Mazar-e-Sharif: First Impressions

The base I’m on is on the smaller side of bases as they go, but still large enough to allow me to get lost my first few days here. There are about 3000 people from 14 (?) different countries all sharing the same area. This leads to a very multi-lingual adventure and makes standing in line for the chow hall interesting if you’re into eavesdropping.

The base itself is like a mini-dirt-covered-multi-ethnic-lemming-military city, with people moving to and fro all the time; weird traffic rules that the Europeans get, the Americans don’t; and the Mongolians purposely break; some creature comforts from home: brought to you by the local PXs, which are mini stores selling everything from underwear to knives to Pop Tarts (all in limited varieties that change as supplies come and go); a Burger King and a Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut, a Pizza hut (who else remembers that song?), and a recreation tent with a small movie theater; a hodge-podge of tent cities spread between actually brick and mortar buildings (every group here has their own area and each is designed differently); and all of this has the backdrop of hazy, snow-capped mountains that make me regret not having a snowboard or getting to go anywhere closer than this to a mountain this winter.

I got lucky because my work location and my living quarters are located in the same area. In addition, I have my own make-shift room (we have artic tents that have been sectioned off with plywood to make 7’ X 6’ rooms). The rooms are big enough for a twin bed, a cabinet, and a floor space of 3’ X 4’. Not a lot of space, but all mine. Most people have to live about half a mile to a mile from where they work and share converted ConEx containers with 1 to 3 other people. The only disadvantage to my situation is that we’re located off by ourselves so that to get to anything else (gym, chow hall, post office, etc.), we have to walk or drive the mile or so. This isn’t bad now, but when it starts to snow and be cold and wet outside, it might start to suck.

I started work essentially the first day that I arrived, although, I don’t think I was coherent enough to actually be productive.  I’ve been here almost a week now and am finally starting to get how things work. The training that I went through in Atlanta right before I got here, didn’t quite prepare me for how it is “in the field,” so I’ve been doing a lot of re-learning quickly. My job consists of long hours, lots of repetition, and a mentality that is flexible, goes with the flow, and learns to make do with what you have. I’m hoping I’ll have that all figured out in short order.

Flights to MeS

Some 8,500 miles, four flights, 40+ hrs, and 12.5 time Zones

This is what it took to get from sunny San Francisco to my current location, Mazar-i-Sharif (known as MeS to most that call this place home), Afghanistan.

I started my trip at SFO with an early morning departure and five hour jaunt across the continental USA. When I first got on the plane there was a British twenty-something sitting in the seat next to mine. A few minutes later an older gentleman comes and points of that the Brit is in the wrong row. Turns out the kid is supposed to be a row behind us. He moves and then switches from the middle seat to the window with the couple behind us so that they can be seated next to each other. And thus I got to deal with what turned out to be a completely inconsiderate ass for the next five hours.

The Brit kid was tired and fell asleep about as soon as he could settle in his seat, the problem was, the kid obviously had no concept of the limited amount of space that one has on a flying tin can and decided it was okay to encroach upon others’ limited space. It started with knees to the back and being unable to put my seat back at all due to him pressing into the back of it. This escalated to a random foot coming out of nowhere, pushing between the window and my elbow and kicking my arm off my own armrest, and culminated with a near brush with a concussion as the guy’s size twelves came up and over the seat top and almost wacked me and the gentleman next to me in the head. This is about the point where I had had enough and the male of the couple behind me finally stepped in to wake the miscreant after he was on the receiving end of my death glares. Stupid kid removed his feet, went back to shoving his knees in my lower back and promptly passed out again for the remainder of the trip. Ah the joys of public transportation.   

The second leg of the journey was the longest, with a trip across the pond, across Europe, and to the Middle East. Two movies, two meals, and a poor attempt at sleep had me arriving exhausted and completely out of whack with the time zone changes. There was some entertainment on the flight though when the guy next to me attempted to wake the guy at the end of our row up so that he could get up to go to the restroom. Aisle Seat Guy must have taken some sort of Ambien or other narcotic  though because he was out for the count. The poor middle seat guy is shaking his shoulder and asking him to wake up and the most he’s getting is a glimpse of glassy uncomprehending eyes and a drugged smile before Aisle Seat Guy is once again comatose. This continues for a few minutes with me providing not so helpful laughter to the mix before Middle Seat Guy just climbs over Aisle Seat Guy, who sleeps on completely obliviously.

My company sets you up with a Meet and Greet service when you get into your layover destination, Dubai, to help you get through customs and get your bags faster and easier. I found the service to be not too convenient or really needed. When you get off the plane, there are people with names on signs (all very nice at making you feel rich and powerful…yeah, not really) ready to take you to your next stop. The problems started when (a) you’re Mister instead of Missus and this leads to them calling you “Sir” indefinitely even after they’ve seen that you’re not male; (b) them believing that you’re getting a connecting flight right away and taking you the wrong direction and then trying to foster you off on others that are yelling at your person that they are responsible for you and that they need to take you to your final destination (all the while making you feel like a lost and misbehaving child for causing this issue and making them have to clean it up); (c) having your person be angry at you cause they got yelled at for picking you up, taking you the wrong place, and then trying to ditch you and being told that they couldn’t; (d) having your escort ditch you because they’re continuing to walk while security has pulled you aside to check your bag, (e) having your escort come back and look at you like you’re wasting their time cause you can’t keep up due to the security check, and (f) lastly, having your escort led you outside, point vaguely in the direction of the taxi line and promptly leave you. On a good note, I did get to go through the “diplomat” passport control line and thus save an hour of standing in line.  

