Life at Camp As Sayliyah

Friday 10 October 2008
1400

I know my family and friends are wondering what it’s like here, and since I’ve been here nearly two weeks I am beginning to get enough of a picture to describe the place that will be my home for the next year plus.

Despite all my griping about the crummy internet access, this is a nice post, and will be a good assignment. As the post commander said in our newcomer’s briefing, “If you are going to be stationed in the AOR, this is the place to be.” It’s a good deal.

First of all, the base seems to be run better than Camp Arifjan, where I spent the past two years. This could be due to a lot of factors – I don’t know for sure why it is and wouldn’t want to speculate here. But it presents a much more military appearance – things are much more uniform, squared away, and in better shape overall. It is a much smaller post (perhaps ¼ the size), so it didn’t take too long to learn where things were.

It is also a smaller community and I’ve already gotten a sense of the impact that has on operations. You see the same people over and over, at work, after work, at meals, etc. It was like that at Camp Arifjan to an extent, but I think there were more people moving in and out there so it didn’t have quite the same feel - you had a chance to be a bit more anonymous. This feels the way I imagine a frontier Army post would have felt in the 19th century American west.

CAS, as it is called for short, is basically a large rectangle enclosed by walls, berms, and barbed wired with the usual force protection measures at gates, etc. At one end of the base is a collection of dedicated offices and living quarters, the PX and associated concessions, gym, pool, post office, etc. The rest of the base is mostly large warehouses that are used for various purposes. I work in a small building at the other end of the base, and also live at that end of the base in a converted warehouse.

There is a good bus service that goes all over post at regular intervals, so it’s easy to get around. It’s even easier to get around since I have the use of a vehicle. My NCO and I share a nice GMC NTV (non-tactical vehicle). There’s also a Toyota pickup that is for the general use of the office. I sort of adopted that my first week, and today is actually my first day with the GMC. It’s been odd to have a car at my disposal, but I think I can get used to it if I try. :-)

The construction of the barracks is interesting. Unlike my barracks at Arifjan, which was regular frame and gypsum board construction inside a warehouse (basically a building within a building), these are made from converted shipping containers stacked inside warehouses. They refer to them as “Cormexes”, but I’m not sure why. The shipping containers are called “Conexes” when used for their original purpose, so perhaps it’s derived from that name somehow.

When I was home on leave I pointed out some shipping containers and told my kids that was what I was going to live in when I got to Qatar. I’m sure it seemed pretty odd to them. I mean, after all, does this look like home?

Metal Shipping Containers

It’s actually not quite the bare metal box you might imagine. Here are some photos of the inside of my room:

This is taken from the front door. The empty bed to the left is my storage area.

The desk is more of a table that folds down, but I want to get a regular one.

I got a broom handle to use as a clothes rack. Things don't dry out unless they are exposed to the air flow from the AC.

Current and future reading material.

I brought my backpacker picture and Robert Service poem ("The Men That Don't Fit In") from home this time.

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The room is made from an 8’x20’ container, so it’s roughly twice the size of my former 7’x11’ room. It is furnished as a double room, but since I’m a field grade officer I get one to myself (RHIP). So it’s a nice upgrade from the telephone booth I lived in for the past two years. The shipping doors have been replaced with a regular door and window, and the inside has a liner installed (kind of like a pickup truck bedliner) that gives me white walls and ceiling, with a linoleum floor. It has several outlets, a couple of lights, and air conditioning. The bed has a nice firm new mattress (it had been replaced when I got back off leave and I had to take it out of the plastic), and with my memory-cell foam pad on top it is very comfortable.

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Well, OK - it's a big metal box. It might seem kind of stark and bare compared to a house back home, but compared to a cot in a tent , it’s a palace.

One thing I don’t have is a refrigerator. At AJ they were provided in every room, but housing here does not do that. I am looking into whether it is a capacity issue with the room wiring or just a budget issue. If it’s allowed I plan to buy my own, since I enjoy having cold drinks within reach. I wonder, though, how much time I’ll actually spend in there since I don’t have an internet connection. I guess we’ll see.

These containers are lined up next to each other and stacked on top of each other, with permanent stairways and walkways built for the second floor. Here is a photo of my “hallway”:

The containers are stacked two high just like in the container yard, only here they have walkways to get to the second level.

