Saturday, May 9, 2009

2nd Anniversary of Breaking My Neck

I keep many anniversaries, both silly and serious. Beyond the obvious ones, like my wedding anniversary and family birthdays, I always celebrate the anniversary of my driver's license. It was easily one of the best days of my life. I wanted to drive ever since I could remember and knew by heart the driveline and engine specifications of every Detroit Muscle Car available in the 60s. In fact, this coming December 19th I will celebrate the 40th anniversary of my driver's license in Iraq. Maybe I'll get two pieces of cake in the DFAC here on that day.

Today is the 2nd Anniversary of the day I broke my neck, and a lot of other stuff: I cracked the first two vertebra in my neck, smashed the 7th, broke four ribs and my collarbone and shoulder blade on the right side and my nose. It all happened in about a second when I flipped and crashed in a downhill race at 50mph on Turkey Hill in Lancaster County PA.

I don't remember the accident or more than two minutes of the following two days, but that accident almost kept me from being here in Tallil, Iraq, writing this post. Of course, you might wonder in the other direction "How did they let him in the Army?" since I re-enlisted (after being a civilian for 23 years) three months later on August 16, 2007. The short answer is: I hang around with academics enough to know that I should always answer the question I am being asked--and nothing more.

The Thursday before Easter 2007, in late March, I called a recruiter and started the enlistment process. By late April I had passed the physical and other tests and was just waiting for an age waiver--I was one year too old to enlist even with 11 years of prior service. As it turned out, I did not get that waiver until July 13. So on April 28, I was set to enlist and just waiting for paperwork. On May 9th I was being MedEvaced from the crash site to Lancaster General Hospital where Dr. William T. Monacci happened to be the neurosurgeon on duty in the trauma center.

Dr. Monacci had just come to Lancaster. He is also a colonel in the Army Reserve. His last practice was in Baghdad, so he had a lot of recent, relevant experience. The next day he and his team replaced my smashed 7th vertebra with a bone from a cadaver then bolted it to the vertebra on either side with a titanium plate. I could have been a paraplegic or worse. As it was, I was up and walking in a neck and chest brace five days later and out of the hospital in eight days.

Of course, I was worried this was the end of joining the Army. But I passed the physical and I did not yet have the waiver. The recruiter said there was nothing to do but wait, so I did. I walked at least three miles per day (to the Starbucks at Stonemill Plaza in Lancaster among other places) and started doing zero-weight exercises at the gym to keep loose.

In July the waiver came through. I was supposed to get the neck brace off during the first two weeks in August, so I told him I would enlist on August 16. I did. I felt fine. No one asked me if I had broken my neck recently, so I had no question to answer.

The following spring, May 2008, we were getting prepared to go to Iraq. I listened to the medical briefing as carefully as I would listen to a prize drawing. At one point the earnest young private giving the briefing said, "If you have enlisted in the last year and there have been no changes in your health SINCE YOUR ENLISTMENT write NONE on the block at the bottom of the form." So I did. Nothing had changed since I enlisted in August 2007.

Then a doctor interviewed us. My health records looked great, tests all good. At the end of the exam the doctor asked, "Is there anything else you would like to tell me?" There was not a thing I wanted to tell him. So I said "No."

So here I am. In an ironic medical twist, I had surgery on my right shoulder on October 30, 2008, to repair a torn rotator cuff and three other ligaments. The likely cause of the ligament damage was hitting the road with my helmet and shoulder the year before, but that was not part of the diagnosis. Because that surgery caused me to miss Army training November, I was classified non-deployable until 2 days before we went to Oklahoma. But I passed the medical test and got on the plane with several hundred of my closest friends.

So that is how I got here despite breaking my neck.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Bitching at Breakfast

After Wednesday's 5k race, a few of us who ran in the event met for breakfast. There happened to be an empty seat opposite me. Before I had two bites of my French Toast, an angry sergeant from our unit sat down in that empty seat and asked, "Why the f$#k do I have run a 5k race every Wednesday?" The question was rhetorical. He did stop talking so I kept eating. "I hate running. . .We only have to run 2 miles for the PT test so why should run 3 miles. . ."

