in high school (or maybe even college). But despite the reminiscences and the realization that it really was 25 years ago that I was here as a young man, it doesn’t make me feel old - quite the opposite. I feel energized, centered, and “together” in a way I haven’t felt for a long time. I think this is really where I belong. What on earth was I thinking for all those years?

Mood: Energized
Music: Berlin, “No More Words”

Waaah! (Somebody call the waahmbulance)

Saturday 9/30/2006, 1930

(I think I’ll start date- and time stamping my postings, because I can’t adjust the timestamp on the blogging tool. I have irregular access to the internet, and I am composing them in Word and uploading them when I can, so the timestamp on the blog doesn’t necessarily correspond to when I am writing them.)

If I believed in that sort of thing, I’d say my patience was being tested today. It was a day of minor annoyances. I’m not even sure I can remember them all, but I’ll try.

My last posting was written from 0900 – 1000 Saturday morning, while waiting behind the Burger King at the PX for the barber shop to open. The day was just beginning, and the first minor annoyance (no breakfast) had already manifested itself. Unless, that is, you count the reason I was waiting at the barber shop in the first place.

My mantra of “high and tight, and #1 on top” apparently hadn’t reached the lady barber’s consciousness yesterday. She was too busy talking to her eleven year old on the phone to pay much attention to me. When she *finally* finished, she stuck the mirror in my face and what I saw looked OK, so I paid and left. When I looked in the mirror this morning, I saw that my hair was still much too long on top (well, OK, the upper sides; I don’t have any hair on top at all :-) ) – definitely not a #1 (as short as it gets without just having skin). I was waiting at the barber shop to ask to have it fixed. So I guess no breakfast might have been Annoyance #2.

A few minutes after ten, I packed up the computer and went around the corner into the PX, to find that the barber shop was not yet open, despite the posted opening time of 1000. Annoyance #3. Several other people were waiting. We waited around, making conversation and speculating about what the trouble was. One by one they left, until I was the last one. (Where else was I going to go?)

At about 10:45 or so, an employee finally came, expressing surprise that nobody was there and explaining that her car had broken down. She didn’t have her keys, so she had to mess around getting some. She had no intention of staying to cut hair, but had intended to take care of her car. Then she discovered that the other employee had decided not to come to work today. So she stayed around to work. I had been hoping to have the barber who had cut my hair wrong fix it, but since she wasn’t there this woman fixed it. She didn’t have a cash drawer and couldn’t take payment, although in my case it didn’t matter since I wasn’t paying. I tipped her anyway. So now my haircut was OK, but it was already nearly afternoon. Time to think about lunch.

I decided to go back to my room and drop off my camera and a couple other things, because my bag was heavier than I wanted to carry around downtown all day. I walked back to my building (all of this involved much walking around the post, similar to the post in Korea). Imagine my surprise and delight when my room key (magnetic card) failed to open the door! Annoyance #4. The cleaning ladies were there and let me into the building and into my room. But the card just wouldn’t work. I called the front desk on the room phone. No answer. Great. I left a message, rearranged my bag as planned, and then set out across the post for the Army Lodging office. When I got there they told me that my card was demagnetized because I hadn’t kept it in the little sleeve. (I threw away the sleeve because they wrote my building and room number on it). So I took a new sleeve and remagnetized card, and set out for downtown. Annoyance #4 dealt with.

I headed for the train and went downtown to seek a Wall Street Journal, some lunch, and a wi-fi hotspot.

Annoyance #5 – no Wall Street Journal. Anyplace. The first “Newsstand” (well, that’s what the sign said) had only one newspaper, a few porn magazines, lottery tickets, and a lot of cigarettes. The second two were closed. Walking many blocks in several directions failed to yield a single WSJ. So I gave up and decided to just read it online once I got to a wi-fi location.

Annoyance #6 – hard to find a wi-fi hotspot. I walked many more blocks, failing to locate any of the places I had written down. Many were closed for the weekend; some I couldn’t find. I finally ended up in Peachtree Center, an underground mall with a large food court. I was hungry and it looked good. I stopped at information and asked if they knew a hotspot. The lady pointed to a sign that said “Hot” in the food court and said people connected to the internet there, but that they had to plug in. I didn’t have an Ethernet cable with me, so I was bummed. I set off to find an Ethernet cable in the mall, since I didn’t want to talk around looking for a wireless hotspot anymore.

Annoyance #7 (or maybe #6a) – ignorant employees who don’t understand internet connections. Finally I gave up and decided to sit down by the “Hot” sign. I noticed somebody using his computer with no cable. Long story short, the people the “information” person saw had been plugging in their power cables, but it was in fact a wireless hotspot. She just had no idea how it worked.

OK, things were looking up! I went back to an oriental takeout place that I had seen, and got a huge pile of various flavors of chicken and some fried rice for lunch (I think it was about 3:00 PM by then). I sat down and had a nice meal and actually got on the internet for awhile. I kept getting kicked off, but I don’t categorize that as a real annoyance – it’s free, so what do you expect? It wasn’t really too bad.

Across from the food court was a store called “International Records”. They were having a retirement sale – all CD’s were $1. I went through the bins and picked up a few that looked good. A couple I already knew I’d like – Six Concerti Grossi by Handel, and the Yellow River Concerto with Yitkin Seow at the piano. (I heard this playing once at a booth at a street festival in Plymouth, but never bought the CD). Others were more speculation – a collection called “Autumn Moon - The Chinese Virtuosi”, the “Nordic Roots” I’m listening to now, a collection of hits by The Motels, The Fixx, and Berlin (seems OK), and one loser that wasn’t what I thought it might be. I ripped them into my computer and put them on the iPod while I chatted with friends over Yahoo Messenger and with Anna on AIM.

So in the end it seemed like the day had been redeemed. I packed up, got on the train, and returned to Ft. McPherson. I went to plug in my computer and….crap!

Annoyance #8: I am using an (expensive) international surge suppressor with multiple country adapters. When I unplugged it at the Peachtree Center, I was neither careful nor observant, and the North American adapter stayed plugged into the wall. So I was here and it was there. Nothing to do but go back and get it.

1 ½ hours, $3.50 in train tickets, and a lot of walking later, I was back here with the adapter in hand. Time for a nice glass of Jack Daniel’s on ice, and a therapeutic session of complaining on my blog. Waaah!

It’s ok, don’t call the waahmbulance. I’m all better now. :-)

Mood: Tired
Music : Nordic Roots ( e.g. En Geng Ska Han Greta)