A Few COR Weeks

So, before I became a commo guy working in S6 (which is my current assignment), and before I was screening people down at the ECP, I was an auditor.

Yes, like the guy who comes around when you've been cheating on your taxes. Exactly that kind of auditor, that everyone hates. But if you fail my audit, you can lose your contract with the government and stuff.

The government has all sorts of contracts with various civilian companies that they have decided they don't want soldiers doing. Like cooking. That is no longer handled by military cooks, but instead goes out to a contractor who does it for us. When our Army reserve unit was activated we were under the impression that we were coming to Afghanistan to do what we were trained to do: Run a post office.

However, because the Army likes to now contract everything, we arrived to Afghanistan only to realize that the job we set out to do is no longer available because all of the APOs (Army Post Offices) are now ran by civilians! It was mass confusion and chaos was rampant! Because now you have lots of Soldiers with no jobs and too much free time. So, they came up with roles for us to fill, but splitting the workload of the current troops. Which is nice. It gives us purpose, and lightens their burdens.

The main job of a Postal unit is to do mail. However, because of the contract that the civilians have with the Army, we are not allowed to help them with the mail. We can't sort, etc etc. There are still a few Army ran post offices that we might have sent some Soldiers to, but the rest are purely civilian. So, we fill the gaps. We go to the various FOBs and COBs (Forward Operating Base and Combat Operating Base, respectively) that don't have a post office of any kind and set one up for them. We don't stay long and don't visit often, but we make it available for them to send out their mail.

The mail that comes in hits the main hub, gets rerouted to smaller hubs & final destinations, and then delivered to the Unit's mail room (UMR) and then on to the addressee. The mail has to be inspected at all of these different locations, but it is divided into two jobs. The end point, where the mail is stored before delivery at the UMR, is inspected by an URM inspection team. They make sure that the units are handling the mail properly and stuff. They have to go EVERYWHERE that there is a UMR and there are several on every FOB/COB.

And then there was my job. While we sort of work with the mail, we don't ever really get as involved as the other guys. It was our job to go out to the civilian ran APOs and perform a long audit on their operation and then to check up with them several times each month to just make sure things are still running smoothly. It was a solid gig. The audits would last about 3 hours to perform, and then a little longer to write up the report. The pop in inspections could go anywhere from 15 minutes to all day. So we had a lot of free time which I loved! Time to go to the gym, read, watch movies, walk around the FOBs, and the chance to travel and see the different parts of Afghanistan (even though they all look the same from inside the base compound lol), mostly while observing while flying between the places.

But all of us got to travel, and travelling was nice. I won't get to travel that much as S6. But the traveling isn't always safe. Just being in Afghanistan poses some risk, but some things are riskier than others. We fly everywhere instead of convoying, which is much safer. But we had a Soldier flying out on a mission and her helicopter took small arms fire from the ground. She was scarred to go out again, but did because thats the job. Recently, a helicopter went down and four US Marines died. Some of the smaller bases get attacked a lot more frequently than KAF as well, sometimes taking indirect rocket attacks on a daily basis. Travelling is not without risk, but the mission comes first.

But anyways, being an auditor was nice. Much nicer than the ECP work, but not as nice as S6. Why? Because I'm so nerdy that when I work on computers I'm not really working but playing :).