Small Victories
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This place will make you crazy. If you weren’t crazy, senile, absent-minded or impossible to deal with upon arrival, a little time out here will bring out the beast.
That said, it’s been quite an interesting experience as a whole. Lots of surreal sights, privileged information, yadda yadda, and it has been something to truly appreciate. The surreal element of the experience and the place being new has blown over, yet it still doesn’t feel quite right. Someone, a generally happy and sarcastic guy and a tenured employee of 5+ years, said something the other day that really hit once it simmered for a while. He said, “I realized after the first few months of being here, that none of this shit is real. This isn’t the real world or a real job, this isn’t our home, these aren’t our friends that we’re standing around smoking with. It’s just not real. Any of it.”
The validity of his statement may not have been immediate, but after realizing how some of the happenings around here pass, the wisdom of his statement became quite clear. Let’s review: You receive 5 days off without pay as punishment for going in reverse in a vehicle without a ground guide, 7 days off for losing a handheld radio, 3 days (each) off for losing any of the 5-7 ID/privilege cards they issue upon arrival, a visit to the medic for a band-aid requires a full examination followed by interrogation… the list goes on and on…
There is actually a form we have to fill out every day that states our business doing whatever task it is we’re doing- be it driving to somewhere or working on a construction job, there’s even a form for using Windex to clean glass. It’s absolutely asinine when you have to fill out paperwork TO fill out paperwork. It seems as though any of our jobs is composed of 80% adhering to rules (like wearing a reflective belt at night or using a ground guide when backing up or having a hat that says our company’s name anywhere you go) and 20% actual work. Our job is to comply. Maybe do a little work. But only with the proper gloves on.
As a matter of fact I’ll be damned if the Base Manager has caught me doing ANY of the productive stuff I’ve done, but he’s set me straight 3 TIMES on having a hat on in the DFAC (dining hall) or smoking in a non-designated area or other seemingly trivial things. I don’t hold that against him, that’s his job, it’s just a very backwards system from the norm.
Anyway, among all the retarded rules set in place by times past where one person messes it up for everybody, my personal ‘crazy’ has begun to sneak back up again. It’s notorious for doing this around 3-4 months after I settle into any new environment. This definitely complicates things in a place where hostile rockets are landing 3 and 4 times a week, live in a tent with 7 other guys and you go outside only to be scorched by the sun (it was 115˚ today) and get covered in dust in seconds. Breathe it in…
Regarding the crazy, there is actually a full-time licensed counselor on site that is supposedly confidential, that I’ve contemplated seeing. Thing with that is, our living situation here is close. You shower with up to 3 other guys every night, live with 7 others in your tent 4 feet away from 8 other guys in other tents in every direction. It becomes clearer and clearer why free therapy is such a necessity.
Then there are your “Bob”s. These are retards that you work whose mere existence makes your stomach turn. These are the folks that you are out the door and down the street when you see them coming because they are impossible to work with. Ugh.
With all the BS, all the frustrations, the little rumors that float around and all the hearsay, the only thing I can do to stay sane is focus on the day to day. Maybe tomorrow a bird will fly into the windshield of my company-issued vehicle and I’ll get fired for being in the bird’s way and compromising the ‘mission’, maybe I’ll snap and punch Bob in the head and be detained by the MP’s before seeing my flight home, maybe I’ll be having the most interesting and fulfilling day in a while and out of nowhere a rocket will fall out the sky and blow me into pieces. Day to day. The only way. It has seemed like a small victory every day just to wake up to my weak ass alarm clock, on time, and get to work to find out I’m actually needed for a series of tasks that day. Small victory when I can tell what the food is that I’m putting in my body from the DFAC. Small victory especially when I put the last 12 on the timesheet for the month to total up my 336 hours for the month.
Luckily, I haven’t failed to continue seeing the good things that exist everywhere out here, all those little things that brought a smile to my face when I arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The swirl of foreign languages and foreign ways, the dirty-thought-inspiring Dutch soldier girls, the HMMMV’s and the bike riding, machine gun toting US troops sent here to save the ‘world’…
Working directly with Afghan locals and building a relationship with a few in particular, experiencing their ways and making them sick telling them about ours has been a fun endeavor also. I went up to a Swiss soldier the other day and said “Hey man, love your knives”. It is indeed the little things, like friends twice your age with mortgages and families sharing a sarcastic laugh about a perverted joke.
It’s people from third-world countries with names composed of 90% consonants and people that answer “No problem sir” no matter whether you ask them how they are doing today or what is the square root of 53,809 because they hardly speak English, but they speak 6 other languages. It’s rockets that land 100 yards from your tent and smash through Hescos but don’t explode. It’s absolutely chocolate cheesecake day in the DFAC. It’s a picture that’s truly worth it’s fabled “thousand words”. It’s finding a coin from a foreign place on the ground and shining it up. It’s spending your entire day off building a room in your tent with wood you dug out of the trash and wondering why there are ants all over then laughing in the realization.
It’s using ‘in’ instead of ‘at’, ‘on’, and ‘to’ because the foreign language you’re learning only uses one main preposition and sounding like a retard speaking your own language…
None of this is real. End of surmon.