Dining in Kuwait

So, I have had a few responses to my entries. So, I am going to take the opportunity to talk about one of them. Nothing else has been going on here, other than a lot of sitting around, reading, and sleeping. The one thing that gets us through the day is arranging when to go to the next meal. There are 2 major Dining Facilities (DFAC) here. The first one is super fancy. Marble(esque) floors and flat panel T.V.s hanging from the ceiling playing the Armed Forces Network (AFN). There are two lines you can go through; main line and short order. Short order is mostly hamburgers and various fried bar food items at lunch and dinner. For breakfast, you can get an omelet. The main line has a choice of 2 meats, starches and vegetables at lunch and dinner. For breakfast it has the scrambled eggs, preformed pancakes, bacon/sausage, biscuits and gravy, grits and oatmeal. You get to choose one of each. For lunch and dinner there is a pasta/potato/taco bar and a sandwich station. The main line cycles through its meals. It serves some sort of fish at least twice a week, but usually some sort of pork or steak product. By product I refer to a meal made from either ingredient; such as steak tips in sauce vs. seasoned steak. The food is general of moderate level of taste. The quality is about on par with Appleby’s or something like that, but in much larger portions. It’s just not presented very fancy; partitioned plate, just thrown on there by the contract workers. I have to say that my favorite veggie so far is the seasoned spinach. I don’t know. It just has more to offer the taste buds than the other plain veggies.
Once you leave the main line, you enter the dining room. It has to be a good 75 meters down and 50 meters across. Down the middle is the “salad” bar, fruit, beverage center and condiments. The “salad” bar consists of iceberg lettuce, quartered tomatoes (very tasty), sliced cucumber, shredded carrots and cheese and other not vegetable items. Thus “salad”. I usually take the cucumbers and tomatoes and drizzle some oil, vinegar and pepper (at every table) to make a tasty substitute to their “salad”. The beverage area has a vast amount of choices. There are multiple all natural juice boxes, milk, coffee (they also have those gas station like machines for cappuccino, etc), three things of Sweet tea, regular tea, and some kind of juice, then the obligatory soda fountain. Now you take that beverage area, place it in the middle of the line, and then flank it by the salad thing on each side, making 2 available salad bars. Now take that line, and mirror it with a worker path between, and you have the dining area service center (4 salad bars and 2 beverage centers). In 3 of the 4 corners, you have 1 taco/pasta/potato bar, 1 sandwich and 1 dessert bar.
Going back to the beverages. The coffee they have is pretty good. They give you a choice b/w “light” or “dark” coffee. I naturally choose dark, and it is quite tasty. It is on the level of the darker roast from Panara Bread Co.(but not that good). Now, there is the matter of Sweet Tea. Seriously? What is that stuff? I tried it and I almost threw up. Why not just drink a glass of sugar water with brown coloring. I can’t believe that they have to have 6 dispensers of that stuff. Blech. I’ll just stick to my normal tea. I wish I could call it sun tea, but I know the sun had nothing to do with it.
I believe that the one thing that most soldiers are guilty of, is hitting the dessert bar. Now they have all sorts of cakes. I don’t get why so many cakes and no pies. Very disappointing. But, they do redeem themselves by having a self serve, soft serve machine as well as a guy scooping a limited selection of Baskin Robbins Ice Cream. I stick to the soft serve. Now I see why my patients returned from Iraq with huge guts. I’ve been good though. I try to limit myself to a cone the size of a toddler cone and only at dinner, 3 days a week. Hey… you have to have some kind of happiness in a crappy place like this. Coffee and Ice cream…… a little bit of respite from the place that is Kuwait.
Photos are to follow when I get them on my thumb drive.
438

A few photos

These photos are from this week. The first is a picture of the tent where we sleep and live. There are about 80 of us in it. This is the 18 sq/ft of personal space that I spoke of.

The other is some camels wandering the desert behind us at the range.

Range Day

Today was Range Day. For most of the Battalion, the soldiers are assigned a weapon that is theirs for the duration of their time with the unit. For those who are PROFIS, we are assigned a weapon out of the available supply. The people organic to the unit have already zeroed and qualified with their weapon, so today was a day to just shoot 20 rounds and verify that there is no major malfunction with their rifle. For me, and the other providers, we are new to the unit and to our rifle so we have to Zero. Zeroing is a process of taking the rifle, in my case the M-16, from a mechanical zero with its iron sights and adjusting the sights to meet your personal needs. When you meet these needs by getting 3 rounds (bullets) into a circle about the size of a silver dollar from 50 meters, you are considered zeroed and will, with proper shooting technique, be consistent with your shots. The military uses human silhouettes on a grid system that allows you to figure out how many clicks on the rear and fore sights you need to adjust. The number of clicks is relatively consistent from rifle to rifle and is called your battle sight zero. Mine is 9 up on the front and 9 to the left. In the pictures you can see how the 1st group is a familiarization round, the 2nd is to determine if you were just a bad shot or showing some consistency. After the second series of 3 shots, the triangulation is calculated on the grid to determine the adjustments. You can follow from the picture how my adjustments worked. The standard is to zero in 18 rounds or less (6 sets of 3). Since we were issued 20 rounds, I had 5 rounds left and tried a shot grouping to see how the zeroing went. I am happy with the results, and I believe that my rifle will do its job if needed. My hope is that after cleaning it today, I will only have to wipe the sand off of it.
Other than that, things have been slow. We are pretty much done with all our training and only have a baseline cognitive assessment to take which will be used to compare our abilities if we are suspected of a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (concussion, closed head injury caused by a blast, etc) – mTBI. The rest of the time is spent napping, trying to call home with the phone systems actually work, which they have not been, and planning for the next meal. Well it’s getting late and I have another day with nothing in it to get excited about. At least we got to fire our weapons today. I’ll write again soon. Take care.

