"What the hell are you doing in Africa"?
africa 
My freind Stacy is awesome. He is an army officer now . Started his military adventure as one of the few, the proud and the eventually, i guess... apparently fed up.....& made his way from grunt to glory and is currently an army of one.
I never really did understand the whole "army of one" slogan.... i thought teamwork was key. Well maybe they just pissed everybody else off, so now they have an army of one ... whatever....regardless i am still acting high...or was it aiming high?!?!?!? in the chairforce
Intraserviice rivalry aside ... my freind Stacy is a good shit.He is a tell it like it is kinda guy...and he keeps me laughing. He's good people... the kind you wanna go to war with.
So there i was in africa...sending "Stac" an email..... yup it was awesome.... i had a "kitchen pass from kindergarten"....... and i was staying at a marine camp. I got to use yahoo mail........yup!!! thanks Colby (cbftw@blogspot.com)
Thanks to my buddy renown author and the original army troublemaker blogger...Colby Buzzell.... the airforce has gotten psycho strict on computer usage.........i think that it is fuggin cool since it is cuz of Colby...anyone else i might be annoyed.........but it was Colby!!! So how cool is that cool!
Yeah so there I am in africa...and like everything else good in my life... if i had it my way i'd have screwed it up a hundred times over.
But it wasn't up to me, i had no choice so the results were the latter of the two. I was cordially invited (military style)on a cross country tour of africa.... so in other words it was like...."pack your shit-- your going to Africa"
and i said....like every good self-sufficient Nco who likes to speak their mind...... "Roger"......
So it is almost the end of my 12 hour shift. I worked 12 in the after noon till 12 in the morning. It was 10 pm when they told me i would be going on the road for a few days. So they gave me a cell phone and some intel and drove me back to the barracks so i could pack. It was about midnight before i was able to hit the sack. I had to be at the chow hall for a ride into work at 0400, which would give me just enough time to fall enough asleep that i was afraid of oversleeping.....so i at best i was able to doze just a bit in fear of the latter.
Before i knew it the alarm went off and i found myself in a groggy state trudging thru the rocks my short and conveinient three hundred paces to the bathroom/shower trailers.....and then dragging my overnight bag /kevlar /flak vest and chemgear thru the stone pathways that seem to inflict all middle east military installations another conveinient three hundred paces or so to the chow hall. Well since the worst part was over....which was the loathing of little sleep....after the few sleepless nights in the days preceeding....i sat sinking into the rocks on the side of the road.....& in a sorta euphoric state i thought to myself "i'm going to Africa......., fuggin a"
So after i had to run into the chow ahll to call my late boss and remind him not to forget about the crewchief......i got a ride into work and waited for my briefings... for my intel.... for the ride out to the airplane.....for my aircrew who had gotten the word the takeoff time slipped two hours. I didn't.....
Typical.
So there i was half brain dead from exhaustion....half wired from too much coffee in a sort of incoherent uncomfortably numb sorta state...waiting to liberate the Africans or whatever mission i was selected to endure... while the aircrew... who were alerted appropriately of the schedule change had enjoyed thier remaining crew rest in peace.
Upon their arrival we endured all things military......as more briefings were inflicted upon us, between the mandatory moments of hurry -up -and -wait..........and after way too many hours when the military had taken a simple process and turned it into something inconceivable difficult....
With the loadmasters signal,
I pulled the chocks and we were off on our african adventure. .....and ......IT WAS COOL!!!
Did you ever see the Movie Black Hawk Down? based off Mark Bowdens book?....you know the scene in the begiining where the black hawks fly up the coast to the target building (the olympic hotel) we flew a chillingly familiar route. The movie was actually filmed in Morocco as opposed to Somalia....and we were closer to where the mog actually took place.
The veiw was chillingly remniscent of that scene. We worked near Somalia for a bit and it was strange, though i was not in Mogadishu much less the battle of the MOG.... i am sure that it would be uncomfortable for anyone who was. In that location ...the tall "skinnys" spoke with the same accent, something for which my first experience was from the movie black hawk down. That in it of itself is awkward. Sorta like your only knowledge of boiler rooms being associated with Freddy Krueger....and then being in a boiler room for the first time. Though you don't necessarily feel any danger it just sorta creeps you out.
