Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Month 9 Day 22

Notebook entry
Sgt. Paul Radley a turnover, $250 million tombstone next fiscal year, $100 million ongoing, $500 million upcoming soon

Journal entry
Woke up and stood watch. Went to Tombstone.
The Major really went there to hash out the details of the move, arrange Kalimars o move the 40 foot containers, arrange flat beds for the track hoe, bulldozers, etc. This is a lot of extra troublefor guys that the RCT wants to use as provisional riflemen. One funny episode the Kandak commander blamed some manufactures defect on the reason all of the transmissions were broken in the dump trucks.
I found out the Maj James Blitz’s orders were somehow messed up or incomplete and the he would be returning to the US on Tues.  This meant that I spent most of lunch and the early afternoon doing a turnover with Sgt Paul Radley.  I gave him an overview of the problems that I was facing and told him that I really needed to start with the personnel, once I got decent personnel I could then move on to training them or sending them to training. I told him that my section had basically regressed since I had arrived because of personnel turnover.  I told him that the general signed but ignored PIRs, that they did not drive a collection effort, that the information they took in was merely typed (because they feel that is more official) then signed by the general then two hole punched and put into a binder never to be seen again, with this in mind they do no analysis, no production, and dissemination is limited to voice transmissions over their one HF radio set.
After that I fought the battle of the inbox for a little while.  Did some coordination with the CLB guys who are going with us on the move and then eavesdropped on a meeting that the G-4 was having.  Apparently the us army Corps o engineers briefed that it is in the midst of $100,000,000 worth of projects for helmand and nimruz, about to kick off another $500,000,000 in projects and they are going to be spending $250,000,000 on camp Shorabak, the corps headquarters alone.  They will also be dealing with the operations and maintenance of those contracts until 2014. When the mentors asked who was going to be training them how to use and maintain the facilities that they have the rep smiled and said, you guys. I cannot believe this shit. Especially when some of the projects are to rebuild/move shit that is already in place.  Just like the millions that are being poured into Camp Garmsir even though it is only a temporary facility. 
I also chased down the billet and ID number of an Afghan soldier detained for associating with the TB the Corps is going to talk to MGen Malouk and figure out how they are going to treat this guy.
Came back, ate chow, took a picture of the giant lot of trucks.

On the ride back from the trucks dinar asked me “are people in America like they are here? I mean you can feel how much they hate you when they see your dark skin and when they find out you are a Muslim. It feels terrible.” I told him that people are scared of what they don’t know and if he goes to a place where they never see a brown person, then he could run into trouble, but if he sticks to some of the bigger cities where he will not be special then it would not be a problemexcept possibly at airportss.  I felt pity for him as he said the next words “you know even in the remote parts of Afghanistan people are understanding and forgiving, they have lost sons to the Taliban, sons to the Americans, and they understand, sons die in war.  When I go back to them they tell me ‘you are so lucky to be working for the Americans’ and I say yah, I don’t have the heart to tell them.” 



photos of the hundreds of trucks just baking away in the sun at the higher headquarters.  Each one paid for by the American Taxpayer

No comments:

Post a Comment