People who need people

I just pushed seven full trucks full of stuff to the West. I'm almost completely caught up on the cargo backlog. This doesn't mean we have a moment's peace, though. A new batch of Air Force and Army personnel are in the midst of arriving. Because transportation is so jammed up, we're getting these teams in dribs and drabs, rather than as complete sets. In the interests of maintaining throughput, our S1 shop decided to inprocess them in one day rather than three (i.e., they're doing what they should be doing in the first place).

People are just a different class of cargo to me -- cargo that complains. To wit, I've developed a set of instructions I give to incoming personnel. These points have relevance outside of Task Force Phoenix, as well:

• Take all commands from the tower.
• Ignore rumors.
• Work through your chain of command.
• If you have a question that begins with the word "why," the answer is, "because this is Afghanistan."
• You are not the only game in town.
• Whenever you travel, expect to be stuck en route for three days.

When people first arrive, for the first 15 days they are clueless. I don't begrudge this, since that's to be expected. What baffles me, however, is that after people have been here for 6-15 months and it's time for them to leave, they forget all their experience and become clueless again. They presume that aircraft just sit around hoping for a chance to feel useful by ferrying outbound personnel wherever they want on a moment's notice. "But I need to be at Ft Leavenworth on 1 July." "That may be, but you won't leave Camp Phoenix until 27 June. Next!" It's so hard for Americans to accept the fact that they need to plan ahead. We can't accept that we can't always get what we want when we want it in the manner we want it. That's probably the single hardest part about Afghanistan, is that this is the country with no Plan B. There's barely a Plan A.