Africa is HOT. I have spent summers working outside in the desert in Kuwait and Iraq.......seeing thermometers peg at 140 degrees in the shade........ but Africa is a whole notha' kinda HOT!!!!
It was still winter at the time & the ac kicked off in our tent only momentarily...and in minutes it was 90 degrees on the thermometer...in the morning....in the winter...... It was hotter there than any place i have ever been. I would hate to see the peak of summer.It is a whole nother kinda hot....unlike anything i have ever seen.
We went to several different countries in Africa. and it was the most interesting mix of culture i had seen in my life. In kenya we had a long drive from the airport to our hotel. Colorfully painted new modern vans were used as busses for public transportation forthe locals. Brightly colored tropical flowers grew on bushes lining the the highway....something remniscent of a tropical paradise........and in front there were stick houses that people lived in. Goats walked freely throughout the town and along the roads......Merchants stood in rush hour traffic dressed in what looked like Swahili tribal garb with their large wooden wheel barrels that carried heaps of fresh mangos or hand woven baskets or other goods to sell along the road. The locals wore tribal garb with a bone piercing their forhead as ifthey just stepped outof national geographic magazine.....or the guy next to him at the market wore an Addidas shirt. I even saw one guy with a grey and black Army t shirt like the army pt gear that our soldiers wear.....hmmmm.........
Every so often people gatherd around a speaker talking on a podium in a microphone... i dont know the lauguage but so i dont know what they were talking about but it reminded me of what a televangilist might be like in africa.
Among the traffic mixed with the newer busses and the merchants with the wheel barrell type carts, there were old ricketey 5 ton sized trucks with flat beds and gates around the bed loosley heaping with furniture (that was not tied down) they navigated weaving in and out of trafficon the expressway while
two or three people hung on to the back of the gates......tempting fate.
I couldn't believe it.... a piece of furniture could easily fall knocking one of the guys off the back into the traffic..........
We did some missions away from the city. The guys that did the illustrations for the lion king did their homework.......it looks just like that there..... the trees and stuff. Only it wasn't a cartoon it was life right there before my eyes. There were termite hills that looked like ant hills... but they were taller than me. Puzzled at the size of the enormous termite hills I asked a local African army guy at the airport we were at if the termites were really big.Because i had seen hawks with a wingspan greater than i am tall and the termite hills were obnoxiously huge.
He held his fingers together as if to pinch something.... indicating the size of the relatively smallsize of the termites and smiled as he explained (in broken english witha thick accent) " No... they are very small but they are veryvery busy very ".....
A marine officer who spent quite a bit of time there said the termite hills were actually were hard structures and if you ran into one with a vehicle it would mess up your vehicle. Then he climbed on one and everbody took pictures.
This airstrip we were at was in the middle of know where. It was a paved slab with no buldings and a guy walking around with an Ak-47. A rickety out house sized structure made of some scrounged up old wooden boards sorta slapped together provided a makeshift shelter from the hot african sun for the guard.
There was a bit of a delay in the process of getting a diplomatic clearance to proceed to the next location....so we had a little time on the ground to spare. The marine looked a bit concerned and pulled the pilot in command off to the side and talked for a few minutes before the pilot decided we would press on to the next location... and wait for the clearance there.
Later i found out that the marine was concerned that if we spent much time on the ground in that location a young local teen might grab an RPG and take a pot shot at our Herk for kicks. So he wanted to go on to the next local to sit idle where security was better. Our pilot agreed emphatically.
And then we waited as we danced our diplomacy jig to the tune of all things bureucrtaic in hopes of being rewarded our clearance to press on. We picked up some guys and their stuff at that next location. They wore civillian clothes. Most were pretty clean shaved with military haircuts. Some had longer hair. Most carried weapons of some sort....M-9s stuffed down the back of their pants........some had various automatic weapons..... some with a laser sight Most of the guys looked mid thirties and they looked like they were in pretty good shape. I guess they were army. Airforce tends to have a bit of a beer gut going on by that age.
And we took these guys and their stuff to another place in the middle of knowhere.
