Blog Machine City

Welcome to the neighborhood

More than anything, I can’t get over how brown everything is. The heat is expected, both from experience and legend (140 degrees in the shade! etc.), but the beige is overwhelming. Maybe that’s why the Army switched to the ACUs: to give us some other color to look at, camouflage be damned. The ground, the sky, the buildings, the tents, the Navy uniforms (they’re wearing sharply starched DCUs here) – every damn thing is beige, tan, brown, and taupe. Even our wall lockers are tan! Couldn’t they have picked, you know, black, or gray, or something?

The heat, of course, is the other notable characteristic of the place. One hundred-twenty degrees Fahrenheit is beyond a feeling of “hot,” becoming an actual force, as if you can feel the photons and infrared radiation punching you in the back of the head from 93 million miles away. But unlike a miserable humid day in the US, you can accept the dry furnace-like heat with a shrug – at least it lets your sweat cool you as intended, even in the incredible heat.

As for the war here: we’re about as far in the rear as one can get and still be in a deployed status. Not that it’s a surprise, but it’s still odd to see people walking around in street clothes, sipping Frappucinos and standing in line to see the latest Harry Potter movie. Fast food is firmly entrenched, even more so than in Iraq years ago: KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, Hardee’s, Pizza Hut, Subway…all available above and beyond the endless free food available at the dining facility, food that the workers sling with gusto in huge piles on your plate. The gyms are huge and well-appointed, and recreation buildings are festooned with flat-screen TVs, PS3s and Xboxes, pool, and foosball tables.

Civilian clothes were a welcome comfort – at least until our unit running the camp command cell complained that they didn’t bring any clothes, so why should we be allowed to wear any? The kibosh was quickly applied: no civvies until the CCC got their luggage from the shipping containers. (The same set of containers that has my box packed in April, as I wrote about previously.) The decision was mind-boggling; what did their status have anything to do with ours? The PX sells clothes, and one could get them sent from home; all that aside, what would the benefit be of the prohibition? I guess it’s that things don’t suck enough in their current state, so measures of increased suckitude must be applied. Hopefully the ban will be lifted soon, but it’s a worrying sign of irrationality so early in the mission, with the rest of the year stretching before us, hot and brown. No need to add any more discomfort or difficulty; events have a way of providing that on their own.

Last look at Wisconsin

We boarded the charter flight at Volk Field on a drizzly evening, at the very same hangar in which I last stood six years ago, on the day I returned from Iraq. As the DC-10 taxied for take-off, we had to wait as another flight landed. The passengers were almost certainly members of our sister brigade, the 2nd BCT from Iowa, returning from Afghanistan. Crossing paths with them wasn’t unexpected; they had been arriving in waves for the last few weeks of our stay at Fort McCoy. Still, it was poetic, or cinematic, or dramatic somehow that our planes should literally pass on the tarmac, a closing credits montage rolling for one brigade and the opening credits rolling for another.

The first two legs of the trip were uneventful and vaguely uncomfortable, as airline flights always are: always too cold or too hot, not enough room to stretch despite being only 5’6″ and the plane being half-empty. We stopped in Ireland and had an unpleasant surprise: a security checkpoint, complete with emptying of pockets (of which soldiers have many) and stripping of belts & blouses. Thence it was into the controlled area of the terminal, where we mingled with French schoolgirls and American tourists and other travelers, like wayward souls temporarily slipped from the demon world. I felt disoriented after hours of flight and the time change; that combined with the sterile, windowless dungeon of the terminal and the sideways glances from the civilians made me feel like a wary animal on the way to the vet.

Underway again, we cruised over Iraq as the sun set, following the Tigris towards Kuwait. As night fell, the lights of the cities along the great river appeared like dim stars, clusters of blue-white strung out against the blackness below. It looked nothing like the orange blaze of America as seen from the air, but the lights were on nonetheless. An improvement, perhaps, from years past?

Landing in Kuwait, the TV screen inside the plane said the outside temperature was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I knew it was true, but my mind rejected the number. My face couldn’t reject the reality, though, stepping outside into the night into a blast of hot air. If you didn’t know where the plane had landed, one would think that another aircraft was parked with its engines facing the door. Not so – just a summer night in the desert.

