At this point I start to wonder if the Army hasn’t really outsmarted us all; if all the training at alien-like landscapes for city-slickers like myself really has effectively desensitized my mind and morale to the culture shock of deployment. Maybe the sleeping in aluminum-framed mushy bunks, showering in cold water behind fluttering curtains, and eating food that doesn’t taste quite right is all part of the Army job in America for a reason, and not for lack of funding and planning. But to deploy most of the world away and have the exact conditions as the usual field problem?

There is a bar where Marines en-route home after finishing their tour can drink two beers ever 20 hours and sing karaoke. There is a BX (base exchange) with a scaled selection of even the best shoppette back home.

Or maybe it’s the fact that even in Kyrgyzstan I manage to have a wifi connection at my bunk and Dr. Pepper and the Stanley Cup playoffs in the chow hall.

Either way, at this point, everything is ‘no big deal.’ The commercial planes had pretty decent food and good movies. We are now just stuck in the cliché Army hurry-up-and-wait status. A flash of light at 0200 local time and they started collecting information for our flight that was scheduled for 0600. An hour later the flight was canceled, for some unknown reason.

Kyrgyzstan outside Manas Air Force Base, in the shade of snow-capped Himalayas, may be in the middle of a bloody coup, but life at deployment-in-transition is melancholy. There are no briefings to attend. There are no drills to rehearse. There is a copious amount of American food, and the only thing we’re killing is time.

The hardest part right now is switching my sleep schedule by 13 hours. It’s dark outside, so my brain is convinced it’s time for sleep. But my internal clock is skeptical, knowing my circadian rhythms are punching in for the day back home at 9 a.m. Most of the guys are dealing with this by simply sleeping the entire day and night.

I’m also trying this caffeine detox thing. I’ve had a single cup of coffee since we left, compared to the usual 4-6 cups a day. The headaches didn’t start until today, and I think that will be the worst of it. Once my body clock, like my Windows laptop, gets set to the Astana time zone I’ll get back to a modest regiment. But for now I’m reaping the benefits of a fully stocked PSP kit, a 110v outlet for my laptop, months of ripping movies to a 500gb hard drive and multiple books.

Inshallah, we’ll leave soon.

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