We made it to our FOB. Finally. After months upon months of training, a couple random stops inbound, and a couple really cool helicopter rides (hey, I’d never ridden in one until last month, so they’re cool to me), we arrived. Ft Riley, Funston, Buehring, Taji, FOB O’Ryan. We’ve been here almost 2 weeks, but it feels like we got here yesterday. Without the Sat/Sun weekend here, everything seems to melt together. Today is a down day, and much needed. Patrols to check out our IA counterpart, retarded admin runs to Anaconda… it’s been pretty much assholes and elbows since we hit the ground here.
The upload speeds here are pretty slow, so I’m having to save images with slightly less quality than I’d like, but such is life. I’ve got a video I’m going to try and upload for my next post, but that may or may not work. We’re working on getting high-speed satellite internet, not because there isn’t internet available (obviously), but because we’re a bunch of spoiled bandwidth junkies who can’t stand waiting while browsing the internet. I find that I’ll spend less time ‘surfing’ in the mornings if I can hit each of my daily read sites, read it, and go do something else. The 5-10 second wait between each page update, when reading motorcycle forums is pretty much a buzzkill. Anywho, here are some pictures from our training. I realized when I got here I have zero pictures of the Phoenix Academy at Taji, but don’t really care because I’d rather forget I spent a week of my life trapped in that place anyway.
Here’s a camel we ran into out on the mission rehearsal lanes on Camp Buehring. Moments later it was sniffing our tow-strap.
Here’s Kevin checking out a group of camels that wandered up next to the staging area for the live-fire lanes at Buehring.
Here’s the camel herder at the same spot. He came over and I had my first ‘meet and greet’ in arabic without a translator. A’salaam a’laikum was about all we got out correctly, but we were able to figure out through the ‘point and motion’ method that he owned these camels, and had 20 of them.
These are our trucks. You’ll probably have to click on and retrieve the larger version to even notice that there is indeed a guy standing in the middle of the picture. Chris is on the order of 6′ (I can’t remember if he’s just taller or shorter than me, but we’re close) and you’ll note how these things dwarf him. The turrets are very similar to the ones we had at Funston, i.e. they have armored windows which allow the gunner a wider field of view from a protected position. I like them, but that’s just my $.02
Finally, here are our CHUs (Containerized Housing Units). Basically a shipping container with an AC unit, some doors and a window or two. The ones on the right are all east-west oriented while mine (on the left) is north-south. We’ve got a nice little fire-pit, and between the 2nd and 3rd one on the right there’s a ping-pong room the last team had the KBR guys fabricate for us. The terps (interpreters) are ping-pong wizards, given the amount of time you have in the evenings.
Well that’s it for this post, more to follow as events warrant, or time allows. Video (hopefully) to follow immediately…
Leave a Reply