Motivated, Motivated, Motivated - SIR!

I had lots of goals when I got here. Get in shape. Save some money. Learn a lot. Meet interesting people. Get some writing done. Make a difference. Watch all 4 seasons of Arrested Development. Stay alive. You know, just typical deployment objectives. Happy to report I pretty much hit all of them.

And now that my deployment is coming to an end, there aren't a lot of goals left. There are still some photos I want to take, some things I want to write and people I want to drink coffee with, but the main goal now is just to pack up and have a smooth hand-over to my replacement. Which means my motivation to do stuff has diminished a bit.

So I'm not the first guy in the office in the morning anymore. I've handed off most of my responsibilities to other people, and my days aren't nearly as full as they were even a month ago. I'm hitting the gym 4 times a week instead of 6 or 7 - focus now is on maintaining my progress, not getting any faster, sleeker or stronger.

It's a weird feeling, to run low on goals. Now my objectives and future planning is oriented towards stuff I'll do back in the states: inprocessing, outprocessing, spending time with the family, getting ready to move... not necessarily in that order. But it's good to know that I did what I came here to do. Now it's time to focus on the next big adventure. And this time, I'll get to do it with my family by my side.

What To Do?

Had a brief moment of confusion the other day as I thought about being home again. Specifically, I wondered what I would do with all that time.

Sure, there will be grocery shopping, cooking, yardwork and preparing to move, plus final trips to various DC attractions. And of course there's inprocessing to do, a PT test to take and all that. But I'm sure there will also be times after putting the kids on the school bus where I'll have free time.

I'll have to get used to being less busy. Sounds good to me.

Telugu in 30 Seconds A Day

Here's me and Rakesh, the Indian guy who works at the DFAC's front door. He is responsible for checking people in, making sure we swipe our badges, etc. He doesn't always wear that hat - it was Indian Food Night when we took this picture, so he dressed up.

Anyway, for the past few months he's been giving me Telugu lessons in 30-second increments, three times a day.

What's that? You haven't heard of Telugu? No, it's not some cool martial art. It's a central Dravidian language spoken in India. With 70 million native speakers, it's number 15 on Wikipedia's list of languages by number of native speakers (English is #3, behind Mandarin and Spanish).

So far, I've learned to say good morning (suprabad), good afternoon (mhedi anum) and good evening (siam car). I can say How are you? (baghanara?)and I am fine (baghananu). I can even say I am very, very good (challa challa baghananu). Spelling is all approximate, of course - it's not like I have a text book or anything. And Rakesh has told me about many more words, but that list is pretty much the only ones I really remember.

Rakesh is an enthusiastic teacher and I've really enjoyed our brief interactions. Just one more under-reported benefit of life here at ISAF.

UPDATE: I emailed the picture to Rakesh and he told me the next day he posted it on his FB page and got lots of comments. That's pretty awesome.

Combat Food

I seem to have a food theme going on here.

Here's me holding an American MRE with a Croatian ration, compliments of my buddy Srecko who left the ration behind when he went back home. Yes, the Croatian one is enormous but I think it's supposed to last all day, while the American one is just a single meal (although I can attest that eating more than one MRE in a day is pretty much the definition of a bad day).

And speaking of bad days, during the May 15th attack, when rockets were bursting in air and we were on lock down, we opened the Croatian ration (that's fun to say - croatian ration, croatian ration). We - and by "we" I mean "I" - opened it partly out of curiousity and a lack of things to do, and partly because dinner-time came and went and we were getting a bit hungry (and by "we" I still mean "I").

Here's a picture of what we found inside:

The "honey biscuits" were tasty - sort of like graham crackers, but with a hint of ginger. The package with the camo pattern is crackers. I can tell you, that's a lot of crackers. The canned meat and pate we left alone. The chocolate bar was unfortunately in bad shape - I opened it and decided life is too short to eat chocolate that looks like that.

Despite the opportunity to dine on international cuisine - an opportunity I rarely pass up - I actually ate a little bowl of microwave macaroni and cheese for dinner that night. And then around 8:30, someone brought over a big box of meals from the DFAC, so I ate pasta and meatballs too, which were quite tasty.

New Lunch

OK, I know I just said I've pretty much run out of new experiences. Turns out that wasn't entirely accurate.

A few days ago, I had a quite tasty lunch at an Afghan restaurant located right next to the US Embassy... and unbelievably, it was my first time eating there. I'm so embarrassed I didn't make it over there sooner & more often.

See, I really like Afghan food. And there's a fantastic little Afghan restaurant near my house in Virginia - wonderful food, can't wait to eat there again soon. But during my time in Kabul, most of my meals have been served in the DFAC. I really haven't eaten a lot of local cuisine.

Part of the reason is that the DFAC is close by and free. In contrast, the Afghan restaurant is about a 10 minute walk and my lunch cost a whopping $5 for more food than I could eat. When the weather was cold and snowy, walking over to the Embassy was rather unappealing. But now that the temp's are fine and everything is dry, I think I'll do it more often. Definitely worth the ten minutes and five bucks.

