Business Trip

I will be taking a 12 month overseas ‘business trip’ beginning in a number of weeks. I will be serving as a Civil Engineer one of the Afghanistan Provincial Reconstruction Teams In the mean time Rheagan, Lucas and Aurora will be making the East / Mid-America Grandparent circuit.

I will be able to make only a few posts over the next year, as there are a lot rules prohibiting service members maintaining blogs while they are deployed. On that note, if you are looking to post a reply on the site, I respectfully request that you check your politics at the door. This business trip is about helping people. Rather than wondering why no one is doing anything about the world’s endless list of problems…about making the world a better place. I am putting my money where my mouth is…I am aiming to do something about it with my own hands.

For the last five and ½ weeks, I have been at Ft Bragg absorbing the Army way of doing things. The schedule that we have kept is very aggressive. My fellow PRT members and I are usually up by 0430 followed by Physical Training from 0500 to 0600…this usually alternates between calisthenics and cardio. The first training event of the day often starts between 0700 and 0800. The day will then unfolds into all kinds of different classes, meetings, and activities, which will end anywhere between 1900 and 2300 (My longest work day went from 0500 till 2320…got to sleep by midnight…followed by a 0430 start. Showers come once every three days, they are often very cold. We have not been permitted to leave Ft Bragg since arriving. Indeed, we are seldom permitted to leave our encampment in the woods, just to get back to the Base Exchange. Personal cars are not permitted, civilian cloths are not permitted, going to the gym is not permitted, even ordering pizza is not permitted. Internet access has been very limited until recently, snail-mail takes twice as long and personal cell phones are almost the only phones. It all has the feel of a Boy Scout jamboree, but a lot longer and with big teeth.

All that said, we are learning a lot of very important skills and we are coming together as a team. Although we complain a great deal, I feel that we will all look back in a year’s time and say that this training experience was a factor for success.

Posted by paul at February 28, 2007 01:49 AM