Recruiting talent

It's something of an open secret that I've been considering writing a book about my time in Afghanistan. I'm not sure there's a market for another State Department PRT memoire out there (it kind of kills me that We Meant Well got there first), but I was so captivated by my time in southwest Afghanistan and so genuinely enjoy writing that it seems like it's worth a shot.

(Commander Killjoy was giving me a hard time about taking leave again, and I told him that I needed to plunk myself down on a beach in Thailand with an umbrella-laden fruity drink and try to get some work done on a draft of the book. "Don't you think you'd have more to write about if you actually spent a little time here?" he replied).

I'm not sure I'll even be able to get the book cleared by State -- I've seen a ton of interesting things here that didn't make the blog, both because I try not to talk much about work and because they felt sensitive in nature -- and State, particularly in this post-Wikileaks era, is hyper-sensitive about such things. But again, it seems like it's worth a shot.

That said, trying to crank out 120,000 words into a vacuum is daunting, particularly when I'm so pessimistic about actually being published. Simultaneously, posting potential book chapters on this blog seems foolish, on the order of why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? (I feel like that metaphor is maybe not entirely appropriate here, which wouldn't bother me in the slightest if I hadn't disclosed that I'm considering writing a book a scant three paragraphs ago).

The point here is that I'm considering starting a new, clandestine blog on which to post potential book chapters. I'm not 100 percent committed to the idea yet (and I frankly fear that talking about writing a book when it's still in idea form is a bit like disclosing a pregnancy too early -- doing so is courting disaster). That said, if things do indeed get off the ground, I would probably want a small cadre of people -- five to ten ish -- to join Team Reading and to tell me candidly when things weren't as interesting as I remember them having been, or when I'm too in the weeds on Afghan politics, or when the paragraphs just aren't flowing and things frankly just aren't working.

A few people are doomed to be recruited for this activity -- I'm looking at you, EmailFromTheEmbassy -- and there are a few others I'm hoping I can recruit (C_Girl over at Hilarity in Shoes, and my Bohemian Artist friends, for example).

But if this actually comes to fruition -- and it certainly is possible that it won't -- then I'd welcome a few more pairs of eyes to look things over. I will likely not reach out to anyone, since I feel that being on Team Reading will be more annoying than not annoying -- but if you're interested in being on the review committee, drop me an email (link on the top right of the blog). Some things will be recycled from this blog (albeit touched up
and edited and maybe reshuffled); other things will be new, and possibly eye-wateringly dry. Regardless, I expect brutal honesty.

All of this is very tentative -- no promises all around -- but for some reason it seems important to me to lay the groundwork now before I go any further.

More Questions Than Answers.

I'm on R&R. Yes, again.

I felt pretty bad leaving again so soon after my last R&R, a feeling that the military seconded and that Commander Killjoy went out of his way to reinforce ("no one is forcing you to go on leave"). But guilty or otherwise, I think passing up 20 days of paid vacation out of some misguided sense of solidarnoszt with my military colleagues would be foolish. And I needed dental work, a fact I clung to defensively as I bought my plane tickets to Bangkok.

But the guilt has lingered, and Ive been working to make up for it. Mostly I'm getting things ready for my departure, organizing the things I need to pass on to my replacement and figuring out how to best do so. Looking back, it seems to me now that State did a terrible job of preparing us for this deployment, and I'm hoping to pass on enough information that the next crop of officers coming in -- probably not my replacement, but the group that follows her -- can hit the ground with a better sense of which way is up than I had when I landed in Farah.

As the ostensible "governance advisor" to the Province, there were things I should have known before my arrival but was never told and had never thought to look up -- I didn't know what questions to be asking, much less where to find the answers. They taught us Farsi, slapped "Governance Advsior" on our business cards, assured us we were experts and then shipped us off to rural Afghanistan without knowing a damn thing about the place. I spent my first few months waiting for someone in the military to call me out on it -- to shriek out that the Emperor has no clothes and to stop inviting me on missions outside the wire. I think we can do better.

There's an Afghan Area Studies course that goes along with language class -- I referred to it lovingly as "Rise and Fall of the Taliban Parts One Through Seventeen" -- but it was taught by an academic, not by a Foreign Service Officer, and was at best tangentially useful. It focused almost exclusively on the modern political history of Afghanistan, a topic that was often interesting but rarely useful. The course lasted a year and was followed by a completely worthless "Introduction to Provincial Reconstruction Teams," taught by a guy who had spent a year in Herat (a city that resembles nowhere else in Afghanistan), and who mostly just focused on his questionably legal business partnership with a Turkmen-owned dairy factory. ("You'll need to be an advocate for companies like these -- and you might end up a partner in the firm, like I did").

Meetings at the Embassy in advance of being shipped ot to the field were more useful, but Kabul is a busy place and the people we met with were understandably strapped for time. We spent a scant 45 minutes with the Embassy's expert on Provincial and District-level political structures, and it was the most useful 45 minutes of my entire training -- but 45 minutes is only enough time for a galloping overview, hardly enough to get one's feet wet. And I was in receive mode -- I again had no idea what questions I should be asking.

And so that's what I've been working on during this trip: I've been sitting at rickety Thai sidewalk cafe tables, sipping Tom Yum soup and fresh squeezed tangerine juice, and coming up with a comprehensive list of questions that people at the Embassy or back in Washington should be able to answer but that field officers on arrival can't -- unless the other field officers were somehow better prepped than me, which I will concede is a possibility.

What is the form and structure of the Provicnial Governor's Office? What is the assigned role of the Deputy Governor, the Provincial Executive Manager and the Administrative Manager? Who controls hiring for those positions, and how much latitude if any does the Governor have in firing them if necessary? Does the Governor's Office receive a budget beyond the U.S.-funded Performance Based Governor's Fund? If so, how much is said budget, what is the process for requesting it and how much latitude does the Governor have in executing it? What are the budgetary reporting requirements? Who compiles said reports, and with what frequency?

It gets pretty thick into the weeds of Afghan rural governance pretty quickly -- but this is the sort of information that field officers should have at their fingertips. To steal a phrase from the military -- we come in without knowing what right looks like.

What is the form and structure of the Provincial Director of Economy's office? What taxes is he legally allowed to collect, and are the revenues from said taxes returned to the Province, or sent directly to the Central Government? What are the obvious avenues for corruption, and what transparency measures if any are in place to prevent said corruption?

I'm not filling in the answers, though at this point I could answer almost all of the two pages worth of questions I've come up with so far. It took a full year of being knee-deep in the politics of Farah province, but at this point I would indeed consider myself an expert on Afghan sub-national governance. Most of my answers to these questions would start with "it is my understanding that...", but that's a facet of having garnered the information from Afghans themselves, and since the Afghan system of Government is obscenely complex (and designed, it seems, to keep power concentrated in the hands of a few), even they are frequently unsure of the answers.

But it's a start. When I finally finish, I'll pass the list of questions on to State's training center and give a copy to the Embassy so they can better prepare field officers who are coming through Kabul en route to their PRTs. I'll walk my replacement through them and make sure she knows at least as much as I do before I leave. I'm not under the impression that my year-long presence in Farah has in any way made a difference ("You need to be prepared to accept 'my province did not get worse' as a measure of success," we were told during one particularly pessimistic training class), but I can at least try to set up future officers for success.

Test

Trying out a new means of posting -- via email. Cross your fingers.

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for ...

I was at a shura a few months ago in Pusht-e Rod district, a relatively volatile area north of Farah City. The district traditionally grows a significant quantity of Farah's poppy crop, and I had plunked myself down during the lunch hour to ask the District Agricultural Manager for his predictions for the upcoming growing season. He and the others elders around him were honest and forthcoming as we ate lunch (goat in tomato sauce over rice, torn apart and eaten without utensils), and our conversation eventually moved from poppy to the Taliban.

I asked them about the Taliban's reach within the district -- how many of them were around, how they went about recruiting, why people in the district joined the Taliban. He paused before answering.

Have you ever been hungry? he asked me. "No," I replied. "No, not really."

I've been hungry, he told me. You'll do anything when you're hungry. There's nothing else like it. When you're hungry, nothing else matters.

He stopped talking and tossed his empty plate and leftover goat bones away from himself. It's not easy to understand if you've never been hungry, he said.

***

Yesterday I was talking to Captain Harmony, our multi-lingual and musically talented Air Force Captain from Public Affairs. "So here's a question," I said. "Do you remember the last time you weren't hungry?"

"God, it seems like forever," she said. "It's like -- it's like that shura you went to with that guy. Do you remember that? Have you ever been hungry? Yeah, I've been hungry: I've been hungry on FOB Farah."