On The Glide Slope

Alert readers may have noticed a lack of recent posts here at AfghanDanistan. While previous shortages of new updates had been attributed to a particularly busy time period, I don't have the same excuse this time.

The thing is, having spent over 5 months in country, I'm sort of running out of new experiences to write about, new observations to share and new developments to comment on. When I first got here, everything jumped out at me as noteworthy and unusual, from the gravel to the laundry to the shops. But by now, I've basically seen and done about as much as I'm going to see and do.

I've achieved most of my goals already, so at this point my focus is pretty much oriented on getting ready to go home. So I'm packing up, putting stuff in the mail, filling out paperwork, writing notes for my predecessor and handing my responsibilities off to people who will be here longer than I will. Very exciting stuff to do... but maybe not so exciting to read about.

Going home, of course, will be a new and exciting experience. I'm sure I'll have stuff to say about that. But I'm not *quite* at the point where I'm actively preparing to depart. I've got about 23 days still before I say farewell to Kabul, which is a slightly awkward amount of time, blog-wise.

But don't worry - when I get to Manas I'm sure I'll have a story or two to share. Hopefully it won't involve me getting hit in the nose by another helmet.

It's Getting Rank In Here

It's fascinating to see all the different types of rank insignia around here. Armies and Air Forces from around the world are remarkably diverse in the ways they adorn their shoulders.

I've seen pips, crowns, stars, swords, leaves, diamonds, birds, bars, stripes, wreaths and braids. In the German army, silver insignia means mid-level officers while gold insignia means a General... unless it's gold stripes - that's for enlisted personnel. In the US of course, gold and silver are reversed in precedence - a silver oak leaf means Lt Colonel, which outranks the gold oak leaf of a Major.

Here's a collection that shows some of the variety in NATO ranks -and most of the insignia with stars do not represent Generals (I mostly picked Lt Col ranks, except where other ranks looks a lot more interesting).

I love the one with the tank on it (that's a Czech General), and there's something about the Canadian maple leaves just strikes me as almost friendly - despite the sword.

The Bulgarian rank progression (on the left) is one of the few where higher ranks have less on their shoulders rather than more. Most of the time, the rule of thumb is that more stuff equals higher ranks.

And speaking of more, did you know a French four star general actually wears seven stars on each shoulder? Yup.

And now we come to Naval ranks, where some sort of conspiracy seems to be at work. Almost every Navy in NATO puts a stripe & loop rank like this on their officers:

I'd love to know the story behind this. Why are Army & Air Force rank insignia so different from country to country, while Navy ranks are almost identical? How did that even happen? It certainly looks like they all got together in a room one day and agreed that Naval officers should standardize. Kinda weird.

Workin' On My Fitness...

Along with getting some writing done, I've been working out a lot during my time here in Kabul. I think the last time I was in this good shape was right before I went off to ROTC field training, in 1992.

In the past four months, I've lost about 15 pounds, cut 5 minutes off my 10K run time, earned the "Tour of Afghanistan" cardio challenge t-shirt and progressed from being able to do a set of 3 pull-ups to a set of 7 pull-ups. I also cut about a minute off my 1.5 mile run time, which translates to scoring a 97 on the AF fitness test - last time I scored 91.

Even better than all that is the psychological improvements. When I went to run the New Years Even 10K run, I have to admit the thought of such a distance was a slightly scary prospect. Now I do 6 miles regularly, no big deal. On Saturday, I ran 7 miles in about 55 minutes - and enjoyed it. Planning to go for 8 soon.

Same thing happened with pull-ups -I hadn't done that type of exercise in a long time, and found them slightly intimidating and painful. Now I look forward to doing them.

I know that once I get back to the states, I won't be able to spend as much time working out as I do now, and that's alright. I do plan to keep up the running as much as I can, but I'll have much better things to spend my time on.

Writing Update

One of my goals for this deployment was to get some writing done. Specifically, I wanted to expand beyond writing for Defense AT&L magazine. I'd published 60-ish articles there and felt it was time to broaden my horizons, particularly since AT&L decided to stop printing and mailing actual magazines and is instead just posting the PDF's on their website.

So... how'd that go? Here's the rundown:

Two articles for National Defense magazine (here's the other one)
Two posts for Time magazine's Battleland blog.
One article for Armed Forces Journal (coming out soon!)
One article for the 2012 British Army Yearbook (to be presented to the British House of Commons in June)
One article for Analog magazine - REJECTED! Yup, that's all part of being a writer
One article for Mental Floss - still waiting for a reply - another fun part of being a writer

Didn't get paid for any of those, but that's alright. I'm getting some ideas (and my name!) out there into the internetz, and maybe someday I'll get paid for stuff I write.

And speaking of that, I've got about 30,000 words done on a currently untitled book about defense acquisition. Not sure what sort of publishing route I'm going to take on that one, but I'm thinking about using Kickstarter to generate some support.

What's still in the works? Well, finishing the book, for starters. And I really should get working on the novel for my kids. I'm going to try again with Mental Floss, under the assumption that the original submission isn't going to make the cut. Planning to write something new for Battleland, and maybe something for SIGNAL magazine.

But with less than 45 days left, I'm not sure how much more stuff I'll get done before I head back home!