Quick one tonight; I’ll regale you with a lengthier yarn on the morrow.

I am sitting in my Contained Housing Unit at the moment, watching West Kentucky have their upset hopes dashed by Drake after leading for the almost the entire game. The service which brings this to me is the Armed Forces Network, or AFN.

I’m a bit afraid that in telling you all of these nice little amenities that we have, I am making life on a combat zone base seem almost cushy. Disneyland under martial law, as it were. Not the case, I assure you. However, the Department of Defense (DoD) has done a few things to make living conditions better than any previous war. In my humble opinion, this is a smart move, one which has served to keep morale generally pretty good, in spite of a long, difficult, laborious war, 5 years and one day old as I write this.

The AFN is one of those amenities, and like most of the DoD’s attempts at entertainment, this one is imperfect, but generally succeeds. AFN comes over satellite (perched on the top of one of our city’s canisters), and offers eight networks, each with a generic name like “AFN Prime,” “AFN News,” etc. The programming is a combination of live stuff (like the basketball game I am watching now) and delayed showings of high-demand shows like “American Idol.” They’ll repeat the big stuff a few times over the weekend.

(And West Kentucky sinks the three at the buzzer for the win!)

On the AFN, there are no regular commercials, i.e., for Michelin tires or GEICO or other products. The commercial commercials are replaced by messages aimed at Army members, teaching me the following important lessons:

1. Don’t go out with a prostitute and then divulge to her top secret information. (Darn; I’ll cross that one off of my to-do list.)
2. Don’t fall asleep while driving. (Good advice.)
3. Don’t eat questionable food from non-authorized sources.
4. Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products (you know, the kind that the Army sells tax-free at the PX a half-mile away) cause cancer, and should not be used by any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine. Apparently the message here is: buy them from AAFES all you want, but just don’t use them.
5. Do take advantage of the many educational opportunity afforded to Army members and their spouses.

About every other commercial is about sexual harassment, how to report it, how to avoid it, why you should not engage in it. These commercial, presumably to make them “fair and balanced,” always include an example of some heavily-eyelinered female boss making comments to and about a male co-worker. This part of the commercials is extremely contrived, unbelievable, and therefore, rather entertaining. The Army has an ongoing war against sexual harassment, which results in the AFN commercials, plus quarterly “POSH” training (”Prevention Of Sexual Harassment”), and a few other programs with similarly tortured acronyms. I wonder if it helps?

At the top of every hour, there will be a news report given by a very scared-looking enlisted Army Specialist (the look on his face says “I thought I signed up to kill bad guys”) speaking in a thick southern accent. These “news” pieces very carefully avoid mentioning any real news—no Hillary or Obama here, no Baghdad bombings, or New York Governor shenanigans. Instead, they are oft-repeated pieces on service-specific topics, such as how a certain group of sailors has practiced overboard rescues on dummies, and the segment will include interviews with sailors who state confidently how they are now better prepared should a real-life situation like this come up. Fun stuff.

Overall, the AFN is kind of quaint, one of those things which will linger in the background of my memories about this deployment, kind of like the water bottles and the Iraqi Fried Chicken.

We had a bit of drama with the AFN when I first got here. Every night at around 8 PM, the signal would go out. There were some bad dust storms around that time, so I thought maybe that was it, but after a few nights, including some clear ones, it became obvious that something else was afoot. After a lengthy investigation and a near riot, it was discovered that a certain low-ranking enlisted marine living in the cans had the satellite box (the one which served our entire complex) in his room. This equipment took up one of his precious electrical outlets (we only have six per room), and when he wanted to play the X-Box, he’d just unplug us all. The night it nearly came to blows, he unplugged the satellite just as a basketball game was nearing its fruition.

When this marine was confronted about the issue, he initially simply refused to answer his door. Eventually, he had to open up, and was ordered to plug the thing back in. He refused the order, and shut his door. A couple of days later, Lance Corporal Snuffy was on his way to a lovely new dwelling in Tent City (where he wouldn’t be bothered with having to prioritize the electrical outlets in his room, for fairly obvious reasons). The night that he moved out was the night that we got the torrential rainstorms. Wonder where his X-Box is now?

Alrighty then, it’s late here on the other side of the planet. See you 4PM-ers later on. Write some stuff on here while I sleep, will ya? And go Huskies!