Preperation

Things are accelerating now. My company had been negotiating with the Army to get a support contract in place, and this was taking a while. We've known about it for months, but a lot of paper pushing needs to happen before they ship civilians to a warzone. All of that changed last week with a scathing email from the brigade commander wondering where his radios and support guys were, and why people were dragging their feet. This lit a pretty effective fire under management's collective ass, and they opened up a huge budget and starting rushing everything. Our first guy will probably have boots on the ground by next Thursday, which is a hell of a turnaround time. I will be following in due course after some training.

I'm going to be spending an indefinite amount of time in Afghanistan starting at the end of October and going through... well... indefinitely. Less than 4 months is all I know. So there's a lot I should be doing to "get my house in order" for the trip, and I'm not sure that I'm hitting everything.

Personal
It turns out that it's standard operating procedure to give Power of Attorney to someone before deploying on a trip like this. So if the roof caves in and needs to be fixed, or my motorcycle's repossessed, or I win the lottery, someone can be an effective proxy for me and I'm not trying to conduct my personal life over a satellite link to the Internet. So in the near future (next week?) I need to talk to a lawyer and give aforementioned power to my sister, Mary Kathryn. She's the most responsible person I know.

On top of that, it was suggested that I get a will and a living will drawn up. I feel like the will's not really necessary as my estate is ridiculously simple, and would just pass on over to my folks in the event of my (highly unlikely) demise over there. However, they've got me thinking about the living will.

Someone also mentioned forming a trust and giving all of my assets to the trust to prevent taxation upon my death, but c'mon; I'm not exactly a tax haven kind of guy. And again, my estate, once liquidated, might cover one awesome vacation, or a moderately priced car. Hopefully my beneficiaries will do something fun with it (in the highly unlikely event of my demise).

Training
The Army provides a training course for contractors called CRC down at Ft. Benning, Georgia. It stands for CONUS Replacement Center, which isn't a very descriptive name. Apparently they issue us a lot of safety gear (body armor, kevlar helmet, sleeping bag, etc., etc., socks), and train us how to use it. I'm sure even the military socks are like any other sock, one foot at a time. I tend to start with the right.

This is scheduled for October 24th, and I'll likely be shipping out immediately afterward. However, I'm on the standby list to go earlier, so maybe I'll be gone even earlier. Either way, it's likely I'm missing Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Packing
How do you pack for something like this? I mean, I'm pretty sure I won't need a bathing suit in Afghanistan in winter and my pea coat from Old Navy is probably a little under kill for the cold. I'm going to get issued a bunch of stuff at CRC, but I have no idea what all I'm going to get.

Yesterday I went to a surplus store with a buddy down in Ft. Bragg. He's shipping out in the next week or so and already did a lot of his shopping. He walked me through the necessities:

• 5-11 Ripstop Pants
• Some kind of wicking fabric t-shirts for an under layer
• 5-11 Tactical Gloves as it will be cold and we will still need to work with our hands.
• Waterproof storage bags
• CamelBak
  
• Caps
• Bed roll
• Decent sleeping bag
• Fleece jacket
• Mosquito Netting (I'm a little skeptical of this one)
• Boots (already ordered a pair, cross your fingers they fit)
• Silk weight base layer
• Polypropelene outer wear
• Gerber multitool

The list goes on and on. Basically I'm going to have a big green wardrobe at the end of this which will allow me to live in the elements indefinitely... Assuming I had any idea how to live in the elements.

So as this thing progresses I'll be posting updates here. I will have Internet access while I'm over there, so I will be checking email and hopefully posting. For those of you in Birmingham or Rochester, I'm hoping to have a going away bash at each. I wonder if we could do something at my house in the 'Ham? We have this great deck upon which we never entertain.