Well, as usual I am quite behind and have some catching up to do on my mission and adventure documentation. That will be an undertaking for yet another day. Instead, I will spend a little while recounting some of the more minor but meaningful moments of my journey thus far.
VOLLEYBALL
The first thing that comes to mind is volleyball. Who knew that volleyball is huge is Afghanistan!? In many villages comprised of mud homes and makeshift power lines, there are well constructed volleyball courts where the villagers have very competitive games and tournaments. And they are really good! We built a volleyball court behind our headquarters building and all the staffers would play for an hour or so daily to blow off steam and get out of the office. On quite a few occasions my boss actually ordered me to leave my office and go play despite my protests that I had an arm-length to-do list. Soon soldiers from other units came to join in and even some of the Afghan civilians working on our base. That is when we discovered they have mad volleyball skills! They were spiking it in people's faces, playing great defense...it was incredible and wildly entertaining to watch. Soon all the regular players had nicknames for their habits or quirks. Baby cakes, the terminator, franchise, beast, salmon (for always being in the net lol), 59 chevy (our old, grumpy, but loveable in a grandpa way, headquarters first sergeant), Paparazzi (me, more of a general reference to my job...Sergeant major started it by calling me Paparazzi 9 all the time), etc. We started having more and more injuries as people got a little too intense and competitive so we had to make special rules to tone it down a bit. We had one guy break his arm, another his finger, one torn ligament, and some other gashes and scrapes. Everyone, including the battalion commander, loved playing so much though, that when the safety officer added a "volleyball" section to the accidents slide the entire room erupted in objection, arguing he should just call it "recreation" and "what is your deal!? are you TRYING to get volleyball playing banned for us like sports are banned for the infantry or something!?" The LT just blinked back through his thick glasses and shrugged saying he would fix it. Our battalion commander was definitely hilarious to watch play. He is extremely competitive and high energy but he somehow always ended up on losing teams and he would get so frustrated. Threatening the LTs on the other team with physical training retribution if they made their serves or throwing his hat down in disgust when someone on his team would miss. All in fun.
INTERNATIONAL TRASH TALK AND BONDING
I have had the opportunity to directly work with the German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Afghan, and Finnish armies, thus far, and that has been one of the most fascinating aspects of my tour. And if it wasn't interesting enough observing the way they behave and do business on my own, listening to them talk trash and poke fun at each other is even more entertaining. Germans have a reputation for being stiff and robotic. A Swedish officer told me a story of how a few German lower enlisted guys were working on bolting something to a wall with a power tool. He explained with great animation how they they were robotically fastening in one bolt after the other until one made a mistake and went right through his had. According to the Swede, this soldier just looked at it without expression, and continued bolting as if nothing ever happened. The Norwegians talked trash about the Latvians and their lack of organization. And so on and so on. All of it is generally friendly and not mean. Just poking fun at the differences. My commander and I reminisced one time about a joint mission we did with the Norwegians. I guess one of the guys got hot during the foot patrol and stopped in the middle of a questionable village to unzip the bottom half of his pants and convert them into to man capris. He finished the mission in his very European looking capris, his pale legs beaming in contrast to his GIANT flak vest and goggles. The Norwegians laughed as a few of them told me about their trip to America and how they were taken to an interrogation room in one of our airports because they were suspected for trying to "sneak" into the country. The Norwegians explained the Americans questioning them thought Norway was some poor European country where the life was harsh and uncivilized. They laughed explaining that Norway is actually one of the wealthiest countries on the face of the earth and the crime rate is one of the lowest, etc. The Swedes that I worked with offered me a bracelet off one of their own wrists that they said they had made with their unit colors and a clasp that has an image of a reindeer, their symbol. I was greatly moved by the gesture. I didn't know at the time that our task force would end up working very closely with them and some would even become great friends. I had nothing so special to give in return so I asked my Commander if we could give them one of our task force coins to show our gratitude and he agreed. On another international note, I have begun a patch collection, swapping my unit patch with any international forces I get to work with. I have a quite a few now and I have had to ask my Sergeant Major for more unit patches repeatedly because I have run out of my own patches to wear. He has now cut me off and I had to order some on my own. It is really neat to explain to people that it is an American Engineer patch and watch them look at it with pride on their shoulder after giving me theirs.
