Adventures in Stanistan

Cheryl pointed out recently that our travel blog has been somewhat neglected. Well in truth it’s been completely neglected. The whole point of the thing was to detail our big trip through Europe. So to get warmed up, we blogged all about preparing to travel. Then for practice, I blogged about one small trip to Alaska where I actually traveled. Once the big travel occurred…. nothing. It’s funny how that works. We were too dang busy traveling to bother talking about traveling. Six countries in two weeks can do that! Then once we got back I was too tired and lazy to write and the editor did not nag me much. So here it is six months later and not a word has been written. Shame shame.

So I thought about it for a while. I am traveling now. But I am on a military deployment. If I was in Alaska or Hawaii or Europe I’d feel pretty comfortable blogging about my military travels. But I’m not. I’m somewhere else. I’m somewhere less friendly doing stuff a little more directly tied to the war effort than I was when I was deployed to Japan, Europe (2x), and many US locations. Due to operational security (OPSEC), blabbering all over the internet about who, what, when, where, and why is a bit frowned upon. It seems some of these terrorist creeps are actually pretty smart, and if enough people give out enough small pieces of information the big picture comes into focus. I have no interest in helping that along. So I decided that in order to keep some measure of continuity with my current deployment I’ve decided to tell a story about a time when I was deployed to Central Asia. Since most of the Central Asian countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan …etc) are very demographically similar we’ll just call this country Stanistan. You can pick whichever one you want and pretend it was there. In the immortal words of Dragnet: “The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

But first a disclaimer: While deployed to Stanistan I met a lot of intelligent hard working people. These were not some of them. I in no way wish to insinuate that all the persons of this region of the world are as incompetent as the group of bozos in the story that follows:

It was a cold, dark, and misty dawn, and the overpowering smell of burned garbage was wafting though the crisp smoky air like the evil antithesis of freshly baked blueberry muffins in a warm sunlit kitchen on a Sunday morning. I knew with an uneasy certainty that the unpleasant odors that were making a determined assault upon my frigid nostrils were an ominous precursor to the disturbing events about to unfold before my heavy-lidded eyes. Haha…Just kidding! This is not going to be an attempt at a really poorly written burning trash novel.

But seriously, it stank that morning! Most mornings there stank. Stanistan is a dirt poor third world place and the people there will burn just about anything to stay warm in the winter. Most mornings, after a cold night, had a smoky burned poop smell to them. Plus it was quite cold and I was damn tired! It wasn’t pleasant. Also not pleasant was the fact that I had been picked for TCN (Third Country National) duty. TCN is the generic term the Air Force uses now to describe most any non host-nation worker on a U.S. base in a foreign country. For instance in Saudi Arabia most TCN’s at the U.S. run Prince Sultan Air Base were Pakistanis. In Germany many TCN’s are Romanian. In Stanistan I am quite sure almost all of the TCNs are Stanistanians which would make them Host Nation Nationals not Third Country Nationals…but I digress. You are not reading this to get a military acronym lesson.

So back to the story: I was an Escort that day. Please remove your mind from the gutter. Escorts are regular military folks pulled from their real jobs to do a security guard sort of duty. Basically we are there to keep an eye on the TCN’s when they have to work inside of a secured area. At Stanistan the whole base is a secured area and there was a lot of construction going on, so there were a lot of people escorting the TCN’s as they did their construction work. I had to do that three different times but this time was the most entertaining. For this escort episode I was stationed at a tall guard tower at the main entrance to the main living area of the base. This was well inside the overall secured area and the workers had been well searched before ever getting to my position so the duty should have been mind-numbingly boring. It just involved sitting on my butt on the steps of the tower and watching other people work for ten hours.

I was watching six Stanistanians try to build a road. We had a gravel road from the entrance right through the middle of the area and they were lowering it and preparing it to become a paved road with curbs. It was quite complex and exciting work (sarcasm). This project had been going on for a few days so one end of the road was a hole about eight feet deep and twelve feet wide. The six Stanistanians were delivered to the area from the front gate and my adventure began. They started off the day busily milling about the hole doing nothing for about an hour. They smoked, kicked some dirt and rocks around, and told funny jokes. At least I think they were funny. I don’t speak Stanistanian, but they laughed really loud at themselves. Then the tools arrived! They each got a nice rusty shovel and a hard hat and that was about it. These tools did not inspire them to do any more work however. Most of them just used the shovels as handy leaning tools. This slowed down the milling and rock kicking but increased the smoking and the jokes.

