The short order line at the DFAC is serving (what passes for) Philly Cheese Steak.
It’s one of the few things they prepare passably here, and it’s my lunch. I eat about half of my meals by myself, and I’m alone for lunch today. I find an empty spot at a table and put my tray down, then grab a cup of the chocolate iced coffee – it’s delicious, and is my chief vice out here.
I chow and read, enjoying the escape from the emails and computer screen.
As I’m finishing up, a line of 5 or 6 women walk past my seat. They appear to be locals – Afghanis – with traditional coverings; not the burkas common in Kuwait, but head-scarves and flowing gowns of deep reds and browns. They’re all middle-aged, walking purposefully, even pridefully. They have purses, something I hadn’t realized was rare on post until just now, and the each have a blue security tag clipped to the front of their gowns to identify them: VIP.
I wonder who they are.
After lunch, I get with my colleague Izzy and we have one of our now-typical conversations which is mostly work-related, but invariably also about movies, family, home, food, and the weather. There is much swearing, just in the course of conversation, and though I always note it, I never stop myself from slipping into it. Izzy’s the same way.
Whereas I’m the government lead in Afghanistan for our mission, Izzy is the contractor lead, and we work hand-in-hand on any issue related to the other contractors we oversee. It’s good to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and we almost always see eye-to-eye.
We live right next door to each other and if the weather is bearable we hold our meetings standing in the gravel outside one of our rooms. Otherwise, one of us will stand just inside the doorway of the other, not wanting to invade too far into what is the other’s compact area of privacy.
Today as we stand just outside my front door, Izzy reminds me that there’s a show at the MWR tonight – a dance troupe he’d seen fliers for several days ago. I saw the same thing at the gym last night, though it wasn’t at all clear what the show is. The flier just had headshots of 5 smiling women.
We agree that we’ll be attending this show at 2000 tonight, because there are no dancing women in either of our rooms.
Just after 1730 we head up to the APOD so that I can put my name on the waiting list for a flight to Kandahar. I have a short mission down there, and would like to leave on Wednesday. They will hold your name on the stand-by list for 72 hours, so we try to plan ahead and get on the list 3 days in advance of when we want to depart.
I’ve heard some horror stories about getting back from Kandahar to Bagram recently, but am hoping they’ve corrected that, as my mission really shouldn’t take more than a few hours and I’d hate to get stuck down there where I can’t adequately do my job.
After I’m all checked in, Izzy and I head over to the DFAC where the best I can come up with for dinner is another Philly Cheese Steak sandwich. Izzy gets the breaded pork chops, which for some reason always look better to me once someone else is eating them than they do sitting in the serving tray.
We chat about the normal topics, perhaps a bit more about his 5 kids at home than usual. I tell him about the 1LT I met last week who was jumpy at dinner – a little shell-shocked; Izzy nodded along. Izzy had hunted IEDs in Iraq and had been hit a few times, and says that loud noises got him for a while, and he also didn’t like the dark for a long time after his deployment – every time he got hit with an IED was at night, he says.
Izzy tells me something I’ve heard a few times as well, that it’s difficult to turn off the ultra-awareness and suspicion that can keep you alive in a war zone. He remembers driving in the States and seeing a car come suddenly out of a side street and having the distinct and sudden thought that it was a VBIED.
Even here, where we are extremely safe (I tell my parents, over and over), Izzy is suspicious of vehicles that don’t have windows – vans or large trucks. There are a couple that park just next to our hooch (what Izzy calls “the condo”), and he always points them out to me: “I don’t like that. They could have anything in there.”After chow, we kill a little time in our respective rooms and head up to the MWR tent a little before 2000, planning to get good seats for whatever this show might be.
We are neither of us surprised to see that the show is cancelled.
DFAC = Dining Facility
MWR = Morale, Welfare, and Recreation
APOD = Aerial Port of Debarkation
1LT = First Lieutenant
IED = Improvised Explosive Device
VBIED = Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device
