Posts filed under 'My Photos'
Been a while since my last post, but we’re finished the main part of our training program here. In my opinion, the Sahrani troops still look more like a pack of recruits than real soldiers, but I guess they are as skilled as we were going to make them in the time we had. From here on, they get the occasional liaison and a stack of manuals and course outlines. To be honest, though, I think the guys they selected for the Royal Guards, who were mostly cops and paramilitaries before we came, are actually fairly good now. . . at least they can throw a grenade without blowing their arms off. (yes, it happened to one of the RACS guys)
As for us, we’re going to be here for a little while longer before we ship out, and that means a lot more leave. We still have some combined-arms exercises to do with the Sahrani troops every so often, but we’re not as busy as we’ve been the last while (that’s why I haven’t written), so I’ve been wandering the island looking around.
I joined the army partly for the GI Bill money in the first place, and I’m planning to take a major in history (remustering to the National Guard) when I get home, so a lot of my time in the last while has been taken up finding a little out about Sahrani’s history. The most interesting thing (to me, anyway) is that it was a British naval base during the Napoleonic wars, and there are occasional ruins that date back two the hundred years or so to that period. The main Royal Navy stations were in the south, and while the major port from back then at Dolores has been silted over quite a lot so that the main road isn’t really navigable by ships anymore, you can see that some of the walls of the old fortifications have been built into parts of modern buildings.
Also, there’s an island in North Sahrani (Obviously I didn’t go there, but it’s in the books and on the maps) that the British kept a base on until the Crimean War that was named after the Queen: ‘Victoria Island’. The British handed over their possessions to the Sahrani Monarchy in 1898, and when the Revolution came, the Northerners renamed the little island ‘Isla de Victoria’ and changed the meaning so that it reflected the victory of the revolution. If you ask me, history doesn’t need to be changed.
See you all sooner than later, I hope. I’ll try to write more often before we leave.
-Will
Below are some images I found in the archive, they’re a bit knocked about but are a nice taste of Sahrani from years gone by, one is from the late 19th century, the other from early 1920’s and the third seems to be early 1940’s, they’re all from near the lighthouse of Tlaloc village.
December 18th, 2006
The perils of having too much time on your hands.
We’ve been getting so much leave lately, since almost all of our training duties are over, that while I was out history-seeking (more about that later), Steve, whose dad is a sport fisherman in Virginia, decided to borrow a boat from a local fisherman and see what he could catch. Thing is, the Atlantic ain’t an artificial lake like Lake Virginia, and so a few hours later the boat turned up empty and we got called up to go out searching for him.
I was in the archives in Paraiso when they found me, and I guess I just don’t prefer spending the whole day in a chopper flying over tiny island after tiny island to being in there, poring over old document after old document. Call me weird; everyone else did.
Anyway, it did end up being the whole day, and then it ended up being all the next day, and it got cold that night, so we were all a little worried that if he wasn’t dead yesterday, floating in the water, he’d be dead now, but with any luck, we thought, he’d have managed to get to an island.
That turned out to be the case, and we found him in the afternoon of day two, on a little scrap of land that was really more of a sandbar than anything else, and he had managed to make a fire somehow. Turns out he had run the boat onto the beach, and then the tide had come in and the boat floated away. No tide on Lake Virginia, the landlubber. He had to burn all his fishing gear and his oars to stay warm overnight. We all had a good laugh. Can’t drive, can’t boat, didn’t catch any fish. Heck, I’ve been on the ocean all my life. He should have asked if I’d come.
I’d have said no, but he could have asked.
-Will
PS I’d bought a cheap video camera that I hadn’t had chance to use much so I decided to take it with me, it isn’t the best quality but captured some nice footage of Steve’s misery!
Download the video here
October 21st, 2006
Remember the whole ‘running into an MP hummer’ thing? Well, turns out that we didn’t hit it after all. This was news to us, because we were all pretty sure we were getting brought up on charges.
The story goes back a ways. You see, Sergeant Cooper was playing football (American Football) with us one day quite a while before we went on leave, and as he turned to receive a pass, he rolled his knee and blew out his ACL. Now, when they sent him home, instead of promoting someone here, they sent over a new fellow from the States.
