Entrenched

I got to go off the FOB yesterday, to meet with some soldiers to survey how they’re doing. A fairly uneventful trip. Not far from the Patrol Base we went to is an event center, or maybe a wedding … chapel? Anyway, apparently weddings are held there almost every night. I heard music and applause and noise; it sounded like a carnival. I couldn’t see anything because of the concrete barriers.

We returned to our FOB in the dark, under rainy skies and lightening. The convoy stopped on the paved road and kicked me out, and I carried by pack the 150 yards to my office building, walking along a gravel road. The gravel in places is deep, and difficult to walk on because your boots sink in when you step instead of pushing you off, like walking in loose sand, only worse.

I dropped off my materials, checked email, putzed around for a while, ate a few jelly beans since we didn’t get dinner, then locked up and headed for my CHU. Well, in my absence a backhoe had come along and excavated a three foot deep trench in front of my group of CHUs.

The trench is as wide as the backhoe shovel, and pretty much serpentines around the entire FOB. I’m talking miles and miles of trench. They have trenched around the chow hall, and several places across my running path, and everywhere else. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they trenched by my CHU. Kind of took me by surprise though to encounter this new ditch, in the dark. It’s not wide, but I didn’t want to risk jumping it in the dark, so I had to walk back and forth for awhile until I found where they had left a spot undug where I could cross.

The other day I was running past a couple of Air Force guys putting the new cable in the trench, and I stopped and asked them what the cable was for. Communications, they said. “Will it speed up the internet?” I asked. “”Oh no,” one of them replied, “nothing will do that.”