I’d like to thank CBS News for their brief story, “How One Soldier’s Strategy Turned Tide in Iraq” Thursday night. There is another link here.

In related news, I’m late ordering “A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq.” But I should be getting it in time for Christmas. I’m looking forward to reading it.

So, there I was, alone at the keyboard one night in Austria.  Staying awake? No problem! The biggest challenge was remembering the German keyboard layout; the ‘y’ and the ‘z’ positions were reversed, the shift keys were displaced outward a bit, a lot of shifting was required to type punctuation that´s normally available without shifting, that sort of thing.

Actually, no, the biggest challenge was figuring out what to write.  I wanted to write about the hikes I´d planned to take and the mountains I´d planned to climb.  Instead I got in round-about fashion whatever virus happened to be going around the local day-care.  Hopefully I´ll have better luck next trip!

     Great going, Capt Sullenberger! You handled a difficult emergency procedure well.  You know what they say, any landing you can walk away from. . . .

     Perhaps the new Sullenberger Corollary to that rule would be ". . . or the passengers and you can swim or boat away from. . ." is a good landing! The best part was walking up and down the aisles making certain everyone else was off safe. 

     Given the good outcome, I think it might actually have been fun to have been aboard (except I would have ended up losing my laptop as I egressed the plane).  Oh, well.  One can’t be everywhere.  I’ll have to settle for the one time I pointed out to some pilots that our small turboprop passenger plane’s cabin pressure wasn’t enabled. 

     Thanks to LifePundit for inspiring me to write this post!

20090119 Update:  I am remiss in not giving credit to the co-pilot, the flight attendants, and indeed to the passengers who by all accounts sounded like they remained pretty calm during the event.  The Captain may get most of the credit, but the Airbus is a crewed airplane, and whatever the crew did or did not do that helped the Captain land entitles them to an heroic part in this event as well.

It’s good to be back in the USA!

     Since no one died, I can say I’m glad to have been through it.  Call me insane.  Natural disasters (or natural near-disasters) don’t really frighten me, and this is probably not much of a surprise to anyone, least of all my friend the LifePundit.  I regard them as problems requiring solutions, if it becomes severe enough to warrant. 

     Starting at about 0026, a pretty good sized jolt hit the house, followed by some wobbling back and forth.  It knocked a few glasses over and kicked a book out of the shelf.  It also toppled my wife’s stereo speakers. 

     Initially I thought a large construction truck was driving down the street.  This was common last year as a new neighborhood went up in the lots next to us.  They shook the house a little bit.  However, when my wife bolted upright and said "Earthquake!" and started to grab the family heirloom, I shouted a triumphant "YES!"  I finally got to play in an earthquake! No more sleeping through the little 3-point-somethings the New Madrid Fault offered or even the 4.X on the California Central Coast back in 1995.  This wasn’t exactly the big kahuna, but it’s about as big as it could have been and not have been deadly.  In any case, it was all over within short order, only about 45 seconds of shaking. 

     Since I’ve always wanted to experience an earthquake of decent size and no one got hurt, I’m declaring victory with regard to this objective in my life. 

     I once saw a blog quote generator come up with something to the effect "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."  I need to get in touch with the author of that quote and set him/her straight on both counts. 

     As it happened, I rolled home and straight into an exercise! I’d like to say I swapped my ‘Battle Rattle’ for a chemical defense ensemble, but rather the chemical defense ensemble went on underneath the Interceptor body armor.  Mercifully it’s been a cool June here in northern Japan. 

     It certainly was fun to get a few flights in, too, even if the weather obscured everything but the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. 

     Now back to the grind!

     Thank for the tip, Mr Patriquin!

     At the leader’s signal, everyone would commence eating.  Did I mention everyone eats with their hands? Yes, the glass was the only utensil available, and you ate the food straight off the banana leaf.  In the past, whomever ate the fastest literally got the most, so in that sense it could get to be a kind of fight.  Today a roasted pigs’ head made an appearance at the table, it didn’t last very long!  In my handful of experiences with Boodle  Fighting, there has always been more than enough food.  Sometimes our hosts have to go find someone else to finish eating the food.  It’s certainly a fairly quick way to eat a lot of food. 

     Now for the food critic portion:  I usually eat the rice and the noodles.  The noodles are about like spaghetti, just cut shorter.  Today the cook put some sort of spice on them which tasted great! I like the adobo, but the cuts you tend to get here contain a lot of fat (not much goes to waste in this country).  Without utensils it’s difficult to trim the fat, so I didn’t eat a lot of the adobo today.  The fish and calamari was reportedly good, I didn’t fight very hard for the seafood, though. 

     I’m thinking about importing the Boodle Fight home.  I think I’ll use some sort of finger food to substitute for items we Westerners tend to eat from a dinner plate, though.  I’ll probably use pizza and finger sandwiches. 

     The second significant event today occurred while I was making coffee at the team house.  I’m not normally at this particular station, but I’ve been here several times a month or so ago, and I’m always billeted at one particular team house here.  As I poured water into the coffee machine, one of the guys who lives here more permanently asked if I’d looked into the reservoir before I’d poured.  

     "Of course I hadn’t," I said.  "Who does that?" I figured something was up, that seemed like an awfully odd question. 

     He then explained that last month they’d found a dead gecko in the reservoir.  Apparently it had become trapped, died, and it’s spirit had slipped away some time well prior, as the poor lizard was fairly well decomposed before one of them found it.  One of the co-workers complained of being sick for two days just due to the mental image.  One of my teammates mentioned there’d been a film on the coffee and a slightly odd taste.  No one really suspected anything, though; they thought it was just the water.    

     Naturally I asked if it’d been in there the last time I’d been here, and they assured me it certainly had been.  So there you have it, my teammates, co-workers, and I had all been drinking dead gecko coffee for who knows how long! 

     I think I’ve just developed another new habit–I’ll check the coffee machine before pouring the water into the reservoir! At least while I’m still in this country!

     I think I’ll be redirecting my search efforts.