443 days.

Plus' and Minus'

Because very little is going on before our push, I thought I would make a list of perks about Kuwait, only because there’s always a little positive to that that is sucky.
No Mortars falling out of the sky. (that’s a big one)
You don’t have you wear body armor.
No whiney patients to take care of. (I don’t mind the one’s that actually need care)
Gourmet coffee shop (although I hear we have one on our FOB in Iraq)
No mortars falling out of the sky. (yeah, it’s that important)
We got here after the really hot weather. It only gets up to about 90-95 deg during the day.
Pallets of bottled water every 200 yards.
Power Point presentations – The stuff they talk about can save your life.
Things that are not positive about Kuwait
Being away from home.
Having less than 18 ft/sq of personal space (I’ll post a picture at some point)
The sand. It’s like confectioner’s sugar and covers EVERYTHING!!!
"15 Gallons of water per soldier per day for hygiene" – how they track that, I don’t know, but I know I do my share to conserve.
Power Point presentations – blah, it’s still power point.
No communication with your friends in another tent (mostly female, and don’t know what tent it is) of when you want to go to chow, so you end up eating w/o them, thinking they are thinking the same as you.
7 hour delay from home so no-one answers their phone when you call because it’s in the middle of the day for them.
Sleeping on a cot.
Knowing that the deployment hasn’t even really begun yet (except that the days are ticking down… Thank Goodness)
Ft. Knox’s DSN (Free military phone system) won’t connect me to my wife’s office b/c it’s stupid so I can’t talk to her after waiting an hour and a half to use the phone

notes from 31October

Here in Kuwait, time passes slowly. I can’t tell if it is the jet lag, or if time just ticks slower. In either case, it gives you plenty of time to reflect. I personally reflect upon how this is going to suck. But I try not to dwell on it because it will only make things worse. Instead I’ve set some goals for the deployment. One of the things that I would like to do is study for my Certified Specialty Board examination. Within the field of physical therapy you can specialize in a certain area. Most therapists do this based on the type of clinic they work in. But this takes it a step further. You sit for an examination (about a $1000) and upon passing you are recognized as an expert in your chosen field. I am planning on sitting for the Orthopedic Certified Specialist (OCS) board; and you get some new letters to add to the end of your name. Other examples are the Sports Certified Specialist (SCS), Neurologic Certified Specialist (NCS) and Pediatric Certified Specialist (PCS), among many more. For me, this would mean an extra $2000 per year to my base pay, which is nice to say at the least. This examination is given once a year and is more difficult (from what I am told) than the actual licensure exam. So I hope to be fairly well prepared upon leaving Iraq.
Another goal, quite appropriate for the situation that I am in, is to re-integrate myself back into the Church. In recent years I have lost faith in the actual organization of the Roman Catholic Church. It is not due to the child molestation cases, though that does tarnish the Church and its ideals, but rather the emphasis on financial goals and making sure that the building makes budget for the fiscal year. It may have been just the church that I was attending. I found out later that the Priest was excused from his position due to mounting discord within the congregation, but nevertheless, it turned me off from regularly attending. After graduation from Grad school, I have felt a need to return to regularly attending Mass, but I didn’t have the spiritual kick in the butt. That is, until I met my now friend and spiritual mentor, Howard. He is assigned with me here, as a GMO (General Medical Doctor), but is actually an OB/GYN in Texas. (He jokingly quotes a friend of his by saying he is a Combat Gynecologist… it’s funny and you know it.) Although he is a senior officer to me, he speaks and treats me as a peer and respects my position as a Physical Therapist and as someone who would like to further know the Lord. He is a very religious man himself, and comes from a very strong Christian background. I had my first Bible study with him last night, and it was obvious to me some of the big differences between the Catholic and non-Catholic teachings. But any way you turn it, the Bible is the Bible, and developing a relationship with the Church and Christ, is the basis behind any denomination of Christianity. I caveat these thoughts with this statement – this is my perspective and is in no way an attack on anyone else’s beliefs and is not here to incite religious commentary or major debate.
Other than that, the days are long and filled with an abundance of down time (no argument here) with intermittent spurts of death-by-powerpoint style lectures and a trip out to the ranges to zero our weapons. We will be moving out of here in a short while but till then, I have started the countdown with my friends from 450 on down. Here’s to 445 days, or there’s about.