In Kuwait our base had a 5k race every Wednesday and our base in Iraq decided to do the same. The officer in charge of our physical training program decided it would be a good thing to get the whole company together once a week for this event, so I talked to the organizer after the race. He was delighted to have more people running. The organizer and I talked at 0645. I showered and got to chow by 0730. Word had spread through most of the company by then even though some of us live as far as a mile from each other.

I should point out that the sergeant who was so upset scores well on the PT test, volunteers for tough duty and is a natural leader. But he has decided that running 5k once per week is an unfair imposition on him.

When he calmed down enough to start eating I asked, "So what about the rocket attack. Did that bother you?"

"F#$k no. We're in a combat zone. I expect that. It was a few rockets. They didn't hit shit anyway.' He paused for breath.

"But why do we have to get up at 5 in the morning just to go run, I mean what the f. . ." and he was off again.

For most of my friends back home, a 5k morning run would be a pleasant or at least neutral experience, especially since it could even be a 5k walk. On the other hand, a few ill-aimed rockets that fell anywhere in the immediate area would still be the occasion of very strenuous complaints to every level of government not to mention "must sell" real estate prices.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Gossip!

My roommate goes off in the evenings to spend time with two guys from his home town. The three of them deployed together before almost five years ago, but can happily spend an evening talking about things that have nothing to do with the Army or the current deployment.

He says the alternative to talking with each other is talking about each other. The main topics of conversation on deployment are home, complaints and gossip. And gossip quickly takes center stage. When people see each other as much as we do, we know each others foibles and weaknesses to a degree that is only possible in families in civilian life.

At this point, it's clear that simply mentioning some soldier's name will lead a group at dinner to groan, laugh or shake their heads depending on the person. And because it is such a close group, the comments circulate quickly. One one field exercise, I told my vehicle crew that I would not allow anyone to talk on cell phones inside the vehicle when we were waiting for instructions. It was raining off and on that day. The rest of the crew knew I made up the rule for only one soldier in the vehicle who would complain to his mother/girlfriend/(dog) at every halt if allowed. I heard comments with sly smile for a week after from soldiers who heard the rule I had made and were delighted that particular soldier was not allowed to drone on and make the rest of the crew suffer.

For those who would think gossip is optional, being part of the gossip also identifies one as part of an informal group. A group that when gossip when you are present considers you an outsider. If you hear "She's a f#$king idiot" when you are eating with five other soldiers, they are letting you in on their group opinion. To be outside the gossip is to be outside every informal network.

For those who would like to read the definitive essay on this subject cliques and who is on and out, the essay "The Inner Ring" in CS Lewis' book "The Weight of Glory" is wonderful on this subject.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

My First Medal in Iraq. . .is for a 5K Race

Each Wednesday, beginning just last Wednesday, The House of Pain gym (no kidding) on our base sponsors a 5K with medals and prizes. This morning a half-dozen soldiers from Echo Company signed up for the race. The prizes were given out by random drawing before the race, the medals were awarded by age group--but only finishers are allowed to collect prizes so the pizza and t-shirt winners did not get their prizes until the race was over. I got medal for being first place in what the announcer called the "51 to Infinity group." Full disclosure rules (that I just made up) require me to say at this point that I was the only entrant in the 51 to Infinity group, but they awarded me the medal anyway.

Even with a time of 26:13, I was ahead of some younger people. Although I was so far behind the race winner, I had almost a mile to go when he finished. First place was a lieutenant who finished in 17 minutes and 40 seconds. There was also a 45-year-old sergeant who came in at 19:33 to win his age group.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Speaking of Snail Mail

I have an address at my new home:

Sgt. Neil Gussman
Co. E 2/104 GSAB
COB Adder T-1
APO.AE.09331

Just so you understand all the Acronyms and numbers, here is the address without abbreviations:

Line 1: Sergeant Neil Gussman

Line 2: Echo Company, 2nd Battalion / 104th General Services Aviation Brigade

Line 3: Combat Operating Base Adder T-1

Line 4: Army Post Office.Armed[Forces]Europe.[Zip Code]

If you would like to send something I would be happy to get snail mail. If you can't think of anything to write, one of the Chaplains wants me to start a CS Lewis reading group on post so if you have extra copies of Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, God in the Dock, Till We Have Faces and The Weight of Glory, please send them. Or you can send them direct through Amazon.com.

