Gotta love the line... "Your service must be at least this old..."
Well last weekend was the farewell dinner for our contractor Mark. Due to the relationship he has with the carpet guys, they hosted it. We had all our JFCOM guys and the team from Allied Command Transformation, the NATO command in Norfolk. Karim’s wife, mother and sister-in-law did the cooking. That was one of the best meals we’ve had here. Rice with raisins, beef, flat bread and the best lamb I think I ever ate (fell right off the bone.) Not that I eat a lot of lamb, but having raised them I do enjoy the chance to get back at the little buggers.My favorite theory of warfare is that the side with the most sheep-herders wins. (My second favorite is that the side with the silliest hats loses.) Spend your life around sheep and you become inured to pain, discomfort and disappointment. They also drive you crazy and mean. That’s why the Afghans have done so well, lost of sheep. That’s also why the only two armies that have done any good here were Alexander the Great and the Brits. Lots of sheep-herders up in northern Greece and places like Shropshire and Suffolk. In fact go to the front gate here and you will find Brits and Macedonians guarding the place. Coincidence? I think not.
Mark made it back to Qatar and had some issues suddenly crop up that would have required him to return here if they were not resolved. The response from the officer in charge of the JFCOM “support” team there was basically “not my worry, he’s a contractor.” Now LTC Moore fixed him up from here, and Mark (COL, USA, ret) went home to see his new baby granddaughter. Now having spent a few years as a contractor before Uncle Sam asked me to put the uniform back on full time, I know two things. One is that everyone must leave the military at some point. The second is that there is joy in taking the carefully worded resume of some sanctimonious twit and feeding it into the shredder. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind on.
Was a little bit under the weather middle of last week. I’ve been healthy so far this tour and this wasn’t so bad, just bad enough to convince me to lay low for a day or two.
The Air Force command (CENTAF) has decided that they can’t drink, even if their attached to NATO. I told my Air Force colleague that it was an age thing. Your service had to be at least 75 years old to have a drink.
A small bit of excitement in Kabul, rocket attack somewhere in the vicinity of the US Embassy a couple of nights ago (heard that one) and two IEDS on ISAF convoys late last night. Those attacks apparently triggered the general alarm here. I heard nothing in our out of the way little corner of the base. (Hey, if you can sleep right below the deck of an aircraft carrier, you can sleep through anything.)
We had another rocket warning last night. The siren went off about 1030 and they announced “stay inside and keep your body armor nearby.” Of course I was inside already, and my gear was in the office, so I tried to get back to sleep. They set the siren off about for more times until midnight to say the same thing, but of course we all had to run back out to the door to hear if they were ordering us to our bunkers. I don’t think that anything landed in the city. I know I know, war is heck.
3 Comments