My Year in Afghanistan: Ahmed the Laundry Clerk.

People and their different cultures amaze me. At Bagram in Afghanistan, we have contractors from all over the world. I call it our micro-society of the world at Bagram Airfield, we have Americans, English, Africans, Indians, Uzbek's, Russians, and of course Afghans. The Afghans are more amazed by everything they see. We have truck drivers who wait in a shelter next to where I work who are amazed by a package of cheese and crackers. Sometimes we start an impromptu soccer game, which they immediately recognize.

In the DFAC, sometimes I get there right before closing when the DFAC workers start to eat; what I'm amazed with is that the Indians and Afghans can't get enough sour cream, they eat it with everything, on bread, in rice, by itself like pudding. This is a cultural thing learned young by eating cream separated from the milk of the cow or goat.

At our laundry facility, I got to know some of the people working there just by picking up and dropping off my laundry a couple of times a week. One day, one of the laundry clerks, Ahmed, was complaining about a toothache. I told him I could get him some aspirin for the pain and that he should see a dentist. Although he knew a little English, there was still a big language barrier between the two of us. I came back a couple of hours later to give him the aspirin, which amazingly he had never seen before. I told him again that he needed to see a dentist. He just smiled and nodded yes.

A couple of weeks passed, and I didn't see Ahmed at the laundry facility. I finally asked some of the other clerks, and they told me that Akmed had gotten sick and died. They never did tell me what he died of. That he just got sick and died, again, the language barrier was a problem. I do know I have heard stories from medical personnel there that Afghans can die of the simplest things, and this was probably the case.

The King Ranch: 825,000 Acres of Texas

I once heard someone say that Corpus Christi is a big town surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. If you check a map, you’ll see that most of the space between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, which are about 170 miles apart, is taken up by the King Ranch. This ranch is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, covering 825,000 acres, making it bigger than the country of Luxembourg.

We drove to Kingsville and took a tour today. At first, the ranch looks like any other cattle ranch, but it’s actually a big company with business interests around the world and its main office in Houston. The Texas ranch is divided into four areas: Santa Gertrudis, Laureles, Encino, and Norias. We visited the Santa Gertrudis Division, which is the ranch’s original name and where it all started. The ranch also developed the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle, officially recognized in 1940 and now found worldwide. There’s a herd of longhorn cattle on the ranch, kept for historical reasons. Besides cattle, the ranch has a top-notch quarter horse program that produced the Triple Crown winner Assault.

During the tour, we drove by the main house and the workers' village. Each division has a self sustaining work force community. An interesting fact is that after the War with Mexico, Robert E. Lee, a friend of Mr. King, helped select the best spot for the main house. The best tactical location for the house was chosen, protected by a creek gully. The house, which you cannot tour, is still used for family events and considered the ranch's ancestral home.

An interesting fact most of the first ranch workers came from Mexico. "In one notable case, King traveled to the village of Cruillas, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in the early months of 1854 (the village having been decimated by a severe drought) and purchased the village's entire cattle population. But shortly after leaving the village, King realized that by solving the village's short-term problem, by providing needed income to survive the drought, he had created a longer-term one by removing its source of future income. King thus returned to Cruillas and offered the villagers the opportunity to work for him in exchange for food, shelter, and income. Many of the villagers accepted the King's offer and relocated to Texas. As the ranch grew, these workers came to be called kineños, or King's men." The ranch’s brand is known worldwide, and its property now covers over a million acres, including a turf farm in Florida. There’s even a special King Ranch edition of a Ford truck.

After we toured the King Ranch, we stopped by the town’s museum. The museum celebrates the King family, the ranch’s cowboys, and its famous brand. The Famous wave "W" is a brand developed because it has no intersections in the writing. These intersections can cause infections because they burn deeper into the tissue. The museum's photo collection depicts the 1940s. If you're in South Texas, you must see the King Ranch.

My Year in Afganistan: Forward Operating Base Salerno

My year in Afghanistan was life-changing, even though I didn't know it at the time.  In fact, I really hated being there.  It's funny how that is.  Often, it's the things we hate that are what's best for us.  Sometimes it can save your life.  That only happens if it doesn't kill you first.

In Afghanistan, I managed a government contract to ensure vehicle accountability across the country.  I had people managing equipment at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Salarno. It was a base near the Pakistan border. I made it a point to visit all my folks spread across the country at their different FOBs. I fly to Salerno on a C-130 through the Air Force's Hub and Spoke system. So I get there, take a look at the vehicle yard to see the vehicles that they were managing. We talk about life at the FOB with the folks in their data entry center, which is nothing more than a quickly built plywood building built on cement blocks. We laugh at the latest company gossip and go eat in the concrete dining facility (DFAC) about 300 yards from their building. The food, like all the food at the DFACs, was good. I ate there 3 times. I fly back to Bagram the next day on a spoke hub flight.

About a week later, I got a flash message saying that a suicide bomber had driven a 5-ton truck bomb into Salerno. It exploded next to the dining facility in the middle of the camp. I initially tried to call the FOB, but the phone lines were dead. Then I called the corporate office in Alexandria, Virginia, to let them know. I was told to keep them informed of our personnel at the FOB. It took a while for that to happen. At the FOB after the explosion, the base was attacked by a group of Taliban fighters. It took a while for the base's security to fight off the attack. This also cut off communications with the FOB. It wasn't until late in the evening that phone calls would go through.

I finally got my team leader on the phone, who gave me a rundown on what had happened. The most important thing was that all my guys, although shaken up, were alright; no one was physically hurt. The Truck bomb explosion had destroyed the dining facility, killing some people inside. This included contractors on other contracts. The data entry center building was blown off its foundation, but no one inside was hurt. One contractor who was walking to the dining facility at the time caught a piece of shrapnel in the neck and bled out during the firefight that regained security. It was just another day in Afghanistan. Life and death continue in Afghanistan.

People and their different cultures amaze me. At Bagram in Afghanistan, we have contractors from all over the world. I call it the micro-society of Bagram Airfield, we have Americans, English, Africans, Indians, Uzbek's, Russians, and of course Afghans. The Afghans are more amazed by everything they see. We have truck drivers who wait in a shelter next to where I work who are amazed by a package of cheese and crackers. Sometimes we start an impromptu soccer game, which they immediately recognize. In the DFAC, sometimes I get there right before closing when the DFAC workers start to eat; what I'm amazed with is that the Indians and Afghans can't get enough sour cream, they eat it with everything, on bread, in rice, by itself like pudding. This is a cultural thing learned young by eating cream separated from the milk of the cow or goat.