Thanks.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Staying in Touch--with Co-Workers

When I am back in the US I work at a museum and library of chemistry and early science that has books in its collections dating back to the invention of printing in the 1400s. In some ways, we are the most low-tech place you could imagine. The staff reads books. People visit to read books. We all talk about books. But if Chemical Heritage Foundation is low-tech at heart, it has a high-tech side. We have an extensive Web site, a Facebook page and many other connections to the high-tech world. And since I miss the people I work with the best of these high-tech connections is "Distillations" the CHF podcast (Free subscription on iTunes.)

when I go to the gym or in have a few minutes I can listen to the weekly podcast on various subjects in chemistry and the world around us. I liked the podcast when I was in America, but now listening Jen, Jim, Sarah, Bob, Jody (not THAT Jody), Audra, or the always mysterious Anke talk about chemistry in the kitchen, or medieval love potions, or how to be green and clean, I hear voices that I miss. Of course, they are all being professional and informative as they speak, but I have heard everyone who is on the podcast laugh and make jokes in person, so I can usually remember some funny thing Anke said about Medieval cures that were worse than the disease, or Jim showing me a Ship of Fools, or Sarah making jokes about almost anything.

CHF is a great place to work. If you don't believe me, listen to the podcast. Almost everyone who is "on the air" is on the staff.

So if high-tech might have kept me from becoming a writer, it certainly is nice to have it for things like listening to people I know and like on line.

Then and Now: Staying in Touch

When I was stationed in (West) Germany, my peak income as a sergeant was $5,000 per year in 1979, the third year of my deployment. At that time the only options for staying in touch with America were phone calls and snail mail. I phoned my family once in a while, but mail was the only real option. Compared to now, calling home cost a fortune: a ten-minute phone call cost at least $5 when most of us made less than $100 per week.

Now I call landlines on Skype from here in the Middle East and half the time I am charged nothing. Phone cards have rates around 20 cents per minute for a call that is as reliable as calling in the states. Email only costs the access fee for internet, same with Facebook and every other electronic means of calling/writing home.

I am very happy to be able to talk to every member of my family every week. I also call friends and co-workers just on a whim because it is cheap and easy. This blog allows me to stay in touch with a lot of people without clogging their email InBoxes.

But no Blessing in this life is unmixed. I learned how to write on my deployment to Germany. I joined the Army a High School graduate who had no aspirations of going to college. Seeing the beauty of the German countryside, talking with Germans, training with British troops, flying to France in a helicopter for a War Memorial ceremony all were experiences beyond pictures. I wanted to tell my family and friends about them.

I don't know how it started, but a few months into the deployment, I started writing several drafts of the same experience as letters. First I wrote to my Mom. She mostly cared that I wrote, not what I wrote, so she got the first draft. Then I would write to Frank Capuano, my best friend from high school, or someone else who I wanted to tell about simply being in a foreign country. Sometimes I would write another more letter, same story. But the last letter in the series would be either to my sister, Jean, or my uncle Jack. They were the best writers I knew personally so I by the time I wrote their copy, I was 4 or 5 drafts from my first thoughts.

A year later when I got a job on the base newspaper it was because of all that practice writing. Even though I write every day now, the process is not the same. I write, I hit the PUBLISH POST button and never revise.

