Off to the Races!

It has certainly been a busy, somewhat exciting week for me.  I spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Kabul preparing for my onward movement to Kandahar Airfield (KAF).  On Tuesday morning, I flew to KAF and since stepping foot here, I’ve been out straight with work.

Let me back up and discuss my stay in Kabul.  While there, I was housed in a room with two other gentlemen.  These guys were on 6-month tours and they came from Cambodia and Armenia!  Anyway, while I was only in there room a few days, they were completely moved into the room and had occupied every drawer, hanging closet and towel rack in the room and adjoining bathroom which left me with zero space to put my stuff.  They were kind enough to clear out a couple of cabinet shelves for me and I had to stack the rest of my bags in a corner behind the door.  It is no wonder why I wanted to get out of there and down to KAF as soon as possible.  I had two major highlights to my stay there.  The first was a surprise surf and turf dinner in the dining facility (DFAC) on Saturday night.  To my amazement, they had rib eye steaks to order, crab legs, and LOBSTER tails!  I suspected that the lobster tails were flown in frozen and would not taste very good but they were delicious.  Then, on Monday evening, I was invited to participate in a beach volleyball game by some of my friends from my orientation class back in 2006.  These guys live and work there in Kabul and they have a team that plays in a league on Monday nights.  So, that was a lot of fun.  My friends and I are also members of the same fantasy football league.

Okay, so I flew down here early Tuesday morning.  After an uneventful 90 minute flight, I arrived at my new home for the next year. KAF is one of the busiest single runway airports in the world!  I constantly hear the roar of fighter jets taking off with afterburners on and think to myself, there’s the sound of freedom!

The base here is enormous.   I am told that we have over 30,000 folks here: American military, civilian, and contracted employees from other countries.  The place is a hot, dry, dusty maze of buildings and tents surrounded by hardened protective walls of concrete and or bins of earth called Hesco bastions.  There is a constant buzz of airfield sounds; helicopters, jets, and generators.  The most dangerous aspect around here may be the vehicular traffic.  The base is also a swarm of Toyota pick-ups and tactical military vehicles.  I have personally been assigned a Toyota Helix pick-up truck with a crew-cab.  I promise that soon I will start posting photographs; I have just not been able to get my personal laptop computer hooked up.

I am temporarily housed in a “wet hooch” about a mile from where I work.  A wet hooch is a modular unit that has a bathroom in it.  As soon as a permanent room becomes available, I will be able to move in and get settled.  In the mean time, the hooch I am in is plenty comfortable.  It has a bunk bed, wardrobe, desk w/chair, and a television hooked up to the base’s cable TV system.  My permanent residence will be a single room in a dormitory-style building with shared washroom facilities.  Even though the room will be “dry,” it will be right next to where I work making the commute much easier.

As for my running and exercise, I was able to run in Kabul on treadmills in their small gym three of the five days I was there.  Here on the air base, I have been able to run outside early in the mornings.  I was too tired to get up early on Wednesday, but I was able to get in a 4-miler yesterday and ran 3.1 miles (5km) this morning.  I have also been able to stick to my plan to do push-ups and crunches every day while I am in Afghanistan.  I was sore for a few days in the beginning but am rapidly getting adjusted to the new routine and I think my body will thank me for it in the future.  For those of you who do not know, I will hopefully be running the Honolulu Marathon with Chris and Marissa on December 8^th during my first R&R, so I really need to get on the training bandwagon to begin preparing for that.

To quote Porky Pig: Th, th, th thaatts all folks!  More next week!

Welcome to Kabul!

The trip to Kabul was relatively unspectacular.  It was tough saying good bye to Terry and the rest of the family.  Mom and Dad called the night before I left and we were able to Skype with Chris, Marissa and Charlotte that evening as well.  The toughest part by far was having to say farewell to Terry there at the Manchester airport!  After flying to Washington on Tuesday, I was able to visit with John Davis and Corey before catching my flight to Dubai.  That 14-hour flight passed rather quickly since I was enjoying the new book Chris had sent me and I actually got a good-night's sleep on the plane. 

We arrived in Dubai at about 3:30 pm local time and since I had just eaten breakfast on the plane, I was worried that I might not be able to sleep in the hotel.  I stayed at the Intercontinental - Festival City which is about a 15-minute taxi ride from the airport.  From my room on the 16th floor, I had a great view of the Dubai skyline including the Burj Khalifa which is currently the tallest building in the world.  The air was hot and hazy there so the view was not a bright and clear as I had hoped. So, as soon as I got settled into the room, I went to the hotel gym for a short run on the treadmill.  I ate supper at the international buffet in one of the hotel's four restaurants then went for a stroll through the attached Festival City shopping mall.  Amazingly enough, I did get a good night's sleep there and woke up refreshed, ready for the flight to Kabul.