I got to stay at the Dubai Creek Hilton for a 12 hour layover. The hotel is beautiful with glass, mirrors, chrome, and marble styling everywhere. The shape of the building is not rectangular which leads to all of the room having interesting floor plans. My room was on the fourth floor and had one wall completely made out of glass windows. It looked out over an adjoining building, the street below, and the Dubai creek. If you craned your neck, you could see the downtown skyline and what I think was the tallest building that the city is partially known for.

Not wanting to waste all of my short time, I dropped my bags, grabbed my purse and headed out to explore. The doorman and receptionist at the hotel both told me that I should take a water taxi across the creek and to the Old Dubai Souk, so this is what I did. The creek is really like a small river or lake (not sure how far in either direction it extends, but it is only about 600-700 meters across. I grabbed a spot on the taxi (which was more like a small ferry that you pay for rides on like a BART or Metro system) and took the ten minute ride. There were other, smaller water taxis that consisted of small boats with just a top to them, where everyone sat around the edges and the driver was in a sunken area in the center. I wanted to ride one of these, but they came from different destinations than I did.

The Old Dubai Souk is like a lot of Middle Eastern Souks that I’ve been to. There are brightly colored shawls, shiny hookahs, touristy trinkets, and the traditional sellers trying to entice you into their stores with gentle calls of “pretty lady, I give you great deal on a pashmina. Please come look.” Once you exit the older part of the area you are in a general shopping area for anything electronic or watch related. I think that if my brother had been with me, he would have been in buying and selling heaven and I wouldn’t have seen him again for a few days. 

As I didn’t want to buy anything, I just meandered through the stalls, grabbed a Mango Lassi to quench my thirst and eventually stumbled upon a Carrfour, which I had to (a) take a picture of for Em, and (b) go into for old time’s sake.  Carrfour is the Middle Eastern and European version of a super Walmart. They carry everything from electronics to fresh produce to fast food restaurants on the fringe. They’re nostalgic for me and Em because after three and a half weeks in Egypt years ago, with dust covered cookies and shawarma as main staples of our diets, we were led to Carrfour in a quest for a certain spice. The air-conditioned giant with its fresh produce and change of fare was a lovely and welcomed sight at the time and has now become a thing that Em and I try to find in the major cities that we visit. So far we’ve found a Carrfour in Alexandira, Egypt; Barcelona, Spain; Istanbul, Turkey; and now Dubai, UAE. There might have also been one in Hungary, Poland or Peru, but I don’t remember.

Jetlag eventually caused me to turn around and head back to the hotel for a bit of rest. I was side-tracked on my way to an early bedtime by the sign for a pool on the roof and a BBQ at the hotel. I detoured to the top of the hotel and was greeted with a magnificent nighttime view of Dubai laid out at my feet. The pool sat in the middle of an open aired terrace with lounge chairs along the sides, a small bar at the back, and an endless skyline in front. I grabbed a small Greek Salad, afraid it might be the last fresh vegetables I‘d get for a while and enjoyed the view. I ended up talking with another contractor that was out enjoying the view as well and spent the next few hours in pleasant conversation.

Morning came way too soon (especially cause my body still thought it was the night before with the various time zone differences) and a cab ride back to the airport. It seemed to me that Dubai airport is more concerned about what gets brought into their country versus what gets taken out. When I arrived in country, I had to run my luggage through three different x-ray check points just to leave the airport. When I came to depart, Security just looked at me and my friend, Steven, that I’d met the previous night, saw that we were white, dress in cargos, and carrying black duffle bags; nodded and let us go through. Maybe it was just that terminal.

The DFS flight (from Dubai to Bagram) was actually very nice, with free On Demand tv and movies, breakfast, and multi-lingual staff to assist. The plane had only contractors on it, so it was relatively empty and everyone had a row or more to themselves.

Once we arrived at Bagram, everyone was corralled into lines for their final destinations. I and about 15 others took the final leg of our journey on a small tin can with two single rows of seat, no cabin crew, and a view of the propeller separated from my face by double planed glass, some metal, and about 5 inches. I decided to not look too much out the window.

The glimpses that I got though on both legs of the journey for that day were of beautiful snowcapped mountains, deep valleys, flat plans with territories marked by stone walls, and some major highways. If you didn’t know what country you were in, it could have been any Middle American state that you were flying over.

 

Thus were my flights half way across the world and the start of a new adventure.

