Whale Sharks, Lake Assal, and Germany

Not too much to report in the last couple of months.

I went on a shale shark trip near the end of October. We took a larger boat into the Gulf of Tadjoura and then got on small boats to go look for whale sharks. You look for the end of their tail sticking out of the water and then jump into the water before they swim away. The whole day we saw about three tails. One of those sightings turned into actually seeing one in its entirety. We saw the tail, and I jumped out of the boat. I accidentally jumped out right on top of the animal so I swam away from it only to be run over by the boat. Luckily the props weren't running so I didn't get chopped up. The whale shark was pretty big but it dove after a few seconds and was gone. Only one other person got a good look at it before it swam away.

The ride back was naptacular and I was able to get some good pictures of the sunset as we returned.

The next weekend some of us went to Lake Assal. Lake Assal is super salty. It's also well below sea level.

On the way to the lake we saw some baboons running around.

Would you like some water with your salt?

It's very easy to float in Lake Assal.

After we finished splashing around we went looking for an extinct volcano that was supposedly nearby. After asking some kids wandering around in the middle of nowhere where it was, we eventually found it on our own. The old volcano is in between Lake Assal and the Gulf of Tadjoura. One of the other guys and I climbed up to the top of it.

The extinct volcano crater. Gulf of Tadjoura in the background.

I found out mid-November I would be heading to Germany to attend a class on Mortuary Affairs. Luckily, I have to friends in the area; one from high school and one from college.

Hanging out reading upside down newspapers and eating cereal.

Breakfast of champions.

Heidelberg Castle

Inside the castle.

Downtown Heidelberg

In the streets downtown.

Brats and sauerkraut

Germany was a good trip but it's time to return to Djibouti. I'll speak to you all again once I've returned. Until then, happy trails.

A Busy Weekend: 1-4 OCT 2009

Thursday is like Friday for Djiboutians. That being said, Thursday night is party night. We went downtown to eat at a very good pizza place and then proceeded to a nightclub.

I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've observed, firsthand, prostitutes openly seeking business. I would liken it to being an attractive girl in a bar full of men. As soon as our group got inside we were swarmed. The French Foreign Legion was there in uniform and several of them were leaving with women as we were coming in. I would imagine the legion has its fair share of STDs from Djibouti. When we left downtown we discovered someone had thrown dirt all over the car's windshield because we didn't pay a homeless person to "guard" our vehicle while we were inside.

Friday night we went to a party on a Korean Navy ship. There was plenty of very good food and a lot of people to talk to. A Korean officer behind me spoke fluent English without an accent so I asked him where he was from. He said he grew up in the US, went to college at Virginia Military Institute, then did OCS for the Korean Navy.

There was a French officer behind me the second time I was in line for food so I asked him a question in French and he was happy to talk to me. We talked about the French units in Djibouti and how long deployments are them. Accompanied tours are two years and unaccompanied tours are four months. He also said when you deploy with the French military you get double salary. After dinner the Korean Sailors put on a show with music and dancing. It was a lot of fun.

Sing it, Korean Sailor!

Korean Navy Dance Party

On Sunday one of the guys in the office and I went on a crazy adventure. He had found a beach on Google Maps that looked nice so we decided to find it. The satellite image didn't show how the path to the beach included several hundred feet of elevation change and roads barely passable to goats. I'm amazed that we did not: flip over, get a flat tire, or get stuck. One situation was pretty bad and we had to take water jugs out of the back of the SUV and put them on the hood to get enough traction to get out of the hole we were in. It was nerve racking but we made it out safe.

For some reason there were people every now and then just wandering around in dried up river beds or down huge hills. Who knows why they were there.

We drove down into that.

The point we almost got stuck.

Nice scenery.

19 Year Old MREs: 19 SEP 2009

Today afforded me the opportunity to get my hands on some real Army history. There were several cases of Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) made in 1990 that had to be disposed of. Knowing I'd probably never get to see MREs that old outside of a museum, I went to go help get rid of them.

I was very surprised to see how similar an almost twenty year old MRE is to a modern one. Many of the entrees and supplemental foods are the same and almost every company that makes MRE components now made them back then, too. Items I'd never seen before I kept. These included freeze dried fruits that look kind of like space ice cream you can find in museum gift shops and cookie and brownie bars that are tightly compressed. I kept those because they remind me of food I saw from the Apollo space missions.

I also tasted a few of the items. The chocolate covered cookie looked and smelled fine, but at the molecular level the cookie must have broken down because it tasted nasty. The freeze dried peaches were very sugary and did not taste good. The crackers, however, tasted just like the crackers out of a brand new MRE. I guess that's also why hardtack from the Civil War is still edible.