I flew to Kabul on Safi Airways, the national airline of Afghanistan, in a relatively new Boeing 767.  I would guess that at least one third of the passengers on that flight were Americans heading to Kabul to work in the country in some capacity, but that is just my guess.  I wrote "We" earlier referring to the handful of folks I had met who had attended some or all the training prior to coming to Afghanistan.  When we arrived at the Kabul airport we were met by an embassy representative who arranged our ride to the compound, a lovely little "gated community" in the heart of the city.

I was put up in a temporary room with two other guys, one from Armenia and the other from Cambodia both of whom are here on six-month tours of duty.  When I woke up this morning after another surprisingly good night's sleep, I went over to the dining facility (DFAC) for a cup of coffee, then went to the little gym to go for yet another short run on a treadmill.  I soon discovered the difficulty of running right after moving to a location at close to 6,000 feet above sea-level!  My short 5 km (3.1 mile) run was exhausting!

The afternoon temps reached into the triple digits and the air was extremely dry and dusty!  The smell of the place reminds me of Tuzla, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the smell of automobile exhaust and trash mixed in with cooking fires.

That's it for now.  Next time I submit a post, it should be from Kandahar!  Until next week...

Time to Go!

My training for the Afghanistan assignment is now complete.  Every U.S. Government civilian heading to Afghanistan has two weeks of mandatory training.  Those heading out to the field have to complete four weeks of training.  Being posted in the field simply means that you are not located physically at the embassy compound in Kabul.  These last two weeks of training were focused specifically on field duty which included working closely with the military.

My training last week also included MRAP Roll-Over training.  MRAP stands for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles which are a family of armored fighting vehicles used by the United States armed forces, among others.  As a passenger in these vehicles, we all must know what to do in the event of a roll-over.  Here is a picture of the roll-over trainer.

This second picture was taken when the MRAP was completely upside-down and there were 10 disoriented civilians inside!

Now that all of this training is complete, I am making final preparations for departure.  I am home this weekend spending some time with Terry and sorting out what I will be taking with me and what I will be mailing over.  Speaking of mailing, please disregard the earlier mailing address that I posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago.  It seems that I will be going somewhere else in country and I have a new mailing address.  Here it is:
Rich Fisher

655^th Regional Support Group

Department of State

APO, AE  09355

 As for the new location, I found out on Monday that I will be serving as the Management Officer for Regional Command-South (RC-S) at Kandahar Airfield (KAF).  I will not spend a lot of time in this blog discussing my job but to simplify things, I will be supporting the government's civilians posted throughout the southern part of Afghanistan from a very large base at an airport south of the city of Kandahar.

On Monday (8/20), I will be able to say my farewells to Chris, Marissa, and Charlotte on Skype.  On Tuesday (8/21), Terry will take me to our little airport here in Manchester and I will fly to Washington, DC where I will be able to see Corey one more time before I catch my 14-hour flight to Dubai later in the evening.  I was able to use some frequent flyer miles and obtain an upgrade to business class for this long haul.  That will make for a much more comfortable journey.  I actually arrive in Dubai the next day and have to stay over night there before catching another flight in to Kabul on Thursday (8/23).  I'll spend about a week at the embassy compound in Kabul meeting people and getting in-processed.  When that is all completed, I'll fly down to KAF to begin working.  

Have a great weekend!

Welcome!

Who would have thought that after a successful career in the U.S. Army, I would once again deploy to a war zone.  Chris gets credit for coming up with the title to this blog.  "Way to be Retired, Old Man!" was his response to the news that I would be going down range.  This time I am going to Afghanistan as a civilian non-combatant.  I intend to use this little blog as a means to share my experiences and to communicate with all of my friends and family.  I will try to provide a weekly update with a few photographs sprinkled among pleas for care packages as I complete my one-year assignment to Afghanistan.  I know that I will be extremely busy working there so by using this blog, I hope to save some time and reduce the amount of individual emails I send out.

I have two more weeks of training before my departure on August 21st.  I will actually arrive in Kabul on August 23rd.  The plans are to spend about a week in Kabul, then move out to Mazar-I-Sharif.  I will work in Mazar for about 6-8 weeks. 

Feel free to let me know how you are doing by posting a comment to this post or by sending me an email at my yahoo account.  I will be able to use Skype for video calls home as well.  I hope to be able to Skype with Terry almost every day while I am in Afghanistan.

I will try to post again the weekend of August 18th, just before I depart.  In the mean time, warm regards to all!  Rich