Of course, if I were writing five drafts of each post, I would be posting a lot less. But I have no doubt that I learned the craft of being a writer by those laborious rewrites. I will be writing other posts on this subject--in one draft.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

We Arrived--Weather Forecast is HOT until November

We got to Iraq today. It was a 30-minute flight that took 11 hours if you include getting up at 0030 (just after midnight), loading baggage at 0200 after waiting for the bus for almost an hour, two hours for the 20-mile ride to the airport squeezed into a bus with seats not made for soldiers wearing body armor, another hour to load the baggage on pallets for the plane (300 duffel bags weigh 50 pounds or more each) then waiting on rocks for four hours for the plane to take off. Finally, the same 20 guys from who loaded most of the baggage unloaded all of the baggage.

Now that we are finally here, Iraq is flat, dusty and hot. It should stay that way for most ofthe time we are here. Tomorrow we will begin work. Today most of us took naps and called home after the short flight that took so long.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

My Birthday in 1979


I got an email yesterday from Bruder Timotheus of the Land of Kanaan, Darmstadt, Germany, asking if I remembered what I did on my 26th birthday in 1979. I had no idea.

So Bruder Timotheus, then Sgt. Cliff Almes, reminded me that May 2, 1979, was his discharge date (He used the military acronym ETS (expiration of Term of Service) showing just how deep they burn those acronyms in us.) On that day I drove Cliff from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt in my 1969 Renault TS with a 4-speed shifter on the column.

On that day, Cliff began 10 months in the novitiate of the Franciscan Brotherhood at Kanaan and later became Bruder Timotheus. He is still there. He is also an American so he fixes things at the monastery and for the last ten years has been the network administrator for Kanaan Ministries.

I talked to Cliff today on Skype. Birds were singing in the background as we spoke. It is spring all over the northern hemisphere, but spring has a very different sound and feel in central Germany than in Kuwait.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Tour of Our Camp

Here are a few views of our current home taken by my Battle Buddy.

The Showers at the edge of tent city


Our Tents


Blast walls surround every building or group of buildings. Units decorate the blast walls as they pass through the camp.


Starbucks seen from the dirt road out front


The Post Chapel. That is a Baptist full-immersion baptismal out front!!

Starbucks Update--56th Birthday in Kuwait


STARBUCKS IN KUWAIT. THE SAND-FILLED BARRIER IS TO THE LEFT.

Today I traded my $99 bike for a Venti Carmel Macchiatto at Starbucks. One of the baristas here asked me about buying it. I felt strange selling the bike, but I could trade it for a latte. So I got a 2-week bike rental for $99 and a free latte!!

Tomorrow I will celebrate my 56th birthday in Kuwait. I was thinking I would celebrate my natal day in Iraq, but Kuwait is close.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Then and Now: Contractors and Training

One of the big differences between the end-of-Viet Nam Army and today is Contractors. In the early 70s, soldiers scooped creamed chip beef on toast in the the Chow Hall serving line. That same soldier got up every day at 2 am to start cooking our high-calorie breakfast. Soldiers drove buses, dug field latrines, hauled ammo and did most other tasks, important and menial, in our every day lives.

Now contractors do many of these jobs. The intent, I suppose, is to allow the soldiers to concentrate on training, and to have more soldiers be warriors and fewer be cooks, clerks and drivers.

Which sounds good, but as someone who has been both a consultant and a corporate manager, I can tell you the world is a different place when you are paid by the hour (contractor)and when you are on salary (soldier). Soldier time is a fixed cost. If we wait three hours, the budget does not change. Contractors get paid overtime if things run late. Everyone in every part of government is worried about costs, so soldiers now know that training begins and ends when depending on the bus schedule.

In the 70s Army if we went to a training area and screwed up something, the soldiers who drove the buses waited till we were done re-running the course for a couple of hours. On our recent convoy training the big former infantryman who conducted our training said if we did not complete the exercise to his satisfaction we would do it again till we got it right. We (and he) all knew he was full of crap. No matter how badly we did, the buses were scheduled to arrive at 2pm on the last day of training. (Actually, we did very well so he got to leave early.) And his shift ended at noon that day. So the contractor was not paid past noon and the civilian drivers would have to be paid extra if they waited for us (NOT vice versa). So he could bluster, but at noon on the last day, he was gone. The buses arrived at 4pm, which was OK because a few hundred soldiers waiting out in the desert is OK--no additional cost when soldiers wait for the bus.

Fighting the War on Terror, One Latte at a Time




OUR STARBUCKS LOOKS LIKE THIS ONE--EXCEPT FOR THE SAND WALLS IN FRONT OF IT AND BLAST BARRIERS ON THE SIDES AND REAR

Now that we are back on base, at least for now, I am back at my favorite place in this sand-covered, blast-wall enclosed corner of the Kuwait desert: Starbucks!! Yes, there is a Starbucks here. More importantly, it is within site of our tent and it is one of the designated Hot Spots that dot the base. We buy Internet service for $12 per week from a local guy who also sells cell phones. But the access card is no gaurantee of service, so the wireless nomads like me move around the base looking for a good signal. Starbucks is one of the best and therefore very crowded nearly 24/7. I get up at 4am to come here and call home on Skype when there is enough bandwidth. At 4am, the place is at least half full. By 6am the 70-odd chairs are full and the good floor spots near the power outlets are filling up.

It really looks like Starbucks too, pine furniture, proper color scheme, snacks next to the register. The drink menu is in English and Arabic which is different than my local Starbucks. The prices are 20% higher than US Starbucks so a Venti latte is $5.

The other difference from the Starbucks at Stone Mill Plaza in Lancaster PA is that all the patrons carry automatic weapons. Whether we are wearing ACU camouflage or PT uniform, we bring our weapons everywhere so almost every table and chair has a rifle or machine gun underneath it. After a couple of days, I got used to M4s and M16s. One day a group of SAW gunners came in to use the internet. I don't know why, but it seemed slightly stranger to see M249 machine guns under tables and chairs than the usual automatic rifles.

Also, Starbucks in Lancaster operates without 6-foot thick sand walls in front and 5-foot high concrete barriers in the back.

A VERY POPULAR FASHION ACCESORY AT OUR STARBUCKS


So for the time being I am fighting the War on Terror, One Latte at a time.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Then and Now: Finding My Limits

In 1982 my sister got married on the 4th Saturday in October. That was also an Army Reserve weekend for me. My sister's wedding was near Boston, Mass. I helped set up a range on Friday, got Saturday off, then had to fire the .45 cal. pistol and submachine gun at 0800 on Sunday. (By the way, Happy 54th birthday Jean!)

I went to my sister's wedding and reception then drove all night to central Pennsylvania. In 1981 I fired expert with the .45 cal. pistol. In 1982 I fired marksman by just one round. Marksman is the lowest category. Afterwards our commander said, "Don't worry Sergeant Gussman, we now how well you can shoot."

I thanked him, but ever since I have known that morning is how I really shoot. I was in a tank unit. If I was going to fire a .45 pistol in combat, that means I am off my tank. So I would be tired, scared, maybe injured. How I shoot after driving all night was a better guage of how I would shoot when things were less than perfect. If the worst happened, I was going to wait till the bad guys got close if I only had a pistol.

On the desert convoy training we just completed, we arrived at 4 in the afternoon and got started with classes and orientation briefings. At 530pm my convoy commander sent me to find out where we would fire at 5am the next morning. I also drove with one of the lead instructors to a compound three miles away where they service our machine guns. Because I knew where the armorer shop was across the desert, I took the weapons over to get maintenance before we fired. I thought I would be staying up late. For a variety of reasons I stayed up all night except for an hour of lying down for an hour at 2am and swatting flies in the back of our 5-ton truck

So at 5am, I drove the weapon-filled truck to the range and got the 30 automatic weapons into the tents where range training started. I stayed with the weapons till 10 am then went to classes on convoy tactics till mid-afternoon. Then we went out and practiced convoy movement. We kept training till just after 9pm, then we could get some sleep. I started to unroll my bag in an open spot on the floor. I was beyond tired. One of the enlisted men, a guy who has a comment about everything, said that the spot of floor where I was unrolling my bag was where some other enlisted man was sleeping last night.

