My Work

Well because of many reasons, I am not able to talk about what I did in Afghanistan. Fortunately, in my last couple of weeks I was able to be involved in an open house that showcased some of the work that I do. You can read about it here. I gave part of this tour and my work was discussed when he speaks of "behavioral science."

This was from a drive out to the new facility - it was cold out there - although not as cold as Kyrgyzstan. Apparently putting a plastic grocery bag over your face will keep you warm. Maybe they hypoxia helps too...



Here are a few pictures from the facility.



This is the team of "Subject Matter Experts" or SMEs as the Army likes to say. The army uses so many acronyms that when I left I created a cheat sheet of acronyms for my replacements. It was 6 pages long of two columns of text. My favorite acronym: TLA.... it stands for Three Letter Acronym. The context: when you are talking about a new program your boss may say "you need to come up with a good 'TLA' for that."

We were not especially close during my deployment - I mostly hung out with the three other guys on my team, but this last week the four of us spent hours waiting around in the same work area for the tour to come through - so we had a fun time joking about how to create an international incident with the press.



More of the beautiful mountains over the new facility.



I thought this was a cool picture - there is something exciting about being around helicopters and other massively cool machinery. I got to watch one of the unmanned drones take off and fly away - it was really cool to see a huge airplane flying on remote control.



Just some more pictures of the facility.



We have a nurse on staff who is so freakin hilarious. She is in charge of making sure we all get shots. She was on site to give some of the tours. During the breaks she would find people who didn't have their swine flu shot and accost them. She wouldn't even tell them what it was for, she would just ask them to come to a back room and attack.

She is about 5 ft tall. They call her the combat gnome. They posted her pictures all over the facility - holding her weapons and warning people to get their swine flu shot "or else!" I wish I had taken a picture of those posters. Anyway, she is so funny - she filled up her shoulder holster with syringes as you can see in the second picture.






These are some of the guards I have worked with for the past 6 months. They picked some of my favorite guards to come give tours - I was with these guys through some really intense moments. We grew really close and I was really sad to leave them.



These last pictures are just cool - pics of the helicopter approaching and landing inside the compound. Everyone freaks out and runs and hides, but I like to be right there feeling the approach and the downdraft.









Well, I think those will be my last pictures from Afghanistan. I hope to maybe put on a couple more from Kyrgyzstan, but aside from the good food - there is not much else exciting.