Free NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan by David Kaelin Page B

You will be dismissed. If your company likes you, they might send you back. If not, it’s the unemployment line.” I hated formations when I was in the Army and I hated them at CRC. We also had a series of mandatory classes such as country familiarization, first aid, unexploded ordnance, and mine identification. The CRC cadre marched us up to a training area for these classes, which lasted from 0600hrs to 1600hrs over the course of two days. The instructors were mostly cool, old, retired, senior non-coms. The classes were useful especially for those who had never been in the military or first time deployers to OEF and OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom).
    You’d be surprised the amount of stupid shit that people will do in Afghanistan. “Hey look! An unexploded mortar round. Let’s play catch with it!” I’ve seen people do it. I always ran the other way. We also had mandatory computer training on sexual harassment, rape prevention, fraud, waste and abuse, and a whole array of other useless information.
    Once CRC cleared us, we drove to Baltimore Washington International Airport where we caught a military flight to Manis, Kyrgyzstan. Winters in the Kyrgyz Republic are harsh. When I debarked the aircraft, I nearly froze in place. Manis is an air force base near the Kyrgyz capital city of Bishkek. It is a central transit hub for contractors, individual military personnel, and units deploying to Afghanistan and re-deploying home to the States. It is a small base with a cadre that acted as a way station for folks entering and exiting Afghanistan.
    After three days, we were finally manifested for a flight to Bagram. We’d flown into Manis during a major troop transition. Units were coming and going constantly. The military had priority on flights. Contractors were bumped regularly. It didn’t matter to me how long we stayed at Manis. Our uplift started the moment we landed at Manis.
    Uplift is a portion of wages based on location. It was broken down into two parts: a post differential pay and a hardship pay. The rate is designated by the Department of State. OEF was designated as 35/35, meaning that there was a 35-percent uplift for post differential and a 35-percent uplift for hardship. Add it up and I was getting a 70-percent uplift on my base salary. If I was offered 93,500 U.S. dollars per year, multiply that by .70, and my annual salary would be around 156,000 U.S. dollars. If the Army wanted me to sit in Manis, that was on them. It was their dime.

Phoenix Rising
    December 2005–Spring 2006
    We flew into Bagram at noontime. I stayed in Bagram for about a week helping with the main Property Book Office but generally doing nothing. There were only three PBUSE stations at that time. Property Book Unit Supply Enhanced (PBUSE) was the new game in town for property accountability. The Army had replaced SPBS with this new online property accountability system. It was more user-friendly than the old SPBS boxes but if the main database systems at Fort Lee went down, the whole thing shut down. Other than that, I liked it. It was basically SPBS with a graphical user interface. I had been trained on the system while working for KBR when the Army had sent a training team to Afghanistan with a three-week course.
    After the course, we had converted all of our SPBS boxes to PBUSE systems. It was a fairly easy transition. We loaded all of our data onto a 3.5” floppy disk. Our military counterpart delivered it to Fort Lee, Virginia. Fort Lee downloaded the data. Abracadabra! We were now PBUSE.
    Within a week, Jim Carrel assigned me to Camp Phoenix which was located just outside of Kabul on Jalalabad Road, J-bad for short. It was a medium-sized base set up to house about six hundred personnel. The Army being the Army crammed over a thousand folks onto the camp. Rooms were at a premium. There were actually people hot-bunking, i.e., sharing beds in shifts.
    We convoyed up to Phoenix with the Army. When we arrived, I was introduced to Rudy,