JACK ARMY’s "A Day in the Life” of My FOB

A chaptered story told on many blogs starts here and continues here:

Chapter Five: Visitors

About once per month, one of the preventive medicine (PM) guys from brigade will visit our FOB. The first couple of visits were challenging because we had lots of areas that needed improvement. Lots of areas. If we were a restaurant, we would have been shut down fast! The team pulled together to knock out some of the easier projects to improve things and the FOB mayor put together several improvement projects that required hiring local nationals and purchasing supplies to get done. Slowly but surely, things have gotten better and PM visits aren’t any big deal at all.

The Air Force sent down a meteorologist to train up a few folks on how to take meteorological readings and send up accurate reports that would help them in weather prediction in the area. There are a few Air Force folks permanently attached to our team here, but we are used to them, so having the weatherman here was interesting. It is a very different war for them, that’s for sure.

Visitors from the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) are great. They have so much to offer the folks in our area of operations and there is so much that needs to be done that when the PRT folks come, it’s a busy time. There are trips into town to visit the mayor, the business center, conduct agricultural seminars, discuss projects for water, sewage, electricity, etc. All good stuff, all stuff that makes life better in our area for the people that live here.

When visitors arrive, I try hard to either greet them at the airfield or to meet them at the TOC when they are dropped off. After welcoming them and giving them time to drop off their gear (helmets, armor, bags, etc.) I immediately give them an orientation tour of the FOB. The best way to do it is to walk up to the top of one of the bunkers. From there, I can easily point out where everything is located and discuss the hours of operation of most things, go over the do’s and don’ts of the FOB and answer their questions. The commander has received many compliments on our reception of visitors and that’s because we try hard to make them welcome and not just jam them into a CHU (containerized housing unit) and forget about them.

Some will get an operations brief or an intell brief, some are linking up with one of the specialized teams on the FOB, others are just stopping off for a couple of days to do some specific task or project. All of them, though, are bringing something to our team that enhances our ability to accomplish the mission. Therefore, they all get star treatment.