When we landed, at this third world place...rickety old trucks apprroached and there was no forklift at the airport to down load the pallets. Luckily the plane had to be loaded with the one coming off last at the aft most pallet position on the ramp. Because we had to break down the pallets and make a chain and down load the two pallets bax by box out the paratrooper doors. Due to weight and balance considerations this was the only way to load the plane. And due to no forklift being available it was the only way to download the plane. So wedown loaded the plane box by box into these rickety old trucks. The guys were funny and worked together well as a team. one guy would pick up a case of water, where the box was broken and would hand it to the next guy warning him verbally that the box was broken.....or if the box was heavy........then some of the guys would warn that a box was heavy when it was obviously very light by looking at it...and they would warn vise versa as well just to be funny. It was sorta amusing..... these big guys obviously in good shape handing off a two pound package warning "careful heavy". I guess it was even more amusing the fact that they thought it was so amusing......it went on for probably an hour withoutthem becoming any less amused.....endearing i guess you might say.
Where we dropped them off...there was nothing there....and nothing around for miles. They brought all the food and water, tents for shelters..... and personal items as well medical and vetrinary supplies that would be needed to treat around 20,000 cattle and a few thousand people....everything needed to do this on those two pallets. And that small group of people did that in around 5 days.
They even scavenged the wooden crates that the water was sitting on on the pallets....so they could build an outhouse.
It was a humanitarian mission to provide advanced vetrinary care to the livestock so that the livestock would be healthy and produce a bigger meat yield for the impoverished locals. The also provided medical and dental care to the locals. And the worked with the loals to get them the training and supplies to eventually become self sufficient.
I did not realize the full scale of that mission until i read about it in army times months later. That was mentioned briefly earler in my blog. The only reason i bought the paper was because (cbftw)was on the cover. I didn't realize till much later the article concerning the mission i was on. Kinda ironic. But it is only a few paragraphs.... Colby's was deservedly on the cover.
So there we are in the most austere place this airman has ever seen, and that night we stayed in a 5 star hotel. Too funny.Quite an interesting contrast. It was on the ocean.....a beautiful resort type hotel with all the amenities a few bars, internet cafe..gym....spa...a dancing club..e few various shops...they gave us warm aromatherapy incensed towls...and fresh squeezed mango juice...... ponds adorned with lilly pads and cattails weaving throughout the courtyard and little wooden bridges conneting the walkways over the ponds.
The guys having spent too much time at the airbase......enjoyed the views.....as there were many tourists from various countries.....and many of the women looked like models.
They even joked asking me to break the plane so we could stay longer. There are not that many good looking women on the airbase and they are largely out numbered by the guys. That is what the guys complain about anyway. And of the good looking ones... you wont find them wearing low cut floor length dresses with a slit up to their ears.
Real Swahili tribal people performed their tribal dances live as we enjoyed a whole huge tropical buffet spread for dinner. The place was very upscale and we were not dressed for it. Our pilots had to wrap sarongs around their clothes to be allowed to join us for dinner.
The next day it was back to the ghetto.......but first we had an intermediate stop. we pulled in another hole in the wall airstrip. And long haired "civillians" with automatic weapons walked up to me and asked "Do you have my soccer balls"... and i looked at him kinda strange and said i didn't know and that everything that we had for him was on that pallet. I figured it was army slang for some weapons or something else i'd never heard of. And after the pallet was down loaded i watched the long haired guy in civvies pull the straps of the pallet loose and cut the metal straps loose with his leatherman. He wipes the sweat from his brow and pulled the cover of the box off. He pulled a few items wrapped in plastic out and set them aside and pulled out another item and then he said "oh good...they sent the pump too....i was afraid they would forget to send the pump" I got a closer look to see that the items he set aside were deflated soccer balls. A whole big box of them.
I smile and approached the guy......"Ok i have to ask.....what are all the soccer balls for?"
"Were starting a national soccer league...."
Ohhhh....of course what was i thinking.........lol...
I got back to the marine camp and emailed my freind Stacey to share a little about the trip in Africa.
Granted about a month prior i had been outbound to the desert aor. So i got Stacy's response which said only....."What the hell are you doing in Africa"........