These Charms had become gelatinous.

Nineteen year old spaghetti: Delicious

"It belongs in a museum!"

Playing Catchup: 16 SEP 2009

I know it's been awhile since I last made an entry. The reason behind my tardiness is a combination of circumstance and laziness. The circumstance is that the macbook I'd had since December of 2007 decided to eat its own hard drive on 16 SEP. It took three weeks for my new Asus eeePC to arrive and until then I made some entries on paper.

The laziness is self-explanatory.

Macbook R.I.P. - December 2007 to September 2009

Acclimatization 22 AUG - 7 SEP 2009

French Foreign Legion in town

Driving through town

The road to the beach

Looking down on the beach

The beach is in a valley

These guys were just sitting on the side of the road

Our trusty Land Rover Defender

My view for the rest of the day

I've been here in Djibouti for two and a half weeks.

I've been assigned to the J-4. In almost all military staffs of battalion size or greater there are certain "'S' Shops" that perform certain jobs. S-1 handles personnel and administrative issues like pay and assignments, S-2 deals with intelligence, S-3 handles operations, S-4 handles supply and logistics, S-5 handles plans, S-6 communications, and some more. The J-4 is simply a joint logistics cell.

Within the J-4 are several smaller offices, two of which are Logistics Operations (Log Ops) and the Joint Movement Center (JMC). Log ops makes sure that teams running humanitarian assistance missions throughout eastern Africa have food, water, and other supplies. Big countries have a single officer assigned to them while smaller countries are clumped together and put under another officer. It is that officer's responsibility to stay in contact with the people on the ground and make sure they have what they need to function. The JMC makes sure that aircraft getting those supplies to the customers are scheduled and figures out what cargo and passengers the aircraft will be flying and where they are going.

Both of the offices have all the required personnel and apparently no one knew I was coming until about two days before I showed up. As a result, I'll be doing odd jobs until one of the country officers in log ops leaves. Then I'll take over his or her countries.

In the evenings I've been helping teach some of the locals English. At the same time I'm trying to pick up Somali and, to a lesser extent, Afar. There are several ethnic groups and languages throughout the area and a lot of refugees from the surrounding countries. I am really going to try to pick up some of the language while I'm here.

Today, Labor Day, some of the J-4 went to the beach. We cooked out on an old exhaust fan duct that had been made into a grill. The beach was great except for the spiny underwater plants that were between the beach and the reef. At low tide you had to swim through the plants to get anywhere. There was an old shipwreck near the beach and we swam to it. It wasn't worth it because there wasn't much to see and it was hard to get out there and hard to get back. There were lots of brightly colored fish swimming around closer to the reef past the plants.

From the horn . . .

Getting There: 18 AUG - 20 AUG 2009

Let's fly on a plane for a long time!

I've finished with the replacement center. The next step is getting from Fort Benning, GA to Djibouti, Africa.

In total the trip took about 28 hours. It was by no means a direct flight.

First I had to get from Benning to Atlanta. A shuttle that runs from Columbus, GA (the town near Fort Benning) to Atlanta got me there. Then it was a flight to Norfolk, VA. From the airport I head to taxi to the Norfolk Naval Base to catch the plane that would eventually make it to Djibouti.

The Naval Base Air Terminal was just like a small airport. A check in counter that takes your baggage and four little gates to board aircraft. There was also a strange place officially called the "dining facility" but it was more like the concessions stand at a little league baseball game. They sold overpriced burgers and hotdogs but I had to get one because I was starving. The greasy cheeseburger looked disgusting but tasted delicious.

The "Dining Facility" is through that glass wall on the left.

After waiting about eight hours it was time to board the plane.

First stop: Terceira, Azores Islands, Portugal

The Azores are a clump of islands that belong to Portugal. They're very beautiful and I a feeling of excitement rolled over me as I stepped off the plane. All this time I'd been in the Army (almost two years) I'd never gotten any sense I was actually doing anything productive. I would shoe up to work at a small post and sit in an office all day rarely accomplishing anything because there simply wasn't much to do. When I got off the plane it felt like I was embarking on an actual mission. I had a purpose. I would be working to accomplish something with people from across the entirety of the military.

Then we got herded into the passenger terminal and were told no picture taking of the flightline and waited for an hour and a half until we could get back on the plane. The strangest thing about the stop was the music. Coming out of the ceiling speakers were popular American songs covered by a twangy country music guitar. The only one I positively recognized was "Hey Jude" by the Beatles.

How quaint!

Goodbye, pretty island.