I exploded. I let him know how much I cared about reserved floor space in a tent in the middle of the desert. One of his buddies took him outside. The next day after we were done with training one of the sergeants from the fuelers said, "Sgt. G, I heard you really went off last night. Nobody was bustin' on you, they were just surprised." My roommates from Fort Sill heard about it. One said, "Damn! And I had to miss it. That must have been the shit." (See post on shit as a pronoun.)

Just as I cannot take the heat like a 25-year-old, missing a whole night's sleep is really my limit. I did sleep very well that second night and the training went well on our third day. I suppose it's good I have a reputation for not blowing up. But now I have less of a reputation than before.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Back from the Desert

We just returned from three days of convoy training. We learn to identify, avoid and react to IEDs, hostile fire and the other hazards of driving on Iraqi roads. We had a full week of the same training in Oklahoma and some of our guys had more convoy training in Pennsylvania before we left.

So the training itself was not new, but in the U.S. we had to pretend to be in the desert. Here the biggest training aid was miles of sand in every direction that occasionally blew up into a a sideways sandstorm, not to mention the clear, blue sky and the sun that here travels east to west near vertical. At noon here (actually 1pm because of Daylight Savings Time) my shadow is so small the fatter sand beetles can't get shade unless they crawl right next to my boot. With a mid-afternoon high temperature just over 100 and wearing full battle rattle we are hot. We wear a a 35-pound body armor vest, 4-pound helmet, uniform with long sleeves, heavy boots, a 9-pound rifle, and 15 pounds of ammo, knives, and other stuff. Plus a pound or two of scum from not showering. Nothing in the states prepares us for the sun and wind of open desert.

Another plus of training here is we our drivers get realistic practice for the first time. In the states going off road means wrecking some local habitat so we pretend to go off road to set up Medevac sites or avoid hostile fire. Here we drive on sand tracks and when we need to we jump the berms and head off road. We also had real up-armored Humvees to train in instead of the light models we trained on in the states. The armor changes the handling. My driver had us bouncing through ditches and sliding sideways. They told us to keep it real and he was only too happy to oblige.

Another realistic element of training that never happens in the states (at least in my experience) is the all the vehicle crews in each group sleep in the same tent. After waking up before 5am we all sleep on the floor of the tent at around 10 at night. There are no special facilities for the female soldiers out on the road, so we all have to deal with that.

We had one hot meal in three days, the rest was MREs. On the bus on the way back the first 50 jokes were about constipation remedies we would need from three days of eating no fiber and lots of greasy meat and crackers from vinyl bags. But I have said quite enough on this subject already.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Back to the Latrine

A few days ago, I wrote about how happy my Battle Buddy is that he found the luxury latrine 1/4-mile from our tent. Yesterday before we left of three days of training I decided to use the indoor plumbing. I have been slowing reading an old high school edition of Les Trois Mousquetaires in French. So when I went to the facility I was an ethnically Jewish American guy in a latrine maintained by a local Arab contractor reading a French book.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Is Dry Heat More Comfortable?

I got a comment asking if dry heat was any more comfortable than heat with humidity. I suppose it is, but I can't tell the difference. In 1976 I trained for two months in the southwest US desert before deploying to Germany. I had one shower during that two months--July and August--and it was hot. It was a dry heat, but I felt very hot in a 56-ton metal container (an M60A1 tank) and after two months, I smelled like I had been hot for two months.

Yes, it is dry heat here, but two days ago when it was 108 degrees on the range (a temp update from range control) I was HOT. I suppose it makes some difference that we are in dry heat, but it does not seem to matter much with 50 pounds of gear on. It's just hot. With summer coming I am expecting a lot more dry heat in my future. I will be just plain hot.