***

The Taliban declared the opening of fighting season on May 1st. They usually take the winter off, heading back to Pakistan to rest up and recover and then using the early spring to help with the poppy harvest, a laborious process that involves scoring the bulbs of the poppy plants, leaving them to ooze sap and then scraping the resulting resin off by hand. Fighting season starts once most of the harvest is in and things are calmer for otherwise-busy Taliban members.

They marked the opening of fighting season with a press release from their shadow government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and announced their intention again this year to expel the foreign infidels while minimizing civilian casualties. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but the threat alert country-wide was raised and my boss in Herat implored us to stay on base for our own safety. FOB Farah was put into FP-Con C -- "Force Protection Condition Charlie" -- which means beefed up security despite the fact that there's almost no chance of our base being attacked.

(I had previously asked El Comandante during a Base Defense Drill if he thought there were any chance of us getting attacked. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "That would be the best thing that could possibly happen to us. Do you have any idea how much ammunition we have here? All the bad guys would be concentrated in one place and we could eliminate them all at once. It would make our job so much easier.")

In addition to increased security patrols, FP-Con Charlie stipulates that local nationals requiring escorts are not allowed on base. Escorted workers includes all construction workers, all fence-diggers (a military base requires almost nonstop fence building, it seems), and, most poignantly, all the local employees in the chow hall. To deal with the personnel shortfall, they put up large signs announcing that lunch and midnight chow were eliminated immediately and indefinitely.

The FOB Farah chow hall had not exactly been on a roll prior to their announcement of limited service, and a spate of food poisoning had obliterated some 25 percent of the PRT over a span of several miserable weeks. They had closed for a day to bug-bomb the entire place, but conditions remained largely unchanged and the number of sick-call patients held steady. Lieutenant SemperFit, tired of putting IVs in dehydrated diarrhea patients, had undertaken a comprehensive series of inspections of the chow hall but returned only with the advice that PRT members arrive at the opening stroke of 5 to get chow before it can get cold and start to spoil. Rumors circulated that eating the lettuce was tantamount to downing poison.

But for all the awfulness of the chow hall, having food was better than not having food. There are boxes of MREs sprinkled around the compound and while I enjoy them for their novelty, a good chunk of the military people won't touch them unless they're absolutely in a place where no other food is available -- they've been on too many deployments to too many wretched places where there was nothing but MREs for weeks upon weeks. And regardless, MREs are terrible for you -- they're meant for people actively engaged in combat, not for desk jockeys, and the caloric content is through the roof. They're a high caloric supplement to the junk food -- girl scout cookies, microwave popcorn, M&Ms and skittles -- that's all over the base.

FP Con Charlie also means that trucks have to be thoroughly inspected, box by box, before they're allowed on to the compound. The zillions of trucks laden with food headed for the DFAC have been sitting in the sun for days waiting to undergo inspection, leaving the chow hall almost entirely out of comestibles. Dinners have been an ad-hoc mishmash of whatever happened to have come in that day, and generally consists of deep-fried frozen foods doled out by harried-looking Dynecorps employees, a piece of meat on a good day, and a salad bar filled with raisins, croutons and olives. After a day of cobbled-together meals involving ramen noodles, beef jerky and dinner mints, coming into a cafeteria with no food in it seems almost torturous.

***

This morning I walked into the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC -- "see mock") next to my office and gleefully announced that I had found an unexpected can of soup in my bedroom. It was in the box of snacks left by my predecessor that I normally never touch, but have been pawing through since food on base has become scarce. "It eats like a MEAL," I read from the label. I wasn't faking the emotion: I can't really communicate how excited I was about this soup.

Lieutenant Granola thanked me for forwarding him an editorial on Bin Ladin from a Pakistani newspaper, and talk turned to U.S. assistance to Pakistan. Most of the military guys were in favor of immediately cutting off our 3 billion dollars in annual assistance, and I immediately went into USG spokesman mode, defending our Pakistan policies. "The last thing the world needs," I said, "is a nuclear failed state."

"So what if Pakistan fails?" First Sergeant McGruff asked. "So India kicks their ass around for a little bit? Is that so bad?"

"Pakistan could obliterate any number of Indian cities in a matter of seconds," I responded. "A hundred million, two hundred million dead instantaneously. It would be a catastrophe on a scale never before seen on this earth."

"Dakota," he said deadpan. "There are too many mouths to feed on this earth as it is. Jesus Christ," he said, as he threw his hands in the air. "There are starving people right here, on this FOB. Just look how excited you are over a god damn can of soup."

So that's where we stand: a week without lunch and with paltry dinners, and suddenly my colleagues are wishing for nuclear holocaust to bring down global demand for food. I want to go find that district Agricultural Manager and tell him that I do, after all, understand.

The Eyes of the Enemy

Farah's reaction to Osama Bin Ladin's death was muted. Our engineers were headed out on a routine project inspection that morning and I asked the SecFor guys to poll passers-by on Bin Ladin's death, assuming that the Embassy would want man-on-the-street reactions. SecFor reported that the streets were largely empty -- they blamed the 120-degree temperatures -- but said that not one of the seven people they asked was aware of Bin Ladin's death. "It seemed like they didn't know who Osama Bin Ladin was," they told me.

I passed that information to the Embassy. It did not make the final report.

I am not under the impression that Bin Ladin's death will change much here in western Afghanistan. We do have an active insurgency in Farah, though whether they're truly Taliban (with Quetta Shura connections) or funded or supported by Al-Qaeda or the Osama wing of global terror is an almost academic debate, and one for which I have limited tolerance. They have attempted to blow up convoys and have succeeded in killing a handful of soldiers in Farah, and the exact taxonomy of insurgent fighter they fall under seems unimportant when placed in that light. The military generally refers to them succinctly as "bad guys," and I have taken to doing the same.

Generally speaking, though, the insurgency is something that I see little of. Fighting happens in outlying districts, and the PRT won't usually move in until the combat is done; there can be no reconstruction until the fighting is over, and the PRT is not a kinetic or maneuver unit, the military's euphemisms for combat troops. I have traveled on occasion to outlying districts and sat through shuras in the shadow of buildings riddled with bullet holes, but I have never been anywhere near active, ongoing combat. My year here, mercifully, has been nothing like the movie Restrepo.

The insurgency happens elsewhere. And so I was quite surprised when I, in mid-March, came unexpectedly face to face with a pack of Taliban.

They were reintegrating. There's a much ballyhooed Coalition program -- the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, though its names and subprograms seem to switch acronyms on an almost weekly basis -- that seeks to bring to bring insurgents and low-level Taliban back into Afghan society. The program on the Coalition side is managed by a charismatic British 2-Star named General Jones, who has visited Farah several times to discuss the program with the Farah Government. ("I'm implementing a nation-wide program," he told us in his charming north-of-London accent, "and I've only got two men and two dogs to do it.")

Jones runs the program on the Coalition side, but for the most part it's Afghan led and we take a largely hands-off approach, supporting from the background as needed. The idea is that non-ideological Taliban -- those who got swept up in the fighting for one reason or another but do not seek the eradication of all non-muslims or the restoration of a pan-global Islamic caliphate -- can be given a means to honorably exit the fight and a small subsistence stipend to get them back on their feet. It's not intended to be a jobs program, nor is the very small stipend intended to be a reward for coming back; it's meant to be a means of grievance resolution and community building. It's one of our exit strategies.

And so, when a pack of Taliban from central Farah Province decided to reintegrate, the Governor called us to let us know, and I and Commander Killjoy tagged along with a few other officer who were headed to assist with registering them in the program.

It is indescribably strange to stand talk to people who just days prior were holding arms against the United States. We were standing in the pleasant garden space just across from the Governor's office, outside a conference room used for large meetings, and exchanging the normal pleasantries that go along with meeting any Afghan, chatting like we were old friends instead two groups of people who, as of days ago, had been on opposite sides of the war. They were young -- early twenties or so, with scruffy beards and the black turbans favored by the Taliban. None of them had ever been to school for a day in their life, a fact which I, well-trained in reading faces from my visa tour in Islamabad once upon a time, could see in their faces without having to ask: it was etched into their eyes.

(After almost a year in Afghanistan, I can tell if someone is literate just by the brightness in his eyes, and I can pick out who the important people are in a crowd just by how they carry themselves; the requisite visa tour that all entry level officers have to go through can seem like a soul-sapping waste of time, but I will concede that it taught me to read people -- and to trust my instincts -- better than any training ever could have).