WINDMILLS
My favorite patch, hands down, is the one I got from my German friend in the Regional PsyOps (psychological operations) Support Team. She is a Captain who I worked with for a message campaign I did in a relatively hostile (at the time) city called Ghormach (more about that mission in another post). We spent a week together there with her two Afghan journalists and became good friends. One day I guess I was lost in thought and didn't realize how obvious it was because she asked me what was wrong and caught me a little off guard. I explained that I was just a little frustrated about having to explain to our own forces why information operations are so important when that time and energy should be spent on the target audience. She nodded and told me that it is one of the most difficult parts of the job. She said, many German PsyOps units have windmills on their patches because that is what we do...fight windmills like Don Quixote. We fight invisible giants in intangible battles that our own forces don't believe in most of the time and we have to convince commanders it is worthwhile, let alone the people we are actually trying to get to believe or have hope in their forces. We have a mission that seems impossible in every way most of the time but on we fight. I thought for a moment. What she said resonated so deeply with me. It felt like she was describing my very existance. A person always fighting battles of principal that others say are pointless and only hurt me politically in the end. I can never accept settling for a politically safe move when I know something isn't right. It is also another reason I probably won't last very long in the Army. People who can't put politics before principal rarely do, it seems. After our time at Ghormach and our discussion, she always signed her emails to me, "keep fighting those windmills!" Now, when I'm frustrated or emotionally exhausted from being so invested, I think about her words and it gives me strength. She left the country recently and emailed me to say goodbye. I told her what an impact she had made on me and that I would never forget her and she expressed that the feeling was mutual. I hope I see her again someday.
THE BAN
"Green on Blue" (Afghan soldiers turning on ISAF sodliers) incidents have become more frequent in the last couple weeks and all of RC-North were been ordered to halt partnership activities for a period of time due to the threat. Most of the work I do involves partnership in some way so it was strange. An entire arm of our mission set was been chopped off suddenly. I actually had an Armed Forces Network reporter visiting to cover a bunch of partnership stuff but we had to send him home early because the missions he was going to go on were canceled. BUMMER. It is sad because that is the fundamental purpose of infiltrating Afghan forces and launching attacks on us from within...disrupting the bond of tentative trust that has been established and halting the training of Afghan security forces. That is what is happening, at least temporarily. Time is already so precious since an end date has been established. Watching the media coverage of the attacks and the ban and everything has been painful. You often don't get a true glimpse of how distorted a picture the media presents compared to what is really going on but that has been very apparent to me since I've been here. This situation has been a perfect example. The sound bites and taglines heavily slanted toward one bias or another make it so that anyone reading it without background information of the real situation gets a biased impression even without reading the article.
WALL OF WISDOM
Early in my deployment I was reading a short book my parents sent me that had inspirational quotes. I have always been a fan of short word groupings that have the awesome power to influence a persons outlook, attitude, and mood and have often made lists of my favorite sayings and quotes in the past. I decided to share this time and posted a large white paper outside my office door titles "LT Ramos' wall of wisdom." Many laughed at it at first scoffing at the idea that I, being so young and a lieutenant, could have wisdom. Nevertheless, each day I typed out a few quotes and taped them to the wall. Soon people started stopping in the halls and to read the quotes on the wall. Each time I would walk out of my office and see someone standing there reading I felt a little hope that maybe of the positive tidbits would be able to better their day. Soon, other officers and soldiers started printing out their own favorite quotes and adding them to the board. It became a place for people to share their positive insights. When I moved to Camp Marmal I had to take my paper down as we packed everything up and closed down Camp Deh Dadi II but it still stand in my memory as a simple thing I am proud of. The wall was nearly completely filled when I took it down and the picture here shows the project mid-stride.
