R&R Zen can only last for so long around here...

Bagram can be compared to the giant planet-eating spacecraft in the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine”. It is an unrelenting, unforgiving complexity of challenges that continually find a way to eat at you until it swallows you and spits your remains out the other end. I liken my recent R&R as having charged my deflector shields to the point that I could keep Bagram at a distance. I’ve been calling it my “R&R Zen”. But just like the starships Enterprise and Constellation battling the Doomsday Machine, my deflector shields of R&R Zen can only take so many hits from Bagram before they are depleted. It’s been exactly two weeks since I departed Thailand. My Zen is barely holding on. Just as Thailand has now spiraled into martial law, my R&R aura has been pulled back to Bagram reality. This place is an untamable beast of our own making. The best I can do is keep it caged. Almost everything we do here is reaction to the latest emergency. It’s all we can keep up with at times. But unlike Nigel the farmer tour guide on the banks of Lake Wakatipu, who I met visiting Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand, I cannot simply smirk and avoid answering questions when asked. For reference, Nigel was telling us all about his red deer buck, who had a giant rack of antlers. The buck was constantly dragging his rack along the fence, which was nothing more than chicken wire. I asked Nigel how often he had to repair the fence and rather than answering my question he went off on a tangent about red deer antlers, their new growth each year, and antler nerve endings. All the while the smirk never left his face. I can’t give non-answers like Nigel did for me. When I am asked about the proverbial fence that I use to cage Bagram I have to be prepared to give a straight answer. There are a lot of general officers who take great interest in asking me lots of questions about Bagram. But we keep the place in order. The recent price of doing so has been the destruction of my R&R Zen.

It has now been 14 days since my last beer. There are 110 days until I reach 365 boots on the ground. I can actually see light at the end of the tunnel. We have come a long way since last September and it is really beginning to show on Bagram. To be honest, I think my team and I have smacked Bagram upside the head so many times that it finally blinked. That’s progress. We’re going to make it.