I've been in combat life saver training for the last couple of mornings. The first day was death by powerpoint. Today we had to stick IV lines in our partner's arm. It was intimidating at first, but after watching it several times it didn't seem so bad. Unfortunately my partner failed to get either of my arms, or the instructor's arm. He kept sticking the needle through the vein. That's an easy mistake to make. I did that the first time on his arm as well. A couple of people I saw forgot to hold the vein when the pulled out the needle and blood went squirting everywhere. That was both funny and stomach curling at the same time.
My days are very busy now. I regularly work until almost 10pm. And I'm usually the first one to leave. There's a great deal of little stuff to do, and I'm working two projects now. Last night I was trying to figure out why rent wasn't getting paid on one of our contracts. It's a paperwork nightmare.
I've come to realize that we are fighting this war, from Kabul, mostly with our checkbook. Or at least it seems that way from my command, NTM-A. Everyone here is managing contracts. The higher your rank, the more money you are managing. The budget for CSTC-A/NTM-A is about a billion dollars a month (literally). And I don't think that covers all the salaries of the government officials we are paying. I've heard that we're going to be paying their salaries for 25 years. The side effect of that is that if we need more afghans, we can't just get some General to approve the new position, since it literally takes an act of the U.S. Congress.
My command here is trying to be more proactive at telling the world what we are doing. If you interested, you might check out the news on the website:
http://www.ntm-a.com/
A picture of the first failed IV attempt:
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