Sweeper 6-5-07
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I trudged to work this morning after an evening of minimal sleep and
greeted the sweeper outside my building. A common sight here in the
land of sun and fun is the lonely street sweeper. You will usually find
this individual of foreign origin pushing his broom at an unhurried
pace, ridding his small section of the world of dust and debris. I am
continually amazed at the perseverance of the sweeper. Despite the
purposeful strokes and careful grooming of the concrete before him, the
dust cloud he creates from his efforts only settles on the area he just
brushed clean. And if the cloud doesn't cover the street, then the wind
will blow in sand from other places to litter the ground. Why does he
do this? Is it because he doesn't have another job to do? Does he know
that it doesn't do much good? Does he know how silly he looks in his
blue/purple jump suit? It is truly an exercise in futility, yet he does
this every day as if he has no other purpose than to move the sand and
dirt from place to place. I say hi to him when I can because he is,
after all, a fellow human being, trying to get through the day. I
remind myself that the job does not make the person. He's not trying to
win a war or battle off the bad guys, but he's doing his job and for
that I applaud him. I often struggle with what language I should say
"hello" to him in as I'm not sure which of the many nationalities we
have working around here (Fijian, Indian, Bangladeshi, or Pilipino), but
he seems happy with my "good morning" to which he replies "gud moan'n".
I hopped on the bus and began another rotation of the earth. I haven't
written much lately because I've spent the last 4 days working on a
briefing for a colossal "summit" at our location, which is another
reason I didn't get to bed last night until after midnight. We, as
advisors, brought in some high ranking Iraqi officials to go over some
key issues that needed addressing. Without getting into the minute
details of it all, it was a valuable conference and it required a lot of
work to assemble the right individuals to create a productive dialogue.
Now, nothing in Iraq is easy. Heck, a helmet, weapon, body armor, eye
protection and gas mask are requirement to cross the street. The
simplest of tasks are complicated by the fact that we are miles from any
sort of basic support for professional type presentations, plus the fact
that supplies are limited due to convoys unable to bring rudimentary
items to the base. Did I mention that we are in a war zone? Yeah, that
can make things a little difficult too. So, with the absence of Kinkos
to print out our slide packets, or an airport shuttle to get key players
from the plane to the conference room, or Jason's Deli to catering our
mid afternoon snack, we did the best we could with what we had. Did I
also mention that we are critically short of paper? How are we supposed
to run a war with no paper? Of the resources we did have at our
disposal was one of Saddam's conference centers. For those of you who
didn't know, Saddam liked to build stuff. It didn't matter if it was
useful or not, he just built it. There are over 20 palaces in this area
that were built for sons, cousins, aunts and best friend's dogs. And
the man like how he looked too. How else can you explain the 20 foot
bronze Saddam heads on the walls of a palace across the IZ, or the 18
full figure statues of the man that lined the top of the palace
currently used as the temporary US Embassy? Because there was an
abundance of these nice buildings, we held our conference in the
personal courtyard of one of Saddam's main palaces near the water
(interesting fact, he use to have his family reunions and get togethers
here). It's not a grand structure, but it contains a courtyard filled
with rose bushes and flowering trees that starkly contrasts the pitted
T-walls and mortar craters that dot the base that it is surrounded by.
The adjoining building to the courtyard was not noteworthy by any means,
but it was plenty big enough for our small get together of important
folks to hash out problems and bring issues to light. And it had A/C.
Apparently, Iraqi officials like A/C. Wow! So do I!
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My mission was to get there early and help set up the technical stuff of
this crucial three part briefing. Why does the Asian get stuck with the
job of being the Audio/Visual geek? Very stereotypical, but I didn't
mind. I helped set up 2 projectors and 4 computers (two laptops and two
SECRET laptops) for our dual presentation in both Iraqi and English. I
carefully loaded the first secret squirrel brief on the machines (it was
being briefed first) and then the fruit of my four days of labor onto
the array of laptops. The Iraqis would be providing the third part of
the brief and I trusted that they would take care of that mission.
Normally I would have commanded the projectors for the brief (another
task normally given to the A/V geek), but the folks of higher rank than
I assigned me the mission of scribe, which is a fancy name for note
taker. I assumed this job for the mere fact that I could type without
looking at my fingers, a skill that you suddenly lose once you pin on
Major in the Army which is why most field grade officers are hunt and
peckers. So there I was, sucking in the words and comments of the first
secret brief and spewing them out on the computer. My hands were like
little yellow humming birds scurrying over my laptop to document every
word. It was important. How did I know it was important? I knew this
because important people were saying important things. They had
important looks of concern on their important faces and they nodded
their heads in deliberate motions to stress how important the
information was. The brief was going well, but it was taking a long
time to complete due to the pauses by the linguists as they played
verbal tennis, translating from one language to the other. We arrived
at our second break and were almost an hour over schedule. That's when
the ranking person in the room, a general of many stars, made the call
to skip the second brief and go right to the Iraqi briefing. What?
What is this you say, Mr. "I have a constellation on my uniform"? I
couldn't believe my ears! I had worked for four days on this brief, and
stayed up until midnight the night prior to make sure that it was
proofread a bazillion times, printed, collated, stapled and put in fancy
folders and you say you want to skip the brief? It bothered me, and my
hands were not as shifty for the remaining of the brief.
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The rest of the summit went well and while I'm not sure if anything was
really accomplished, I'd like to think that some progress was made for
all of our efforts. It's always hard to tell with Iraqis because they
like to pontificate and talk a big game, but often their actions don't
always match. I make this generalization, of course, based on my
dealings with the few I have dealt with and I know that it's not right
to categorize the entire nation as lazy. Only time will tell if we made
any progress. The end of the conference did not mean the end of our day
as there were notes to compile, tasks list to update and after action
reviews (AARs) to conduct. The Army still likes its paperwork and there
is a small drove of trees out there that fell victim to this singular
event. It made for another long day and I was glad to catch the 8
o'clock bus back to my hooch while there was still some light out. As I
trudged passed the guards at the gate and made my way to my room, I
passed the same blue/violet jumpsuit clad man, pushing his broom across
a section of sidewalk that no one rarely walks on. It was the same
futile act that he was performing this morning. After my briefing
debacle this morning where I worked hard on something that was thrown
away in the blink of a general's eye, I could relate more to the sweeper
than I could to the fellow officers in my section who presented their
info. Maybe, in the big scheme of things over here, we're all just
sweepers, but in camouflage.
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Interesting quote of the day: "Some days you are the dog, some days you
are the hydrant."