We boarded buses and drove for a couple of hours to a camp to check in to theater; by the time we arrived it was after 11pm local time. While we waited for check-in, we had to separate our baggage, since various groups on the flight were going to different camps. This entailed unloading two shipping containers (on the backs of trucks) worth of baggage in the dark, hot night, then organizing the stuff, then reloading everything onto the correct vehicles bound for each group’s respective camps. Somehow, no one got injured and nothing got lost in the operation, despite the onset of fatigue-induced delirium and flight-atrophied bodies.

Somehow (or perhaps inevitably), our little crew from the HQ (the most important group! the ones who planned the whole movement!) got lost in the shuffle and wound up with no ride to our final destination. Luckily, another crew was headed that way and had room, so we rode with them. Typically, field-grade officers and sergeants major don’t have to beg for rides anywhere, but no shit, there we were, scamming a lift from a subordinate unit. Naturally, though, we couldn’t just drive off – we had to await escort, which wasn’t scheduled to arrive until about 6:30 am. That was three hours away, so we did what everyone does upon arriving in a combat zone: we drove to Starbucks.

I expected a setup much like everywhere else: a ratty little trailer with a Starbucks sign on top, a place bearing only a passing resemblance to its namesake. Instead, it was like stepping through a dimensional portal to an actual human coffee shop, with all the accoutrements and decor of a stateside Starbucks. I watched, bewildered, as a guy ordered a giant whipped cream-topped coffee drink with an M-14 EBR slung over his shoulder. It was almost too much to handle: it’s four AM, I haven’t slept for twenty hours or more, I’m in Kuwait, and I’m in Starbucks with a bunch of dudes with rifles.

Outside, the day broke with no discernible sunrise, just a gradual turning of the sky from black to milky white, and we set off on the buses again, for another few hours of driving. Arriving at the camp, we were dropped at our living area, got our bags from the truck, and began our first day with little fanfare or even orientation. Here you go, welcome to Kuwait – now figure it out!

It’s been fun, Wisconsin, but we’re outta here. Next stop: the beach on the Persian Gulf!

The sun is setting on one of the last pleasant evenings I’ll see for a year. The skies here are thick with gnats and also with cliff swallows; I’ve watched them since May when they were just starting to build their little mud houses. Now the young are all fledged and flitting about all day long, scooping up bugs by the bucketful (or so I hope) on jaunts across the grass, stopping now and then to preen their rough new feathers while perched on the wires overhead. Soon they’ll pack up and fly south for the winter, only to return next spring and repeat the whole process.

We too are almost ready to fly away for a year; indeed, our schedule closely mimics that of the little swallows. Our perspective, too, is just as businesslike – I don’t know that there’s much excitement or fear for the year ahead, just the rhythm of Army life in an age of war, familiar and imperative like the change of seasons.

Some of our people are already in Kuwait, and send back reports, most of them of them unsurprising. It’s hot, there are many fine facilities for our use, sand everywhere, and we anxiously await the epic yard sale of the departing unit. One surprise though: CRT televisions are everywhere. I asked if they were left over from Desert Storm or from the start of OIF in 2003, but no – they can be bought, new in the box, at the PX. I haven’t looked lately, but it seems as if CRTs have all but disappeared from domestic electronics stores. Where did these come from? A small mystery, then, for me to investigate soon. A tantalizing glimpse of the excitement that awaits upon the burning sands!

The human world passes in a blur

A four-day pass over the 4th of July weekend was a welcome distraction, but like lost souls, we soldiers cannot linger long in the human world.

Coming back to Fort McCoy on a beautiful July night, I feel a familiar melancholy, the sensation of leaving home after being reminded of what I’m leaving. Last time, I was leaving almost nothing behind; it was a clean break, a fresh start, a new adventure with the ending totally unwritten. Now, I am leaving something behind – a wife, friends, pets, a house, a job, things, hobbies, other trappings of the human world.

I’m not resentful, for I chose this path freely, knowing what it entailed. I’m not an embittered old soldier, cursing the organization that’s trained and paid me and given me these strange experiences. Still, volunteer or not, leaving home for a year is nothing that’s easy.

