The December Update

Hello there to all. Again, as is usual for my writing habits, I haven't written in about two months. Things are going well here and the weather is beginning to turn toward winter with the temps getting colder and a little bit of weather turning up now and then. We haven't had any snow yet, but there is some snow on some of the surrounding mountains. I am not complaining though because as cool as snow looks, it sucks if you have to do any kind of outdoor work or drive in it, which takes on a whole new dimension here when you figure in driving in snow and off-roading and all. I am also looking forward to going home soon. I can't say when but it is soon enough that I can start looking forward to it and that is a good thing. Christmas is coming up and we don't have any serious plans or anything, but we are doing a secret santa, which was planned a little late so who knows if anything people ordered for other people will get here on time.

Well, here are some pictures that I have taken over the last few months with some little tidbits of information about them:

A couple of weeks ago, we went out to a nearby village and delivered a bunch of relief supplies to them, stuff like food supplies, winter coats and hats, and fuel. We also held what we call a MEDCAP, where we have a couple of medics available to examine anyone who is sick or hurt or whatnot. This was picture that Mike took of me while I was taking pictures of the distribution. We try to be as "hands off" as possible and have the local police and Afghan army guys hand the stuff out because we want it to look like all this stuff comes from the Afghan government, which is, of course, a load of crap and everyone knows it, but whatever.

Taking pictures... not much more that I can say about that.

This is Mike giving directions to the Mayor and police officers, pretty much reminding them that it is there job to do this, not ours, and explaining for like the tenth time, exactly what is to happen and how. They got the idea after the tenth time and ran with it.

Mike playing the ever popular high five game with some of the little kids while they waited in line to fill up their jugs with fuel. There were a whole lot more kids than adults there, most of which were in line to get fuel.

This was our team pic that we took around Thanksgiving.


This is Fannie the Dog. Her job is to sniff for bombs in the road and get blown up instead of us. Kind of sucks for her.


A girl waiting to get fuel. She is wearing one of the winter hats we gave out.


Some other girls at the give away. I thought this looked like one of those National Geographic shots.


More pictures of me sitting around watching the haps. That's pretty much my job in these situations; we plan it all which takes days, but then once we get it rolling we step back and let the Afghans take it.

Little girls in their cute little dresses covered in sequins.



A cool sunset picture I took the other day before a big storm came in.


Same sunset.



This was the next day as we were trying to get back to base before the storm actually hit.


This was a lesson learned about paying attention to instructions. When crossing a river there are two things you need to do. First is to listen to the instructions of whoever is willing to give them to you, especially if they have more experience than you or outrank you, because then if something bad happens, you have someone to blame. Second and more important is you always watch the truck in front of you and notice where exactly they drove through the river; basically, if they made it through and you do the exact same thing they did, your odds are pretty good that you will get through just fine. The problem in this picture is that the guy driving did neither of the smart things above. He was told to enter the water gently, in four wheel drive and not let off the gas. Just enter the water and power through, but don't speed through. He didn't do this, instead he went too fast into the water which sent water into his air intake which flooded the engine and stalled it. He also did not do what the other five or six vehicles in front of him did and that was to avoid the deep spot on the far right, but hugging that rock on the left edge of the bend in the river. What ended up happening is that one of my guys, Mike, had to drive the truck he was driving, a much bigger truck, back into the river, then they had to connect the two trucks and Mike had to pull out the hummer backwards to the other side. After they were on the other side, it took about half an hour to get the engive started because it was full of river water. Our truck on the other hand, was behind them and now had the pressure of not getting stuck, but because I am the worlds greatest off road hummer driver, we were fine.