Well there was certainly a lot of excitement this week. For those of you who don’t read the news, you should, there was a relatively “big” Taliban attack this week. A small group of Taliban stormed an abandoned high rise building that was only partially constructed and started shooting at the US Embassy and ISAF from the upper floors, both small arms fire and RPGs. According to the reports I read on the web the building was about 800m away which is pretty far if you want to hit anything accurately with small arms or RPGs. Not that they really care about hitting what they shoot at, they just want publicity. Which they got.
C^3 apparently took some small arms fire during this so that made it exciting here as well. I got to watch some video feeds from the big balloon that they have here which was kind of cool, and some UAV feed so it wasn’t a total waste. Although seeing everyone sitting at their desks working on their computers while wearing body armor and Kevlar was something you don’t see everyday. This place actually felt like we might be in a war zone for a little bit, but it is still rather cupcakey.
Prior to all this we had a ceremony on 11 Sept, it was pretty good, CSM Hill (the ISAF CSM) spoke. They had a small band there, I didn’t know we had bands in theater. That struck me as pretty odd. So at these formations everyone is well in formation yours truly included which makes it a tad strange. I’ve never really been taught to stand at attention or at ease properly and while it doesn’t seem to hard to fake by watching other people and using common sense im sure we civilians stick out. Also they never told us what to do with saluting and that sort of thing. I don’t salute which is correct for a civilian but its also odd to be one of the few not doing a traditional military salute during the national anthem. I mean I still take off my cover and put my hand over my heart and all which as far as I can tell is the correct thing for a civilian to do. I guess my point is with all the stupid training I had to take to come over here something on the proper civilian things to do in these sets of circumstances would be handy as there wasn’t much consensus among civilians if you looked around.
They had a new type of chicken nugget at the DFAC one day at lunch, they were awesome. I had the best chicken salad, it was awesome. But they haven’t made fresh bread in the mornings in at least a month, im not happy about that.
So I’ve been wanting to play a game for a while, I was finally able to talk some of the people I know here into it Sunday evening but not till later in the evening since people had other things they had to do first. Anyway I went outside and ran into a kite string which was impossible to see in the dark and a couple other people ran into as well. We found one end of it (no kite) which was good cause then we could get it out of the walkway. So I decided to try and find the other end thinking that there would either be a kite on it or atleast there wouldn’t be a kite string laying around. About 10-15 min later I had a huge bundle of kite string with two ends and no kite, drat. I stuffed it in my pocket since there wasn’t a trash can around and proceeded down to the basement to meet up with my friends to play a game. I walked into their office and one of them was standing there with two kites they she had gotten somehow and trying to figure out how to get some kite string. Now if you’ve ever been in a situation like this and someone randomly walks in and offers you some kite string that might seem a little strange or atleast a bad attempt at a joke. Luck for me I had a bunch of kite string still stashed in my pocket. And that my friends is how you become a miracle worker. I love it when the lack of a plan comes together.
So after the kite string incident we went over to the Gym which has the library and game room attached. They weren’t up for monopoly so we ended up with clue and sorry. Sorry was the game of choice however it was missing a red pawn which I tried to quickly use to my advantage my shifting the board so I could be red, however it’s pretty easy to tell I was missing a pawn so I ended up using Miss Scarlet as my secret weapon (aka 4th pawn.). I haven’t played Sorry in ages. There is actually a surprising amount of strategy for such a simple game. Nowhere near as much as im used to in Settlers or Puerto Rico or the like but enough to make it interesting. I’m also happy to report that I managed to win though it was a close one at the end, well atleast between red and blue. Someone had also sent over a bunch of cheap Hawaiian decorations, which we had found on the shelves where people put stuff they get that is for the taking. So we were sitting around playing Sorry in the Library with Miss Scarlet wearing Leis. It was funny. And nice to get atleast one game in, maybe we’ll get another one in this weekend.
Also one of my roommates redeployed yesterday. So now I have a bottom bunk and until we get another roommate a little more room. All of which is pretty good. I’ll have a guy above me once I get a roommate which I imagine will happen in the rather near future but we’ll see. Still I have a bottom bunk with curtain so I can make it darker. Actually being in the top bunk wasn’t that bad. Hopefully we wont get another roommate for a while so I wont have much time left when we do get one but again knowing how the rooming situation is around here I kinda doubt that will happen, we’ll see.
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