My computer doesn't like dry heat either. It has been shutting off after an hour or less when I am outside trying to get some bandwidth near the signal towers. It turns out it can't cool itself with dry 100-degree air. So my Mac and I think alike.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Hydration, Hydration, Hydration

Everywhere we go we hear "Hydrate!" "Hydration is Critical!" This follows the government/military penchant to use a multi-syllable Latin-derived word to show that a given task must be done. "Drink!" would not work because it would lead to the smartass retort "Drink What?" then "Drink Beer!" So we hydrate. But not always.

Because when one hydrates, one will sooner rather than later need to un-hydrate. Which is more of a problem than you would think. If we listen to closely to the all the calls to hydrate then get on a bus, no one is going to stop the bus. The hydrated soldier might have a couple of hours of serious discomfort before being allowed the natural consequences of following his orders.

And since we travel in groups, we line up for everything. That means the poor soldier in the back of the bus does the un-hydration dance in a long lane waiting for one of six portajohns with lines of 50 at each one. Like every other health pronouncement, one size never fits all and some people hydrate to the point of pissing away necessary salts. So they end up full of water and with dehydration effects.

I would hydrate more if I knew I could take a leak when I needed to. But it is quite clear the opposite is true. If I hydrate I will be sitting in a bus or Humvee think that nothing could be more beautiful than a brown plastic Kamal Al-Sultan (the local contractor) Portajohn. So I drinking slowly and often, same as when I am racing, and pay attention for signs that I need more water. And since much of our hydration is by individual half-liter plastic bottles, I always make sure I keep at least one empty with me in case we are confined and my personal emergency becomes dire.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Home on the Range. . .or Not


Today Echo Company range a small arms range for several hundred soldiers. It was not the exhaustive marksmanship test we went through in Oklahoma, just a few rounds to make sure the weapons are working. Even so it takes a long time for that many soldiers to fire, so we were on the range for hours. I was one of ten range safety soldiers. We kept the people who were on the firing line in line and made sure everyone was keeping their weapons pointed down range.

In Oklahoma or Pennsylvania, this job would simply be boring. In Kuwait the high temp was 102 degrees (40 Celcius) under clear skies. We are at 29 degrees north latitude, about the same as Daytona Beach, so the is much closer to straight up in the sky than we ever see in the northern states.

It was hot and we were standing on hot sand. After two hours I was starting to melt. By the end of the day when the safeties fired, I was worn out. I know I will acclimate eventually, but while it is always good to be in shape, in a place like this it is better to be young and in shape.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Flush with Happiness

Here in Kuwait we all have Battle Buddies. Everywhere we go--except stumbling out to the PortaJohns in the middle of the night--we go with our Battle Buddy. The main thing is that we go nowhere alone. So we can travel with just about any other soldier, but most of us have one soldier we travel with more than others.

My Battle Buddy is another old guy (48) who, is a conservative Presbyterian and likes quiet. We are hoping to room together if we end up in a place with 2-man rooms. We room together now, of course, along with 76 others.

For all of us happiness comes in different small luxuries. My Battle Buddy is fond of saying "It's the small things that matter." For him, the discovery that brightened his life (literally) was the latrines 1/4 mile from our barracks that have indoor plumbing and LIGHT. It seems my BB does not like sitting in a dark latrine. Now he knows he can have BOTH flush toilets and lights, he is a happy man.

Speaking of happiness, I could not stop laughing the second day we were here over a joke one of the soldiers made at my expense. In the morning we walk 50 meters west to the PortaJohns and if you want to make a more efficient trip, you can walk 50 meters south to the outdoor running water sinks and brush your teeth. At 530 am I was walking (more like stumbling) toward the PortaJohn holding my toothbrush to make the two-destination trip. A young soldier passed me on his way back from the PortaJohns and said quietly, "Sgt Gussman. The've got some really good blue mouthwash in those PortaJohns."

I thought it was funny at the time. It is typical of the jokes here.

Canvassing Shows Just How Multicultural South Central Pennsylvania Neighborhoods Are

  In suburban York, Lancaster, Harrisburg and Philadelphia, I have canvassed in neighborhoods with multi-unit new homes like the one in the ...