MOVING TO MARMAL
As those of you who have read the previous posts know, I deployed in February and my first home in Afghanistan was Camp Deh Dadi II in Regional Command-North, Afghanistan. Originally Camp Spann was considered Deh Dadi I but it was renamed in honor of Johnny Michael "Mike" Spann, a paramilitary operations officer with the CIA who was the first American killed in combat in the now ongoing operation in Afghanistan. Camp Deh Dadi was first described to me via teleconference with the advance party that deployed ahead of our main body as "a postage stamp sized s***hole." Really, I didn't think it was bad at all and it was certainly much nicer than many of the other camps I have been to in RC-North. It was not too small, not too big, had relatively nice facilities and wasn't terribly over crowded. As our main body prepared to head home in September, those of us that had been selected to stay on as part of the "TAC," responsible for maintaining continuity of leadership for the U.S. Engineers in the North until a replacement could be identified, prepared to move to Camp Marmal. Marmal is owned by the Germans and serves as the headquarters for the region. It is large, very spaced out, and over crowded. It is nestled near Mazar-e Sharif, a fairly affluent, safe, well educated area of Afghanistan, and has not been attacked directly for years. The tent I live in there is basically the same as the one at DDII but the restroom, chow hall, office, etc facilities are much more spread out. I later flew over DDII and was shocked to see how barren the old place is, now completely stripped. We handed the shell of it over to the Afghan National Army but I don't think they have begun using it much yet because there is no well for water on site and they don't have a logistical set-up for transporting large amounts of water in the area yet. Marmal has a Norwegian pizza place I am huge fan of, a German restaurant that serves Schnitzel and even a German Club called "Planet Mazar" that houses a bar (with only near-beer for Americans but the real thing for most of the Europeans) and a DJ certain nights. It has a beautiful view of some mountains and is really overall a nice place.
PROMOTION
Beyond my dutiful reasons for extending, the fact that I would be able to get my first Army promotion in a combat zone was a happy coincidence. The promotion from 2nd Lieutenant to 1st Lieutenant is basically automatic after 18 months in as long as you don't screw up too badly or get flagged for something. Nevertheless, it comes with a nice pay bump and a little bit (very little lol) of credibility so I was excited. I became eligible on November 13, 2012 but my orders didn't come through until the 20th. I tried to refrain from driving our admin. staff completely nuts during that week but I was quite anxious because the remainder of the 841st Engineer Battalion, with whom I deployed and extended with, was preparing to leave. Finally the orders came through and because their flight out was delayed a day or two, my boss and Battalion Commandeer were able to be the ones to promote me. My boss explained that when a soldier gets promoted they get to do what they want for their ceremony and I chose to have it on the roof of the Norwegian pizza place thinking it would offer a good view. I asked them not to make it mandatory because I didn't want anyone to have to stand through the ceremony that didn't want to be there. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain the day of the ceremony and my commander asked if I wanted to change venues. I started to say yes but he said he once was promoted in the rain atop a guard tower and if I wanted to do it in the rain, he would be there. With that encouragement I stated that was what I really wanted to do. My new boss who had just arrived (as part of Task Force Comet) read the orders and PBB, the other 2 guys staying longer, the Sergeant Major and my Battalion Commander attended. By then it was only barely drizzling so it worked out well and we had pizza directly after. A few others showed up about a half and hour later stating they had intended to show up and I thought it was nice of them to try at least. All in all, it was a good day. My old group left early the next morning and my boss left a note on the inside of my notebook for me to find saying "Be Good Brittany. Best wishes moving forward" and signed his name. It moved me to find it and although I didn't feel I was really close enough to anyone to really miss them, I had fond memories of the time spent with them.