The next time I see my home, it’ll be blanketed in snow. Some are trying to time their leave dates so that it’s not so cold, but not me; I embrace the winter fully, as a full-faced reminder of the contrast between home and away. The blast furnace and the frozen north: the starker the differences, the stronger the reminder of what home truly is and that for all its thin comforts, Kuwait will never be anything like home. A scene from Apocalypse Now recalls this idea: They choppered in T-bones and beer and turned the LZ into a beach party. The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.

But what else can we do? We can no more stop trying to make our deployment feel like home than we can stop missing home altogether. And the sadness gives me focus, an emotional reference point to keep my bearings no matter how far from home, a reminder that I’m not a just a cog in the green machine of the Army.

Last year, at annual training, we (the commo guys) decided that Weird Al’s Dare to be Stupid was the theme for the operations section; it was a bit of good-natured humor at their expense, with their being mostly infantrymen and tankers.Yesterday, though, as I watched the Frenchman (our boss) enter his twelfth hour of unraveling the mess of hand receipts in which we’re ensnared, I realized that the song was really the theme song for the whole trip so far. The largest example, an awesome video-montage in my head, follows:

Instead of bringing a shitload of computers, phones, and other networking equipment, the installation provides most everything we need to conduct our training here. It’s a great idea in theory, but our supporting brigade’s terrible property management has turned it into a nightmare. I should’ve known we were in for trouble when I walked into their supply building on the first day and saw the piles of random computer gear strewn at all angles, the shelves bursting with collections of parts in no discernible order, and the Frenchman and the Other Brigade’s guy vainly trying to make sense of the damn thing. The two of them had to count and recount just our allocation of IP phones three times that morning – twice after being loaded into our van and we were almost leaving.

Since then, it’s been a seemingly endless shell game of issue, return, re-issue, swap out, and scavenge, all meticulously (if often incorrectly) documented on the favorite form of supply sergeants everywhere, the DA Form 2062. More commonly known as a hand receipt, the idea of the form is simple: you write the item and its serial number on a form, I sign it, you keep the form, I get the stuff. When I’m done with the stuff, I give it back, you destroy the form, everyone’s happy. Works great – unless you’re handling a brigade’s worth of computer equipment, in which case you’re soon buried in an avalanche of paperwork, as shit is moved around and sub-hand-receipted and generally mucked-with.We’re talking about fifty or a hundred hand receipts, all pointing different directions, a breadcrumb trail leading straight into the sarlacc’s mouth.

This would be bad enough, but thanks to the Other Brigade’s insistence on dealing only with us and not with any of our subordinate units, the paperwork is effectively doubled (and sometimes tripled), as the Frenchman must sign for the equipment from the Other Brigade, then the units must sign for it from us, thus maintaining a chain of accountability. The madness is compounded by the fact that a not-insignificant amount of the gear ended up broken (out of the box, as it were), resulting in numerous substitutions and swaps, and a couple of insane moments where the Other Brigade actually signed for gear from us, even though we signed it out from them, since we would eventually get it back.

The Other Brigade’s commo NCOIC (who is a whole story unto himself) has bombarded us from the beginning with threats that if we don’t give all of his stuff back, “you’re not getting on the plane.” Not much of a threat, really, and it’s a tiresome one anyway, since any property accountability problems will be ones of his making. We joked today (in his presence) that we’d just drive by his office in our van and kick all of the crap out of the back, driving away hollering. He didn’t think it was too funny (and repeated his threat), but we all thought it was hilarious. If only…

The weapons of the signal soldier

Two of our laptops needed repair this last week, so we requested warranty service from Dell. No problem – I’ve dealt with Dell’s enterprise warranty service many times, and it’s generally been excellent. Imagine my surprise, then, when a pair of boxes arrived, and inside was a pile of parts – two sets of three-piece motherboards and a disassembled display. When I say disassembled, I mean there was a raw LCD panel, a nest of wires, a backplate, and a bezel. Evidently the Army’s warranty doesn’t include labor, so I spent a whole day elbow-deep in the two computers, stripping them completely to the chassis.

Luckily I had my trusty M9 by my side, should any wayward jihadists try to steal my gear.

