Hockey season

One of the big bonus things about being here is that I get to meet all kinds of cool people and see some pretty neat stuff. Last night the Canadian military brought over a bunch of NHL alumni players as sort of a USO tour for the troops. A few years ago the Canadians actually built a nice floor hockey rink at the boardwalk area on base and last night the Kandahar hockey champion team got to play a friendly game against the NHL guys. They spanked them 6-3.

The Canadians also flew the actual Stanley cup out here and put it on display for people to see, pretty awesome. Most people can never say that they ever got to see it up close and in real life, much less got to rub their grubby paws all over it, and even fewer yet will ever get to say they did that all Afghanistan. But I can!

My roommate and I were out at the boardwalk getting a kabob when we saw everything happening so we ran back and picked up another guy and grabbed a camera and headed back. Well worth the 20 minute wait in line.

Below from right to left: Chris, Kendall, Mr. Stanley Cup, and moi.




And they just started posting USO flyers advertising that James Gandolfini aka Tony Soprano and a few other cast members are coming over. I've been pretty disgusted by the Sopranos show ever since I happened to see a scene where a pregnant girl gets beaten to death with a brick by her boyfriend, definitely not a fan. But also coming out is Rose McGowan, Marilyn Manson’s ex-wife. That lady is super hot, if I’m in town I’ll definitely show up for that one.

Not too long ago I had the perfect sort of day to pop me out of the melancholy moods that I’ve been in lately. We flew out with a big group of corporate bosses from the States on their little Wild West tour that they periodically go on. We flew in and dropped them off at a place called Shindand and then made a few other hot stops and then came back to pick them up but ended up waiting a couple of hours for them.

It was a beautiful day with cloudless blue skies and just the perfect temperature. I threw my emergency pack down on the ground as a pillow and crawled underneath the nose of the chopper into the shade and took a nap. Talk about peaceful!

I do love Kandahar because there is always something happening. We have F-16’s, F-18’s, Marine Harriers, Tornados, Mirages, every kind of helicopter out there. For a military hardware fan like me this place is amazing. But all of that awesomeness is so loud with jets taking off on afterburner every 20-30 minutes. Out at Shindand I was struck by how quiet and peaceful it was. The whole 2 hours that I spent dozing under our chopper, I think I heard maybe 2 or 3 other choppers fly by. It reminded me of how Kandahar used to be back in the day when it was just a sleepy little FOB. Now it’s a monster of a base with over 20,000 people and about 7 or 8 times as much real estate as it used to take up.

But back to my day; everything went perfectly with the beautiful weather, no idiots on board, a peaceful nap in the warm spring sunshine. Just 8 hours of zooming through the sky. I couldn’t have planned a better day. Once again, life is good!

It’s always a lot of fun to meet those one-in-a-million type of girls who just blow me away with sheer awesomeness, the kind with a wicked smile and big bright eyes. The kind with a sense of humor that both rocks me back on my heels and brings me back for more with a smile on my face. The kind with a passion for life and adventure, the refreshingly uncomplicated and entirely confident kind.

Yup, I had forgotten that such a creature existed until I met one and spent a few days uncovering layer after layer of incredibly endearing personality and surprises. But...always a but, life dealt the usual dirty card and *BAM!* she ends up hundreds of miles away doing secret squirrel stuff on almost no notice. This damn job really gets to me sometimes when it comes to getting in the way of anything approaching normal in my life. Ah well, it will be more than worth it when I meet the goals that I’ve set for myself by being here.

So now I’m breaking out the ol’ heartstrings tuning kit to get myself back into my normal desert-dwelling dude state of mind. I need a dog! But before that happens I need to buy a house, before that I need to finish up here...so I guess that just leaves me with the gym as my sole outlet for frustrations.

Tomorrow is a nice long day though; I’m looking forward to that. All the way out west to the Shindand area and then north to Herat and then back again. The bottom line is that life is still good.

Would have been...Is been...Will been...

I am lousy when it comes to remembering dates such as birthdays or semi-important holidays like Valentine’s Day; I’ve even forgotten my own birthday until I get the package from my mom often accompanied by a reminder of how old I'm getting and/or a demand note for grandbabies. Love ya, mom.