Well, there are some interesting posts I still need to catch up on...the hair episode, an attack, a message campaign, some IED finds...I am in catch up mode so hopefully coming soon.
VOLLEYBALL
The first thing that comes to mind is volleyball. Who knew that volleyball is huge is Afghanistan!? In many villages comprised of mud homes and makeshift power lines, there are well constructed volleyball courts where the villagers have very competitive games and tournaments. And they are really good! We built a volleyball court behind our headquarters building and all the staffers would play for an hour or so daily to blow off steam and get out of the office. On quite a few occasions my boss actually ordered me to leave my office and go play despite my protests that I had an arm-length to-do list. Soon soldiers from other units came to join in and even some of the Afghan civilians working on our base. That is when we discovered they have mad volleyball skills! They were spiking it in people's faces, playing great defense...it was incredible and wildly entertaining to watch. Soon all the regular players had nicknames for their habits or quirks. Baby cakes, the terminator, franchise, beast, salmon (for always being in the net lol), 59 chevy (our old, grumpy, but loveable in a grandpa way, headquarters first sergeant), Paparazzi (me, more of a general reference to my job...Sergeant major started it by calling me Paparazzi 9 all the time), etc. We started having more and more injuries as people got a little too intense and competitive so we had to make special rules to tone it down a bit. We had one guy break his arm, another his finger, one torn ligament, and some other gashes and scrapes. Everyone, including the battalion commander, loved playing so much though, that when the safety officer added a "volleyball" section to the accidents slide the entire room erupted in objection, arguing he should just call it "recreation" and "what is your deal!? are you TRYING to get volleyball playing banned for us like sports are banned for the infantry or something!?" The LT just blinked back through his thick glasses and shrugged saying he would fix it. Our battalion commander was definitely hilarious to watch play. He is extremely competitive and high energy but he somehow always ended up on losing teams and he would get so frustrated. Threatening the LTs on the other team with physical training retribution if they made their serves or throwing his hat down in disgust when someone on his team would miss. All in fun.
INTERNATIONAL TRASH TALK AND BONDING
I have had the opportunity to directly work with the German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Afghan, and Finnish armies, thus far, and that has been one of the most fascinating aspects of my tour. And if it wasn't interesting enough observing the way they behave and do business on my own, listening to them talk trash and poke fun at each other is even more entertaining. Germans have a reputation for being stiff and robotic. A Swedish officer told me a story of how a few German lower enlisted guys were working on bolting something to a wall with a power tool. He explained with great animation how they they were robotically fastening in one bolt after the other until one made a mistake and went right through his had. According to the Swede, this soldier just looked at it without expression, and continued bolting as if nothing ever happened. The Norwegians talked trash about the Latvians and their lack of organization. And so on and so on. All of it is generally friendly and not mean. Just poking fun at the differences. My commander and I reminisced one time about a joint mission we did with the Norwegians. I guess one of the guys got hot during the foot patrol and stopped in the middle of a questionable village to unzip the bottom half of his pants and convert them into to man capris. He finished the mission in his very European looking capris, his pale legs beaming in contrast to his GIANT flak vest and goggles. The Norwegians laughed as a few of them told me about their trip to America and how they were taken to an interrogation room in one of our airports because they were suspected for trying to "sneak" into the country. The Norwegians explained the Americans questioning them thought Norway was some poor European country where the life was harsh and uncivilized. They laughed explaining that Norway is actually one of the wealthiest countries on the face of the earth and the crime rate is one of the lowest, etc. The Swedes that I worked with offered me a bracelet off one of their own wrists that they said they had made with their unit colors and a clasp that has an image of a reindeer, their symbol. I was greatly moved by the gesture. I didn't know at the time that our task force would end up working very closely with them and some would even become great friends. I had nothing so special to give in return so I asked my Commander if we could give them one of our task force coins to show our gratitude and he agreed. On another international note, I have begun a patch collection, swapping my unit patch with any international forces I get to work with. I have a quite a few now and I have had to ask my Sergeant Major for more unit patches repeatedly because I have run out of my own patches to wear. He has now cut me off and I had to order some on my own. It is really neat to explain to people that it is an American Engineer patch and watch them look at it with pride on their shoulder after giving me theirs.
