FEATURES It’s Too Darn HOT!
Well, I am back from Afghanistan. But am now starting to reflect a little on my time out there. And of course when you do that you start to look at what you did and how you did it. ‘Did I do well enough?’ I wanted to go and test myself...’How did I fare?’
by Sergeant Alex Ford T
hen on Wednesday we had our medals parade. And the Officer Commanding of our deployment gave a short
final speech just before we fell out to rejoin our families. They are not his own words – they belong to Theodore Roosevelt – but to hear them... well, they made me feel a lot better about how I tackled the deployment.
“It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”. Theodore Roosevelt, Paris, 23 Apr 1910
I could blather on about the heat and it has to be said that the abiding memory I have of Afghanistan is the heat. I expected it to be hot, but I had no idea just how hot it would get in high summer. I remember days in Saudi in the summer there, 40 degree heat, but the time actually spent out in it was very little. We ended up living in a proper, purpose-built accommodation block with all the mod cons that you associate with brick buildings – running water, toilets that flush, air-conditioning... and travelling to and from work in air conditioned vehicles.
And then, as I was working on fibre-optic based equipment that required a dust free environment, we worked in negative pressure cabins which were of course... air- conditioned. So, ultimately the time out in the heat was maybe two hours at the most. Then we would also be in the safety of an air base. No body armour. No helmets. No blast-pants needed.
It was very different in Afghan. It got up to similar temperatures as in Saudi – maybe a degree or two higher. The difference there was that there is just no escape from it. The generators that provide the power for the site couldn’t cope with a load of air conditioners running from it, so we were limited to just one or two dotted about. And they are single units that are not really designed to fight the heat of the sun on the tents – even with a sunshade, the tents get stiflingly hot. You can only really stay inside them until about 10am, and then it’s just too hot.
No. The only place that was really cool was the chef’s refrigeration unit. The next coolest place was the Ops Room, which has recently been relocated from a tent to a purpose built ‘Hab’. This is a small hut built of Hesco (wire cages filled with gravel, dust and sand) and then with a steel roof and more Hesco on top. It’s also got an aircon unit which helped to keep the temperature at a steady level. The problem with this was that it was fairly small and could only really accommodate people who NEEDED to be in there rather than people who wanted to be there to cool down.
14
Envoy Winter 2011
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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