Letters from Iraq: Mud, Dust and Engineers

By Lt Col Victor Zillmer

Letters from Iraq is written around letters sent home and documents written at the time that show the people and the day-to-day operations of a United States Army Corps of Engineer unit from September 11, 2001, until March 2006. It is a story of all the local Iraqis, foreign nationals, military personnel, and civilian volunteers who struggled in the heat and sun, mud and cold, to support the army and rebuild Iraq. History records the deeds, both good and bad, of the leaders, but for those who toiled in the hot sun, under constant threat of death, often only because they had to feed their families, there is no record. This is their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514473276

Lt Col Victor Zillmer

Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Victor Zillmer (retired) served for thirty years in both active and reserve duty, serving among other places—Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and New Orleans—after Hurricane Katrina. Starting service as a private in basic training, he rose through the ranks the hard way and was responsible for more than one thousand construction projects, including Saddam Hussein’s prison cell and the New Orleans surge barrier. LTC Zillmer has seen war and what it does to both the individuals and entire cultures. He now resides in Lindale, Texas, where he grows blackberries and writes novels.

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CHAPTER 1

How Quickly Life Changes

July 2001

I was a bad statistic. That was the summation of a conversation that would propel me into, at the time of this writing, three tours of duty in Iraq and forty months in the Middle East.

I was home on a small farm outside of Lindale, Texas, trying to pick up the pieces of my life. A long and nasty divorce process had finally been completed the year before, and I managed to retain the land and the house I had built some years before. Similar to my life at the time, the land and my home were all road worn and in need of reconstruction.

In July 2001, I received a phone call from the head of the Emergency Operations Office of the Transatlantic Programs Center (TAC) in Winchester, Virginia. He had worked for me in Kosovo six months earlier. I was the chief, and he was my senior civilian while on temporary assignment in the Base Camp Construction Agency (BCCA). Now the roles were reversed; he was back in his original job, and I was one of the officers assigned to the office.

It was great to hear from him.

You haven't been to AT (annual training) in four years, he said after the opening greetings.

That's because I've been deployed overseas for most of the last four years, I replied. You know that. You're the guy who sent me.

I know, but you still haven't done AT, he said.

Well, so what? I replied.

You are a bad statistic on the briefing chart. All they see when I show them the slides is that I have an officer who hasn't gone to annual training in four years.

I did not want to argue with him. I knew exactly the situation he was in. He had to explain his briefing slides on various statistics in his unit, and one of them was the percentage of reserve officers who had attended annual training. To have an officer who had not attended annual training in four years, even though he had been in three combat zones during that same time, would certainly require explanation during a briefing. Sympathizing with his plight and because we had been fellow travelers in a combat zone, I said, Okay, what do you have?

He rattled off a list of places and reminded me that I would need to go before October 1 to get the training---before the end of the fiscal year. Going to equatorial Africa at the end of summer had zero appeal to me because there are diseases there they have not named yet; and when he said Kuwait, I thought, I've never seen the desert, so why not? It would be the middle of September, and while it was still hot, it was no longer the middle of summer.

I agreed to go, planned the trip for September, and told Alice, the lady I had been dating for a few months, that it would be for only two weeks. This was one of the many peculiarities of military life to which Alice would eventually become accustomed.

I arrived at Kuwait International Airport in the usual condition for most military travelers: exhausted after thirty-six hours of flight and stops and full of airline food fermenting a rebellion in my stomach. After spending most of the night sitting on some bleachers in the dark while waiting for transportation to Camp Doha, I finally managed to get to sleep around 0600 hours. I'd told the major who greeted me the night before that I didn't need a ride to the office, as it was only three blocks away, and I would be at the office around 0900 hours.

After my first real sleep of two hours in more than two days, I walked to the office. That was my first mistake of the day. It was already about 115 degrees, and by the time I got there, three blocks was a very long distance. I'd swear the major had a knowing smile, but I guess he figured if I was too dumb to take him up on the offer of an air-conditioned ride, one short walk would educate me soon enough.

For all those who have suffered through jet lag after a military flight halfway around the world, it is murder trying to stay awake. As I was struggling to keep my eyes open, the major was dutifully showing me everything I was to be doing for the next two weeks. On top of all this, my stomach was doing backflips; so I declined lunch, took the keys to a vehicle, drove back to my room in the visiting officer's quarters, and informed the major I was going to lie down for a while and try to get over the pasta supreme airline food.