WINDMILLS
My favorite patch, hands down, is the one I got from my German friend in the Regional PsyOps (psychological operations) Support Team. She is a Captain who I worked with for a message campaign I did in a relatively hostile (at the time) city called Ghormach (more about that mission in another post). We spent a week together there with her two Afghan journalists and became good friends. One day I guess I was lost in thought and didn't realize how obvious it was because she asked me what was wrong and caught me a little off guard. I explained that I was just a little frustrated about having to explain to our own forces why information operations are so important when that time and energy should be spent on the target audience. She nodded and told me that it is one of the most difficult parts of the job. She said, many German PsyOps units have windmills on their patches because that is what we do...fight windmills like Don Quixote. We fight invisible giants in intangible battles that our own forces don't believe in most of the time and we have to convince commanders it is worthwhile, let alone the people we are actually trying to get to believe or have hope in their forces. We have a mission that seems impossible in every way most of the time but on we fight. I thought for a moment. What she said resonated so deeply with me. It felt like she was describing my very existance. A person always fighting battles of principal that others say are pointless and only hurt me politically in the end. I can never accept settling for a politically safe move when I know something isn't right. It is also another reason I probably won't last very long in the Army. People who can't put politics before principal rarely do, it seems. After our time at Ghormach and our discussion, she always signed her emails to me, "keep fighting those windmills!" Now, when I'm frustrated or emotionally exhausted from being so invested, I think about her words and it gives me strength. She left the country recently and emailed me to say goodbye. I told her what an impact she had made on me and that I would never forget her and she expressed that the feeling was mutual. I hope I see her again someday.
THE BAN
"Green on Blue" (Afghan soldiers turning on ISAF sodliers) incidents have become more frequent in the last couple weeks and all of RC-North were been ordered to halt partnership activities for a period of time due to the threat. Most of the work I do involves partnership in some way so it was strange. An entire arm of our mission set was been chopped off suddenly. I actually had an Armed Forces Network reporter visiting to cover a bunch of partnership stuff but we had to send him home early because the missions he was going to go on were canceled. BUMMER. It is sad because that is the fundamental purpose of infiltrating Afghan forces and launching attacks on us from within...disrupting the bond of tentative trust that has been established and halting the training of Afghan security forces. That is what is happening, at least temporarily. Time is already so precious since an end date has been established. Watching the media coverage of the attacks and the ban and everything has been painful. You often don't get a true glimpse of how distorted a picture the media presents compared to what is really going on but that has been very apparent to me since I've been here. This situation has been a perfect example. The sound bites and taglines heavily slanted toward one bias or another make it so that anyone reading it without background information of the real situation gets a biased impression even without reading the article.
WALL OF WISDOM
Early in my deployment I was reading a short book my parents sent me that had inspirational quotes. I have always been a fan of short word groupings that have the awesome power to influence a persons outlook, attitude, and mood and have often made lists of my favorite sayings and quotes in the past. I decided to share this time and posted a large white paper outside my office door titles "LT Ramos' wall of wisdom." Many laughed at it at first scoffing at the idea that I, being so young and a lieutenant, could have wisdom. Nevertheless, each day I typed out a few quotes and taped them to the wall. Soon people started stopping in the halls and to read the quotes on the wall. Each time I would walk out of my office and see someone standing there reading I felt a little hope that maybe of the positive tidbits would be able to better their day. Soon, other officers and soldiers started printing out their own favorite quotes and adding them to the board. It became a place for people to share their positive insights. When I moved to Camp Marmal I had to take my paper down as we packed everything up and closed down Camp Deh Dadi II but it still stand in my memory as a simple thing I am proud of. The wall was nearly completely filled when I took it down and the picture here shows the project mid-stride.
