Yep...I'm busy...so...

So, this morning I get to work and get a gentle reminder from my mother that I haven't posted anything to my blog in almost a month. The whole reason for my beginning a blog was to keep the folks back home up to date on the happenings in and around me. I did really good for a few months, but here lately we have been so busy that I don't know whether I'm coming or going. On top of that I am so close to hitting R&R that I just want to get my work done and go home!

As of tonight I've got 23-24 more days until I leave here headed home for R&R. I've mentioned in the past that 3/4 of the team will be headed home for R&R at the same time. At this point we're like giddy schoolgirls just as excited as you can imagine.

We all feel very fortunate that we were able to schedule our leave during the Christmas/New Year holidays. Most of our military friends will be staying right here and serving right on through the holidays; hopefully each of their families will send them something to make it special. On my first deployment my wife sent an 18" Christmas tree that was already decorated and everything...it sat in my shelter way past Christmas too! It really is the small things that make the holidays special while deployed.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself though, three days from now will be Thanksgiving! We're all really hoping that the dining facilities will have some good turkey and dressing...although they have tried making dressing in the past and is was a monumental failure. On Thursday our office will be slightly manned with each of us spending only a couple hours at work...hopefully the taxpaying public won't mind too much that we're taking the afternoon off!

Just like each of you at home this time of year gets us to thinking about all the things we are thankful for and helps us to put a little perspective on what's important. For myself this year is a bit different because absence from family makes you really appreciate the small things like family pictures on Christmas, watching Christmas Vacation with my brother, and getting together with family to hear the same old stories again that never get old. This year I'm thankful to God for keeping me safe on this deployment, I'm thankful that I have such a wonderfully supportive family, I am thankful to my church family for their love and support, and finally...I'm glad this deployment is 3/4 of the way over!

God bless and ROLL TIDE, Beat Auburn!!!

One step at a time...

For those of you who have never been in this situation one of the things we deployment-prone folks do while on deployment is set a few benchmarks when we get here. Most tours are 12 months long and during that time there is certain to be quite a few things missed, but with each missed birthday or anniversary is just one more benchmark passed. The Team left on 10 April 2010 and for me the marks that I was looking for were as follows:

mid-June...my birthday
mid-July...my anniversary
early-September...football season
late-October...Halloween
late-November...Thanksgiving...just kidding, Alabama/Auburn game!
mid-December...R&R (leave)

I really haven't given a whole lot of thought to the milestones past R&R, I just want to get there first. I assume a good mark will be the Super Bowl, after that we'll have less than a month left here.

My reason for discussing this is because tomorrow marks 200 days of deployment...only 50 more until R&R. We didn't plan for 250 days until R&R, it just worked out that way. By the time we get to mid-tour leave we will have been gone from home for over 8 months and 1 week...entirely too long.

Our office has gotten busy again after the two-week lull that we had for end-of-year closeout. Between work and Alabama football the overall deployment is going fairly well, no complaints outside of the typical Army complaints. It has been interesting in the sense that we are co-located with Air Force and Navy troops, which means that I've had to learn a new language or two. For a while I was in an office that was completely split...1 Army, 1 Air Force, and 1 Navy. We were constantly having to remind one another to stop using acronyms since no one understood them outside of our own service component.

The next exciting thing that is going to happen here is a back-up taping for ESPN of the UA/Miss. State game. ESPN plans to do a live broadcast from Bagram for that game, but just in case there are problems they will be taping ahead of time for the sake of redundancy. Apparently The University sent some Bama gear that we are going to get and there are quite a few Tide Alumni scattered around post. Hopefully I'll be on camera giving a shout-out to my wonderful family!

Thank goodness I'm not paid to blog...

I have realized that if I were paid to blog then my family would go hungry very quick, or Loni would have to remind me to write all the time. It's been just over two weeks since I last updated my blog and there haven't been too many new occurences.

The end of the fiscal year came and went without any major malfunctions. It seems that when it's that late in the game everyone has an emergency need that must get purchased before September 30th...which happens for the most part. When we say "no" a General will often get involved and our no quickly becomes a "sure, I think we can squeeze that in."

We had a pretty amazing BBQ last Sunday to celebrate our end-of-year. SSG Martin and I did most of the prep work and cooking with some help from a couple of our Air Force buddies. We were able to grill steak, chicken, and even lobster tails...it really was wonderful. One of the guys said that day, "if it weren't for all this dust I'd think I was at home." We had a great time cooking out and I think everyone enjoyed their food. In the end there were probably 40-50 people who came and ate, we were literally on the grill for over 4 hours and you can definitely tell it by my sunglasses racoon tan. The good thing about that tan is that everyone else looks just like me, nobody walks around outside without glasses due to the sun and sand.

Today, Daniel and I had the opportunity to go meet a local vendor at our entry control point (ECP-1). The ECP goes right into the town of Bagram and we were able to see some things that we hadn't yet seen on this deployment. Even though we were not together on our trip to Iraq we did much of the same tasks with a lot of convoying in/around the country as a primary occupation.

I was just telling Loni last night how I hadn't seen a child in 6 months; I finally saw a few today. This one little boy walked right up and in the best English he could muster he asked for my pencil, which I gladly gave to him. He gave me a huge smile, a thumbs-up, and then ran off screaming about the pencil to his friends...too bad I didn't have enough for them all. It was the same situation in Iraq, the kids wanted to crawl all over you and wanted anything from pens to water to whatever was on your uniform and shiny. It's amazing how many of these people have so little that a child is overwhelmed by the gift of a pencil.