I drove back to the office around 1400 hours, and the major and I continued to work on my in-processing on such things as computer passwords and phone access. While we were doing this, a contracting officer came into our little office and said, Someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center!

I remember thinking, why would someone fly a Cessna into the World Trade Center? I knew the Empire State Building had been hit by a bomber during the Second World War and suffered very little damage. So from about three until five that afternoon, we watched events unfold. It was September 11, 2001.

The world changed rapidly over the next few days. Instead of staying for only two weeks, I learned I would soon receive orders for a six-month tour as the executive officer for the Gulf Region Engineer (GRE) in Kuwait starting in early October. They would probably have kept me right there, but it was the end of the fiscal year, and it was just too difficult to get six-month orders cut without funding. I was able to wangle a military flight out of Camp Doha, but the flight connections were totally screwed up. After a two-day layover in Germany, I finally arrived in Dallas on September 24.

Security was so paranoid at the time that even with green duffel bags and a military identification, I was searched head to toe several times. Since my flight originated in Kuwait, I suppose they thought I might be a terrorist. I arrived back in Lindale and began trying to get everything done in a couple of weeks that I previously thought I would have several months to accomplish.

Alice was not at all enthused about my departure for six months. The romance had been going along very well, and we had reminded each other on several occasions that there was no rush and we had plenty of time. We would both eat our words.

CHAPTER 2

Sleepy Camp Doha Is Awakened

October 2001

All the World War II movies have the tragic railroad depot scenes where the young lovers are slowly and inexorably parted as the man departs for war. Modern security measures have made a hash of that scene. Now there are no teary departure scenes where the lady runs down the concrete, and he waves out the window visually enhanced by steam from the locomotives. After a quick and all-too-unfulfilling good-bye in front of some skeptical security agents, I got to sit by myself for a couple of hours and wait for the plane to depart. Alice and I would not see each other again for four months.

Security was even more thorough on this trip. Since I was going to the Middle East, my olive drab luggage and I were checked at every location. How ironic that my luggage was lost; my two duffel bags and an air force flight bag, with my name and rank stenciled on the outside, were sent by a U.S. air carrier to Kuwait via Iran. You can be sure that when it finally arrived, I checked it very carefully, and I wrote the following poem to vent my frustrations:

Traveling

Some say hell is freezing, for others it's burning hot,

a place of burning brimstone, but neither makes much sense.

Souls wandering forever, but a place it is not,

it is traveling forever, at government expense!

The army says it needs me, the request above reproach,

To travel halfway around the world, to fight again once more.

But bean counters rule the army, so my ticket is coach,

That means folded like a pretzel, and a butt that's mighty sore.

I leave my home in Texas, in the green and fragrant pine,

For the deserts of the gulf, and leave in such a rush.

It would be nice, if for once just once this time,

To declare war on a country that has toilets that will flush.

It's off to war on Saturday, to make my connections meet,

And lay over in Washington, at over the government rate.

Then off to the desert sand, and it would be a feat,

If the airlines got my luggage there, now that would be great.

Eight hours across the ocean, and they call it airline food

But it's really preparation for an enemy torture scheme.

Eight more hours across Europe, and you might think me rude,

But I'd rather eat a cow chip than airline pasta supreme.

We arrived in the desert, not long after dark, And said a prayer to Almighty God, that our luggage got there too. But in some way I must be remiss, and short of the mark, Because when the conveyor stopped, I was short a few.

I'm feeling terse, as I write this verse, and just a wee bit mad,

The initial battle I have lost, to the travel bureaucracy.

For if we move men and equipment, in a manner so bad,

How we handle a shooting enemy, I don't want to see.

Some say hell is freezing, for others it's burning hot,

A place of burning brimstone, but neither makes much sense.

Souls wandering forever, but a place it is not,

It is traveling forever, at government expense!

In October of 2001, Camp Doha was a sleepy little post at the end of the world. That would drastically change over the next six months, and the Gulf Region engineers would play a very large part in the preparation for all that was to come.

Prior to September 11, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had a small office in Kuwait to handle about $7 million a year of construction in Kuwait for the army and air force. There were also other projects in various countries throughout the Middle East, one of which was what would later become Camp Arifjan.

Now it is time to explain exactly what I do. The United States Army Corps of Engineers has troop units, soldiers, who do construction work, and then there are engineer districts that are headed by engineer officers but are staffed primarily civilians who supervise contractors that do the work. I have been in both. The office at Camp Doha had, including me, three uniformed officers and about a dozen civilians. The purpose of the office was to construct whatever a government agency needed, using primarily local contractors. As for government agencies, we did work for the United States Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and a few spooks who always get upset if I name them so I once again do not.

