New Year's at Howz-e Madad

Ah, New Year's Eve. The end of one year, the beginning of the next. A time to reflect on what has past, and plan for improvements on what is to come. Our NYE, here at FOB Howz-e Madad, started with a new hairdo, and ended with a few thousand pounds of explosives.

Sgt. Allen and Sgt. Mora came over to hang out ... Sgt. Allen was my tent mate, up until this morning when she left, and Sgt. Mora is a mortar battalion guy (we met him our first or second day on the FOB and he let us play with mortar charges, so we liked him immediately!) ... with Jason, Nathan, the Chief, Tali-Dan, JBhad, and I. JBhad couldn't hang, and left early, but Nate, Jason, and Tali-Dan spent a good portion of the evening looking for ninja outfits, designing custom flags for Nate-opia, and generally screwing off on my computer. (This was the day of the sore pooping FB status from me ... that was from (most likely) Tali-Dan.) The rest of us just sat around chatting and having a lovely time.

Fairly early in the evening, it was decided that Sgt. Allen needed a new hairdo, so Tali-Dan and Nate went a little insane with the styling glue and she ended up with fairly insane hair. I have pictures, but I'm not certain she is going to appreciate me posting them on my blog, so I'll post them of FB later. :)

I should have written this just after NYE, because I have to try and recreate the evening in order, and it's not working out very well at the moment! (No alcohol involved at all ...)

Anywho, we have a new firefighter named Chris, who is from South Africa. You know those little towels you can get that are completely dehydrated, so when you put them in water, the expand and actually become a towel? Well, Chris has a package of those that are apparently used by strippers in South Africa to ... well ... clean up. He is telling Nate and Tali-Dan about this, both of whom are fascinated, so they decide to see if they will expand, using only saliva. On the count of three, both boys pop a dehydrated towel in their respective mouths. Several minutes, a bit of bottled water, a little spitting, and quite a bit of flapping heads later, voila! Both Nate and Tali-Dan have towels hanging from their mouths. So now they both have towels to bathe themselves with, except both towels were hydrated from spit. So what does Nate do? Yeah, he wipes his face. That's on video too. Perhaps it was one of those "you had to be there" things, but rest assured, it was hilarious.

One of the cool things about being the fire department is that people tell us stuff. So we were informed of the planned midnight "festivities" several hours in advance, and knew to stay up. If I had gone to bed when I had planned (regular time), what came at midnight would have scared the hell out of me and I probably would have wet myself.

So, I live on a small forward operating base in a war zone, in case you missed that part. Sometimes the bad guys get in some hits on the good guys. That is the horrible part about being here ... knowing that, at any time, someone you know could be hurt or gone forever. The fun part about being here is watching the bad guys get what is coming to them. And that's what happened on NYE. The nice men and women of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF is the NATO mission that we are all technically part of ...) made some bad guys go away. And they did it with A LOT of kablowies! It was SPECTACULAR! Bright flashes of light, followed by the sounds of in-ground swimming pools being placed with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately, I have no pictures. I wasn't fast enough. I did get some sound though, and that's on my FB page.

What was funny about the whole well-timed offensive, is that not everyone knew about it. So there were a number of people in the DynCorp area of camp that spent a couple of hours in the bunkers, scared out of their minds. I suppose that isn't really funny, but we were all standing outside watching the festivities, without a care in the world, while our poor coworkers were all huddled together thinking the world was coming to an end ... there's a little humor there.

So there you go ... New Year's was rung in with many thousands of pounds of explosives at midnight. I'm not sure a traditional fireworks show will ever be enough again.