This model is how the rest of the trip conspired. Fly, get off the plane, wait in a small terminal for an hour and a half to two hours, get back on the plane, repeat.

After our first stop we made three more in Italy, Crete, and Bahrain before finally making it to Djibouti International Airport.

Some city of the east coast of Spain, I think.

Italian countryside.

Kingdom of Bahrain

In the Italian terminal there were posters of random foods with their names on top. For example, there was a picture of a nasty looking hamburger with melted shredded cheese all over the top of it and on the top of the large poster was simply the word "Hamburger".

One of the highlights of the flight was the snackbox. We got two of them. One from Italy and one from Bahrain. Each box had local snacks in them.

Italian snackbox!

Bahraini snackbox!

We finally came to Djibouti but that's where the photos stop. No pictures of the flight line allowed. As we were on final approach to the airport I did manage to get a shot of a shipwreck and some of the reef nearby.


Until next time . . .

CONUS Replacement Center: 8 AUG - 17 AUG 2009

Fort Benning, GA - Pine trees, sand, and humidity.

After a week and a half of leave back home I reported to the Continental United States Replacement Center (CRC) located at Fort Benning, Georgia. The CRC is set up to receive and send forward individual augmentees like myself who are not deploying with a unit.

Lots and lots of contractors.

The CRC processes every branch (there was an air force officer and a navy chief in my group) as well as Army civilians and civilian contractors. Contractors are the most numerous type of person here. From my estimates contractors outnumber military about two to one. Almost all of them are headed to Iraq or Afghanistan. I talked to one contractor who fixed tanks when he was an enlisted Soldier in the Army. Now he works for General Dynamics and will be doing the exact same thing he did when he was a Soldier except he'll make about four times the amount of money for it.

The CRC cycle is only a week long. The first couple of days are mostly medically related. The clinic makes sure all of your shots are up to date, you have any medications you need, and you don't have HIV. I'd done all of this before I left my old duty station so I mostly waited in long lines so I could tell someone, "I have everything I'm supposed to." They would look over it, tell me I was set, and then I'd sit on the bus and wait for everyone else to finish.

After medical processing was over it was time for administrative stuff. People made sure your life insurance was set up and you have an accurate next of kin contact.

Over the course of a couple of days we got issued all of our equipment. I received an inordinate amount of gear, especially for where I'm headed. I'm allowed three duffels bags and a rucksack. I've made one duffel the bag completely filled with things I'm confident I'll never use such as my several layers thick Extended Cold Weather Clothing System. According to its specs it's designed fore use from +40 degrees to -60 degrees fahrenheit. I doubt I'll use it very much considering Djiboutian temperatures rarely drop below 70 degrees.

Most of my issued gear. 75% of it will not be used.

One smart thing they told is about is Eagle Cash. Eagle Cash is a little smart card that's hooked directly into your bank account. The thinking behind it is that physical currency takes up a lot of resources. It's heavy to transport, not that durable, and is easily stolen. Also, every cash machine has to be refilled when it's emptied. Cumulatively, filling those cash machines take a lot of resources and puts people and machinery in danger since a convoy is going to have to make those cash runs over time. Electronic transactions do away with all of the logistics behind handling paper currency.

The last couple of days were tactically related. We did some Improvised Explosive Device (IED) familiarization, some medical aid familiarization, and we qualified with our M9 pistols.

For a long time I thought I'd be going out on Friday at the end of the cycle with everybody else. Turns out that because I'm going to Djibouti I fly separately and at a later date. Because of this newfound schedule I was able to make it to my brother's wedding. No one expected me to be there and my parents and sister were the only ones who knew I'd be there when I arrived. My brother was very surprised when I showed up.

I leave tomorrow and should be making my next post from Djibouti.

I've got my orders in hand: 28 July 2009

Welcome to my blog!

My name is James. I'm an Army officer and I've been afforded the unique opportunity to be deployed to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. I hope to chronicle my experiences and exposure to this small piece of the American military's overall mission.

I've been able to contact a couple of other officers who have been on the Djibouti mission. One was transportation, like myself, and the other a signal officer in an artillery battalion. The transo officer said he ended doing 12 hour on 12 hour off shifts tracking missions and that it was pretty boring. The signal officer said he enjoyed himself and was able to see a few other countries. I just hope I'll be able to be off camp as much as possible and with the local population.

Today is my last day at my current duty station. I'll head home for a few days then process through a replacement center and be on my way. Because I'm going as an "individual augmentee" I get funneled through Fort Benning, GA instead of going with a unit from their home station.

I hope to keep everyone updated as much as possible. If I start slacking send me an e-mail.