Why use local labor instead of soldiers? Primarily because it is far more cost effective. An engineer battalion of four to five hundred soldiers and hundreds of pieces of construction equipment is very expensive and time-consuming to move. Once they get on the ground in some foreign country, they have to be fed and housed; have safe drinking (potable) water, working sewers, and reliable electric power compatible with their stateside equipment; have to find spare parts for unique equipment; and have to find local sources of supply. A local contactor has none of these issues. Therefore, it is faster, safer, and far more cost effective to hire local contractors and have a few government inspectors to make sure the work is done correctly.

The other important point to remember is that in October 2001, we had no idea if any troops were coming to Kuwait and if there were how many and what they would be doing if and when they got here. At this point, we were given no strategic vision, meaning what were we going to be doing? Plans were certainly evolving back in Washington, but in October 2001, we had no idea we would have a hundred thousand troops on the ground eighteen months later.

Around 1 November 2001, we got our first taskings in support of the events to come. Events to come changed rapidly, though, and the construction projects for the next sixteen months in Kuwait are prime examples of how jobs begin and then need to be changed and changed again because of evolving events and conditions that cannot be foreseen when original plans are made. I had experienced this many times before, but I never cease to be amazed at complaints made months and even years later by Johnny-come-lately politicians and media who were not a part of the experiences at the time they occurred. Just because decisions were changed does not necessarily mean the decisions were flawed. Most of the decisions were reasoned, briefed, and concurred with at the highest levels. But a common theme in sustainment engineering is recognizing the rapid changes on the battlefield necessitate changes in mission requirements that are far faster than contracting and construction can react.

We had weekly meetings with our primary contractor, a joint venture between an American company and a local one. As I mentioned earlier, I will never mention a company or individual by name that lives or works in the Middle East for the simple reason there are now terrorist organizations that will kill that individual, every member of their family, and probably all their workers if they knew they worked for us.

At the beginning of November 2001, troops were to be increased in Kuwait, and we began plans for tent cities in the desert. By mid-November, we had completed the drawings and started to work on some of the contracts for tent pads, buried electrical lines, generators for the tent pads, and leach fields. By the time we started construction, though, the population estimate had increased and the site moved from a deep sand area to a limestone ridge. This would be the first of many decisions that were good and well-thought-out decisions at the time that would later be overcome by events.

One of our first missions was to build leach fields for some portable shower units. A leach field is a pit or trench filled in with gravel or some other highly permeable material designed to allow water to move quickly into the ground. As was often the practice, the customer would purchase some item of equipment and have the Corps of Engineers install the item and make the necessary connections. Usually, the customer does this only once. Equipment from the United States, or Europe, usually has the wrong voltage, amperage, cycles, and resistance. Translated into everyday English, it means you plug in your American equipment and it either melts or catches fire. Even the plumbing sizes don't match, causing the person or persons involved to have what we refer to as a significant emotional event. After such painful learning experiences, the organization in question decides that in the future the corps will complete the entire task. Anyway, we received plans from the Camp Doha Department of Public Works; and after an initial check of the plans, we awarded a contract to dig the leach field in the site specified.

The commander on the ground wanted the showers in a different site, and the contractor on the ground complied, but no one informed us. I drove out to the site one day and found the leach fields almost complete but in a different site. He had the hole almost closed, but I was able to see the leach field was cut into solid limestone! In the desert, you have places that have sand, often quite deep, and other places that have thick layers of solid rock. The original intent was to have the water leach into the large granular sand at the site we specified. The new location would now be a swimming pool full of rock and sudsy used shower water. I made some calls but was unable to get the site changed. My next surprise was the shower units themselves: basically a cube with four individual stalls, with one door per side. There was no place to take off your clothes but outside the stall in the open desert. They might not have been too bad in the old days, but with modern coed military units, undressing outside has a few problems.

The next challenge was the designer of the shower stalls had never been around soldiers. Everything we build must be soldier proof. The showerheads were cheap plastic, and most did not last through the first day. The electric water heaters at best did not work and at worst delivered an electric shock---not fatal but definitely unpleasant. Many times I would tell people when they would ask why they should pay the Corps of Engineer 6 percent to design and manage their projects, Never do construction in a third-world country on a 'trust me' basis. We had a list of local contractors we would not use and shared that list with the incoming units, expressly telling them not to use them. They would try it themselves, and we would eventually be called in to try to salvage what we could.

