End Of Days

The end is near.  After six months deployed to the world's largest dustbowl, my time is nearly up.  I can't begin to describe my glee.

 

I have enjoyed the work.  I have made great friends and connections.  But I have hated the place.  Part of that is just being 7,000 miles away from home and family, but most of it is earned honestly.  This camp is dirty, dusty, smelly, cramped and crowded, silly, frustrating, and often infuriating.  Putting Afghanistan in my rear view mirror is high on the list of things that will make K.C. happy.  I am so looking forward to being at home and having some semblance of normalcy.

 

My replacement arrived on 1 Dec, wrung out after 70 hours of travel from Kansas City to Dallas, Maine, Germany, Kuwait, Bagram and, finally, Eggers.  That was on top of flying back home for Thanksgiving with his family between CRC and deployment, dragging all his newly issued gear with him.  Once he arrived at Camp Eggers, it was time for me to go through in-processing again, this time from the other side.  Being the expert, knowing all the paths around Camp and all the people we were passing in the street, and trying to impart some of that knowledge to someone else was very surreal.  I remember very clearly how timid and small I felt when I arrived, looking down the barrel of six months of long hours, intense workload, and painful family separation.  Seeing some of those emotions in my replacement made clear to me just how much of a newbie I was when I started.  Now wisened, grizzled, and more than a bit jaded, it was hard to grasp that the only thing between me and a ticket home was 10 days of transition time. 

 

Transition time is critical to continued operations at CSTC-A.  I have 10 days to teach my backfill everything he needs to know TO GET STARTED.  There's no way I can teach him everything I know, let alone everything he needs to know, in 10 days, but it's what we've got to work with, and it's good enough to push him in the right direction.  Speaking from experience, as the one doing the replacing it feels very much like the right direction is off a very high cliff with razor sharp rocks below.  Now that I'm the one being replaced, I can say it's more of a small ledge with a thin mattress at the bottom.  The learning process will be bruising, but it won't kill you.  I tried to tell my replacement this, but he doesn't believe me.  I don't blame him.  Six months ago, I didn't believe my predecessor either.

 

So far, the best lesson I have managed to pass to my replacement is just how frustrating this place can be.  The general chaos of a deployed position combined with messy data and infuriating technical issues make "normal" very different from our home station, and it takes some getting used to.  Case in point: today he was working on making a Power Point slide, using data with known flaws, with a 15 minute deadline, for a briefing to a general that we didn't know was happening, for people that probably when his computer locked up and all progress was lost.  That was quite the proper "welcome to Afghanistan" moment, I do believe. 

 

When getting ready to deploy, EVERYONE told me how quickly six months would go by.  I knew they were right, having been there and experienced it themselves, but it's very difficult to impress that upon the brain when you've just started.  Now on the back end, I can say that, yes, 6 months does pass very quickly.  The days are very long, but the months are mostly short.  Until of course, your replacement arrives.  And now time seems to be standing still.  Relativity needs to die a slow and painful death.

 

As much as I'm looking forward to going home, I am dreading the travel.  Because I am "re-deploying", i.e. going home for good, the military has no incentive to get me out of country quick.  lt does them no good.  As such, anyone going home on R&R gets priority for travel space over me.  This is because it behooves the military to get them out of country as fast as possible so they can get back as fast as possible and continue doing their job.  While the amount of people allowed to go on R&R at any given time is capped at 10% of the force, you can imagine that Christmas time is going to have a higher volume of people moving than other times of the year.  That means I'm likely to be waiting several days at each stop for a plane ride, making the possibility I'm not going to get home before Christmas much more likely. 

 

And while I'm playing roulette with airplane seats, getting bumped from one after another, it will be cold, I will be living in a tent, again, I will be alone, and have very little to do besides wait anxiously for the next flight manifest to see if I got a seat.  Manifest calls can come at any hour of the night, meaning I will be getting very little sleep.  I will be hauling two duffle bags plus a back pack with me everywhere I go, and assuming that they will be stolen if left unattended.  I will have loads of time to sit and think about the next flight will be mine and if I'll get home in time for Christmas.  (Aside: my girls told me that if the Air Force wasn't fast enough to get me home, Santa Claus could pick me up Christmas Eve on his way through Afghanistan and deliver me under the tree the next morning.  Fearing crushing disappointment, I told them that Santa stayed away from Air Force bases because he didn't want to get shot down.)  Movies and music can only entertain for so long before they either start to drive me insane or I run out of them.  

But, dreadful as it may be, it must be done for me to get home, so I will gladly do it.  I'd ride a camel home if it would get me back before Christmas.  I'll have a couple more posts before I blow town, but after that I won't have a reliable internet connection, so updates may be a little spotty.  I'll do my best.

All for this evening.  Out here.