The reintegrees spoke only Pashto and no Dari, and seemed wary of talking to me through through an interpreter. But like a lot of Afghans, they could get by in Urdu, the primary language of Pakistan, and they opened up once we switched to a language they could talk to me directly in. They were rural poor, and claimed to have joined the insurgency for the wages it pays -- Ten Dollar Taliban, as they're known. One said he joined because it seemed like fun -- he was bored, and taking pot shots at passing soldiers seemed like something to do to break up the otherwise staid life of a rural farmer. The others nodded in agreement: it was a way to kill time.

I had expected that talking to members of the Taliban would be fascinating beyond any speaking of it: they were the physical incarnation of America's enemy -- actual, living examples of "bad guys" who likely had taken up the cause of Death to America and all of that. It is not inconceivable that even a scant week prior, they'd possibly have tried to kill me if our paths had crossed and it had been convenient.

And yet, they were remarkably uninteresting. They were all sheepish about their past with the Taliban, and seemed almost embarrassed that they hadn't engaged in any major combat activities. Mostly they just wanted the bags of wheat they'd get as a subsistence allowance from the reintegration process. We talked about farming and tending the fields, but ended up having not much to say to one another.

I left the larger group of reintegrees to go inside with Commander Killjoy, who was set to begin talking to the self-identified leader of the group, the one who had ostensibly convinced them to come in and reintegrate. He, in a clean set of Afghan clothes and with a larger and more commanding turban than the others, claimed to have spent significant time in the Pakistani city Quetta, home of the Quetta Shura which ostensibly guides all Taliban activities.

And again the Consular experience kicked in: I was convinced that this man was lying to me. I wasn't sure what it was that he was lying about, if he was just stretching the truth or embellishing things, or if parts of his story were true and just small falsehoods had been studded in, but I was positive that he was lying.

Without realizing I had done so, I switched into visa officer mode and began interviewing him as if he were a suspected fraudulent applicant in the immigrant visa line at U.S. Embassy Islamabad. I started grilling him, trying to trip him up within his own story so I could figure out what was true and what wasn't. I knew what I was doing, but I thought that I was doing a good job of keeping it lighthearted and friendly. "Lighthearted? Are you f__king kidding me?" the Commander told me later. "I'm not sure you realize how intense you can be, sometimes. That was really, uh, really something to watch."

(Commander Killjoy and I have since worked out a code word -- "cupcake" -- to use if either of us think the other is being too hostile with our interlocutors. I originally made it up to use on the off chance he went off the deep end, but the only time it's been trotted out has been to calm me down in the face of unreasonable and repetitive demands, something that makes me irrationally annoyed. The first time he used it ("did you get one of those cupcakes at lunch?"), I responded that I didn't see any cupcakes at lunch, and he sighed despondently about there being no point in having a code word if I refused to remember what it means).

And so I grilled him, through an interpreter since I don't speak Pashto and didn't want to give him the upper hand by speaking Urdu.

How often did you go to Quetta?

At least once a year.

How did you get there?

By road, and then over the mountains.

Through which cities? On which road?

Highway one, the ring road. And then through Spin Boldak and through Balochistan.

You drove? Or someone else drove? Or you took a bus? How did you get there?

I told you, we took highway one. Everyone takes highway one -- even regular citizens. It's not out of the ordinary. Starting to get defensive.

And when you got there, where did you sleep? What did the room look like? Did you have a bed, or a cot or did you sleep on the ground? How many other people slept in the room with you, and were you inside or outside? When you met representatives of the Quetta Shura, what did the room look like? Did it have a table or did you sit on the floor? What did you eat? Did you have to pay for the food or was it provided? How many meals a day?

And so on. I remained steadfastly convinced that he was lying to me, but the Commander told me gently that it ultimately doesn't matter if parts of his story were made up or embellished or whatever. He had been accepted by our Afghan counterparts and was reintegrating, and that was the end of the story; where or about what he was lying was no longer relevant. The Taliban leader looked visibly relieved when I stood and left the room.

After Osama Bin Ladin was killed, I noted on Facebook that I have lived in Pakistan and even driven through Abbottabad, but was not involved with the Operation that got him. I have spent exactly one day on the range and have never shot anyone, much less a major figure from the world of Islamic extremism or a terrorist leader -- such is not my role in this war. But I can say confidently that at least one member of the Taliban -- or ex-member, now -- will always remember me as the guy from the PRT who, for a period of twenty minutes or so, stared him down and made him bracingly uncomfortable. It's no take down of Bin Ladin, but there's still an odd sense of satisfaction to it.

Lonely Planet: Farah

Lieutenant Granola was in my office this afternoon and happened to mention that he thinks (for whatever reason) that he might eventually be posted to the Central African Republic. I mentioned that I know nothing about the C.A.R. -- not even its capital city -- and think of it only as the sort of place that Foreign Service Officers get sent to when they're being punished for something.

We did a little googling -- the capital is Bangui -- which then led to us looking at the WikiTravel page for Bangui, which doesn't actually look that horrible. From Bangui, we leapt over to the WikiTravel page for Afghanistan to see what sort of advice they might have. The guide is actually surprisingly extensive, but there are tons of blanks waiting to be filled in, and Farah (mentioned only as a province in Southern Afghanistan, which is not where it falls in the USG's geographic taxonomy) has no page whatsoever. Granola and I agreed that this is unacceptable, and are both hell-bent on filling in the information to try to attract a few tourists to sunny Farah.

In the mean time, this photo from the Southern Afghanistan page (and the caption, faithfully reproduced here) was easily our favorite part of the whole guide:



Typical Rural Scene in Southern Afghanistan

Employee Evaluation.

I was walking around base grousing about having to work on my personnel evaluation, my second-least favorite part of working for State. "I think I'm just going to take credit for everything the military has done," I told one of the SecFor guys.

"Don't you think they'll figure out it wasn't you?" he replied. "I mean, what are you going to write -- paragraph 16: '...and then I was all, TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT, and a ka-BOOOOOOOOOOOM!'"?

We Meant Well

I have approximately nineteen billion words written about Zambia (complete with match.com-ready photos of me cuddling with lions and cheetahs), but the text is still on my first-edition 1940s blackberry and has to be manually transcribed on a regular computer, a proposition I haven't been able to face. Moreover, it's EER season -- Employee Evaluation Reports, that is -- and the Byzantine system review and promotion that State employs means that I (and the rest of the Foreign Service -- we in essence shut down for two months while we write about our own accomplishments) am fully consumed with googling for glowing accolades and finding alternate ways to make myself sound like a champion.

In the mean time, a fellow State Officer who headed up a PRT in Iraq has written a book due out in September entitled We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. It's not due out till September, but I for one am salivating for it. From the review on Amazon: Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity?

The scenarios listed above don't translate one-to-one with the Afghan experience, but there have definitely been similar surely-you're-joking moments, none of which I've written about here for fear of being off message and having State drop the hammer on me -- which is kind of unfortunate, since events like the influx of a troop of Hip Hop dancers to Herat in the name of cultural outreach are basically begging to be blogged about. (I heard about the event second-hand; if I had been there, I probably wouldn't have been able to resist).

The author of the book -- a fellow FSO named Peter Van Buren, whom I haven't met -- writes a bitingly sharp-edged blog at WeMeantWell.com, which is so blazingly honest that I'm shocked the hatchet hasn't come down from above yet. He says a lot of the things that a lot of us think but don't say, which is usually hara-kiri in the State blog world. I'd vaguely toyed with the idea of trying to turn my time in Afghanistan into a book -- probably more akin to Peter Hessler's Peace Corps memoire River Town than We Meant Well, but regardless, it appears that I've been beaten to the punch.

Admittedly Annoying Habits from Afghanistan

A brief catalogue of annoying habits reinforced by eight months in Afghanistan:

1. Negative: Eight months with the military has wholesale eradicated the word "no" from my vocabulary and replaced it with "negative."

I will concede that this is a speech habit I coveted prior to my assignment with the U.S. military. It's a phrase that sounds very martial, which is similar to sounding rugged, only more so -- and since I have crafted an entire internet dating portfolio around appearing to be rugged, picking up the phrase "negative" just seemed to be the next logicial step, not dissimilar to talking enthusiastically about camping or pretending to have an interest in rock climbing. I had made some inroads into picking up the "negative" habit in Beijing by spending inordinate amounts of time hanging out with the Marines, drinking cheap beer and talking about push ups. At the time, though, I was still generally capable of saying "no."

Now that the vocabularic transformation is both complete and seemingly irreversible, I recognize that it just makes me sounds like a twit.

I will say that "negative" is a small step up from "nay," which is Urdu for no and which I used consistently upon returning from Pakistan. While "negative" at least implies some sort of military background, "nay" just indicates that you're big into Dungeons and Dragons and spend your spare time hanging out at Renaissance Festivals, likely while wearing a tunic and carrying an unsharpened sword -- that is, the opposite of the rugged look I'm going for.

