David Grizzle, a senior executive with Continental Airlines and a good friend from our parish and Boy Scout troop, is serving for a year in Afghanistan with the U.S. State Department’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Group. Every so often he sends home emails about his life and work there. They’re also posted on the Web site of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, where David is a trustee, at http://www.etss.edu/GrizzleKCM.shtml.
Here’s an excerpt from Kabul Corporate Monk # 7 (with extra paragraphing added for improved readability):
[In a meeeting to plan for transporting 30,000 pilgrims to the Hajj:] It was more that I would never have imagined a group of 27 senior government, military and religious figures discussing with the utmost of earnestness how many portable toilets it was really necessary to have, what the appropriate distribution was between men and women, how often the toilets needed to be pumped out, and whether the schedule for pumping should be more frequent for the women’s or the men’s toilets.
The most intense debate was over the decision of whether there should be more toilets for the people before they boarded the aircraft, or at the place where they disembarked.
The relevant fact pattern was the same for people on both sides of the issue: the intense aversion of village people to using toilets on airplanes for fear of being sucked into the toilet and jettisoned over the Persian Gulf.
You can easily see the sides squaring off between the “early eliminators” and the “holders.” (I cast my vote with the “holders” party, and we got a 25% greater allocation of port-o-potties.)
At the time of my vote casting, I recognized that I was not without preparation for this critical decision. I had participated in surprisingly similar conversations at Troop 55 committee meetings when we tried to decide how many toilets the scouts would need at a campout.
Toilet allocation issues are one of those complications that reappears in the course of a diverse life.
* * *
Before I came to Afghanistan, I was a general fan of the U.S. military, but I lacked any real experience. Since being here, I have become a virtual worshiper of the military. They are so efficient, so devoted, so well prepared – and yet self-effacing — that it is hard not to idolize them.
If you go to a meeting to discuss any event, the military representatives will have thought through plans the most comprehensively of everyone there — combined. And they would not think of planning even a baby shower (I don’t think they actually do that, though; it was just an example) without having a Powerpoint presentation.
I arrived down at Kandahar and walked into a briefing room with several laptops on the table and a projector. I told them I had brought an agenda. I was very proud of myself; I had even brought eight copies.
Their immediate response: “You got it on Powerpoint, on a stick, don’t you?” Now usually I do most of my work in Powerpoint, but in this case I had backslidden and prepared the agenda in Word – the software equivalent of the Etch-a-Sketch for the military.
I also had brought paper and not my memory stick. Everybody in the military carries memory sticks – on lanyards around their necks, where G.I.’s used to carry dogtags. I mean, I’m cool, I have a 256 MB memory stick just as big as most of theirs, but I had left mine back in Kabul since I was going to a forward air base where it might get blown up.
I didn’t want to put my stick in danger unnecessarily, but I ended up suffering a fate worse than the loss I feared, as I watched the glances of the colonels to the majors to the captains, all with the same non-verbal message loudly proclaimed: “This man, he has no stick.”
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