The Common Man...

Holy COW!! It is 2025 and I am actually done for the day. Mind you, I have worked several shifts from 8am to 11 or 12 at night in the last week or so. Then, to top it off, I get some unbelievably stupid phone calls anywhere from 0530 or 0600 until about 0730, then I finally drag my ass out of bed a few minutes to 0800.

I have had the pleasure of receiving phone calls from my counterpart down South at 0600 to tell me that a plane did or did not take off.... Now just so you can understand the absurdity of this; he knows that the airport is an hour away and that our personnel have to be there an hour early, so if the flight is supposed to arrive here at say 0700, and take off at 0730, that would mean that my people have to meet at 0500 to depart by 0530 to get to the airport by 0630. Since we USUALLY have multiple passengers going to multiple destinations, that means multiple flights. But, we are limited by the number of vehicles we have and do not want to send multiple convoys [as the greatest threat up here is roadside bombs (IEDs)] so I do everything I can to minimize the exposure our troops face, thus one convoy leaves w/ everyone onboard in order to make the earliest flight...

But the reality is, the knowledge, to me - in a half comatose state at 0600 - as to whether that plane actually launched or not means absolutely nothing. About the only thing is does provide me is an ingratiating desire to locate said IED and plant it squarely in said individual's hindparts.... If the convoy has already departed, and most likely is almost to the airport, and most likely has passengers departing and arriving on other aircraft, they cannot and will not turn around to come back... I cannot get ahold of them on the cell phone anyway. Now Dan is a pretty good guy, and we have had some fun sharing some "stuck on stupid" stories - which I will share with you shortly - about the military's version of common sense.

Sidebar: I recently heard that Abraham Lincoln once said, "God must have really loved the common man, for he made SO MANY of them..." Now I don't know if old Abe really said that, but how in the hell did all those "common men" find their way into the Army and into Afghanistan at the same time as me...? Now that's what I wonder.

I got a call this morning at about 0630 - this was after finally getting off work around 1130 pm and not getting to sleep until about 2am. This most important phone call was because someone at the airport - whom I witnessed write down the particular phone # the day before - realized that they had forgotten one Colonel Covington's cell phone #... It should probably be noted at this time that said "dip$h*t" was not to meet Col Covington until 0930, but decided in his infinite wisdom, to call me - the Air Operations Officer - at 0630 in order to get the Col's urgently needed phone number. Now why he determined that he must have that # at 0630 instead of, say 0900, was beyond my comprehension at that hour... Not to mention that I was just as surprised as you probably are, that along with scheduling flights and transportation to and from two different airfields, that one of my tertiary duties is now appearantly that of the camp's Operator as well. There is actually an Admin office here that would have that information, and another Comms (communication) office that actually issued the phones. Oh, wait, I get it - they probably realized that it was TOO EARLY and those people probably wouldn't be in their offices yet.... So, let's call Murph - he'll know the number.

The common man... Here's another fun one; today I got a call from one of my corpsmen. He is down South, and I had told him to go to the terminal at a certain time and to inform them that he needed to travel North on a specific flight, leaving at a specific time. What he was told was that the particular flight was full of mail and cargo and that he could not fly on it. When it arrived here, I asked our mail clerk how much mail we got. He informed me that we had rec'd 1130 lbs of mail. Now this particular flight can carry approx. 2500 lbs of weight. So I called down to the terminal and started asking why my corpsmen was not allowed to fly. I actually had one "common man" tell me that it isn't necessarily the weight, but that I needed to consider the "cubic factor" of the size and shape of the cargo as well., and that maybe it wasn't a weight issue, so much as a VOLUME problem... Now I have been moving troops and cargo for almost ALL of my 14 year career - and I can tell you that unless they were shipping several hundred square feet of nearly empty boxes there is no way that 1100 lbs of mail would fill that cargo hold on that particular plane. I am not sure if this particular "common man" truly believes that the smoke he was blowing at that moment was actually a valid point, but after I got off the phone with him I am pretty sure that I was several shades of cherry red... See, this particular "common man" is a LT Colonel - two pay grades above me, so I was unable to tell him just how common he is...

Dan, my counterpart, shared another brilliant Air Farce policy with me the other day; we are trying to move several Humvees from down South back up here to the North. He was coordinating the Air Movement for three vehicles and was told that two of them were too heavy to be put on one C-130. Now, a fully loaded Humvee weights about 14000 lbs, which we realize is a lot, but the weight capacity on a C-103 is 40,000 lbs. When Dan attempted to explain his "combat math" and actually rounded up the Humvees to 15K lbs per vehicle, for simplicity sake, and tried to explain to his "common man" that two Humvees fully loaded MIGHT, JUST MIGHT weigh upwards of 30,000 lbs, but that left a 10, 000 lbs "cushion" for us to work with. The "common man" argued that it wouldn't work because of temps and altitudes and heat and weight and balance considerations, etc. So Dan suggested that they contact the "powers that be" in the Air Farce down in Bagram for an "Official determination." The second "common man," I'll call him CM2 for the remainder of the story, agreed that two Humvees would be too heavy, but further offered that he could put one Humvee and a Pallet of cargo on the plane. Dan said, "well, what if my pallet weighs 15,000 lbs, would that still be okay?" "Oh, sure," said CM2, "that would be okay." I'm not kidding you. Can anyone help me out with this. Seriously, I can't make this $h*t up. This is the mentality I deal with on a daily basis.

I think I'm going to turn this BLOG into a book, not a comedy, so much as a tragedy, I'm still working on the title. I'm thinking "Army, Navy, and Air Farce, a seemless coalition." Or maybe "Diaries of an Uncommon Man in a Common Military" Any other suggestions?

I at least hope that you have found some glimmer of humor in my everyday suffering. I'm sure that one day I, too, will be able to look back at this and laugh. For now, I just cringe and try not to cry. I just hope that stupidity is not contagious...

Love to all,
Michael