At the height of the operation, the brigade sergeant major walked in, Diet Coke in hand, and goggled at the pile of parts on my desk. “What the hell are you doing?,” he exclaimed, gesturing with the can. “Depot-level maintenance, sergeant major.” He asked if I was qualified to do that kind of disassembly. I just shrugged and said, “Sure!” He laughed and walked away.

***

Today I had to go to the maintenance bay and one of the guys offered me a ride. “Nah,” I said, declining, “it takes longer if I walk.” As long as I’m walking, I can’t answer my phone, and I don’t have to talk to anyone. Plus, the weather here the last few days has been phenomenal, so I wanted to enjoy it. I took in the cool breeze, the warm sunshine, the waving grass and sighing oaks, the layered symphony of bird songs, all somehow unsullied (or maybe even enhanced) by the rumble of Humvees and rows of white-sided Army barracks. The beauty of the day, though, just sharpened the contrast between the beauty of central Wisconsin and the scorching sand-hell of Kuwait that awaits us, just a month away. Even worse is that I know what it will be like, to yearn for the sights, sounds, and smells of a living world instead of the dessicated alien planet of the desert, surrounded by nothing but sand and the artifice of man which both sustains and constrains us.

Maybe some Jim Brandenburg and Craig Blacklock posters are in order…

A few too many late nights at the shop

Today marks only our second week here, but it feels like an eternity. As you can see in the picture to the left, two weeks of sixteen hour days have reduced us to the mental state of drunk chicks on Facebook. This photo was taken on one of our good nights, where we weren’t bickering about some weird detail of computer equipment or trying to make sense of the rat’s nest of intertwined plans that are somehow designed to drive this organization towards the war.

I guess what we’re experiencing would be called the “fog of war,” except that we’re not in the war yet and everything that’s happening to us is self-inflicted. It’s like fratricide on a vast, organizational scale; killing us with spreadsheets and regulations instead of bullets and explosives.

It’s hard to estimate how many spreadsheets even our modest shop produces in a day. Every task, roster, list, and table needs to be captured and have a “tracker;” so two to five new spreadsheets a day would be a reasonable guess. I suppose there isn’t much other way to keep track of stuff; we don’t have enough room on the walls for endless whiteboards, so spreadsheets it is. Still, I cringe when I think about the man-hours spent on creating beautiful color spreadsheets to track tasks that take less time to complete than the thing made to track them.

The uniform situation is another way in which we kill ourselves a little bit each day. First, the infamous reflective belt: a simple, fluorescent-colored belt, designed to make you more visible. It’s a fine idea for periods of low visibility, especially while riding a bike or something. But the Army definitely believes that you can’t have too much of a good thing, thus the rules: belt worn all the time with the PT uniform, and worn with ACUs during low visibility. This of course becomes expanded by some units – so as to make GODDAMN SURE the rule is met – that it’s worn any time before breakfast and after dinner. I think it’s also required if you’re riding in the back of a troop carrier (like a 5-ton truck or LMTV). I protested the whole thing in front of our previous first sergeant, and his response was, “well, if it saves one soldier’s life, it’s worth it.” Where does it end, then? Reflective bodysuits?

The Army Combat Shirt (ACS) is another example. The ACS is a nifty shirt designed to be worn under body armor. It’s light, cool, and close-fitting, for better mobility and comfort. It’s a great piece of kit, which naturally means its wear must be brutally restricted. Naturally, it can only be worn with body armor, but additionally, we could only wear it with these restrictions: a) only with flame-resistant ACU pants (not regular); b) you must carry a FRACU top and tan undershirt with you while wearing it and c) you must put on your undershirt and FRACU top if you take off your body armor. Thankfully, the last two restrictions more or less went out the window when the first sergeant started walking around before and after our training convoys wearing his ACS with nothing over it (the horror!). Nevertheless, the angst and heated discussion that surrounded the whole situation was energy that could’ve been better spent on more important things.

Luckily, our “army guy” training is out of the way, so now we can concentrate on our actual jobs of networking, communications, and cursing the names of our higher headquarters (Eagle Brigade! Above the Best! Set the Standard! Yell Cliches Loudly!). I’ll write about the Wheel of Taclanes to which we’ve been strapped, rotating slowly in agony, in a future post, but suffice it to say that it sometimes feels like we’re the first unit to ever mobilize here. One would think that they’d have the network figured out by now, but…