Eventually, the troop units did work-arounds and made the shower units serviceable. They installed a canvas blind around the shower stalls, and a sucker truck arrived every day to suck out the water from the leach field and haul it away. The population of the camps grew to many times the original size, and we were contracted to both build the shower units and install the leach fields for many forward operating bases in Northern Kuwait.

Not all our shower trailers went smoothly either. The trailers were made in factories in Kuwait City, and we went to the factory to inspect the trailers before they left. All corrections were made and the units accepted before they left the site. However, we forgot to take into account some of the kamikaze driving habits of the local drivers.

The Iraqis built the road out to our forward operating bases (FOBs) during their prior occupation of Kuwait. It was not a very wide affair, and it was bombed heavily when the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The Kuwaitis didn't like the road since the Iraqis built it during their occupation, so it was never repaired. It was little more than bomb craters haphazardly connected by old thin asphalt. The local drivers took off down this road, going ninety to nothing with, as some eyewitnesses later reported, the shower trailers bouncing as much as six feet off the road from time to time. Needless to say, the trailers arrived as little more than garbage and had to be completely rebuilt. Later on, all shower and latrine trailers were built in the field.

When it does rain in the desert, it can rain with remarkable intensity and the water run-off can be significant. The units moving into the tent cities needed a place to store their ammunition. They quickly built a berm around their ammunition storage areas. The berm was about six feet high and prevented terrorist vehicles from making suicide runs into the ammunition. I saw their holding areas and told them they had to put some culverts in the berms or when the rains came their ammunition would be flooded.

Telling someone they need to prepare for rain in a flat open desert in the middle of summer will definitely get you some incredulous looks. The short answer is they built no culverts, and when the rains came in the winter of 2002--2003, one of the ammunition-holding areas had the lower third filled with water anywhere from ankle to waist deep. With the high water came the mud, and loading mud- or sand-encrusted ammunition into a weapon is what we call a nonstarter.

The marines were also coming to Kuwait, and an off-the-shelf plan had been in the works for several years to build a facility for the First Marine Expeditionary Force (IMEF) at the Commando Camp in Northern Kuwait. More than two years of design and the funding approval process had gone into a facility that was to serve as a logistics hub for the marines when they conducted training operations in the area. The plan looked like what it was designed to be a logistics hub for peacetime operations for a small unit. Unfortunately, it would serve as a wartime headquarters for the marines, a purpose for which it was woefully under-designed.

I took a look at the plans and wrote up fourteen recommended changes so the facility could be adapted from its original purpose. Because the plans had been far too long in development, however, it was not easy for my recommendations to be well received either by the Department of Public Works (DPW) or by the marine representative at the time.

We did a site inspection, and one of the civilians that was with me picked up a boot found on the old camp. I suggested he leave the boot where it was, and he asked why. I showed him a bunker nearby the Iraqis used during their invasion to store ammunition. It had been hit by one of our bombs, and the bunker ripped apart. There were boots, usually torn, scattered about. I told him when a detonation of that magnitude takes place, often all that is left of a human body is what is in the boots. He dropped the boot.

Both DPW and the marines had good reason not to make any changes at this point. It was a DCA (Defense Cooperation Agreement) project that often takes years to get all the required approvals, including approvals for changes. It seemed better to have something on time than what might or might not be needed later on. And it was by no means a certainty at this time that we would liberate Iraq. As events unfolded, the site would be used as the marine headquarters, and it was woefully undersized for that requirement.

The contractor chosen for the marine camp was also less than adequate, and try as I might, I could not get rid of him. This guy required constant monitoring and a lot of rework. In one case, they were installing an underground cable as big around as your arm (155 millimeters) and through poor handling techniques managed to cut it with a backhoe. Their solution was to strip the insulation bare, lay the cable ends beside each other, throw some silicone sealant and a few raps of duct tape around it, and bury it. Our inspectors had the whole incident on camera, and even when I presented this evidence to both the DPW on Camp Doha and our headquarters in Virginia, the decision was made to keep the contractor.

Christmas Day passes much like any other day in a combat zone. Kuwait at this time was very secure, and after we received some training on security and bomb detection, we could come and go downtown. I have spent many a Christmas far away from family, and I have pretty well adjusted to the situation. But it is much tougher on the young soldiers, for often, this is their first time away from family at Christmastime. The command makes an effort to bring in an element of home and throws a big shindig at the dining facility. The chaplains are busy too.

