Oh, how I love meetings...

You would think that being in a war would mean certain things. For one, you would think that things would be exciting (possibly even dangerous) all the time. For another, you would think that there wouldn’t be as many boring meetings as you get back home.

You would think that. And you would be wrong.

Obviously, exciting doesn’t always mean good. And in a war, exciting often means bad. So it’s okay when things aren’t exciting.

But what about when things are the exact opposite of exciting? Like when they’re like this…

Or this…



While most of what I do here is satisfying and, at times, fun and even exciting, there’s one thing that I dread every week. It’s one hour of suffering that is so grueling and painful, that every time I turn around, it seems like it’s upon me yet again.

It’s…the weekly CJ2 Video Teleconference!!

This is basically where representatives from each of the different regional commands around Afghanistan meet (in a virtual sense, of course) with the good folks here to discuss the previous week’s events, and talk about where things are going in the near term. My job here makes it so I have to go sit in as part of the peanut gallery and, generally, try to stay awake.

As one would expect from any good Coalition effort, there are several nationalities represented. Similarly, there is a varying degree of competence on the individual level. That’s not to say that Country X has smart people and Country Y doesn’t. Rather, certain individuals seem more capable than others. In fact, some have certain reputations for being either very capable, or so incapable as to cause confusion about how they even got on the right airplane to get here in the first place. Something else that’s interesting is how the less capable ones take up so much time saying so little, while the more capable ones can condense immense amounts of information into brief, cogent statements.

And then, there are the accents.

Again, in any multi-national setting, you have to expect varying skill at communicating in the common language (in this case, English). And people are generally pretty understanding of others’ difficulties. Conversely, I would think that when you have someone who’s trying to communicate in a language that is secondary to a good proportion of an audience, you would try to find the most capable speaker available. And most everyone else seems to get that. Except for the Italians. They seem to have decided to pick the person least able to make himself understood. This situation has resulted in our very own weekly episodes of “Allo Allo”.

Being here DOES sometimes make me wonder what happened to the Axis powers...

Perversely, although this provides for some good entertainment, it also makes his portion of the meeting almost incomprehensible and therefore the most frustrating.