So last year I started using the Google calendar and thus far I haven’t missed anything but Valentine’s Day again; a moot point but whatever. I went all-out with it and put everything that I had planned for the next year or so in there. March is definitely the month for birthdays it turns out. I’ve got Kyle, John, Ashlie, Sarah, Andrea, Tim (Tim-eeehhhh!), and somebody named JP….that’s it. Impressive! Now if only the PX would have appropriate birthday cards for friends and brothers instead of in-laws and cousins x-times removed…and that I had an up-to-date address book. Happy birthday one and all!

Looking back at what I accomplished in the past 12 months, I didn’t accomplish everything that I set out to do, in fact I inflicted a few idiotic setbacks upon myself but all in all it was not a bad period of time. I’ve helped some friends through tough times and had some help myself. Met new people, renewed some old friendships, burned a bridge or two, started and dissolved my own corporation, found $600 cash on an airplane, made and broke some resolutions, won a raffle, kissed a girl, got a free upgrade on a car rental, switched jobs, and I traveled a bit.

And if my R&R schedule hadn’t been all mixed up by my switching employers I would be in Ukraine next week getting my rad dose on the Chernobyl tour and making an idiot of myself with my old Dnieper buddies. I hear that for a guy who isn’t an alcoholic and doesn’t have violent tendencies towards women, it’s a tough place to stay single for long. But then again men will always talk up their country’s women. Anyway.

But I wonder what the next 12 months will hold. Of course the monotony of work will be a constant for the next 5 months or so but after that its 30 days of unfettered Pete time for whatever. Then it’s my EOC leave in December after that! And if I get really lucky, I’ll finally get my own contract here and will be able to retire at 30! My buddy Larry and I both have our fingers crossed for that one. I did the math once and 6 years of doing this work is the equivalent of almost 14 years of experience at a normal job working normal hours. C’mon 2010!

So whatever lies ahead in the near future, I can’t wait to get to it.

I am definitely a landscapes person. Although I will forever long for the lush and beautiful forests and fields of places like Germany, there is also much to be said of the rugged and foreboding landscapes of places like here in Afghanistan or a place I am dying to visit, the seemingly endless wild of eastern Russia.





Although a life alone is never one that I would wish for myself, there are times where I can sympathize somewhat with some of the ideas of the monks of primitive Christianity who went out to the wildernesses of Europe, Africa, or the Middle East to seek solitude. There is something to be said for being alone at times. It took me a few years as a teenager to recognize and figure out how to act on the feelings but sometimes I just get this urge to get out and be alone for awhile. Of course I could drown those inclinations with mind-numbing cable TV or endless Youtube videos but getting out and whether its simply sitting on a rock in the woods or climbing to the top of a much bigger rock to sit and think, it is simultaneously a marvelous recharge for both the body and soul as well as an outlet for stresses and worries that I am often not even aware that I’ve been harboring.

I guess that as with the monks of old, when celibacy is a way of life, you take what you can get lol.

But if I were to win the lottery, after seeing to the affairs of myself and my family, I would buy myself a helicopter and spend a year just flying around this amazing country. As I spend hours zooming around the sky here I see caves that aren’t visible from the ground that I would give anything to explore and amazing mountains just screaming for some idiot to come climb. Even setting aside the sense of adventure of traveling all through a war zone, this place has so much adventure potential that it bothers me so much to be cooped up by rules or danger. That’s probably why I go crazy and drive my truck up to the mountains and do Pete stuff for days on end on my R&R’s.





Even with rules and regulations in place, there is still a ton of fun to be had here. A lot of it isn’t easily understood or explainable except to the participants though. Today I typed up a little letter and had it translated into Dari and then I printed off a few copies and put them in empty water bottles and tossed them out of the chopper over random villages that we overflew. Imagine the shock of the readers as they are informed that not only are they part of a new country, but that the country has and is named for a new queen that they are subject to, who also coincidentally happens to be a good friend of mine! Afghan men almost universally believe that women are some sort of sub-human breeding commodity. Yay!

Here’s the video clip:
CLICK HERE!!!




Me being excited about successfully forming a new country. Hail Ginastan!