2. Inshallah: At this point in my life, I am fully incapable of referring to any future event without throwing in an Inshallah, Arabic for "if it be the will of Allah."

I've consistently used Inshallah in lieu of "hopefully" since I've lived in Pakistan, but living in Afghanistan has reinforced a very specific feeling of impending doom you get if you don't use it -- like omitting it will cause something terrible to happen. (At one point after leaving Pakistan, I casually threw out an Inshallah at my parents' house, and my mother asked what it meant. "If Allah wills it," I told her. "Dakota," she replied icily, "I would like to remind you that we are Catholic").

Of all my annoying habits -- and I will concede I have many -- my consistent use of Inshallah is the one that most bugs the Godfather. "What time is the Ambassador's plane supposed to land?" he'll ask. "9:30 Inshallah," I'll reply, and he'll take a deep breath and get that exasperated look that indicates that dealing with civilians is his cross to bear, and grit his teeth and say -- "the scheduled time of arrival is zero nine thirty hours, whether Allah wills it or not. This is an Inshallah-free PRT. Zero nine thirty."

"Right," I'll rebuke him. "Zero nine thirty Inshallah."

3. Touching your heart: Shaking hands is an uber-mandatory part of Afghan culture, and every meeting begins with a long procession of people entering the room and shaking the hand of everyone present. If you shake hands and you really mean it, you finish the shake by using that same hand (always the right hand) to touch your heart while bowing slightly from the waist.

If for some reason you can't shake hands with someone -- for example, if they're the opposite gender and by extension touching them with your grubby male paws would be wildly inappropriate, or if their hands are full of AK-47, or if there's like a tiger pit or something in between you and them -- then it's perfectly fine to acknowledge their presence by making eye contact, smiling, touching your heart as above and bowing slightly.

Likewise, if someone offers you something you have to turn down (a lunch when you're pressed for time, for example) -- you can't actually say "no thanks" -- the no is rude, and besides you might slip up and say "negative, thanks," although mercifully that word has not yet invaded your Farsi vocabulary. Instead, you just say "thank you" twice (preferably in a slightly dismayed tone of voice), shake your head lightly and repeat the chest-clutch/bow routine. Offer declined, problem solved, off to the races.

After eight months in Afghanistan (and a year in Afghan Farsi classes before), I am incapable of acknowledging another human being without touching my heart -- even if we've only made eye contact and haven't actually shaken hands.

The Italian Colonel on my base has made it clear that this habit freaks him out ("I am not Afghan, you need not do this -- people will think you are too much Afghan now"). Lieutenant SemperFit, the PRT's Physician's Assistant, has informed me that clutching your chest is known in medical circles as Levine's Sign, and is one of the hallmarks of a heart attack; he invariably asks if I'm feeling ok and if I have any crushing pain in my chest radiating into my left arm.

(Lieutenant SemperFit is the PRT's well-built and vaguely exercise-obsessed P.A. who was previously seconded to the Marine Corps as a medic -- known in the Navy as a "corpsman." He's also a raging conspiracy theorist and has sworn never to eat Afghan food out of a persistant fear of being poisoned. I told him he's missing out -- the Afghan food I get off base is easily the best food available in Farah. "Right," he responded in that tone of voice indicating that he thinks I'm in idiot. "Till they poison you").

I was aware that the heart-touching thing was getting out of hand, but I didn't realize how deeply ingrained it had become until I dropped anchor in Zambia, where I've been heart-grabbing/bowing like a madman. Unexpectedly, though, it appears that Zambians make the same gesture. It is unclear to me if doing so is innately Zambian or if they're just responding to me, but I've gotten a lot of hands-on-heart in response. And a thanks-plus-clutch-plus-bow has actually been consistently enough to get rid of both taxi drivers and child beggars, two of the developing world's normally most persistant annoyances.

On Wandering

In unrelated news, on the 13th of March, I flew to Zambia (via Dubai and Nairobi) for R&R. I'm headed to Namibia on the 20th, and then down through the South African Wine Country to Cape Town, from where I fly home on April 4th. More from me... eventually.

Law and Order: Farah Edition

The military's got a thing for Task Forces. My small base alone hosts four of them, and even after eight months here, I only kind of know what they're each tasked with. There's task force Southeast (which works roughly southeast of here), Task Force South (which confusingly doesn't work south of here -- that's the no-man's-land of Nimroz Province), Task Force 45 (God only knows), and Task Force Arrow ("Straight Arrows!"), which took over for Task Force Fury ("Fury from the Sky!") and which disappointingly is an infantry unit and uses neither crossbows nor other medieval weaponry, despite their name.

The sheer number of task forces in this country is equal parts overwhelming and ridiculous. A buddy of mine at a PRT in the East got fed up with it and declared himself and his fellow civilians to be Task Force Mongoose, allowing him to say things like, "uh, why wasn't Task Force Mongoose invited to this meeting?" We at PRT Farah have yet to declare ourselves to be a Task Force, but now that I think about it, that probably needs to happen.

Last week, PRT Farah hosted Combined Joint Task Force 435 -- CJIATF 435, if you will -- which is is tasked with overseeing detentions in Afghanistan (they took over for Task Force 82, according to their wikipedia page, and do you see how this Task Force thing is out of control?), and is headed by Admiral Harward, a three-star out of Kabul.

Here's the thing: two or three weeks ago or so, I was up in Herat hobnobbing with the good people from an entirely different and unrelated Task Force named Task Force Shafafiyat, who also sometimes go by the English translation of their name, "Task Force Transparency." (Irrelevant sidenote: I myself would romanize the word transparency as "shifafiyat," with an i and not a in the first syllable, but I was gently corrected by Kabul on the spelling and now have to choose between the Embassy-preferred but clearly incorrect spelling, or buck the trend and go with what I know to be correct and by extension have others think that I'm wrong; I have devoted more time to this dilemma than you would think humanly possible).

TF Shafafiyat, as you might guess, focuses on government transparency, and is headed by General H.R. McMaster, a charismatic and outspoken one-star with a shaved head and a forceful personality. He was intensely engaging and he was memorable, and that's not something I say lightly given the number of painfully forgettable PowerPoint presentations I've had to sit through during this war. (The now-famous spaghetti-as-war-diagram chart shown to McChrystal was not a random outlier; "this war will be won through better and more complex powerpoint slides," I've heard said sarcastically).

I have an obscenely bad memory for names and faces, but McMaster's strong presentation coupled with his appearance (wiry, muscular frame and shaved head) stuck in my mind. I was consequently quite surprised when Admiral Harward, the three star from CJIATF 435, stepped off of his C-130 at Farah Airfield and turned out to be identical to McMaster.

Seriously, look me in the eye and tell me they aren't identical.

So General McMaster Admiral Harwood and the rest of TF 435 showed up to come to Farah to talk about rule of law, the physical infrastructure of Farah prison and other related topics. They had come in part because of a report that was written about Farah's general Rule of Law conditions, and I had contacted the Embassy in a huff to ask for a copy, annoyed that someone was writing about my beloved province without having the courtesy to run it by me first. The Embassy responded, attaching the report to a quizzical email that gently noted that I had in fact written the report in question, in late November. And even though it was certainly mine -- I recognize my own sentence structure, even in dry reporting cables -- I to this day have no recollection of having typed it out.

So TF 435 showed up and was whisked up to our conference room for a discussion on rule of law. I had prepped myself by studying the report I had supposedly written (I considered sending myself a kudos on its comprehensiveness), and the meeting went fine. In reality, though, it was just a warm up for the big field trip of the day, which involved taking the Admiral to the Farah prison, both to see the facility itself and to take a gander at the $985,000 extension that the PRT is funding to ease overcrowding.

Farah prison was the site of one of the largest jailbreaks in Afghan history, which happened just before I arrived in July of last year. Some 20 Taliban members bribed the guards to smuggle in explosives, blew the doors off their cells and escaped into the rugged districts of Northern Farah; other Taliban members had staged simultaneous attacks on police checkpoints to draw the police away and provide cover for the escapees. Visiting the Prison had been on my to-do list for some time, though other things always seemed to crop up when the PRT's rule of law guy (First Sergeant McGruff, a 30-year veteran of the Michigan police department with a gruff, no-nonsense bearing) was headed that way, and I was excited that the Admiral had finally given me an excuse to get there.

We hadn't told the warden or anyone else that we were coming until the morning of the visit, so when we showed up an hour after phoning them, we were quite surprised to learn that they had arranged a ceremonial brick laying for us on the site of the extension, with a few cinder blocks written in ribbon and ready to be layed down. (I went back to the prison a few days after the visit on other business, and saw that rather than cutting off the ribbon, the Afghan contracting company had just cemented them into place as they stood, ribbons and bows still festively intact).