This is where the story gets bad for us. Actually, I thought it was going to get bad for me right after it happened, because I’m the one who threw the brilliant pass. When I got called into Captain Armstrong’s office for that whole OPSEC thing (remember the pictures that got taken down?) I thought it was about that. Anyway, as soon as the new guy got here, he started to push people around. Mainly me. I guess he just has something against me, but damned if I could tell you what it is.
So this new guy, Sergeant Fenimore, sees the traffic cam footage somewhere, and he freaks out. . . as far as he’s concerned, this is what he needs to have our whole squad (a bunch of ‘troublemakers’ he says) up on charges.
Didn’t work out that way. Master Sergeant Williams works in the Motor Pool, you see, and when he heard that this was going on, he did what Fenimore should have done and what none of us even thought of. He actually looked at the cam footage and identified the vehicle. All of a sudden, there he was saying, “I just had one of my guys rotate the tires on that Hummer and there wasn’t a scratch on it.”
Second time this year I’ve been in Captain Armstrong’s office, and this time it was to ask me if I wanted him to move Sergeant Fenimore to another Platoon. I said no (of course). I just hope Fenimore doesn’t read this blog. . . 
September 8th, 2006
Today, me, Frank, Eddie and Steve were invited to play a bit of soccer with a bunch of guys from the Royal Guard. Sahrani is as crazy about soccer. Like everyone else, I played a bit of soccer as a kid in Kennebunkport, but we were all way more into Baseball and Hockey. . . and of course, when you say ‘Football’ here, it means something different than it does back in the USA. In any case, every kid here is almost always playing ‘football’ — by which I mean soccer. If there’s a flat space here more than a few yards wide, there’s some kids on it kicking a ball around.
So, basically we got our butts kicked and ended up buying the beer at the end of the day. Small price to pay for such a good time. I tell ya, if these guys ever have a World Cup team again, (they haven’t had one since 1993) they’re going to give everyone a run for their money. Sorry for the lousy pic, we were too busy playing to take any good pictures. In the pic though, you can see their goalie is wearing a Juan Antonio Samovar T-shirt. No, I don’t expect anyone to know who that is, (I didn’t) but if you ask these guys, he’s the greatest soccer player who ever lived. They made me watch some videos of him playing, as well as an interview in their language that I didn’t understand a word of.
Their national soccer legend is from Paraiso. You learn something new every day.
-Will
August 15th, 2006
Okay. . . as I promised, here’s a postcard from the island.
Okay, so I didn’t promise a postcard, but trust me, you don’t want to see the
pictures that got taken with my camera when we were on leave. . . I didn’t
know where the thing was most of the time, and it turned out that Steve had
got hold of it while we were barhopping, so there’s not really much worth
looking at. Well. . . actually, there’s nothing I’m going to show you,
because who knows who’s reading this.
I didn’t get it back until we were in the car on the way back to the base,
and shortly after that we found out that we were all in trouble for reckless
driving or some such thing. Who knew that rear-ending an MP hummer would be
such a bad idea, especially since they didn’t even notice it at the time?
Turns out that even Sahrani has traffic cams, and Lord knows what we’re
going to all end up doing as a result of this. Fortunately, the wheels of
military justice grind slow. . .
Anyway, as a result of all that, all you get is a postcard and a
description clipped, word for word, from the Sahrani Royal Ministry of
Tourism brochure I picked up. I take no credit for their English. . . I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.
“Kingdom of Sahrani is a beautiful place with the real diamond in its
heart - the capital, Paraiso. The city, where old time beautiful
architecture meets modern standard of modern living, the city that know past
and the future. There is many interesting places in Paraiso, where you can
relax or improve your knowledge of the history of our land.”
By the way, Frank wasn’t driving because he didn’t go with us. That was
actually Steve. Steve is the very picture of responsibility. (I don’t know
where the hell he got his driver’s qualification.)
-Will
PS Ok I will show you one picture from the camera, a bunch of us waiting at a bus stop to begin some barhopping, see how well we all blend in with the local scenery!
August 9th, 2006
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