Red alert!

I have been involved in four Red Alerts since arriving at Camp Anaconda. I don't want to freak anyone out here, but apparently it's a fairly routine thing for this camp. GlobalSecurity.org referred to Anaconda as "MortaritaVille" for all the mortars landing here in early 2003. The situation is much improved since then.

A few days ago, I was on a bus from the office area of BDC to one of the four Dining Facilities (DFAC). On our way to the DFAC, the red alert klaxon comes on, and our bus drivers (idiots from the Phillipines) have one response: drive directly to the nearest bunker, park the bus, lean the seat back, and go to sleep.

Please note that I have nothing against Filipinos, or the Phillipines. I just don't like the idiots they hired from there to drive our busses.

Anyway, siesta time was conveniently next to the Fuel Distribution Point of this huge airbase. As you might imagine, it takes a LOT OF FUEL to keep the jets and helicopters and cars and trucks and SUVs and electrical generators running. They keep the fuel in these berm-surrounded bladders (each bladder holds about 25,000 gallons of fuel), and there are about 75-100 bladders at the Fuel Farm. I don't know about you, but I can think of better places to be during a Red Alert than RIGHT NEXT TO EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE SHTUFF.

When we went to Green All Clear, we had to wake up Senor Marcos.

This morning, the Red Alert went off very conveniently at 7:44 AM. I was just heading out of the hooch to go get a cup of coffee (this is absolutely the ONLY thing I will consume from the Convoy Cafe; this DFAC is located 80 meters from my hooch, but I have only eaten there once). The Cafe closes at 8:00 AM, so this Red Alert was disturbing, to say the least: how in the hell can I get a cuppa Joe when the Red Alert is going on?

I called The Lovely One, since I had nowhere to go, and we were talking for a while, when the power went off in my hooch. THAT'S WHEN I PUT ON MY PPE (Kevlar vest, helmet, etc.). I went outside, as if that could enlighten me in any way, and a few minutes later came back in to my hooch to discover that the power was back on. Oh, by the way, when you lose power, you lose the network, and you lose the phone call you were just on. There's something vaguely disturbing to TLO as she is talking to me talking about Red Alerts, and the line goes dead.

So I get the computer back on line, and there's this frantic email from TLO, and I get SKYPE -- Ok, let me digress here: you guys have GOT to get Skype; I make phone calls from my PC to TLO's Mac on Skype and it costs NOTHING. Skype is free at www.skype.com and I recommend it highly. You can call other Skype users for free, and any calls I make to the US on land lines or cell phones costs about 2.5 cents/minute! I even talk to Dr. Sis in Rome, Italy for 2.5 cents/minute. -- running again, and there are like three voicemails on my Skype account, all of them concerning TLO's concern for me.

I email her immediately, I AM OK. I also call her, and tell her I AM OK. I have to rush off at this point, since we finally got the Green All Clear signal, and my meeting starts at 0830, and it is now about 0815. I make it to the meeting on time.

It's really strange, though, to think about these red alerts. Many of the people here have been here so long that they don't take these red alerts seriously. Seriously, they don't. They continue doing whatever it is that they are doing, they don't don their PPE, they continue driving down roads, or walking between buildings, or going for smokes. God help me if I ever get that complacent over here.

Moi