The Admiral had arrived in advance of the Godfather and I, and we hustled to catch up; he was already inside the prison when we approached the gate. "You can't go inside," the guard told us. "There's some Admiral in there."

"Right," I responded, pointing to the haf-dozen military people with me. "He's ours. We're with him. We need to get inside."

"You can go inside later. There's some admiral in there now," he responded. My translator took over and explained the situation in hurried Pashto, and the guard glowered at us suspiciously but ultimately acquiesced. "No weapons inside," he told us. The Godfather had a pistol on him and stayed behind; I and the other visiting military headed in.

Heading in required crawling through a 3-foot high door made of rusty iron and secured with enormous bolt locks. The door and the crawl space after it were low enough that you had to go on hands and knees, and the final entrance to the prison was another metal door with a similar fastening schema. The walls on the other side, in the center of the prison courtyard, were 20 feet high and made of smooth concrete; when the door slammed shut behind you, that was it: if they didn't want to let you leave, there was no way of getting out.

I felt like I was in the Shawshank Redemption. It was kind of terrifying.

("If a riot breaks out, hit the deck before they start shooting and stay still till you think it's over," McGruff had told me. "It's a god damn kill box in there, and the Afghan guards on the wall aren't going to differentiate between you and them.")

I had assumed that there would be no riots while we there, that the Admiral would take a brief tour of the facilities and then we would bolt. But he had come with his Afghan counterpart, the national-level Minister of Justice, and when I came in, the Minister was addressing the crowd of detainees in fast Persian; from what I could pick out, it sounded like he was berating the detainees ("you are here because you deserve to be here"), and the crowd was not responding well, shouting at the Minister in Pashto and generally looking rowdy.

I've said before that my fight-or-flight response is keyed squarely to flight, and the whole thing left me with a rising sense of panic and an ongoing, head-turning and slightly desperate search for an exit; my instinct was to inch towards the door, but that seemed futile given the 20-foot walls ringed with armed guards. There was, in short, no avenue of escape. The whole scene -- dusty tents in the courtyard flanked by rows of drying prison laundry, and nothing but to look at but motivational slogans and a small patch of empty blue sky -- seemed to designed to eradicate hope.

"Can you even begin to wrap your mind around how much misery there is in this place?" one of the Admiral's aides asked me. "I really can't," I told him.

The Minister finished speaking, took a few questions ("I am an innocent man, and everyone knows it; why am I here?" and then more heartwrendingly, "I was told that I would be released when I turned 70. I'm 72 now; when will I be released?"), and then we high-tailed it out.

The Governor told us later that he thought it foolhardy that we entered into the center of the prison with so many obscenely dangerous criminals wandering around. Commander Killjoy later mandated that no U.S. personnel are allowed to enter the inner courtyard in the future ("It really is a kill box in there"), making our visit possibly the last by USG representatives. All things considered, I can't say I'm sad I don't have to go back.

On Pay Cuts.

Wikileaks wasn't a big deal in my part of Afghanistan. The Governor occasionally asks me to stop taking notes during our meetings ("Hey Wikileaks, don't write this down"), but aside from cramping my habit of keeping a verbatim transcript of my life, it didn't really touch me. I was already a year out of China by the time the story broke, and the statistics here -- 9 percent literacy, 1 percent internet access -- meant it wasn't a big deal in Farah.

State got great press out of Wikileaks. "Wikileaks Proves Diplomats Doing Exactly What They're Supposed To" was a big leitmotif, and for a brief moment in time, State was feted as leading the charge for peaceful resolution of international problems. There was also the annoying undercurrent of "We Had No Idea Those Embassy People Were Actually Smart," but even that I'm chalking up as good press. The positives definitely outweighed the negatives, and I felt like State came out on top -- that people had come to know who we are and what we do.

State was briefly the golden boy of the Federal World. And consequently, I was taken completely by surprise when the House passed a 16 percent pay cut for Foreign Service Officers last week. It comes at a particularly bad time, smack in the middle of a two year pay freeze (which itself was hard to take) and in the face of a possible Government shutdown that may involve being furloughed.

But frankly, it's not about the money.

We're a small service, and the pay cut affects only junior and mid-level officers -- about 7,500 people total. You only take a pay cut if you if you're overseas, and the cuts only affect the Foreign Service -- the other agencies that live and work overseas are not included in this. State has been singled out. You can't help but feel like Congress is trying to punish the Foreign Service for something we did, but we don't really know what it was.

There's that old lingering perception that U.S. diplomats are the snobby elite, spending their time in Paris drinking champagne and mocking people who don't know which fork to use, and I have the feeling that THAT, somehow, is the problem here. But I thought, mistakenly it seems, that Wikileaks had cleared all that up -- that Wikileaks made it known that the United States Foreign Service isn't all champagne receptions and tea parties, and that the quiet work we do is helping the American cause, even though it's behind the scenes and most Americans are unaware of it.

I've committed to giving up two years of my life to live in Afghanistan. I'm not looking for thank-yous for it: I knew what I was getting in to when I signed up for this, and State has certainly incentivized my coming here. But to have Congress come back and say that giving up two years of my life to this place is worth 16 percent less than last year has weighed on me. A 16 percent pay cut is just the opposite of a thank-you; it's a direct statement that the work you do is not valued. It's hard to take it any other way, and it's particularly difficult to take when you're living on the edge of a rocky desert, 40 kilometers from combat operations and a thousand miles from nowhere.

Others in the Service are outraged about it, and there's been a flurry of well-written responses. My favorite, which I've re-read a thousand times, came from a friend of mine in Jordan. There's a movement to blanket congress with letters (I wrote mine, though not nearly as eloquently as others), though the Foreign Service undoubtedly lacks the numbers to make a difference. Even writing my Congresswoman felt futile, since I live in DC and my Representative in Congress has no vote.

My response has not been outrage so much as a lingering sadness; the entire ordeal (including some of the ugly, you're-probably-overpaid/stop-your-whining/if-you-complain-you're-not-a-patriot rhetoric it's stirred up) has made me question what I'm doing here. I had assumed upon signing up for this job that I'd have lots of these moments -- that I'd find myself questioning U.S. policy, or that we'd take repeated, terrifying incoming and I'd be unwilling to leave the base because of it, or that I'd miserable in the wake of casualties and question the logic of continuing on. But that none of that ever happened -- I've never wavered in my desire to be here or in my commitment to this place. At least until now, when the House voted to cut my pay. It really isn't the money (the bill is ambiguous and almost certainly won't pass the Senate or the President) -- it's the sentiment that goes along with it.

People have said that we're taking a pay cut because we enjoy our work too much, but that seems ridiculous -- like they should only pay people for working a job if it makes them miserable. The same cuts were recommended by the White House's Bipartisan Fiscal Commission, though budgetarily speaking, cutting 16 percent of 7,500 people's salary is not a significant figure, and it certainly doesn't explain why we alone were singled out. Moreover, the commission noted that even with the pay cuts, the Foreign Service will remain a highly competitive and sought after: some 25,000 people apply for 300 to 900 jobs annually. But I find that rationale to be wildly offensive -- that they can cut our pay with impunity because of how imminently replaceable we are.

I'm going on leave in a week, if the military can fix our runway so my plane can land. It's definitely time: we've been running ragged implementing a thousand different programs and hosting visitor after visitor, and an ugly internal fight with the maneuver unit over our housing has left all the civilians on edge; it will be good to get away for a few weeks. But it will also be good to get away and take a deep breath and re-examine all of this.

I like living in Farah and I love working with the military, and I don't feel like I'm done with my experience here. But the pay cut has engendered in me a significant homesickness, and made me focus on what I'm missing instead of what I'm gaining from this experience. I toyed briefly with leaving -- Afghanistan is what the Foreign Service calls a "no-fault curtail" posting, so you can cut your posting short at any time without any negative financial or career impacts -- but I think that impulse has passed and I'm back to committed.

I have been questioning, though, if instead of eking out time to study Pashto during the day, I should be eking out time to study for the GRE -- if it isn't time to reconsider this career and begin taking more concrete steps towards quitting and getting my PhD. I've heard others in the Foreign Service say similar things about moving on. I doubt that Congress's intention with this pay cut was to push us towards the door, but that may very well be what ends up happening.

Manuary and the Drowning of Farah

I've said a thousand times that we don't even get clouds in Farah, much less rain, so when it rained -- rained hard! -- for five days straight, it was something resembling a natural disaster. Half the districts in the province claimed flooding damage, and the Province's Emergency Disaster Response Committee was convened and the whole thing took over our collective lives. The mountains that ring the FOB were wreathed in clouds, and being outside was eerie.





