Kandahar 1

I've been here a week now, and it's pretty boring. The flight here went through Turkey (where we had to stay on the plane while it refueled - the terminal renovations that were supposed to be done 4 months ago are still ongoing), then through Kyrgystan for one night, before arriving here in Afghanistan. In Kyrgystan I met up with my friend, Shane, who was on his way home from being here for 9 months. I met up with him and his wife, Danielle, in Florence a few months ago while he was on R&R. He was stuck there for 10 days, waiting for his flight. There are frequent flights that leave from there, and he was hoping to try and get on one of them, but the "rules" said that he couldn't, so he was stranded.

The base here is huge, some 30,000+ people, many of them contractors. There are Canadians, Brits, Slovaks, Belgians, and a bunch of other small contingencies of different nationalities. It's dirty, crowded, hot, and gray - all the way from the rocks, gravel, dirt, and roads underfoot, to the 12 feet high reinforced concrete barriers that form a huge labyrinth of alleyways and Concertina wired-surrounded compounds, to the hazy sky above. There are several gyms and a bunch of dining facilities. The process of feeding all these people here is immense. There are thousands of refrigerated cargo containers stacked all over the place. Apparently they ship them in armored lorries overland from Pakistan and then into Afghanistan. Apparently, the contractors who provide and serve it charge the government $25 a meal. The food isn't horrible, but for $75 a day it leaves something to be desired.

There's an area called the boardwalk, which is really a boardwalk, located in the middle of the base. There are some restaurants (including a TGI Fridays), gift shops, and other retailers, and in the center courtyard they have a couple of volleyball courts, a floor hockey rink (for the Canadiens), a small soccer field, and they're constructing a new sports field (it may even be indoor) there. Last night they had a band playing. Not sure if that's a regular thing or not.

The flight line is constantly busy with cargo planes flying in and out, fighter jets and helicopters going out, and various other types of planes coming and going. Even NASA has an airframe they fly at just under 50,000 ft that carries various instruments and experiments. The mission they're doing now involves using lasers to create various maps of terrain, etc., that they use to help with planning missions. Some of went yesterday and had a little tour of it. The roads and open lots are also full of humvees and massive armored vehicles. It's amazing to me that our military is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, even over a million doolars, on each of these vehicles, and the insurgents are ruining them with IEDs that cost the price of a pizza to make. Of course, we have to keep people as safe as possible, but the asymmetry of it all is pretty stark, to say the least.

My job in the clinic is rather uneventful, for better and worse. I don't have to deal with lots of the BS that I do in a busy clinic, but I'm going to get stupider. I'm not seeing the blown up kids, which on the one hand is good, because I'm not some masochist or anything, but I also feel like I'm not really doing anything to really help. I may try and spend some time over in the trauma department, though. The other doctor here is a flight doctor, named Joe. He's also the head flight doc here. We split the days up (8am to 11pm) so don't really hang out any other time except if we're both in the clinic at the same time. There's a lot of downtime since most people come in during our sick call hours, 2 hours in the morning and evening), and even then, I'm seeing maybe 2-3 people at most, and a couple times one or even none.

Joe and I share a "room." They're actually relatively small cargo container sized boxes, maybe 8ft by 15ft. We have two bunk beds bed and a small wardrobe to hang and stack things, and that's pretty much it. I can't imagine having to sleep with 4 people in there - a claustrophobe would have enough difficulty living in one of them already. They're better than some of the other accomodations on the base, though, where they sleep 8-10 in a tent structure. Fortunately, we're also not next to the shit-pond, a large retaining pond where much of the human waste goes, as well as some other industrial waste. On some days it lets out a particularly tart stench. There are signs that people have put up that say things like, "Don't eat the brown trout," that kind of stuff. The story goes that some Marines bet one of their buddies $1000 to jump in it, which he took them up on. Apparently, he ended up with chemical burns all over his body. Let's face it, Marines aren't usually the smartest guys.

The other people here in the clinic now are also brand new - arrived just after I did. It's an older group - 3 Master Sergeants. They have way too much rank to be here, probably. I guess it's both good and bad, but I can't really see myself wanted to just hang out with them. I mean, I'm old and all, but not that old.

I also have to wear a gun around everywhere, not that I'll ever use it, but still. I almost forgot it in the dining facility one day - a big no-no.

Anyways, it's pretty boring here.