I find that it's easy to become somewhat jaded dealing with the locals and having to endure their business practices and lack of the English language...I'm not saying they should know English, I'm simply saying that their lacking English is a huge source of frustration. Seeing those kids today helps to put things into perspective quickly. I don't directly see the good that happens outside the wires of Bagram, but I pray that my being here helps these children in some way in the future.

That's about it for now...the Tide is 5-0 and they are coming on tomorrow night at midnight so we'll be having a big party (cokes & chips) to watch them roll over South Carolina on the way to #14.

Why is my hut shaking?

Just last week in all of one day we went from having daytime temperatures in the 90s to all of the sudden it's not getting above 72 degrees. This sounds wonderful, but it's actually been quite cool around here. The nights are similar to what we experienced when we first arrived in country, hovering in the 50s. We have still been able to spend a little time clearing our minds every couple of nights sitting outside on top of the bunker watching the planes land...we just have to wear more clothes now.

Earlier this week I experienced my very first real earthquake and had absolutely no idea what it was. Once while in college I was awakened around 3:00 a.m. to what I thought was an earthquake, but it turned out there was a cave-in at a coal mine in a nearby town. I think I remember the cave-in registering around a 3.0 on the Richter Scale. The earthquake we had this week registered 6.3 on the Richter Scale and was centered about 125 north of us and apparently the epicenter was 120 miles deep in the Earth's surface...amazing how technology can pinpoint such a thing. Anyway, around midnight the b-hut I'm in started shaking like crazy...I thought someone was just playing a trick or something. Mom basically told me that me being in a war zone is bad enough, she can't deal with that plus earthquakes!

We're working like mad right now as September 30th is the end of the fiscal year, which means all of our contracts must be complete by then. This will keep us really busy for the next week or so. On the other hand, the General is coming in tomorrow (allegedly) so we've been busy cleaning for that as well...good times.

The 1960th as a whole is feeling pretty good right now because we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel...no it's not the end of the deployment, but rather our R&R is coming up. CPT Campbell will be heading home in the next week or so, the rest of us have about another 80 days or so. College football season will get us through those 80 days much quicker than expected.

More running and a prayer request

I'll start on a serious note tonight by asking for my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to lift up one of our Airmen. As I've mentioned, the place I work is a truly joint environment with all services represented. The female Air Force troop that sits beside me at work begun feeling ill two nights ago; loss of vision, numbness, incoherent speech, and dizziness. She was taken to the base hospital and subsequently flown to Germany for further observation. I ask each of you to lift her up in your prayers.

Now, on a somewhat lighter note, this past week was the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America. Here on base we had the 9/11 Never Forget Run which just happened to be 9.11k or 5.65 miles. Just like my last run, my goals were to (1) finish, and (2) keep all miles less than 10-minute in pace. Right off the bat I realized that my legs were not quite 100% recuperated from the half-marathon the previous week. I felt really sluggish!

Let me also say that Ramadan ended on Thursday night before our Saturday morning run. The 3-5 days immediately following Ramadan are called the Eid holidays, which is like rolling Christmas/New Year/Mardi Gras/4th of July all into one big holiday. The locals basically eat, drink, and shoot rockets in a drunken stupor for 5 days or so. The rockets changed our running route on Saturday morning, we weren't allowed to run close to the perimeter. Anyway, the last minute change also changed the run distance from 5.65 to 6.4 miles without any of our knowledge...no wonder my time was horrible. In the end, I met my goals once I found out the distance changed so drastically.

Other than running a lot we're still working crazy hours and staying extremely busy here at the end of the fiscal year.

More later.

The Air Force Marathon

Each year in September the Air Force along with a few corporate sponsors hosts the Air Force Marathon. This is the half-marathon that I've been writing about over the past month or so. Saturday, the 4th, was the half-marathon and along with myself there were at least 999 more knuckleheads silly enough to run 13.1 miles in the name of fun. The size of the base determines whether they host a 10k, half-marathon, or full marathon...thank the Lord Bagram could only withstand the half!

We began our run at 5:00 a.m. on the nose and the course took us 6.55 miles out around the airfield and then back. The north side of our base actually has some pretty views of the countryside, we could see the mountains really well in the distance as well as a few of the local homes/huts. Since we ran around the airfield we had the opportunity to see quite a few really interesting aircraft take off and/or land.

Before I began I established two goals; (1) finish the race, and (2) average 10 minutes per mile for the duration of the run. I somehow managed to do both! An exact 10-minute average would have been 2:13:00, it took me 2:07:18. When I finally did come to a stop I wasn't sure that my legs would support me all the way back to my hut, they were quite wobbly and weak. Today is Tuesday and my legs are at 90%.

The most interesting thing that I heard while running was from a young Sergeant whom I kept passing and subsequently being passed by. He would run and then walk, I felt like he was the hare and of course I was the tortoise. Anyway, he passes me once while I'm jogging along and says "come on Sir, only 5 more miles!" If I weren't so weak I think I would've kicked him, but I'm pretty sure my legs wouldn't allow it.

As far as running goes, this coming Saturday is the Patriots Day 9.11k (just over 5 miles). Only two of us ran in the half-marathon from my office, I think there are six planning to run in this one. If nothing else I'll have extra t-shirts when I get home!

General update...

Thank goodness we cleaned for three days...the General was a "no show" for the weekend.

Silver Lining = at least the place is clean and painted!