The rain turned the Afghan moon dust into a thick sludge, and large swaths of the FOB itsflooded. The maneuver unit (which owns the FOB) had to dig drainage trenches in the gravel, and the floors of my office and bedroom were covered in mud that got tracked in. In my bedroom, it dried into cakes that disintegrated back into rough powder, and no amount of sweeping is enough to keep it from clinging to the bottom of my feet and working its way into my bed. I've changed my sheets twice since the rain, but it still feels like I'm sleeping on the beach.



The weather kerfuffle happened to coincide with the end of the month of January, which our men and women in uniform -- or more accurately just the men, since none of the half dozen or so women here participated -- refer to lovingly as "Manuary" and celebrate by growing truly awful mustaches.

Growing mustaches for major events is a surprisingly large part of the military mindset. When the 4th Infantry Division ("Straight Arrows!") took over for the 82nd Airborne ("Stay All American!") as the maneuver unit on base, they promptly began growing "deployment mustaches" that lasted until people got tired of looking ridiculous and shaved them off. That was followed shortly thereafter by both Playoff Mustaches (kept until favored teams lost) and then the great month of Mo'vember, which, like Manuary, requires a mustache.

PRT participation in all of this was all but nil until Manuary hit, and then some primal urge kicked in and half the people around me grew awful mustaches. Some only lasted a few days, and others were picked off over time as trimming accidents took away too much from left or right and it was deemed unsalvageable. But more than a few hearty souls kept it up the entire month.

Engineer Lovesalot grew a particularly luxurious mustache (no doubt in part to spite Captain Adventure, whose scraggly mustache grows nearly straight out from his face, parallel to the ground); he began carrying around a fine toothed comb in the velcroed chest pocket of his uniform, and took to sneaking it out during staff meetings and surreptitiously combing his facial hair. "I started this as a joke," he said. And then guiltily added -- "but...but it feels really good."

Lieutenant Dracula, over in Supply, kept his mustache until he went on leave. "Is it normal to miss a mustache this much?" he opined after shaving it. "My upper lip feels so cold and afraid."

(Lt.Drac is of some vague Eastern European ancestry that actually has nothing to do with Transylvania -- but his first name is Vlad, and so Dracula it had to be. "I'm Ukrainian," he told me, but I don't see why that matters).

I myself did not participate in Manuary, as I'm already the proud owner of a significant quantity of facial hair and even trimming it too short causes Afghans consternation: they like full full beards. I did feel a little bit like I was missing out, but Drac's office mate (Petty Officer Moonshine, who owns a distillery in Breckenridge and has promised me a tour and some Bourbon the next time I'm in Colorado) consoled me: "It's not that you lack a mustache," he said. "It's just that you've got mustache all over your face."

Meanwhile, back at the frat pad

Captain Adventure is roommates with Engineer Lovesalot, a Navy lieutenant whose geographic separation from the female species appears to be causing him physical pain. They're both fully grown men, but they carry themselves like frat boys and have an ongoing war of attrition based on causing the other just enough pain to be annoying. It's awesome to watch.

(Before I went on leave, I'd asked Lovesalot if he needed anything from Europe. He looked off into the distance, sniffed the air as if searching for a memory, and mournfully whispered -- "girls?")

The two of them have taken to carrying around cans of compressed air -- the sort you'd use to clean the dust out of a keyboard -- because if you spray it upside down on exposed skin, the propellant comes out in a streaming jet that's cold enough to sting.

"So we were in our room last night," Lovesalot said (Boston accent: flat vowels, final r's dropped), "and that bastard tried to get in me in the back of my arm, right here, back of the arm, but I ducked and he got me RIGHT HERE" (open mouth, index finger aimed at the tongue, talking as if though at the dentist and fully numbed) "right here on my TONGUE -- it tasted like I'd chewed up an aspirin or something, on my TONGUE -- and I was like, you got that in my fucking MOUTH," (mouth still open, still pointing indignantly at his tongue).

"So I told him, you gotta sit there and let me do that back to you, and he was like, twitching and trying to like, get away from it" (and here he imitated Adventure, tongue extended and eyes closed, head down and to the side, twitching in anticipation of the hit on his tongue), "but he took it, I mean he HAD to after that. Seriously, it was like aspirin."

I'm not sure I have done this story justice; living in the grown-up equivalent of a college dorm does sometimes have its upsides, though.

Yum yum, Give Me Some

The Godfather, whom I've taken to referring to in real life as Commander Killjoy, has now become a loyal reader of this blog. He promptly informed me that the blog is worthless, as it barely focuses on him at all and certainly fails to document the vast universe of witty nuggets that pass his lips on any given day. He's made it clear that he expects this situation to be rectified, chop chop.

This directive came on the heels of a conversation in which he laid out his plan to use our recently-ordered simultaneous interpretation equipment to beam his inner monologue directly into the ears of his minions. I pointed out the logistics difficulties -- interpreter's equipment has only a short range -- and he decided on the spot (rapid, decisive leadership) to move all 92 members of the PRT into the Senior Enlisted office next to his. "But you'll only have 10 earpieces," I said.

"The best part of this plan," he replied, "is that you will only have an earpiece, and not a mouthpiece."

(The simultaneous interpretation equipment is a mic with 10 wireless earpieces for it, which will allow our interpreters, who do whispered translation during shuras, to be heard by everyone who has an earpiece and not just by those in their immediate vicinity; I told the Godfather that I'd ordered us a force multiplier from the Embassy and he promptly responded -- "You ordered another Commander Killjoy? Because that's really the ultimate force multiplier.")

I can only assume he's still mad at me for naming a to-be-slaughtered goat after him.

Christmas: there's an unexpected Kenyan-American on the SecFor team -- Specialist Masai -- and he, born and raised in East Africa, had been itching to get his hands on a celebratory goat. I had dropped a few not-so-subtle Yule-season hints to the Governor that being gifted a Christmas goat would be much appreciated, but it never came to fruition; rather than relying on the kindness of others, SecFor took up a collection of a couple bucks a man, and one of our interpreters called a guy he knows, and two hours and 90 bucks later a goat showed up at the front gate.

(There's a goat market just down the street from the FOB -- goat is the preferred red meat in the Afghan diet -- and said goat market is rumored to sell poppy and raw opium paste on certain days of the week; I have never seen the market and can neither confirm nor deny these rumors).

The goat was tied it up in a concrete bunker just behind the operations center and left it a bowl of water and a plate of goat-inappropriate food that SecFor generally appreciates -- turkey bacon and corn dog chunks, things on that order. The water bowl was Styrofoam and the goat hoofed through two of them before Masai took over, leaving the water at a distance where the goat could drink it without kicking it over, and supplying a tray of lettuce. "What are you naming it?" I asked the guys. "Oh, we're not naming it," I was told. "We don't want to get too attached."

I deemed that to be unacceptable. I named him after myself: Little Dakota.

I was worried that Little Dakota wouldn't provide enough meat for the entire PRT, so I checked with Captain Adventure (the tall and self-assured head of SecFor, who specifically asked for his nickname; I was going to call him Mortarshoot -- he's an infantryman at heart -- but Adventure seems equally apropos) to see if I could sponsor another goat. He greenlighted it. "If there's anything these guys could use," he said, "it's more killing." I ponied up the 90 bucks.

Little Dakota was small and black and gentle, and got along with everyone and generally abhorred violence in the form of headbutting, and when the second goat arrived it was clear that he was everything Little Dakota was not: wild-eyed and bucking, with a swagger in his step and larger, more threatening horns. Little Dakota was a peace-maker; the new goat was tougher, a warrior with no interest in diplomacy or making friends. The metaphor was too perfect; I named him Little Godfather.

Portrait in Sepia: Little Godfather in the foreground; Little Dakota in the Background

"I'm gonna be out there and make sure he puts up a god damn FIGHT when it's his time to go," the Godfather said. He didn't need to oversee the process, though: Little Godfather was out for blood, and would headbutt any SecFor guy who got too close.

I spent the morning of the slaughter feeding the goats animal crackers ("wrap your mind around how meta THIS is, guys") and generally trying to ensure that their last hours were pleasant. There was a brief discussion about where the slaughter should actually take place; we toyed briefly with the idea of doing it on the concrete slab formerly used for basketball but from which all the hoops had been removed by Sergeant Major MoraleKill, the senior enlisted man of the Maneuver unit, who had de-hooped the court as a means of preventing injuries. They ultimately decided to keep the slaughter on PRT turf, near the concrete bunker where the goats had spent the night.