MOVING TO MARMAL
As those of you who have read the previous posts know, I deployed in February and my first home in Afghanistan was Camp Deh Dadi II in Regional Command-North, Afghanistan. Originally Camp Spann was considered Deh Dadi I but it was renamed in honor of Johnny Michael "Mike" Spann, a paramilitary operations officer with the CIA who was the first American killed in combat in the now ongoing operation in Afghanistan. Camp Deh Dadi was first described to me via teleconference with the advance party that deployed ahead of our main body as "a postage stamp sized s***hole." Really, I didn't think it was bad at all and it was certainly much nicer than many of the other camps I have been to in RC-North. It was not too small, not too big, had relatively nice facilities and wasn't terribly over crowded. As our main body prepared to head home in September, those of us that had been selected to stay on as part of the "TAC," responsible for maintaining continuity of leadership for the U.S. Engineers in the North until a replacement could be identified, prepared to move to Camp Marmal. Marmal is owned by the Germans and serves as the headquarters for the region. It is large, very spaced out, and over crowded. It is nestled near Mazar-e Sharif, a fairly affluent, safe, well educated area of Afghanistan, and has not been attacked directly for years. The tent I live in there is basically the same as the one at DDII but the restroom, chow hall, office, etc facilities are much more spread out. I later flew over DDII and was shocked to see how barren the old place is, now completely stripped. We handed the shell of it over to the Afghan National Army but I don't think they have begun using it much yet because there is no well for water on site and they don't have a logistical set-up for transporting large amounts of water in the area yet. Marmal has a Norwegian pizza place I am huge fan of, a German restaurant that serves Schnitzel and even a German Club called "Planet Mazar" that houses a bar (with only near-beer for Americans but the real thing for most of the Europeans) and a DJ certain nights. It has a beautiful view of some mountains and is really overall a nice place.
Beyond my dutiful reasons for extending, the fact that I would be able to get my first Army promotion in a combat zone was a happy coincidence. The promotion from 2nd Lieutenant to 1st Lieutenant is basically automatic after 18 months in as long as you don't screw up too badly or get flagged for something. Nevertheless, it comes with a nice pay bump and a little bit (very little lol) of credibility so I was excited. I became eligible on November 13, 2012 but my orders didn't come through until the 20th. I tried to refrain from driving our admin. staff completely nuts during that week but I was quite anxious because the remainder of the 841st Engineer Battalion, with whom I deployed and extended with, was preparing to leave. Finally the orders came through and because their flight out was delayed a day or two, my boss and Battalion Commandeer were able to be the ones to promote me. My boss explained that when a soldier gets promoted they get to do what they want for their ceremony and I chose to have it on the roof of the Norwegian pizza place thinking it would offer a good view. I asked them not to make it mandatory because I didn't want anyone to have to stand through the ceremony that didn't want to be there. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain the day of the ceremony and my commander asked if I wanted to change venues. I started to say yes but he said he once was promoted in the rain atop a guard tower and if I wanted to do it in the rain, he would be there. With that encouragement I stated that was what I really wanted to do. My new boss who had just arrived (as part of Task Force Comet) read the orders and PBB, the other 2 guys staying longer, the Sergeant Major and my Battalion Commander attended. By then it was only barely drizzling so it worked out well and we had pizza directly after. A few others showed up about a half and hour later stating they had intended to show up and I thought it was nice of them to try at least. All in all, it was a good day. My old group left early the next morning and my boss left a note on the inside of my notebook for me to find saying "Be Good Brittany. Best wishes moving forward" and signed his name. It moved me to find it and although I didn't feel I was really close enough to anyone to really miss them, I had fond memories of the time spent with them.
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