In which we learn our Castle Correspondent can put some wood to the ball, and that not being able to drink apparently means the Air Force can't play ball, either.
Most importantly, we learn how to control staff officer over-population...
I wanted to talk a little more about the 9-11 ceremony we had. As I said it was at night here, to coincide with the time of the attack. We had three speakers, all officers who had been in the Pentagon on that day. Two things that were said really struck me, the first was that we are now walking around the same areas of Afghanistan where Osama used to freely go, and the second was the mention of a recent suicide bombing in a market down south. The only difference between that attack and 9-11 he said, was of scale. The same evil and the same intent were present on both days. We lit candles afterwards, and when the crowd left the gardens there was dead silence, and most kept there candles burning all the way out and back through the camp. I’d call it a steely resolve mixed with sadness.We had GEN Smith, JFCOM commander come for a visit last weekend. He came to see how the support was going and was really pleased. He gave me one of his personal four star coins (which a certain person, and he knows who he is, can still trump.) [Preen -the Armorer] When getting ready for the visit our boss was trying to put a briefing together for the general and was trying to get a slide off the intranet which he couldn’t download. Someone said “just screen capture it and port it into PowerPoint.” And he replies “how do I do that?” Now saying PowerPoint in front a bunch of staff officers is like spraying catnip. Three seconds later there were four of us looking over his shoulder offering advice.
“Control V then paste”
“You need to crop it”
“You have to get the picture toolbar”
There is a type of IED called a “come-along” which is designed as bait to sucker you into the kill zone. If the Taliban wanted to hurt the staff they should use a badly formatted PowerPoint brief.
“Courier New? Nobody uses that font fo…BOOM…”
The Air Force had a sixtieth anniversary celebration. Part of that was inter-service softball. I played even though I fall in the casual player category and never really did it a lot. Now put a lot of naturally competitive military people out in the field, playing for the honor of their service, and things get serious really quickly. There were quite a number of us older types limping around for the next few days, from trying to play like kids again.
For the record the scorecard in the Kabul Cup is Army 2-0, Navy/Marines 1-1 and Air Force 0-2. We were pretty close in the game we lost to Army, but had a few bad breaks. We sent a couple of players back down to the minors in Khandahar and Tirin Khot to work on their basics.
My line of the night:
Air Force Captain “Hey are you going to the cookout tonight?”
Me: “Sure, are you guys going to have birthday cake? Because we gave you your spanking this afternoon.”
Probably time for one more update before the fun ends.
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