There had been a spirited debate about who would actually do the goat slaughtering -- Sergeant DoubleD (who holds some sort of NCO position within the SecFor, though what he's actually tasked with is beyond me; the name DoubleD -- that's Domestic Dispute -- is taken from the ongoing and protracted arguments, punctuated with equal numbers of "baby I love you and miss you," that he has with his wife in the public arena of Facebook. "Facebook is nothing," I was told. "You should hear them argue on the phone.") wanted in on the action, but it was decided that Masai, who had long experience in all things goat, should actually be in charge of the first one.

Little Godfather was the first to go.

Just before the slaughter: Specialist Masai, assisted by Sergeant DoubleD

Masai took him by the horns (DoubleD had tried to pet him and had gotten headbutted, and kept a berth from that point forward), dragged him to the appointed area, and held him down with his neck over a fifty-cal ammo can -- a metal box used to hold bullets. Little Godfather bleated mournfully -- not an "I'm in pain" bleat or even an "I'm scared" bleat, but more of a "Wow, this is a shitty situation and I am helpless against it" sort of bleat that I found oddly depressing. The scene had drawn a crowd of cameramen; I walked away for the actual cutting.

A gaggle of bloodthirsty PRT-types; Captain Adventure is kneeling, second from right

Masai gutted and skinned the goats (Afghans usually skin the goats by attaching an air hose to them, in essence inflating the skin off the carcass; Kenyans, it seems, just use a balled fist to work the skin off the meat), and then they were wrapped in tin foil, buried in a pit just outside the FOB gate, and covered in hot coals and a thick layer of moon dust.

We dug them up six hours later. "I hate to be all food-safety civilian here," I said, "but maybe we should consider stabbing them with a meat thermometer to make sure they've reached an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees?" "You know, that's a good idea," Captain Adventure said. "Does anyone here have their meat thermometer on them? Sergeant DoubleD? Specialist Masai? Anyone? No?" He looked at me like I was an idiot, grinned, and started digging. The goats smelled delicious.

Little Dakota and Little Godfather were served alongside Carne Asada and an enormous pot of rice that the Governor's staff made for us. (In addition to the pot of rice, the Governor sent over four additional goats the next day; they were put into Dynecorp's FOB petting zoo along with a cow, a turkey, and multiple other goats). The final verdict on our goats was that they should have been dug up an hour earlier -- they were definitely over-roasted -- but Masai declared them delicious and tore into them; between him and our stable of interpreters, most of the meat was picked clean.

The first piece I had was tough and hard to chew, and I declared that I was definitely eating Little Godfather; the second piece was tender and soft, and I announced that the higher quality cut of meat clearly came from Little Dakota. "Of course Little Dakota was more tender," the Godfather replied. "Little Godfather was all muscle, and muscle is always tougher."

Everything is Illuminated

A few photos from the New Year's Mortar Shoot. These were late-night illumination rounds, normally used to light up battlefields, with eleven rounds fired to ring in 2011.



"Late-night" might be a stretch -- it was 7:30 when they started, but the sun goes down early in the winter and there's no twilight in the desert; New Year's Eve was moonless, dark and still.

Expect the Unexpected

It is raining in Farah. Our local staff says it's first time he can remember since February of 2009. I never thought I'd find rain so deeply unsettling.

Next Step: The Amazing Race

New Year's Eve on FOB Farah was set to be relatively low key, with a barbeque followed by a celebratory early-evening mortar shoot. The Arizona National Guard barbeques less frequently than the Guamanians, but it's damn good when they do --they're unexpectedly proficient at carne asada, thin-slicing beef and then marinating it in lemons and garlic and orange juice and god-knows-what-else; the beef, eaten with roasted peppers and tomatoes tucked in a flame-toasted tortilla (sent in bulk by someone's wife, god bless her) is hands down the best thing FOB Farah has to offer.

I had every intention of eating myself sick at the barbeque, and woke up early on New Years Eve to hit the gym in advance of my over-consumption of grilled meat. Afterward, I was back in my room and contemplating a nap when I got at knock at the door from Lieutenant Granola, a Michigander with a firmly crunchy-Seattle mindset, right down to his new-age Paleolithic dietary habits. "Hey," he said. "I, uh, just wanted to make sure you were still in for the Adventure Race?"

"That's tomorrow, right? What time?" I asked.

"Not tomorrow," he said. "Today. In, like, half an hour. You're in, right?"

I was already cripplingly sore from the gym -- it was in essence my first time to exercise since going on leave in November -- but there was no way I was missing the FOB Farah Adventure Race. I put on running shorts and a plain grey t-shirt, but then thought better of it and tossed on my winter marathon outfit: white shorts over black and red tights, an army t-shirt with the "ARMY" crossed out and "CIVILIAN" penned in above it, and a headband to top it off. I was going for sporty, but it's clear from the pictures that I actually looked vaguely village people, with a dash of Richard Simmons thrown in for good measure.

"I'm not sure you needed to write it on your shirt for people to know you're a civilian," the Godfather said.

I met Granola on the basketball court, and we were joined shortly thereafter by our other teammates -- Warrant Exasperated, a good-natured but generally grumpy Warrant Officer from Public Affairs, and Sergeant CapsLock, whose wife has the endearing habit of writing his Facebook updates in blaring boldface ("TALKED TO CAPSLOCK TODAY, HE RECEIVED ALL THE PACKAGES WE SENT HIM, HE GOT THE PACKAGE THE "BLUE STAR MOTHERS" SENT TO HIM, HE LOVED IT ALL, HE IS DOING WELL, HE IS VERY BUSY").

The four of us were the only team the PRT fielded, and we were one of almost twenty five teams. The Italians were out in force, accounting for almost half the teams, and most of the rest came from the Maneuver Unit (the actual war-fighting types we share the base with), though a few other teams were represented as well -- the guys from the Fire Department had a team, as did the Air Force (who, as you might expect, run our airport) and Dynecorps, who are supposed to be in charge of repairing things like the laundry machines, though given how few of the laundry machines actually work it's hard to say what they actually do.

It was new year's eve, and as such one of the teams featured the Chaplain dressed as Old Man 2010, with a long fake beard and a cane. Another of his teammates was there in an oversized diaper, dressed as baby 2011. It was 65 degrees and sunny. It was set to be a good day.

The organizers distributed maps of the FOB ("Don't lose them," we were told. "It's a security risk if you do"). Each of the teams, it turned out, had been allowed to organize one event, and a total of eleven teams had done so. The first team to finish all eleven events would win the race and take home the grand prize of being able to cut to the front of the chow hall line for an entire month.

The organizers shouted out -- "Ready… Set… GO!!" and our entire team blitzed off the basketball court, sprinting at full speed for the space outside my office. We had decided to hit our own event first, because it was relatively close and because we knew where it was, giving us an advantage if we sprinted there -- if another team beat you to an event, you had to cool your heels and wait until they finished before you could start. As planned, we made it there first, and promptly set to work.

PRT EVENT: Pick up a gigantic all-metal tow bar (used to move disabled Cougars and weighing something in the neighborhood of two to three hundred pounds), walk it fifty meters away, around a cone, and back to the starting line.

It was surprisingly easy: 300 pounds actually isn't much for four people as long as they all work as a team.

Another team, hauling the tow-bar.

We dispatched the event with no problems, checked the map, and bolted for our next station.

MARINES: The Combat Medicine event. Pick up two stretchers loaded with "patients" made of 100 pounds of ammo cans. Haul the stretchers fifty meters and load them onto an up-armored humvee. Grab the rope attached to the front of the humvee and drag it 50 meters. Pick up your buddy and fireman carry him 50 meters to the end of the compound, and then switch roles, with the former patient becoming the fireman and vice versa.

I've never met a Marine who did anything in moderation, and this event absolutely reflected that mindset. Just hauling the ammo cans would've been enough for an event; just dragging the humvee would've been enough for an event. Add in the stupid fireman's carry and the whole thing became obliteratingly, over-the-top difficult. The Marines, in the mean time, were throwing smoke grenades and yelling at you to "give it more of a combat feel."

(The Marines had apparently wanted to do a "run and gun," which would've entailed sprinting to a range and blasting away at a target, but they were told that live ammunition and speed trials is a recipe for disaster and that they should make other plans).

I was paired with Granola, who's about the same size as me but considerably stronger; that said, I had no idea how to actually fireman's carry someone and his attempts to talk me through it were less than effective ("where the hell do my arms go?!"). I ended up bending the rules and giving him a lame piggy back ride, which we deemed good enough. Despite my logistical difficulties, I fared much better than CapsLock, who was stuck fireman's carrying Exasperated, who's well over 200 pounds of muscle. It nearly crushed him, and he spent the rest of the race trying to recover.

