What a day!

I say that on those days that stand out from the blur of all the rest, but it seems that I am saying it more and more often.

The more trivial event of the day but the one that I enjoyed the most was getting to play with a little kitten. Pets are officially forbidden over here on base; dogs and cats are trapped and killed. Sometimes though, certain areas or organizations unofficially adopt a cat or two. I had a cat here several years ago that I inherited from some Air Force guys who saved it from a trap. They named it Shit-head and just like a dog will recognize its own name, Shit-head answered to that name and that name only.

I’m a guy who loves pets and I miss having a little furry something or another around to play with and take care of. Today as I was walking from my van to the laundry facility, I saw a pretty young Army captain seated on the bench outside of the self-serve laundry playing with a little kitten, he was about half grown. I don’t know what it is about Afghan cats but they are amazingly friendly and outgoing and this little guy was no exception. He was playfully batting the girl’s hands as she would sneak in and rub his belly. I had to sit down and steal some of the cat’s attention but the girl didn’t mind and we laughed and talked for a few minutes about the pets we have at home. It was good to have one of those normal human moments.

Another interesting thing happened when I was handed an envelope with about $60,000 in cash and told that someone would meet me when my chopper landed out at some faraway FOB. I just about gave the guy a heart attack when I feigned ignorance as to the whereabouts of his cash, but I didn’t have the heart to carry the joke too far. I remember the first time that happened to me back when I worked for my old company. I had a fairly respectable job title that entailed quite a bit of responsibility so one day as I was flying through Uzbekistan to come back from R&R they grabbed me and gave me $350,000 to carry back into the country. Quite a shock. One moment I was missing my girlfriend (at the time) and savoring the happy memory of a couple of weeks spent sleeping in and cruising around Germany and the next I’m paranoid and suspiciously eyeing everyone around me and checking my pack every 2 minutes to make sure it was still shut. Doesn’t happen too often anywhere else.

And finally, we were down to the final 2 legs of our mission of the day and we landed at a Marine base out in the middle o f nowhere called Delaram. I whipped out my new cell phone and called back to Kandahar to check in and my favorite ops girl told me that we were on hold because Kandahar was under another ground attack. Evidently a bunch of guys decided to kick off Ramadan with a bang and launched some more rockets and then bum-rushed the gate with some suicide bombers.

So we spent a couple of uneventful hours munching on our MRE's and baking in the sun under our birds as we waited for things to get cleaned up . Another thing pretty unique to the area here.

In other news, I’ve been working down my reading list on my Kindle, right now I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I hadn’t read it since I was about 12 or 13, it is sooo good! I really liked the movie but the book has so much more that they just couldn’t put in there. More 2 sentence book reviews coming soon!