Reflections on the Suck

First off, let me say this is going to be a long post, so get some popcorn and settle in. There’s a pair of inter-related but divergent reasons that the post will be so long. The first of which is that like I said last time, I have a bunch of good pictures and they each bear some explanation. The second is that some of the back story to the pictures sparked the oft ill used neurons for rational thought, and I’ve got somewhat of a diatribe on the state of The Suck rattling around inside my head. Funny things, thoughts that bounce around inside your head. Comedian Lewis Black once joked that it’s not some physical abnormality that causes aneurysms, but instead some thought that has no logical explanation, and thus bounces around inside your head until you’re found dead in your bathroom.

So, in order to keep the thoughts dribbling out of my head in some semblance of well, order, I think I’ll go through the pictures chronologically, and if the diatribe leaks out in between, so be it. If not, I’ll finish up at the end. But then again, that would make sense, and things don’t really make sense over here, so it may turn out that this is all some disjointed ramble. When looked at in retrospect, I will wish I could just blame it on PWI (Posting While Intoxicated), except that while it’s probably just what this whole damn country needs, alcohol is not readily available over here. At least not to me anyway. But enough sidenoting. The first picture comes from waaay back on the 3rd, and was taken by the boss while over in the land of Hajj (one of our nicknames for the IA side). I have seen dust devils this large before while out in AZ, but not this close. It was apparently quite the event:

Next up, we have the lunch which the IA BN Commander threw for us. Mutton and bread with rice, the standard ‘banquet’ dish over here (apparently), same as we had for the previous team’s going away dinner. Standard is everybody stands along both sides of the communal tables, and scoops food with the right hand. No utensils or napkins in sight. This sheep was a lot fattier than the last one, and thus affected some of our team’s digestion a bit more harshly. I pretty much steered clear of the gelatinous stuff, and made out alright. The bread over here is actually wonderful, so getting that soaked in mutton juice and filled with rice is quite the delicacy. First the jundis had to set up:

Then everybody dug in:

We had two patrols, sort of. The first was during daylight hours, and though the following picture and the story behind what’s actually going on could by itself fill a post 3-4 times the size this one looks to be, I can’t / won’t go there.

What I will go into is why we call him “The Juggernaut”. While we were training at Ft Riley, we had a CLS (Combat Livesaver) training lane. During said lane, we were in full battle-rattle, just as he is in the picture above. One of the roleplayers had recieved ‘mortar shrapnel’ in his leg, and therefore couldn’t walk. So, rather than get a couple more guys in the room and buddy-carrying said roleplayer out to the LZ, CPT Daly hoisted the dude into a fireman’s carry and toted him down a flight of stairs and across the training area. A conservative guess would put the guy’s weight at 220+. Later, the moniker was reinforced when he dead lifted our S-6 (who at the time went about 270+ with his gear on) and put him feet first into the back seat of a humvee while training in Kuwait. Mind-boggling.

Of course earlier in the day, he had mistakenly thrown one of the set-screws for our helmet lights away, so he had to go and retrieve it. Little did he know I was toting my camera…

The second patrol was a night mission, and we went out to work with one of the CPs. It was dark. Like wicked dark. I could focus fine through the monocle, but I couldn’t get the camera to focus through it, as there just wasn’t enough light. If you’ll recall the photos I posted from the training range at Ft Riley, they were crisp and clear. 2% illum and overcast means friggin DARK:

Of course when route clearance comes through, they’ve got more lights than the second coming (and rightly so). From inside the CP, it makes for some surreal light shows:

The next day, one of the jundis brought his little sister in to see our Doc at sick-call. She has a scalp issue, so Doc took some high-res photos of her head to send higher for a dermatologist to look at. I waited until that was done and she had put her head-covering back on before I snapped some shots.

She’s 9, and was very shy. [diatribe warning] Why she had suffered with the condition for 2 months before she got brought in to see Doc (she had already seen a local doctor, but only a week earlier) is completely beyond me. One of those things without logical explanation again. But as I said before, things here don’t make sense.

Why are we doing missions with the IA the way we are? Don’t think about it, your head might explode. Difference of cultures? Methinks not. It’s not that they’re apathetic, it’s that they just don’t care. One of our guys (name withheld to protect the innocent) has mentioned that if it came into existence following WWII, they (the IA) don’t need it. I tend to agree. I once heard a LTC attending the AF War College state: “Alexander the Great conquered the known world without the use of a computer. I think we can do this without Powerpoint.” Now I know, it’s not all of them. Some of the
se
guys do get it. A couple of them are pretty sharp. But a lot of them are just existing. What does that mean? I don’t know. I can’t tell yet. I do know it bugs the shit out of me, but I’m not exactly sure why yet. I ran across the blog of another soldier here in country, a LT with a Stryker unit. Completely different flavor of suck where he is, and probably a stronger flavor too. However, I think he’d agree that one of the elephants standing in the room is the complete lack of sense in lots of what happens here. Check out his blog here:LT G. His situation requires a tighter reign on OPSEC stuff, so he’s got nom de plumes for his guys and their AO. He’s a good writer, but be advised his stuff is a bit more flavorful than mine. Not that our conversational English is probably any different, but his use of expletives in the written word is a bit more prolific than mine. Anybody reading this (or his) that has been to the suck will understand. A lot of you will just go “huh?”. It’s ok.

So, in order to segue between the diatribe and the end of this post, I’ll put up a picture of the how. How do I deal with the suck? I work on the calluses on the fingers of my left hand…

Lates. I’m gonna stop thinking now.