At this point, we were still not planning construction to support any operations in Iraq. We were well located to support Afghanistan, and that was the main effort at this time. Our construction effort was about $12 million in ongoing construction and another twelve in future work we were relatively certain would occur. It was a far cry from what we would have a year later. But for now, the soldiers on Camp Doha celebrated Christmas and worked the phone lines back home. I was sneaking up on fifty years old at this time and had spent many Christmases away from family. For the average nineteen-year-old, a gray Christmas in a foreign land, the first away from home, is a lot tougher affair. A week later, 2001 passed quietly into 2002 at a small oasis of American and allied soldiers in the vast emptiness of the desert.

CHAPTER 3

Another Cryptic Call

January 2002

Toward the end of January, I got another cryptic phone call from our headquarters in Virginia. It seemed that now I was in Kuwait on the wrong kind of orders. The fund site for my orders was a reserve fund site, and I was supposed to be on orders with an active-duty fund site. The conversation went something like this:

So just do an amendment to the orders, I said.

We can't. You have to process out on reserve orders and come back on active-duty orders. Furthermore, you have to go to Fort Benning to do this. And it gets worse, he said.

How much worse can it get? I asked.

You have to sign up for at least one year, and you have to do it now. The command is activating lots of people, and your name is at the top of the list, he said.

I replied, You know I was planning on getting married in May and returning to active duty in June. This is really going to mess things up.

And it did. After quite a bit of going back and forth, he and I worked it out that from May to mid-June, I would be sent on temporary orders to the Southwest Division and work out of the headquarters in Downtown Dallas. At that time, they were in charge of activating teams of engineers for overseas duty and could use some updated lessons learned in the field before the teams were sent overseas.

I already knew that leave on reserve fund sites had to be used at the end of reserve orders and would not accumulate with active-duty leave. I had been burned on that before. So my fiancée and I talked, and we decided to get married in February instead of May. I departed on my remaining leave around the end of January, got back to Texas with the usual jet lag, and we immediately drove off for Northern Wyoming.

I had tried to convince my fiancée that it is mighty cold in Northern Wyoming in February, but she wanted my father, a semi-retired minister living in Wyoming, to officiate. So on February 4, 2002, we were married in a little stone church in Story, Wyoming. There was snow on the ground and deer in the yard, but we had to leave this idyllic scene and immediately drive back to Texas. We moved a small portion of Alice's furniture to my place and spent a few days constructing a chain-link fence around the backyard for her two dogs; and with that as a honeymoon, I flew back to Kuwait via Fort Benning and some confused administrative clerks.

CHAPTER 4

Back to Duty in Kuwait

February 2002

On the way back to Kuwait, I stopped over in Milan, Italy, to look at a factory we were considering to construct the container barracks. The quality of their work was good, so we arranged for the containers to begin arriving the middle of May.

On March 2 we received a tasking to build a joint operations center (JOC) for Combined Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) on Camp Doha. The initial drawings I received looked like a typical office building. I immediately suggested to the deputy post commander that we construct something along the lines of the command operations centers in the Balkans but on a larger scale. I sent some pictures with the e-mail, and he immediately liked the concept, and we were off and running.

The main difference between an office building and a command operations center is that information is often decentralized in an office while in a command operations center the commander can be in one spot, see volumes of information on several big screens, and physically see all his senior staff officers in one place and at one time. The purpose of such a structure is to facilitate communication at all levels and prevent people from hiding in their cubicles.

Two such facilities had been constructed in the Balkans: one on Eagle Base in Tusla, Bosnia, and one on Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo. I was a liaison officer while on Eagle Base, and I watched closely as it went together. At that time, I was glad someone else was responsible for construction. But at Camp Bondsteel, I was the BCCA chief and responsible for the first of many changes to the existing facility there. And now, in Kuwait, we would be building a joint operations center at least five times larger than the ones in the Balkans.

While the electrical gadgetry we use is new, the layout of a joint operations center is actually similar to those constructed by both the British and the Germans during World War II. A staff officer from World War II would probably not understand the current electronic gizmos, but if the screens were replaced with a map board, he or she would feel right at home. As is so often the case in military engineering, the concept has been done before but you just have to know where to look. A few hours or days in an air-conditioned library, studying the methods used by the military in past combats, can save tens of thousands of man-hours of labor in the hot sun and many times lives too. The following is from an e-mail sent at the time:

[19 March 2002

Let's see if I can get out a longer e-mail than just a few words.

