Sergeant Hamster

By tomorrow evening I will have ridden around the 10-mile perimeter of Tallil Ali Air Base more than 130 times.
With a varied ten-mile loop, some traffic, the wind, the dust and the other difficulties of my repetitive ride, I hardly think of it as a hamster wheel when I am riding, but when I think about circling the same loop every day and adding up how many times I have ridden this circle--then I start to feel like a rodent way down the food chain. Or a man imitating the rodent.
On the north side of the base where I live and work there are buildings, huge generators, sometimes heavy traffic, pedestrians on sidewalks and the road, and flags snapping in the breeze.
On the east, west and south side of the base, there is mostly nothing. Here are a few views of my daily ride across the south and turning north on the east end of post:

Issue 3, Dark Horse Post Newsletter

I finally figured out how to post the newsletter on the blog. Here it is. If you actually want to read it, send me an email and I will forward a copy.

Thank You to Several (actually 22) People

To Sarah Reisert for Propel Packets and razors (not to be used together) and for sending me a weird web site every Thursday.

To 2LT West's Dad for sending copies of Inferno, we just finished reading it in the Tallil Dead Poet's Society.

To Brigitte Van Tiggelen for sending copies of Aeneid which we are starting next Tuesday as well as for the copies of The Weight of Glory we are reading now in the CS Lewis book group.

To Larry Wise for putting hand grips on the 29er bike so I won't burn my hands on the 130+ degree days and the other bike repairs.

To my Uncle Jack for connecting Viet Nam to the current war and reminding me how much I would have loved to tell my Dad about all of this over a cup of coffee.

To my sister who was upset when I enlisted in 1972 and no happier this time but is very brave.

To Matt Clark who spent the worst hour of this year with me--he drove me to the airport for the return trip to Iraq.

To my roommate for putting up with "livin' in a friggin' library."

To Kristine Chin for editing all three issues of the Dark Horse Post. The current issue will go out tomorrow.

To Amy Albert who wrote me a few days ago asking if she could help by sending us stuff and will be sending some of the future books for the book group.

To Meredith Gould for various reality checks she has given me about life, the universe and posting.

To Robin Abrahams for the Clerihew contest and for sending the her book Mind Over Manners (available on amazon.com!) and to Marc Abrahams for asking (bemused) questions no one else asks.

To Jan Felice and Scott Haverstick for laughing at me as well as with me about this whole Iraq thing.

To Abel Lopez and Brother Timotheus who have been my friends so long they take this whole Iraq thing in stride.

To Lauren, Lisa, Iolanthe and Nigel for being proud of me even though having their Dad gone for a year was not in their plans.

To Annalisa for dealing with everything back home, taking care of Nigel and letting me know when the blog posts go too far.

And now the bad joke. . .

Envy Again

So I went to the guy I wrote about a few days ago and told him I envied his job--he has no responsibilities except public affairs for a unit of 600 soldiers, which is one of my jobs. He also has the use of an SUV which would be nice to have in the middle of a day or to go to meetings without being drenched in sweat from a bike ride. But having told him, my envy is more properly jealousy. I wish I had what he has but I do not want to take what he has. Envy has that dimension of wanting to take from its object.

Anyway, he said he negotiated his deal before the deployment started--somehting that would be difficult for me at this point.

And speaking of sin, I was up larte last night writing a post about two soldiers who are in different ways unable to do their jobs, but are covered up by the Army system that wants the numbers to look good on paper. I took the post down again because looking at it in the morning it was uncharitable and it violated my OPSEC rule about identifying soldiers. There were enough specifics to identify people and that is not what I should be doing.

And then another friend pointed out last night that my year in the desert is hardly the spiritual experience I hoped for. She is right. When I return to America, I will be deliriously happy to resume whatever I can of my life as it was--family, friends, work, racing, pub night. My spiritual life will need as much cleaning up as my dust filled lungs after my year here in the desert.