I responded...."picking up guys and starting national soccer leagues"
My freind Stacy is awesome. He is an army officer now . Started his military adventure as one of the few, the proud and the eventually, i guess... apparently fed up.....& made his way from grunt to glory and is currently an army of one.
I never really did understand the whole "army of one" slogan.... i thought teamwork was key. Well maybe they just pissed everybody else off, so now they have an army of one ... whatever....regardless i am still acting high...or was it aiming high?!?!?!? in the chairforce
Intraserviice rivalry aside ... my freind Stacy is a good shit.He is a tell it like it is kinda guy...and he keeps me laughing. He's good people... the kind you wanna go to war with.
So there i was in africa...sending "Stac" an email..... yup it was awesome.... i had a "kitchen pass from kindergarten"....... and i was staying at a marine camp. I got to use yahoo mail........yup!!! thanks Colby (cbftw@blogspot.com)
Thanks to my buddy renown author and the original army troublemaker blogger...Colby Buzzell.... the airforce has gotten psycho strict on computer usage.........i think that it is fuggin cool since it is cuz of Colby...anyone else i might be annoyed.........but it was Colby!!! So how cool is that cool!
Yeah so there I am in africa...and like everything else good in my life... if i had it my way i'd have screwed it up a hundred times over.
But it wasn't up to me, i had no choice so the results were the latter of the two. I was cordially invited (military style)on a cross country tour of africa.... so in other words it was like...."pack your shit-- your going to Africa"
and i said....like every good self-sufficient Nco who likes to speak their mind...... "Roger"......
So it is almost the end of my 12 hour shift. I worked 12 in the after noon till 12 in the morning. It was 10 pm when they told me i would be going on the road for a few days. So they gave me a cell phone and some intel and drove me back to the barracks so i could pack. It was about midnight before i was able to hit the sack. I had to be at the chow hall for a ride into work at 0400, which would give me just enough time to fall enough asleep that i was afraid of oversleeping.....so i at best i was able to doze just a bit in fear of the latter.
Before i knew it the alarm went off and i found myself in a groggy state trudging thru the rocks my short and conveinient three hundred paces to the bathroom/shower trailers.....and then dragging my overnight bag /kevlar /flak vest and chemgear thru the stone pathways that seem to inflict all middle east military installations another conveinient three hundred paces or so to the chow hall. Well since the worst part was over....which was the loathing of little sleep....after the few sleepless nights in the days preceeding....i sat sinking into the rocks on the side of the road.....& in a sorta euphoric state i thought to myself "i'm going to Africa......., fuggin a"
So after i had to run into the chow ahll to call my late boss and remind him not to forget about the crewchief......i got a ride into work and waited for my briefings... for my intel.... for the ride out to the airplane.....for my aircrew who had gotten the word the takeoff time slipped two hours. I didn't.....
Typical.
So there i was half brain dead from exhaustion....half wired from too much coffee in a sort of incoherent uncomfortably numb sorta state...waiting to liberate the Africans or whatever mission i was selected to endure... while the aircrew... who were alerted appropriately of the schedule change had enjoyed thier remaining crew rest in peace.
Upon their arrival we endured all things military......as more briefings were inflicted upon us, between the mandatory moments of hurry -up -and -wait..........and after way too many hours when the military had taken a simple process and turned it into something inconceivable difficult....
With the loadmasters signal,
I pulled the chocks and we were off on our african adventure. .....and ......IT WAS COOL!!!
Did you ever see the Movie Black Hawk Down? based off Mark Bowdens book?....you know the scene in the begiining where the black hawks fly up the coast to the target building (the olympic hotel) we flew a chillingly familiar route. The movie was actually filmed in Morocco as opposed to Somalia....and we were closer to where the mog actually took place.
The veiw was chillingly remniscent of that scene. We worked near Somalia for a bit and it was strange, though i was not in Mogadishu much less the battle of the MOG.... i am sure that it would be uncomfortable for anyone who was. In that location ...the tall "skinnys" spoke with the same accent, something for which my first experience was from the movie black hawk down. That in it of itself is awkward. Sorta like your only knowledge of boiler rooms being associated with Freddy Krueger....and then being in a boiler room for the first time. Though you don't necessarily feel any danger it just sorta creeps you out.