Then it got slightly more interesting. One of the Stanians decided he wanted to spin his shovel like he was trying out for his high school flag twirler team. To give him due credit, he was pretty good. He’d obviously practiced this work technique before, because he could get that shovel spinning like a helicopter rotor. However, once he had the shovel flying in a blur above his head for a minute or so he must have got distracted as it all went wrong. He clubbed himself in the back of the head with the flat side of the shovel’s blade. His hardhat went flying about twenty feet and he practically flew a few steps forward. As he was standing right on the edge of the trench this ended with him diving headfirst into the trench which fortunately had a foot or two of loose soil at the bottom. His crew just stopped milling and it was dead silent until he lifted his head out of the dirt and smiled up at everyone. Then they all really started laughing. I smothered my chuckle and pretended to have not noticed as there was no point embarrassing the poor fellow any more than he already was.

The second part of the adventure started when this rusty red earth-mover shovel arrived. This thing was so old it looked like an uglier twin of Mary Anne from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (I loved that book as a kid). The big difference was this old shovel was a diesel and belched out almost enough black sooty smoke to cover up the burned poop smell! The arrival of the shovel signaled it was time for real work to begin!....sigh….or not. In reality it meant it was time for lunch. The shovel was powered down and the Stanians ate lunch. I myself worked very very hard at my duties and succeeded in not napping. Lunch was about two hours long, and then the milling around began in earnest while the shovel driver spent an hour getting the shovel running again. Finally the shovel was fired up and the maniac shovel driver went to work on the trench. He was a wild man with that shovel digging out scoops of dirt and flinging them in the general direction of an antique dump truck. This included one bucket load that entirely missed the bed of the truck and crashed onto the cab of the truck. The dump truck driver was half asleep and just about jumped through the roof when the load crashed onto his cab. The truck’s door flew open and the driver spewed some of the vilest Stanistanian curse words that I have ever heard. At least I am guessing it was vile spew because the millers stopped milling and looked shocked and the shovel driver looked angry and sheepish all at once. Then just like that the dump truck driver slammed his door shut and went back to his nap. Then the entire crew of millers started laughing again. They were a jovial bunch. I failed this time to contain my chuckle.

This is where the six millers finally found real work. They shoveled up all the dirt that missed the dump truck and threw it back in the hole. It was kind of counterproductive to be filling the hole while the shovel emptied it, but since the power shovel was much faster they made some good progress. The danger of this method of hole digging is the manual shovelers were very close to the diesel shovel and the big hole. This resulted in the last of the comedy of errors that had helped keep me focused all day long. The maniac shovel driver must have been upset by the earlier exchange because he was shoveling with a vengeance. The shovel was on tracks and the body would spin back and forth from the hole to the dump truck just flinging dirt like a mad man. At the same time the millers would be shoveling up the flinged dirt that missed the truck and would fling it right back in the hole. It was like a well-oiled dysfunctional machine! Until one of the millers, the shovel twirling cheerleader to be exact, mistimed his operation and got in the way of the shovel. I actually cringed at first on this one because I thought he was going to die. The diesel shovel was pivoting back to the hole and the twirler was standing at the hole dumping a shovelful of flung dirt. The heavy four foot high sharp-toothed shovel was heading straight for his upper back and head when he must have caught it in his peripheral vision because he dove out of the way of the swinging shovel in the nick time…. face first, right back into the hole again. This time I couldn’t hold back and when he raised his head with a big dirt faced grin, even I had to laugh right along with the rest of the millers.

That pretty much concluded the entertainment portion of my escort duties. The Stanistanians worked for another two hours or so without any major OSHA safety violations, I stayed awake and did not freeze in the cold, and everyone went home alive and in one piece. That day at least. With the crazy way they worked I can’t imagine no one ever got hurt but at least I didn’t have to see it. I never worked on the road crew again but I did get to see some great winter sidewalk building techniques the other two times I did escort duty. But that’s a much shorter and much more boring story so don’t hold your breath waiting for it.