ONE LAST BIG TRIP

I spent most of the last week traveling way out west checking out some ongoing projects and to look at some potentially future work. It was probably the best trip I have had this deployment and really gave me a great perspective on some of the outlying bases, cities, and infrastructure. The week started with a monthly conference I have with the Operations Officers of the units which work for us. It is an opportunity to discuss issues, evaluate progress on active projects, pass along information about future work, and just have the time to all talk as a group. This has been very important since most projects have some form of coordinated effort and are executed by multiple units. This conference was supposed to be the week before, but the weather won and I did not fly anywhere. I did get to spend a bunch of time waiting for flights and not getting much sleep, but it comes with the territory.

After the conference, my Operations Chief and I started the second part of our trip which was a visit to one of the camps that are being constructed in the ongoing pursuit of pulling military personnel out of the population areas and allowing the Iraqi police to oversee the cities. No different than in the US. We don’t want a bunch of military vehicles and personnel on the street corners, but have no problem with police doing their job. Anyway, the project was going well, the team was motivated and doing the work quickly, safely, and with very high quality. The only downside to this part of the trip, but the length of the day. We did not get to bed the night before until close to 11:00 pm and had to be staged for the convoy at 2:30 am. That was tough. Well we convoyed to the project I was just talking about and then were picked up by another unit to take us to our final destination for the day. The convoy took us through a small town that I had never been to and it was amazing to see the day to day life. It looked as close to normal as a war torn third world country could look. People were out and about, stores were open for business, houses were being constructed, trash was being cleaned up, and it just looked and felt normal. It was along the Euphrates so there were palm trees along the shoreline and grass in some spots. All of this led us to one of the major Iraqi dams which was our next destination.

The dam was amazing. It was built in the late 70’s until the mid-80’s so it was more modern than most facilities in the United States. The design is Russian and it was built by Yugoslavians and Czechoslovakians. It provides significant agricultural irrigation and some power generation for the entire region. We went there to look at a couple projects were are working or planning, but the best part of the visit was getting a “behind the scenes” tour by a mechanical engineer who works at the dam. We went all over the facility from the sluice gates up top to the turbine rooms, control centers, and cabling/transformer areas. The stairs never seemed to end and we kept going down in to the depths of the dam and into the nooks and crannies. Quite the impressive facility. I would like to be stationed there; most of the forces live in the dam and have balconies that overlook the river. They are able to see sunsets and sunrises regularly and it just seems closer to home. Plus, the PT would be great. You could do stair runs every day or if that is not good enough, run up the ramp that goes from the bottom to the top of the dam. A couple of those and you would be hurting.

I am now back in Fallujah and cranking along. This week should be interesting as we are working through the start of a major project which has had significant coordination problems. There are also a couple organization changes that are occurring which always makes things interesting. The team is still doing great and everyone is safe and sound. I will put some pictures up soon, but the connection is absolutely horrible right now due to that cable break somewhere over here. They say it will be better in another week or so, but I am not holding my breath.