Africa is HOT. I have spent summers working outside in the desert in Kuwait and Iraq.......seeing thermometers peg at 140 degrees in the shade........ but Africa is a whole notha' kinda HOT!!!!
It was still winter at the time & the ac kicked off in our tent only momentarily...and in minutes it was 90 degrees on the thermometer...in the morning....in the winter...... It was hotter there than any place i have ever been. I would hate to see the peak of summer.It is a whole nother kinda hot....unlike anything i have ever seen.
We went to several different countries in Africa. and it was the most interesting mix of culture i had seen in my life. In kenya we had a long drive from the airport to our hotel. Colorfully painted new modern vans were used as busses for public transportation forthe locals. Brightly colored tropical flowers grew on bushes lining the the highway....something remniscent of a tropical paradise........and in front there were stick houses that people lived in. Goats walked freely throughout the town and along the roads......Merchants stood in rush hour traffic dressed in what looked like Swahili tribal garb with their large wooden wheel barrels that carried heaps of fresh mangos or hand woven baskets or other goods to sell along the road. The locals wore tribal garb with a bone piercing their forhead as ifthey just stepped outof national geographic magazine.....or the guy next to him at the market wore an Addidas shirt. I even saw one guy with a grey and black Army t shirt like the army pt gear that our soldiers wear.....hmmmm.........
Every so often people gatherd around a speaker talking on a podium in a microphone... i dont know the lauguage but so i dont know what they were talking about but it reminded me of what a televangilist might be like in africa.
Among the traffic mixed with the newer busses and the merchants with the wheel barrell type carts, there were old ricketey 5 ton sized trucks with flat beds and gates around the bed loosley heaping with furniture (that was not tied down) they navigated weaving in and out of trafficon the expressway while
two or three people hung on to the back of the gates......tempting fate.
I couldn't believe it.... a piece of furniture could easily fall knocking one of the guys off the back into the traffic..........
We did some missions away from the city. The guys that did the illustrations for the lion king did their homework.......it looks just like that there..... the trees and stuff. Only it wasn't a cartoon it was life right there before my eyes. There were termite hills that looked like ant hills... but they were taller than me. Puzzled at the size of the enormous termite hills I asked a local African army guy at the airport we were at if the termites were really big.Because i had seen hawks with a wingspan greater than i am tall and the termite hills were obnoxiously huge.
He held his fingers together as if to pinch something.... indicating the size of the relatively smallsize of the termites and smiled as he explained (in broken english witha thick accent) " No... they are very small but they are veryvery busy very ".....
A marine officer who spent quite a bit of time there said the termite hills were actually were hard structures and if you ran into one with a vehicle it would mess up your vehicle. Then he climbed on one and everbody took pictures.
This airstrip we were at was in the middle of know where. It was a paved slab with no buldings and a guy walking around with an Ak-47. A rickety out house sized structure made of some scrounged up old wooden boards sorta slapped together provided a makeshift shelter from the hot african sun for the guard.
There was a bit of a delay in the process of getting a diplomatic clearance to proceed to the next location....so we had a little time on the ground to spare. The marine looked a bit concerned and pulled the pilot in command off to the side and talked for a few minutes before the pilot decided we would press on to the next location... and wait for the clearance there.
Later i found out that the marine was concerned that if we spent much time on the ground in that location a young local teen might grab an RPG and take a pot shot at our Herk for kicks. So he wanted to go on to the next local to sit idle where security was better. Our pilot agreed emphatically.
And then we waited as we danced our diplomacy jig to the tune of all things bureucrtaic in hopes of being rewarded our clearance to press on. We picked up some guys and their stuff at that next location. They wore civillian clothes. Most were pretty clean shaved with military haircuts. Some had longer hair. Most carried weapons of some sort....M-9s stuffed down the back of their pants........some had various automatic weapons..... some with a laser sight Most of the guys looked mid thirties and they looked like they were in pretty good shape. I guess they were army. Airforce tends to have a bit of a beer gut going on by that age.
And we took these guys and their stuff to another place in the middle of knowhere.
