A Year In The Sandbox

We left FOB (Forward Operating Base) Fenty early in the morning on Friday the 7th and headed for FOB Finley-Shields.  We had no idea what the billeting situation would be, so I made sure I was out there early enough to get on the first run hoping to get my pick of the billets.  They had to make 7 or 8 runs to get everybody over but it turned out to not matter since they already had the billets assigned by work section.  It worked out about as good as I could hope for since everybody in the commo section get along together.  We live in plywood buildings called B-Huts, they’re about the same size as the tents we lived in at Ft Bragg.  They have beds, air conditioning and heat and not much else.  At Ft Bragg we had 16 people in a tent.  Here there are 5 of us in the B-Hut, some have 6.  We’ve been improving it ever since we moved in, acquiring shelves and stuff, but they could still use a lot of work.  We ran some 550 cord to hang sheets from to divide the space so we have some privacy.  We’re working on getting loft beds built so we’ll have more space but wood is hard to come by.
There’s not much to the FOB.  It used to be a Russian resort back when they occupied the country, so there’s a hotel building that the officers live in.  My office is also in the hotel.  There’s a swimming pool but no water, it’s used as a basketball court now.  There’s a small gym, a dining facility, a small chapel, a small rec center, an MWR building with internet stations, morale phones, a pool table and a ping-pong table, and different offices.  It was a short trip from Fenty, only about 5 or 10 minutes of actual driving once we left the FOB.  Fenty has all of the support elements like finance, a PX, a Pizza Hut, coffee shop, etc.  We don’t have any of that here, so there are always people going to Fenty for stuff.  I’ve been once and it’s really not worth the hassle of convoying over there.  The PX is tiny and the Pizza Hut tastes weird.
Later on the Friday we got here we met the people we were replacing and started learning about what we’ll be doing for the next 9 months.  When we walked into the shop for the first time it was a pig-sty.  There was crap everywhere, no method to the madness at all.  We only had a few days with the outgoing team to learn everything we could and we’re still learning about stuff they forgot to tell us.  The short version of what we do is maintain all the communications equipment on the FOB.  This includes everything from the computer and networks to the radios and satellite equipment both on the ground and on the trucks.  If a mission goes outside of Jalalabad city then one of us rides along to fix any commo stuff that breaks and to operate the tac-sat equipment.
I’ve taken lots of pictures of the FOB, as soon as we get personal internet access I’ll start putting them up.