Inspired to Ride, and NOT to Ride

In the last couple of weeks, my main riding buddy has pushed me to go faster in a couple of ways. He has his own bike here, a mountain bike with 21 speeds. He has full off-road tires, so the advantage of having gears is balanced by the rolling resistance of his tires. Last week he wanted to do sprints. We did several hundred-meter sprints on the back side of the ten-mile loop. I have a mild dust-induced throat infection, but had a great time. Yesterday he rode in the morning and was having trouble maintaining speed, so he suggested I take the half-mile-longer road near the IED training area and he would go straight past the air strip. The idea was I would catch up to him just before main post. Well he was feeling bad and I was feeling good so I caught him sooner, but that two miles gave me the exhilaration of the chase. He is going to be here toll April, so I should have someone to ride with three days a week for the rest of the tour.

Before the other story, a milestones update:
As of today I have ridden almost 4000 miles this year including 2100 miles here in Iraq.
I don't have an exact number here, but I am now over 150,000 miles since I started riding seriously in 1986, the year I quit smoking. Of those miles, 75,000 are since January 1, 2000. If I go back to racing there is a good chance I will increase my total miles to 200,000 miles within the next 7 years.

In our brigade is a young medical officer who rides an exercise bike incessantly. I asked her if she ever thought about riding on the road. She said she did, but that it is dangerous. I suggested riding here because bases are so much better than civilian life. She said she had thought about it, but then one day she was riding the bus and the bus pulled out in front of a bike and almost hit the bike.

At least that was the view from inside the bus. I was the rider on the bike. From my perspective, about half the bus drivers are South Asians who come from cultures with no tradition of chivalry. The traffic laws follow Darwin's rules. The bigger vehicle has the right of way. Bikes yield to everything. I dealt with this all over Asia. Here on base the bus drivers know if they hit a guy with ARMY across his chest they are gone and lose their job. But their instinct is to pull out in from of the little vehicle. So when they do it, I just keep pedaling. They back off, cursing me in whatever language they speak. But the more I do it, the less I have to do it. They get the idea that this is not Mumbai or Bangkok and buses do not have absolute right of way over bikes.

But from inside the bus looking down on the guy who is getting closer to the bus every second until the driver backs off, it looks scary. I did not try to explain anything to her or admit I was the guy. I just said that an exercise bike is fine for aerobic fitness.

A No-Wind Situation

For the last few days the wind died out almost completely here at Tallil Ali Air Base. The good news is I can ride the perimeter of the base faster than usual because I can ride a fairly steady speed slowing only for the across-the-road ditches, missing stretches of pavement and stop signs. Here as on every base it is AWESOME to ride where people can lose their jobs over their driving. But it means I have to obey the law also (Jan and Scott: No kidding. I stop for stop signs!!) So I circled the 10.2-mile perimeter road in 33:52 on the 29er and 31:40 on the Trek. I also did the 15k (9.3-mile) route in 29:11. These are as fast as I have ever gone around post. At first I was thinking 'Not even 20mph, I must be falling apart!' But with bad roads and single speed bikes I do have a disadvantage.

The bad news is that no wind causes two odd effects that have left me with a nasty sore throat and hacking cough. The first is that when there is no wind the dust rises from the ground near dust. It's weird. I was half-way around and going fast so I did not quit but sucked a lot of dust into my lungs. Now I am paying for it. The second problem is the burn pit. When the wind is out of the west, the toxic fumes from burning all of our throw-away utensils drifts away to the East on the usual West wind. Yesterday as I finished the lap a light breeze form the East blew the smoke from the raging fire in the burn pit across the base--and a across the road I ride on. Nothing like ending the day with polyethylene smoke!!

Even though the wind makes me struggle to ride 7mph when it howls out of the west at 30mph, I suppose it will be better to have the wind. It will also help with the temp. Today at lunch time it was 133 degrees (56 Celcius). And with no wind at night it is almost 90 degrees before dawn.

New Camera -- My Photos On Line

One of the benefits of the Public Affairs work I do for the battalion and brigade is they gave me a very cool camera. It's a Nikon D200 DSLR with a NIKKOR 18-200mm zoom lens. With this camera, I am shooting pictures of soldiers at work and writing 1-3 paragraph extended captions to go with the photos. The story/photo is then published on an armed forces web site so local newspapers can download photos/stories of soldiers in their area. It is a public access site, just click here. You will see a dozen photos with captions posted yesterday. There should be many more in the coming months.