We were two events in, and all of us were already gasping for air like wounded seals. We started to run to the next station, dialed it back to a jog, walked for a bit, and then slow-jogged/half-hustled past the airport to a section of the compound owned by the guys who go out in advance of us on missions to make sure there are no IEDs in our way.

ROUTE CLEARANCE PACKAGE: a standard tire-flip event. Cover fifty meters with one huge tire that you aren't allowed to just roll, as a logical human might do, but rather flipping it end-over-end.

Most teams were putting all four guys on the tire at once, but we had two guys go in at time, taking turns, so you in essence only had to do half the event. It took us a minute and forty seven seconds, and then we were off to the airport.

AIR FORCE/CARGO EVENT: Pick up a box, drop it onto a steel air force palette, and then strap it down with cargo netting. Physically speaking, it wasn't a particularly difficult event, and I actually enjoyed it because cargo straps are one of those things that you see from time to time on the FOB but that you never get a chance to play with -- sort of the ultimate That's Someone Else's Job-type toy.

It basically just required tossing some netting over a box and then putting on clips ("actual air force requirements are way more strict," Exasperated said). We knocked it out in a hurry, paused briefly while CapsLock threw up ("I'm not sure I can run anymore, guys"), and then slow jogged it up the helipad for the Dust-Off crew's event.

The Dust-Off crew are the Medivac guys, and the hospital is emblazoned with "PICK 'EM UP, DUST 'EM OFF, SET 'EM BACK DOWN." In addition to a fleet of helicopters, the hospital also has an ambulance truck labeled BAND AID 1.

DUST OFF EVENT: A rope toss. I'm sure there's a name for the game -- it's something you'd see on someone's patio if they were hosting a barbeque that a lot of kids were coming to -- but I have no idea what the name is and halfhearted googling didn't get me very far. You basically had to take little weighted rope-type things and throw them onto a rack. The rack was divided into three levels (red, yellow, green), and you had to get one rope onto each level of the rack before you could move on.

This much we now know is true: people in the PRT have terrible aim.

We finished, and then decided to swing back around to the far side of the FOB to cover all the far away events before finishing with the center of the FOB, which was event-heavy and close to the finish line. We headed through the Italian side of the compound to the mud area where they park their tanks.

ITALIAN EVENT: The Italians on the FOB right now are a unit of Lagunari out of Venice, and they wanted an event that would reflect their maritime heritage. (The Lagunari are the Italian equivalent of Marines -- Marines, you might say, ostensibly guard the Marina, while the Lagunari ostensibly guard the Laguna). The closest water is about a thousand kilometers away, so they built a boat out of wood and attached it to long metal poles, and made their event involve hoisting it onto one's shoulders and hauling it through the desert. The boat weighed, without exaggeration, at least 70 million pounds.

Seriously, 70 million pounds.

From the gate, you had to pick up the boat, set it on a metal barrier, climb over the barrier two at a time, pick the boat back up, set it on another barrier, climb under barrier two at a time, and then head off around the corner.

Over one barrier, under the next.

After the barriers, the boat had to be carried through 50 meters of Afghan moon dust that was at least a foot thick. About halfway through, the Italians turned on the fire hose.

It was freezing cold, and it tasted like unfiltered Afghanistan tap water, and it was MISERABLE at the time, but looking back at this picture now it looks outrageously fun. I'm debating if I can somehow use this picture for internet dating.

From the mud field, you had to drag the boat up and over a five foot mud hill. You then take it back through the mud field -- again with the fire hose treatment. And then, because the event hadn't been physically challenging enough, you had to put the boat down and climb over a concrete barrier.

Me and Granola going over the wall, with Exasperated in the foreground.

Exasperated was wearing camouflage pants from his uniform, and they snagged on the top of the wall as he went over it, ripping a chunk out of them. They continued to tear throughout the rest of the remaining events, eventually leaving him with a gaping hole in his crotch. "Thank god you're wearing underwear" was the universal sentiment.

All that was left after the wall was to pick up the boat and again go through the first-under-then-over routine with the barriers. Then you had to rotate the boat 180 degrees to get it back in the starting position, ready for the next time. Viva Italia!

It took us FOREVER to do this event, which was outrageously brutal. We had to stop more than once and catch our breath and allow our aching shoulders and biceps a second to rest. There was only one boat, though, which meant that all the other teams who arrived after us had no choice but to cool their heels while we finished; we were, in essence, delaying the entire field of participants, which was kind of awesome. We finally crossed the finish line, rotated the boat the mandatory 180 degrees, and then limped downfield to the fire department's event.

FIRE DEPARTMENT: There had been rumors that the fire department would also be doing a mud event, and we collectively weren't sure we could face it. Their actual event -- pick up four fire hoses, run them 50 meters down and back -- turned out to be a cakewalk. Anything more might've been fatal.

We finished and then jogged up to the main FOB for the last four events, the first of which was at the chapel.

THE CHAPEL: The chapel's event involved picking up a huge rope, hauling it onto the top of the concrete bunker outside their building, and then back around to the beginning. "We don't, like, have to pray or anything?" I asked. "No. Well, I mean, you can if you want to," they told me. We moved on.

TASK FORCE SOUTHEAST: Task Force Southeast is another group of Italians on the FOB in charge of three of the districts in the east of the province. They've built a traditional wood-burning pizza oven in the middle of their compound, and the pizza that they serve all too infrequently is so mind-blowingly amazing that I kind of get a little choked up just thinking about it. I was hoping -- praying, even -- that their event would somehow involve eating massive amounts of pizza, and I was set to dominate.

Tragically, their event just involved crossing a 30-foot rope that was strung up between two MRAPs. I was unexpectedly good at this: you have to hook your legs onto the rope and then sort of spiderman your way across, and since I'm pretty flexible, I found it easy. We finished, asked for pizza ("no pizza"), and then moved on.

DYNECORPS: Dynecorps does FOB maintenance, and their event ironically involved leaky pipes. You were given three six-foot lengths of pipe, a bucket and a tap at which to fill the bucket. You had to fill the bucket from the tap, and then use it to fill the pipes with water, and then (plugging the bottom of the pipe with your hand) carry the water ten feet to another bucket. Finishing required getting about two gallons of water into the final bucket.

We watched the team in front of us struggle and struggle and struggle with this, which was odd, because we dispatched the whole exercise in like 45 seconds before jogging off.

We couldn't find the final event. We searched, Granola and I ran to the basketball court to ask the organizers, we double checked the map: nothing. We finally figured it that they were outside the chow hall, but it added a good five minutes to our time and ratcheted up the frustration quotient by a good amount.

TASK FORCE ARROW: Task Force Arrow are the infantry guys on compound, and their event was all about brute strength. "I assume you're all familiar with a four-man push up?" they said. (I was not; my team filled me in). "Do a four-man push up, and then in the up position, walk on your hands to the finish line." It was about 25 feet down.

A four-man push up requires you to get on the ground, like you're doing a regular push up. Someone then comes and, lying down perpendicular to you, puts their feet on your back. Someone else puts their feet on his back, and so on, until all four people have in essence woven themselves into a square. It's like doing a regular push up, only with the entire weight of someone else's legs resting on top of you. The final product looks like this:



I found this IMPOSSIBLE. I just couldn't do it -- I wasn't strong enough to make it happen. I made it into the "up" position once or twice, but I wasn't even close to strong enough to walk on my hands in that position. I ended up dragging myself along the tile to the finish line, and it was only with Exasperated in essence pushing me from behind that I made it. It was brutal.

(I can say without hesitation that I was the weakest link on my team as far as strength goes; that said, I and Granola -- who is my on-again-off-again running partner -- were without a doubt the fastest on the team).

We finished, and I looked at Granola and declared that we had to finish strong -- we had to sprint it in. We bolted for the basketball court, and as we rounded the corner I threw my arms in the air and shrieked out "PRT!!" We hit the finish line and I tossed them our score card on which each of the events had been checking off participation.

"Uh… where's the rest of your team?" they asked. Exasperated and CapsLock finally rounded the corner (Exasperated clutching shut the huge hole in his crotch), and we collectively crossed the finish line.

I had been expecting to come in dead last. I have no pretentions about my own prowess as an athlete, for one, and the military guys -- all of whom seem to be at least 10 years my junior -- usually work out twice a day, and really, who are we kidding? But we planned our route well and rarely got stuck at any of the events waiting for others to finish, and we had enough hustle in our step to end up crossing the line in fourth place. Given that there were some 25 teams, we were more than pleased with fourth -- beaten only by two Italian teams and the guys from Route Clearing Package.

There was no prize for fourth (third place got cigars, I think, which has no appeal to me), but being able to gloat victoriously is certainly a reward unto itself.