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 dayI'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 . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment