Welcome to another installment at Norseman Creative! I hope you enjoy this look back on an extremely formative experience I had, my first deployment in 2016. Check out the shop for merch, as the low-effort meme campaign on the Norseman Creative Instagram page will continue until the last copies of all my books are shipped from my house. You have been warned. Enjoy!
Ten years ago today I landed at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar to kick off my first of three deployments supporting the Global War on Terror. By 2016, the U.S. Military had been engaged continuously in the Middle East for 26 years, starting with the Gulf War (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm) in 1990 and 1991. U.S. involvement continued with the follow-on No-Fly Zone enforcement operations over Iraq that continued until Operation: Iraqi Freedom kicked off in March of 2003. When I finally joined the fray, the GWOT entered its fifteenth year, and life on the main operating bases in the Gulf Coast Council states had fallen into a boring lull.
While Qatar was my first deployment, it was not the first time I had volunteered to deploy. In late 2014 I volunteered for a deployment tasking to Afghanistan, which my commander denied, citing my lack of experience. A fair assessment, as I commissioned only about six months prior. I tried again with my new commander in the autumn of 2015, and again was denied.
2016 turned out to be my year. I returned to Texas from a family vacation on New Year’s Day, met up with my girlfriend at the time, and woke up the next morning single. Ten days after that, I had deployment orders and two weeks to get my stuff together and on a flight to Qatar. Perusing the journal I kept at the time, I re-discovered how angsty I was in those days. The writing is “cringe” (as the kids say) and it takes everything within me to keep from casting it into the trash.
As angsty and cringey as that journal might have been, my 2016 tour at Al Udeid was formative. The fast-paced environment at the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing meant I had to adapt quickly or fail, and there was a ton of opportunity for growth. My flight and I awarded and managed a massive budget of construction contracts, but what sticks with me a decade later is not necessarily the paperwork we did together. It’s all the other stuff I learned.
My education started almost immediately on landing in Qatar, as my deployment mistakes started before I even left Texas. I showed up vastly over-encumbered, with the maximum amount of luggage I was allowed to bring along according to my orders. Dragging two-hundred pounds of luggage across the rocky, dusty ground outside the Al Udeid Personnel Terminal, my flight spotted me, helped me load my bags into the back of our beat-to-shit dodge pickup, and then immediately started ribbing me.
It was immediately clear to me that poking fun at me was the flight’s way of checking out my personality, to see if I could hack it or if I was going to pull rank and make the next six months suck for everyone. Eager to not have a shitty six months, I accepted their ribbing with what I hope was grace. Of course, my grace on that first round of teasing opened me up to their good natured ribbing for the duration of the deployment.
My deployment wasn’t all (making) fun (of me) and games, although we did play a lot of ultimate frisbee in the parking lot behind the gym. Reading my old journal, I was reminded of the sheer amount of work we had to do, and how I struggled to keep pace when I first got there.
Thanks to a congressional inquiry into the amount of mold in the Al Udeid living areas and the operations to annihilate ISIS, our team was swamped with construction projects from the moment I landed to the moment I left. To be honest, I wasn’t fully prepared for the scope of work. Our flight divvied up the actual procurement workload evenly, more-or-less, which meant that I had a large portfolio of projects to keep tabs on, as well as the normal leadership responsibilities inherent to being a commissioned officer.
One of the more important projects my flight worked on was actually one of the cheapest. A squadron of B-52 bombers were slated to start operating out of Al Udeid a couple months after I arrived. A couple months before they were scheduled to land, a problem arose: B-52s are massive airplanes with a gigantic wingspan. Nobody had bothered to check and make sure the bombers would actually fit on the runway.
After some hemming and hawing at levels far above that of a Second Lieutenant, the order came to my flight to expand the runway in time for the B-52 squadron to land on schedule. We were told this was of the highest importance to the Wing Commander and the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar. A cursory reading of my military award packages from that time frame would lead one to believe I took the project, awarded the contract, expanded the runway, landed the B-52s, and then personally bombed the daesh back to the Stone Age on my own. In reality, however, I was merely a conduit through which the project flowed.
My flight worked together to get the project completed quickly. After we started digging into the problem, we made some helpful revelations. First and most important was the runway was the Qatari Air Force’s responsibility, so we could skip a few U.S. contracting steps to get it done quickly. Second, the Qatari Air Force had a contractor on base specifically for runway maintenance. One meeting with them, and we had the runway temporarily expanded for way less money than the Air Force had estimated and in way less time.
I would later learn through the grape vine the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar was so pleased with our quick thinking they came to the base to express their gratitude. Why the Ambassador was so interested was never made completely clear to me, especially since rather than coming to shake our hands, the Ambassador went to the Civil Engineering Squadron and shook a couple of their hands instead.
Within the Civil Engineering Squadron, my flight worked closely with a small team of Air Force personnel and private contractors hired under the Air Force Contractor Augmentee Program (AFCAP). Their responsibility was to monitor the technical construction details of the various projects going up around base. My flight’s responsibility was to enforce contract terms and conditions on the contractors completing these projects.
Balancing the relationship between the Civil Engineers monitoring the projects, the contractors, and ourselves could be tricky. The relationship was made trickier by the government’s propensity to half-ass design drawings or try to enforce U.S. standards on vendors who had no experience or capacity to meet those standards. On several occasions, the vendors would complain to us the Civil Engineers were ordering them to do things outside the scope of their contract. An equal, if not greater, number of times the Civil Engineers complained to us the vendors were not meeting the terms of their contracts.
One afternoon, towards the end of my deployment, one of the contractors expressed frustration that the Civil Engineer Non Commissioned Officer and AFCAP contractor responsible for approving his work were dragging their feet on a specific project. As far as construction projects went this one was pretty simple, they were putting the finishing touches on a new veterinary office for the Army veterinarians responsible for managing the animals on base. The small building was just four exterior walls on a concrete pad with a handful of interior rooms, a little bit of wiring, and plumbing for handwashing stations and sinks.
The NCO had eagerly volunteered to oversee this particular project, so I was confused as to why she would be dragging her feet getting final approvals done. In order to solve this mystery, I went on the next site visit.
When I arrived, I met the CE NCO, the contractor representative, and a visibly annoyed Army Veterinarian/Captain who really wanted to move into their new building and get to work. The building was virtually complete, and had even been cleaned thoroughly. As we walked through the building, the CE NCO scrutinized every little detail. Finally I just asked her what the problem was.
One thing you have to know about deployments is there are semi-wild domestic dogs and cats that roam around basically every deployed base. General Order Number One forbids U.S. military personnel from doing a lot of things, including treating these animals like pets. If the animals are useful as pest control, they are often captured, vaccinated, and sterilized in order to keep the population numbers down while still hunting pests. U.S. service members quite frequently ignore this order. Sometimes they even make social media groups and pages dedicated to these adopted dogs and cats.
Another thing you have to know is that, for the military veterinarian “taking care of the animals on base” doesn’t just mean providing for the health of the Military Working Dogs. They also have their own pest control mandate. If the animal control team on base captures a cat that is too used to eating human food and therefore not catching rats and mice, the cat is brought to the veterinarian and euthanized. In the case one of these dogs or cats becomes too popular and the service members flaunt their disregard for General Order Number One via social media, that animal is hunted down and similarly dispatched.
The problem the NCO had was when she eagerly took on the new veterinary office, she was under the impression the Army Vets would operate the same way an urban veterinarian with a bleeding heart operates: every animal is our best friend, a sacred companion, virtually a person to be cherished. Army Veterinarians operate more like a mix between a hard-nosed ranch veterinarian and Dale Gribble: animals have a purpose and if they perform that purpose they get medical care. If the animals aren’t performing that purpose, they need to be exterminated.
Upon realizing she played a role in the eventual murder of someone’s favorite deployment cat, the NCO thought she could prevent the building from opening. I pointed out that the animal control operations still occurred, with poisons, shotguns, and air-rifles. Allowing them to be captured and evaluated provided them a chance at living, albeit without their reproductive organs. She halfheartedly tried to argue, and in the end I ordered the building accepted by the government and allowed the Army to move their veterinarians in.
Balancing the relationship between the U.S. Air Force and our many contractors was a necessary part of my job. That first deployment helped me understand how to strike the balance so everyone’s needs were met as often as possible. It wasn’t always possible to make everyone happy, and in those cases we just had to revert to what the contract said to do.
Within the Contracting Squadron, one of my biggest struggles was a personality clash with the Contracting Squadron Commander. The Squadron Commander and I never really seemed to mesh well, for reasons I never figured out. A month into the deployment, it felt like I was being pulled into his office every other day for some counseling on something I was doing wrong or other. This frustrated the hell out of me, because sometimes it felt like I was given guidance to do something, I would go out and do it, and the next time I was counseled it was because I somehow did that thing incorrectly in yet another way.
Many times, I thought his feedback was nit-picky and wholly irrelevant. He didn’t like the chair I sat in during meetings with contractors, or he didn’t appreciate the order in which I handed water bottles out. I would fix whatever he didn’t like, and the next time we spoke there would be something new to fix. It was exhausting and exasperating.
Frustrating as that was, I learned how to grit my teeth and push through an environment of constant scrutiny. It also became clear that I didn’t even have to like everyone I worked with to still get the job done. I just needed a shared mission and a direction to run.
By the time I left Al-Udeid, I had almost seven months of hard-earned expertise under my belt, and a number of high-profile projects under my belt. Perhaps I returned to my home station a little too cocky for my own good, but what I learned during those 195 days in the desert poured a foundation that set me up for success for the remainder of my career. Hell, I’m still talking about it to this day.
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