Letter from Qatar

Here is another installment from our officer in the field. It's a great letter and it is always interesting to see how things work inside our military. It's quite amusing actually. no snippets this time as the whole letter is great. Read the whole thing below...

Hello all!
Well I have finally been afforded the perfect opportunity to get my next e-mail out to everyone. I am currently on staff duty tonight, which means that I sit in an office and monitor several phones, walkie talkies and radios and if anyone decides to launch a missile at us I activate the siren. So yeah, pretty much I do nothing. I will get the privilege of doing this about once every other month, so you are all at least guaranteed an e-mail then!

Things have started to settle down after a few hectic weeks. I had 11 Soldiers that left my section and I received 9 new Soldiers. So we have been busy in-processing them and training them on their new jobs. Actually just getting the 9 Soldiers was quite the task in itself. I got a call on my cell phone at about 0400 in the morning and the Soldiers that we were expecting had actually just landed in Qatar instead of Kuwait where they normally would have gone first in order to in-process into the middle east Area of Operations. So when they called me I told them to stay put and I would be ready and pick them up within an hour. They called me back about 30 min later and said that they needed to get on a plane to go to Kuwait first. I said NO, NO, NO don’t do that because they will get stuck in Kuwait, but they were getting their orders from someone higher up, so I told them to give me 5 min. and I would have authorization for them to stay here and 2 min. later I had the necessary authorization for them to stay here. I called them back but they had already boarded the plane and the doors were closing. So I was bummed that I knew I was going to lose at least a day or two with them going to Kuwait. Then the next morning they called me and said that they were waiting for a flight to come back to Qatar and that they would be there sometime that evening. About an hour later I got frantic call from them because some Lieutenant Colonel walked into where they were waiting and split them into two teams and told the first team “You now work for me” and he ordered the other team to get on a bus and head to another camp located in Kuwait and they were now going to work for some other unit. Now as soon as I heard that I knew it was because Kuwait isn’t exactly happy with us. Technically we fall under the control of Kuwait, but really for our day-to-day operations we fall under Qatar. So when our Kuwait higher headquarters supervisors came to visit us a week or so prior our supervisors here in Qatar got into a yelling match with them (and won) and we are getting official orders cut to show that we now completely fall under Qatar instead of Kuwait. So I knew that Kuwait was trying to return the favor for us and show us that they were still in control too. So it took three days of lots of phone calls and e-mails and it ended up going to a Three-star generals level before it was finally settled (as if there was any doubt) that they would come down to Qatar.

The new Soldiers that we finally received are all Active Duty Soldiers and for years I had heard that Active Duty Soldiers are so much more different then Guard Soldiers, as of right not I can’t say it is for the better, but it is still a little early to know what all their strengths and weaknesses are. But the way I see it right now is that Guard Soldiers are used to getting a months worth of work done in a weekend. Where as Active Duty Soldiers managed to stretch a weekends worth of work over 30 days. Of course I think it is that same Guard mentality that drives me to stay late almost every night and get as much work done as possible in a day. But slowly I am coming to the realization that I will never ever get fully caught up on things to do around my building. The Command Sergeant Major here makes sure of that. Every morning I have to walk through the building with him and he manages to find some of the most insane jobs that I have to complete. Sometimes it is very simple and takes hardly no time at all (i.e. that chair is missing an arm, make sure you throw it away) and sometimes it is a little more involved (i.e. the pool tables look like junk, write up all the deficiencies on the seven pool tables , find a contractor to fix them and then the money to pay for it). So he definitely keeps me on my toes in that department.

The other thing that has been keeping me busy is that about every other day or so I get a phone call that some of the items from my big spending spree are sporadically arriving. So I have to go pick them up and sign a bunch of paperwork and then I have to set it up in our building and make sure it works. Not that I mind doing all that, in fact I find it very fun, but it is time consuming.

All of that and I still have my daily reports to deal with, Soldier issues, daily physical fitness exercise. We have 100+ new Soldiers arriving everyday always asking the same questions, weekly I go through the several hundred comment cards and read every one of them. 95% of them write stuff that will not change like the 4 day pass should be a week long. The one thing I always get a kick out of is that everyone thinks that their rank should be the cutoff for which Soldiers get their own room. Right now only Colonels and Command Sergeant Majors get their own room. Lieutenant Colonels and Majors both say that Field grade officers and above should get their own room. Captains say Captains and above should get their own room. Lieutenants say that all officers should get their own rooms. Master Sergeants and Sergeant First Classes say that senior NCOs should get their own room. Sergeants and Staff Sergeants think that all NCOs should get their own rooms and Specialists and Privates think that everyone should get their own room. It is really pretty funny.

Last Friday night I had probably the most fun I have had since I have been here. One of our vendors treated me and LT Mangen along with two of our Soldiers out to a special party on the beach. However, to get to the beach we got to take a 20 min. ride in a SUV over the sand dunes. Our host treated us by giving us his very best driver “Smokey” and he treated us to a CRAZY ride. It is hard to explain exactly what it was like, but we offer the same venue for Soldiers all the time and for safety reasons we only allow them to go up to 60 Km/hour however when they took us out I saw the speedometer reach at least 120 km/hour! He would go screaming down a straightaway and then he would fish tail left and right and I don’t know how he kept the SUV from tipping but he did an excellent job of pushing the vehicle to the limits. The other fun thing he would do is we would go sideways on a hill and you feel like you are looking straight done the side of the hill but somehow he managed to keep the vehicle upright.

In the next two weeks we have a BIG tournament coming up. Every year the Qatari military challenge us to a volleyball tournament. For some reason we accept every year even though we KNOW that they hire professional volleyball players to come “join” their military for a couple of weeks to train up, play against us and then go back to wherever they came from. I made the second team. And we have about 3 hour practices almost every other night and it is safe to say that I am very sore from every practice. Some of the guys on the A team are REALLY good and it is generally not a good feeling to be on the receiving end of one of their spikes. But I have definitely learned a lot about volleyball in the last few weeks and improved my own game. But it is VERY serious stuff so I am anxious to see how it all goes when we do actually play the Qataris.

Well I am sure there is more to write about, but that is all I can think of at this time. Overall things are going well and time is going fairly quickly

Jeremy