Look out Al Asad!

Wow it’s been a while since I last wrote. I should probably give an update as to what I’ve been up to and how everything has been going. Shortly after my last post, my boss went on his two week vacation, and I moved out to Al Asad in the western deserts of Iraq. It’s a large base in terms of square miles, but population wise it’s rather small. It has more scenery than Taji does. We’re in a wadi, a dried up river bed, there are date trees all over the place. We have a stadium and a patch of desert where all the abandoned MiG fighter planes were left. MiGs are the Russian’s fighter planes and a lot of Middle Eastern countries had close ties to the Soviets in opposition to the USA’s ties with Israel. All that however is a different post. We’ve had 3 major sand storms since I’ve been here. One of them was at night while we were having Institute. We were discussing the dust of the earth, when the dust of the earth was pounding at the doors and windows trying to get inside. By the end of the lesson the room was smoky with dust. When we walked outside we found the storm had blotted out any remaining light that would have been left by night. Between those two things you couldn’t even see your hand when you stuck it out in front of your face.

It’s easy to realize just how fortunate I am over here. I don’t have any bills; the room I live in for free is bigger than the one I was paying to live in back in Salt Lake. I work about 50 feet away from where I live, I’m fed 3 times a day, well let me rephrase that. I have the chance to eat 3 times a day; the food is a couple steps down from what we had in Taji. It’s hard to live without Chicken Sandwich Monday. I can Skype with most people who want to do that, or I can chat online. My section has a trailblazer that we get to run around in when we don’t feel like walking. Life is good.

But life kind of sucks when you don’t have anyone to share it with. My unit deployed with just over 300 people, and we’re going to head back with just under half that. We’ve had people leave to go to other units to work. My boss’s boss did that. And since we’ve moved out to Al Asad our job here in country has shrunk considerably. We had a lot of people sitting around doing nothing, so we’ve been sending people home early. It’s harder than I expected it to be, watching almost everyone else go home. All but one of my friends have gone, and he’s slated to leave early next month. But I’ll be home soon enough, so no worries. It’s easy to get anxious.

I have been so busy since I moved to Al Asad. My boss went on his 2 week vacation, and his boss left to work for another unit. Guess who woke up one morning and realized that he was suddenly in charge? That’s right. Dang. I went from focusing solely on one aspect of things, to being expected to have knowledge about everything that was going on in not only my section, but also the sections that my boss’s boss was in charge of. Even though we went from having control and management of about 40 units down to about 3, the staff went from 18 people to just me. It was a bit stressful to say the least! I worked very hard, and tried my best to catch up with everything. I think it took me about 3 weeks to really get my feet under me. I had to plan out how my unit was going to move from Al Asad back to Texas. I was totally overwhelmed!

I came quite close to having a vacation myself when I first got to Al Asad. There’s a program for the troops over here that lets us go to Qatar for a few days and there’s stuff for us to do down there. Just a little get away really. I had begged to get a slot for that trip, and I finally got one! I was so excited about it! Sadly, two days before I was supposed to leave it was “suggested” that I not go because there was quite a bit going on still with the planning to get everyone and everything home. I had two people trained up to cover for me while I was gone, but it was deemed not the best choice for me to go. That was a huge let down. Once my boss finally got back and out to Al Asad, a month after I had last seen him, he tried to get another pass to Qatar for me but failed. He then told me that he’d let me take off for a week or so and wander the country as I pleased. I had my transportation guys set up flights for me for whenever and wherever I wanted to go so instead of flying stand by, I would have a reservation wherever I went. But the same guy who suggested that I not go to Qatar nixed those plans. Well we had some equipment that needed to be escorted to Kuwait! I was told I would be the escort for it, and that I could just take my sweet time getting back. Ha-ha go figure, but yesterday we found out that it doesn’t need to go to Kuwait after all. Dang it!

It seems that I won’t be going anywhere. Something tells me that if history proves anything, I’ll be surprised if I make it back to Utah with everyone else! But life has calmed down a good bit for the time being. It’s a relief to not have to work 12 hour days 6 days a week and have a 3 hour break on Sundays. While I wasn’t the only person assigned to my staff during that time, I was the only one who I could count on doing things correctly. I’m really looking forward to heading home! I finally talked Kelly into moving out to Utah with me! So I’ve taken care of my roommate situation! I’m way excited about it. It’ll be nice to get home.