Life at Arifjan - One Year Later

Sunday 21 October 2007
1800

My BOG (Boots on Ground) date has come and gone. A year has passed, and since I’ve extended, I’m here for nearly another year. I suppose that’s a good enough reason for a little retrospective thinking.

As I consider what occupies my thoughts outside of work, it’s apparent to me that I’ve turned inward over the past months. I am doing less observation of my surroundings and thinking more about me, my family, and my future. I suspect that is because my surroundings just don’t change much – it’s all pretty familiar and not new anymore.

Here is a little visual indicator of the time that has passed:

October 2006:

Life at Camp Arifjan #1b
Originally uploaded by hkp7fan.

October 2007:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58512268@N00/1671790765/
Originally uploaded by hkp7fan.

Work, eat, sleep, exercise, read, watch movies, talk (and IM and email) with my family, play WoW. That’s about the extent of my activities. The major source of variety is work, and that subject (although hardly top-secret) is supposed to be off-limits for personal Blogs. My work here wouldn’t be that interesting to most people, anyway.

The largest part of my activity is getting maintenance and new construction accomplished in the facilities I manage. As recent public news articles have reported, there are major investigations going on into the contracting activities at Camp Arifjan. The resulting tightening up of procedures has made it that much harder to get anything done. The bureaucratic red tape has increased substantially (I didn’t think that was possible, but it has). So I spend lots of my work time planning various projects and then going through all the necessary procedures to try to make them a reality. Someday my grandkids will ask me “What did you do in the war, Grandpa?” and I’ll say something like “I made sure that DA Form 3953 was filled out and submitted correctly”. Hardly the stuff war movies are made from…

Being stationed in the rear area on what the Wall Street Journal recently called “a sprawling logistics base with fast food restaurants and internet cafes” has pros and cons.

On the pro side, I am reasonably comfortable and safe from the dangers that the troops up north face every day. (The military professional in me cries out that this is not a “pro” at all, but in human terms there are much worse places to be than Camp Arifjan).

On the con side, I am also insulated from the Iraqi and Afghani people, and so I don’t get to experience the positive effects we are having in those countries. Like people at home, I have to rely on the reports of others to learn about what’s going on there. I suspect that I do have more immediate exposure since there are plenty of people here who’ve “crossed the berm” and spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our newspapers and magazines here are also filled with reports, probably more so than those back home. Nonetheless, I feel pretty cut off from the realities of the war.

Maybe that is one reason why pictures like this one really drive home to me why we are here:


Kids in Iraq
Originally uploaded by hkp7fan.

When I saw this photo it immediately made me feel proud to be American, and still does each time I look at it. The hopeful, happy, trusting expressions of the children as they look up to the soldier who is handing out treats while they wait for medical treatment provide the major emotional impact. I also like the way the kids are in focus, but the soldier is blurred and anonymous. In a very visible way, he’s “Any Soldier” (which, by the way, is how a lot of the Care Packages we get here are addressed).

The photo reminds me of the Peggy Noonan article I sent home to my family a couple of weeks ago. These kids will grow up and remember that we were the good guys. And that’s important, regardless of how it turns out politically in the end.

For what it’s worth, we’re winning the war. I’m not sure what the press back home is reporting, as I have limited exposure to it. But it seems pretty clear to me that the security situation has improved dramatically and that Al Qaeda in Iraq is seriously degraded.

In my personal opinion, we are going to have to do something dramatic about Syria and Iran if we are serious about stabilizing this region. It’s disappointing to me that we haven’t done so already.

It just seems so obvious. I was still pretty young, but even at the age of twelve I understood that bombing Cambodia was a good thing, since the communists were using it as a sanctuary from which to attack our forces. If Iran and Syria are providing aid and comfort to our enemies, then they are our enemies. It baffles me that we don’t just spank them severely and make them stop.

Oh well, I’m not in charge of geopolitical strategy, just a few converted warehouses in a rear-area supply base. I’ll keep doing the best I can at that job and maybe next year they’ll put me in charge of the rest of the war. :-)

Mood: Happy
Music: Handel, Concerto No. 4 in F Major