I have been working on a PowerPoint briefing on the challenges of working in the region right now and how we can improve operations. We hit a few basic issues we have hit before and added a lot more specificity to some of the problems and solutions. Essentially we have maxed out on our workload and anything more will just cause delays and unhappy customers. So essentially we are telling them to increase some staffing and simplify some of the byzantine ways we do things.

We do have several cultural challenges, safety being one of them. They have a different outlook on it, as something we make them do, not something that will keep them from getting hurt on the job. Safety shoes issued to the workers were gone within a few days, either sold downtown or sent back home. I guess the idea is that everything is God's will. Therefore, if they get hurt on the job, it was God's will; therefore they could do nothing about it.

I have already talked about time. Time is meaningless here. It is a hot nasty desert today, tomorrow, next month, and next year. Why be in a hurry? It will still be a hot nasty desert.

With the warm temperatures and all the rain in Texas, the grass should start to run away on you. It will be green and lush for several months until the dry days of (hopefully) late summer arrive. Then Texas summer is Texas summer.

At least it isn't Kuwaiti summer.

Well you got a few lines out of me anyway.

Can't wait to get home.]

The briefing I mentioned was about the time it would take to contract for building of the facilities for a force, still unspecified, to overwinter in Kuwait. The point was they had to get going and tell us now what size force we would be required to house, build roads and parking lots, and provide water, power, and sewer, along with the usual force protection items such as guard towers, entry gates, perimeter fencing, and berms. The bottom line was every day lost because of a decision meant more soldiers would do without adequate shelter or protection from the elements should we decide to invade Iraq sometime before the heat set in the next spring. To a large extent, our arguments fell on deaf ears.

As for safety gear, especially steel-toed work boots, many of the workers had never worn Western-style shoes. During one hot day, I was inspecting the work on one of the projects; and I saw an old man digging a trench without either shoes or even a hat, much less a hardhat. He could speak no English; so I asked Dynamo, the supervisor for his company, why one of his workers, a very old man, was digging a trench in the hot sun without either shoes or a hat. Dynamo explained the guy was from Pakistan and could not read or write and had never worn shoes. He was about seventy years old and had been married late in life to a much younger woman. After many years, they still had no children, so he took a second wife. Then both wives started having children, and since life in Pakistan was hard, he went to Kuwait to work as a construction laborer. Every year, he went home; and then nine months later, he would have two more children. The guy was a bit of a legend. I told Dynamo to keep him out of sight when my boss was around.

As for time, I have come to understand the local point of view. It is too hot to do much of anything for six months of the year, so why be in a hurry? To look outside, you see a dry, hot flat desert; and six months from now, or ten years from now, it will be the same. So what is the rush?

[27 March 2002

We are having one of those days. I have the air force and the contractors going at it again. Both have good points, but in this case I'd say the contractors have a stronger case. We have been doing all we can to expedite construction on a project, but the fuel tank for the project was turned away from the gate because a bomb sniffing dog didn't like it's smell. So now we have multiple nasty-grams going from the contractor to the AF and back.

The stress is getting to us all, and some really fine people are starting to crack. For all the hype of one war, one effort the fact is it is not happening. For that matter it never has in history, as even in WWII there was a lot of gouging and profiteering. We simply do not have enough people to do the mission, but we cannot get more people to volunteer to come. Since this is a hardship tour, they cannot be compelled to come. So we keep trying to muddle through without enough people to do the job. And now we have more bureaucratic types that think we have too many phones and vehicles. Of course, the policy is our civilians will live off post, and you must have a mobile phone in a vehicle when you leave post, but you should never try to befuddle a bureaucrat with simple logic.]

One of the constants of dealing with security is that the other post's security isn't good enough; so even if it is a military vehicle, with soldiers in it, when it entered an air force facility, it had to be checked again. This often led to hour-plus delays for every vehicle entering the facility. If you had a senior officer, you could call ahead and have a vehicle from inside the camp come and pick them up while their vehicle waited in line. I declined this opportunity for my boss's boss as I wanted him to see just how much time was lost every day when we had to enter the camp. In our meeting with the post commander a couple of hours later, some frank and blunt observations were made about interagency cooperation. Still, nothing changed.

For our contractors, it was worse. Wisely, every inch of the vehicle was searched, and the bomb-sniffing dogs had a hard time telling the