Life as a Paid Nomad: Preping through Assessment to Deployment

About two years ago (2010), I attended the annual conference put on by the California State Division of the International Association for Identification. The conference was held at a lovely resort in Palm Desert, CA where the temperatures made it more appealing to sit by the lazy river and sip a margarita than attend lectures and classes. I resisted this siren call though and an as a result attended a lecture that would eventually change my life.

The speaker was Hilary Moses and the topic was Expeditionary Forensics. Hilary talked about what it was like to work in the Forensics field in the middle of a war zone. This might not sound like the best idea to almost everyone, but to me and those that do this job, it sounded like the job of a lifetime. Someone out there was willing to pay me to travel abroad doing what I love and provide me with an adventure…how could I pass that up? That lecture created a seed that grew into a nagging that eventually led to me applying and receiving a job offer to be like Hilary and ply my trade in Afghanistan.

I was hired by BAE Systems as a rotation LPE. This means that I work in both the US and overseas (wherever the need for me to be is) as a latent print examiner. The job is perfect for a nomad like myself because you never quite know where you’re going to be stationed or for how long. They can send you out for a few weeks to a year or so at a stretch or the contract could expire and you could find yourself unemployed within a few months. It’s all a gamble, but one that I’m willing to take. The moneys good, the adventure present, and there are stories waiting to be discovered.

Before being deployed, I needed to complete 3+ months of paperwork, readings, and assessments. I was hired as a contractor, but the program that I’m working for is run by the Army and they feel the need to make sure you know what you’re doing before sending you on your merry little way.

This training started with four weeks in Dalgren, VA where I meet a bunch of helpful people, read pages and pages of documents that were half out of date or didn’t related to me, completed medical and dental appointments, was stick in the arms with a zillion shots (they call them vaccines, I call them painful), received some cool new dirt colored clothing and gear, and eventually was signed off to be shipped to my next location, DPC.

DPC is the Deployment Processing Center. I spent a lovely four days in the off-the-beaten-path town of Jacksonville, NC, the home of Camp LeJune Marine Base. Here I got to sit around a lot, have people make sure that the paperwork that I had done in Dalgren was acceptable and complete, and get stuck with more needles. In the evenings I got to wander the local Wal-Mart, as that and restaurants are about the only entertainment in the town. One the plus side, I received a set of dog tags and pissed off the guy making them cause apparently the four allergies that I needed printed on the tags keep causing the machine to break. Once I showed up and stood over the guy’s shoulder and told him to leave one of the allergies off (poison oak), the machine seemed to work fine and then I was free to drive the nine hours to my next destination, Atlanta, GA.

Atlanta and Fort Gillem have been my home for the last eight weeks. Here I endured the stress of assessment where one wrong move meant you were going home before you ever really got anywhere. It’s confusing, stressful, and can mean that you left your job only to become unemployed. There were about two weeks where I thought that: “This is it. I’m done. Finish. They’re going to send me home.” The assessment had multiple components to it, the hardest two being a comparison exam and a written exam.

Before I came here, I was freaked out about the written and felt that that would be the hardest thing. I studied for two months, made flash cards, practice sheets, talked to others that had taken the test, and read a few textbooks, so that by the time I got to the written test, the only thing I needed to worry about was hand cramping. The exam was 125 short answer questions that needed to be handwritten. Anyone that knows me (or is reading this blog) can attest to the fact that I have a different definition of “short” than most people. The final result was five and a half hours of writing and 27 pages of chicken scratch. Then it was a week and a half of wondering if I was going home until they came back and told me I’d passed. The guy grading my exam was like: “I would have had it graded sooner, but it was 27 pages.” What’d they expect with 125 short answer questions?

Turns out that the hardest part of the assessment were the comparisons. I figured that these would be fine. You have eight hour to correctly identify or exclude 12 of 15 latent prints to one or more “suspects”.  It’s one of those things that you either can do or can’t do. Besides just looking at prints, there is no real way to study for this. When I actually took the test, my first impression for half the prints was “you’ve got to kidding me! These aren’t even comparable.” At the end of eight hours, I had made nine correct identification and/or exclusions. I then spent three nerve-wracking days waiting to see whether I would be granted a second shot (there’s a random guy that oversees the entire Expeditionary Forensics Division that gets to decide if someone gets a life line or a plane ticket home) before my assessor told me as an off-hand remark on his way out the door at the end of the day that I’d be granted a retest. Apparently my nervousness and constant state of “freaked out” had no affect on him whatsoever.

Obviously since I’m writing this and set to deploy in two weeks, I passed my make up test (by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, but passed nonetheless). The rest of the assessment period was a series of mock cases and mad scientist chemistry. This was the fun part. I got to make chemical concoctions and work with lots of nice expensive equipment that I’ve only ever seen in the Forensic catalogs, and realize that lasers are cool.

Currently, I am waiting for the last of my four mock cases to be reviewed and for my paperwork to be submitted for the final stamp of approval. Then it’s a hectic week at home buying gear, packing, driving, and visiting everyone before I ship out on the 19^th. If all goes to plan, I’ll arrive at my final destination, Maxar-i-Sharif, the night before Thanksgiving.  Until then…