The DFAC (dining facility) here is awesome. Last year it won the award for being the best DFAC in the entire Army worldwide, and I can see why. No complaints about the food here. The only quibble I have so far is that instead of steak and seafood night on Wednesday, they have it at lunch. Since I am in the habit of taking some fruit and a power bar while at breakfast and eating them for lunch at my desk, this means I either have to change my routine on Wednesdays or else miss that meal, which is kind of a highlight for me. The first week I went ahead and went there for lunch, but this week I just forgot since it doesn’t even cross my mind to go out for lunch. What a dilemma – do you feel sorry for me yet? ;-)

There is a pretty nice gym (which also houses the video take-out place and a combination Orange Julius/Dairy Queen. I hadn’t had an Orange Julius in thirty years! I had one last night and it brought back memories of my friend Eric, who first introduced me to them in high school.

The office building area at the north end of the post has quite a bit of green vegetation. There are wide expanses of grass, several large trees, and quite a few smaller trees, flowering bushes, and flower beds. You can hear a lot of birds singing when you walk through there, and depending on the breeze you can actually smell the flowers and “green smell”. What a welcome change from the sand, rocks, concrete, and hot metal that makes up the rest of the environment! It’s like an oasis.

The PX is not as large or as well-stocked as the one at AJ, but that is to be expected since we are not as large a post. There are lots of things I was used to that they don’t have, but the big difference here is that I can go off post to find things. My first foray off post was a quest for honey to put in my morning tea. Not only did I find honey, I found my favorite brand – Sue Bee!

Sue Bee Honey from the local mall. The label on the other side is in English.

So I don’t think I will lack for any comforts I may want. It’s a far cry from a FOB or a COP in Iraq or Afghanistan. I thought I’d used up all my “good deal time” in Kuwait, but this is even better.

One thing that makes CAS different is that among other military activities, it is the R&R center for the whole AOR. There is a constant rotation of people here on four-day passes from Iraq and Afghanistan. The USO has a large center which is colocated with the MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) offices in a building right across the street from my office. It has a restaurant, an Irish Pub, and a wine bar. It has a large central area with a stage for bands and other shows, lots of large screen TV’s with perpetual football and basketball games on, darts, pinball, pool, bowling, video game consoles, reading rooms with comfy couches and hundreds of books, a computer area with desktop machines as well as two wireless networks for personal laptops (that’s where I am now). There is also a snack bar with free snacks (for the R&R people , not for me), a Green Beans coffee, and a lounge with a large-screen TV showing movies 24x7.

MWR also organizes local trips for the R&R people. We can go on them if there is room, but the R&R people have priority for obvious reasons. There is also a program where you can sign up to sponsor R&R people and take them downtown to go shopping and sightseeing. I plan to do that once I know my way around a bit.

I am just beginning to get my arms around my job now that I am pretty much finished in-processing. My day off is going to be on Fridays, since that is the day our contractors don’t work (Friday is the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Sunday). So I’ll take Friday as a personal day, and then use Saturday for catching up on work, professional development/education as well as sponsoring R&R people to go downtown sometimes.

One thing that surprised me when I went to go off post by myself is that there is not a map of Qatar to be had anyplace on post. The PX at AJ had maps and guidebooks to many Middle Eastern countries, but here they have nothing. Kind of ironic, since we weren’t allowed off post in Kuwait but here we can just drive out the gate if we have the proper ID and pass. So now I have to try to find a map and guidebook downtown at the mall. Hmmm….what’s wrong with this picture?

When I went to work last Saturday, I was surprised to see that I was out of uniform. I went in wearing my ACU’s like any other day, and found that everyone else was wearing jeans and polo shirts with the CAS logo and embroidered name, rank, and department. Each unit or activity has their own distinctive color – ours is red because that is the Engineer color. This tradition is something different that I’ve never seen before, and I like it! Not wanting to be the odd man out, I immediately went to the PX and had one made for me. So here I am in my Saturday uniform:

Tonight is Thursday, which they tell me is a wild and crazy night downtown (like Friday at home, I guess). I didn’t really feel like going off post tonight, but I definitely plan to go out exploring a bit tomorrow. I don’t have any specific destination in mind, except maybe a coffee shop at the mall for high-speed internet access. Mostly I just want to get my bearings and get a sense of where things are. In case it’s confusing, this post was written on Thursday night but posted on Friday.

I’m actually sitting in the mall area at Al Udeid Air Base again. The wireless connection here is awesome – literally ten times faster than the one at CAS. This time Popeye’s Chicken is open, so I think I’ll have some for lunch. I have to get the vehicle back so my NCO can go out on the town tonight. This should work out well – I am not a “night life” person and could care less about going downtown at night, and that’s pretty much all he wants to do off post. “Jack Spratt could eat no fat….”

