Pressure

Thursday 10 December 2009

We had our first snow today here at Bagram. Actually, it was a slushy, icy, 33 degree F, muddifying, Afghanistan version of snow, not the beautifying mountain kind of snow. It was sort of the weather equivalent of learning to snow ski at West Point. That place could even suck the joy out of something as fun as skiing. I still have an image of a heap of bodies (most of them from Southern states) piled at the exit of the ski lift at the top of the ski slope at West Point.

“You bunch of monkeys look like a goddamn Rossignol yard sale!” That comment from the compassionate instructor assigned to the Department of Physical Education would have been funnier had I known at the time that Rossignol was a brand of ski equipment. The fact that his boss was officially titled “The Master of the Sword” should tell you something. It was a fairly accurate portrayal of the situation, however, given the tangle of skis, poles, and various items of inappropriate clothing that lay strewn about. At the time, we had to wear cotton sweat pants and our felt jackets as the uniform for ski class. That, too, is funnier in retrospect because we must have looked like a bunch of snowballs as we caromed down what we considered our “ski mountain.” You can probably imagine the end result of setting loose a bunch of cooped up, late teen/early-20’s adrenaline junkies who have no idea that snow + gravity = danger onto an icy mountain in New York state.

Truthfully, any kind of change is a welcome distraction here and I haven’t heard a “this sucks” in over 2 days. There’s kind of a feeling of anticipation in the air, most likely due to the expectation of more troops arriving and the predictions about whether the optempo will actually slow down this winter, as it has during past winters in this country. The consensus is that it will not, especially given GEN McChrystal’s recent testimony that “victory will result from the prolonged application of pressure.” I guess that’s us.