As we come to the threshold of our sixty-day window, Jack is starting to get a little melancholy realizing that he's going home soon. So Jack's gonna take a little time here and tell you just all of the picturesque moments he's going to miss when he leaves FOB Salerno. You might just want to grab a tissue for this. This prose has tear-jerker written all over it. So here's a not-so-all-inclusive list of the things that Jack is going to find difficult to live without when he gets back to the good ole' U S of A.
1. Just because I, yet again, experienced it walking back to my hooch from the barber shop, I really don't know what I'm going to do when I can't walk outside and almost retch myself to the gravel from the stench that wafts over the FOB from the two cesspools and adjoining overflowing leach field at the edge of the base. What's more, that appetizing odor originates from an area right across the road from the dining facility and gets more intense as you get closer to breakfast, lunch or dinner.
2. Speaking of stenches, when that smell finally subsides, it's dark, and the peace of the evening settles over the FOB. Oh, and long about 2am when I get up to walk to the bathroom, I find that the human waste stench has been replaced by that of farm animals. Who would have thought that as the breezes of the day die down, and I'm sleep walking to the latrine that the entire waste product stream from every farm animal in this valley would make a beeline for my nose. Retching begins again with a vengance.
3. I'm really stuck on stenches, but Jack's olfactory sense has been so overwhelmed that it defies the imagination. So after Jack has nothing left in his stomach, he gets to go inside and start work. Then the local Afghan contractors start walking in, and I'm not kidding folks when I say that I swear every Afghan local was genetically disposed to have NO sense of smell. I don't know what's worse the eye-watering smell of fermented body odor or a cesspool, and, frankly, I'm sick of being forced to decide by staying inside or going outside.
4. Jack's sure some of you use a nice noise machine to lull yourselves to sleep at night. Well we have something just as nice. Just imagine you're about to fall asleep and BOOM! it sounds like someone threw a grenade under your bed and damn near blew the doors off your hooch. No warning, no nothing! Not to worry, though, that's just the huge freakin' howitzers that are probably about 500 yards from us firing fifteen miles or so into enemy territory. The real kicker is that you don't know if it's incoming or not for about 5 to 10 minutes because that's how long it takes the Army to figure it out--nice, huh?
5. Finally (for this rant), I will not miss these stupid uniforms. I don't know what the Air Force was thinking, but here's what my thought process would be. What type of climate is the Air Force deploying to most often? Hot weather, right? And don't you think that since IEDs are a major threat, that our uniforms might be fire retardant? We don't have either quality in our current uniforms because the decision-makers (who apparently don't deploy) think that wash-and-wear is more important than comfort or safety. So I currently wear a uniform in which I'm sweating my butt off on a daily basis along with the characteristic that if I ever get caught in it in a fire, it will become a flaming part of my body. Needless to say, Jack doesn't do convoys. He can deal with the heat.
Jack out!
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