When we landed, at this third world place...rickety old trucks apprroached and there was no forklift at the airport to down load the pallets. Luckily the plane had to be loaded with the one coming off last at the aft most pallet position on the ramp. Because we had to break down the pallets and make a chain and down load the two pallets bax by box out the paratrooper doors. Due to weight and balance considerations this was the only way to load the plane. And due to no forklift being available it was the only way to download the plane. So wedown loaded the plane box by box into these rickety old trucks. The guys were funny and worked together well as a team. one guy would pick up a case of water, where the box was broken and would hand it to the next guy warning him verbally that the box was broken.....or if the box was heavy........then some of the guys would warn that a box was heavy when it was obviously very light by looking at it...and they would warn vise versa as well just to be funny. It was sorta amusing..... these big guys obviously in good shape handing off a two pound package warning "careful heavy". I guess it was even more amusing the fact that they thought it was so amusing......it went on for probably an hour withoutthem becoming any less amused.....endearing i guess you might say.
Where we dropped them off...there was nothing there....and nothing around for miles. They brought all the food and water, tents for shelters..... and personal items as well medical and vetrinary supplies that would be needed to treat around 20,000 cattle and a few thousand people....everything needed to do this on those two pallets. And that small group of people did that in around 5 days.
They even scavenged the wooden crates that the water was sitting on on the pallets....so they could build an outhouse.
It was a humanitarian mission to provide advanced vetrinary care to the livestock so that the livestock would be healthy and produce a bigger meat yield for the impoverished locals. The also provided medical and dental care to the locals. And the worked with the loals to get them the training and supplies to eventually become self sufficient.
I did not realize the full scale of that mission until i read about it in army times months later. That was mentioned briefly earler in my blog. The only reason i bought the paper was because (cbftw)was on the cover. I didn't realize till much later the article concerning the mission i was on. Kinda ironic. But it is only a few paragraphs.... Colby's was deservedly on the cover.
So there we are in the most austere place this airman has ever seen, and that night we stayed in a 5 star hotel. Too funny.Quite an interesting contrast. It was on the ocean.....a beautiful resort type hotel with all the amenities a few bars, internet cafe..gym....spa...a dancing club..e few various shops...they gave us warm aromatherapy incensed towls...and fresh squeezed mango juice...... ponds adorned with lilly pads and cattails weaving throughout the courtyard and little wooden bridges conneting the walkways over the ponds.
The guys having spent too much time at the airbase......enjoyed the views.....as there were many tourists from various countries.....and many of the women looked like models.
They even joked asking me to break the plane so we could stay longer. There are not that many good looking women on the airbase and they are largely out numbered by the guys. That is what the guys complain about anyway. And of the good looking ones... you wont find them wearing low cut floor length dresses with a slit up to their ears.
Real Swahili tribal people performed their tribal dances live as we enjoyed a whole huge tropical buffet spread for dinner. The place was very upscale and we were not dressed for it. Our pilots had to wrap sarongs around their clothes to be allowed to join us for dinner.
The next day it was back to the ghetto.......but first we had an intermediate stop. we pulled in another hole in the wall airstrip. And long haired "civillians" with automatic weapons walked up to me and asked "Do you have my soccer balls"... and i looked at him kinda strange and said i didn't know and that everything that we had for him was on that pallet. I figured it was army slang for some weapons or something else i'd never heard of. And after the pallet was down loaded i watched the long haired guy in civvies pull the straps of the pallet loose and cut the metal straps loose with his leatherman. He wipes the sweat from his brow and pulled the cover of the box off. He pulled a few items wrapped in plastic out and set them aside and pulled out another item and then he said "oh good...they sent the pump too....i was afraid they would forget to send the pump" I got a closer look to see that the items he set aside were deflated soccer balls. A whole big box of them.
I smile and approached the guy......"Ok i have to ask.....what are all the soccer balls for?"
"Were starting a national soccer league...."
Ohhhh....of course what was i thinking.........lol...
I got back to the marine camp and emailed my freind Stacey to share a little about the trip in Africa.
Granted about a month prior i had been outbound to the desert aor. So i got Stacy's response which said only....."What the hell are you doing in Africa"........
I responded...."picking up guys and starting national soccer leagues"
posted by militarybrat at 4:13 PM
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