That is a summary of my impressions of life at Camp As Sayliyah so far. Like I said, despite my extreme frustration with the internet situation, overall it is a very nice post and is as good a place to be as there can be in this AOR. If the commo people come through on their promise to upgrade the internet, even that situation might improve!

Mood: Happy
Music: Atreyu – Ex’s and Oh’s

How do you say “Qatar”?

Tuesday 7 October 2008
2130

I always used to pronounce the name of this country as “Ka-TAR”, with the emphasis on the second syllable (like “guitar”). Then, when I was stationed in Kuwait, I heard everybody pronouncing it as “Cutter”. I went on saying “Ka-TAR”, because I thought they were just being ignorant.

As it turns out, I was the ignorant one. Once I got assigned here, I wanted to pronounce it correctly so I looked it up. Sure enough, the dictionary said that the emphasis is on the first syllable, so it’s “KA-tar” (which, when you say it quickly, sounds a lot like “Cutter”). So I trained myself to pronounce it “KA-tar”, even though it seemed unnatural. I just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “Ka-TAR”. When I went home on leave, many people commented on how I said it and I took the opportunity to explain it and “correct” them on the pronunciation.

Now since “correct” was in quotes above, you can probably see it coming…it turns out that wasn’t quite right, either! Once I got here I heard it being pronounced differently – more like I had heard it before, but not exactly. So I asked my sponsor and got the explanation that it is actually pronounced by the locals as “KAH-TAR”, with an almost equal emphasis on both syllables. There is probably some dictionary symbol to show that, but I don’t know what it is. For all I know that’s what my dictionary actually said and I just misunderstood the symbol.

I found this out a few days ago and was planning to write about it here, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. Then today I was in a newcomer’s briefing, and I heard one briefer use all three pronunciations within the space of about ten minutes. That was when I decided that it doesn’t really matter, since people are going to know where you’re talking about regardless.

Can you say “Qatar”? I knew you could….


Mood: Happy to finally get on the internet while I still have some battery power left
Music: Whatever loud music they are playing at the USO that drowns out my headphones

Qatari Five-O

Monday 6 Oct. 2008
2000

Well, today is my birthday. “The big five oh”, as they say, hence the title. I guess I should be feeling introspective and waxing philosophical, but I’m not. I’m just tired. :-)

I have been getting settled in pretty well and getting myself more or less un-jet lagged. Last night was the first night that I actually slept through most of the night. I’ll post some photos and a description of my room later on, but for now I just want to get a few things done while I have the internet connection. I will say that I have nearly twice as much room as I had in Kuwait, which is very nice indeed.

Camp As Sayliyah has a lot of positive things, but one huge disappointment – the internet service here really sucks. I thought that being a rear-area base and also the R&R post, it would have great services, but it doesn’t. The internet service is slow and unreliable, and worst of all, is not available in the barracks. I have to go out to the USO or the gym to get a connection, and so my after-hours activities and routines are totally disrupted. I think maybe that’s one reason I am still so tired – I can’t get anything done because I spend hours and hours sitting in one of those locations struggling with the internet trying to accomplish what should be a five-minute task. I tried talking on Skype and it didn’t work too well. I haven’t tried Yahoo IM yet but I’m not optimistic. And forget gaming altogether….

I guess I didn’t know how good I had it at Camp Arifjan in that regard. If I could leave and go back to Kuwait, I’d do it in a heartbeat just for that one reason alone. But I’m stuck here and have to make the best of it. There are other things that make life here more relaxed and potentially interesting, but nothing that makes up for the feeling of disconnectedness caused by crappy internet service.

I’ve been downtown a couple of times already. What a novelty to be able just to drive out the gate and go to the mall! It’s a lot like Kuwait, although things in general seem to be a bit better kept – neater and tidier. It’s very cosmopolitan, with a mix of people in traditional Arab dress as well as more westernized attire. We went to the mall for some small stuff but also looking for a desk for my room. There is a little fold-out table on the wall of my room, but I plan to remove it and install a desk there, with a bookshelf above it.

Well, I’m afraid I just don’t feel very voluble this evening. I keep falling asleep in my chair, so I guess I’d better go do that in my bed! I was planning to go online and play a game for awhile for my birthday, but maybe I’ll watch a movie instead.

More soon, once I’m just a little more settled in as well as better-rested.

Mood : Tired
Music: Franz Danzi - Wind Quintets