That's French for, "I'm Awesome"

For those of you that don't know, I am back from my 40 day business trip to "Lil France". It was an absolutely awesome experience. I can not really express that enough here. The French (FR) were excellent host and were very friendly. There was no rude "Euro-trash" attitude which I completely expected. I have never been to Europe so I can only base all my assumptions on what I hear from others. Much like what the FR do when they read and see the things about the US that are out there. We really do look like a country of complete idiots. The clowns that are out there "occupying" cities in America get a lot of international news and so does Rick Perry and Herman Cain and the rest of the candidates. Add all that tom-foolery in with the rest of Washington's BS and we really look just a shade better than Syria on international news.

Fanny Agostini - BFMTV Weather Girl

But the bright side of it all is that one of the weather girls on BFMTV, Paris news, looks just like (kinda) the character "Robin" from "How I Met Your Mother", one of my favorite shows. This cheered me up immensely when I was having a long day.

As for what I was doing day to day out there; I spent a lot of time on the computer. I sent a ton of emails a day it seemed, coordinating flights in and out of the area and helping with the planning of upcoming operations in the area also. I also spent a lot of time being the middle man between the US and the FR. That is essentially my job as the US Aviation Liason to the French, but people just love to blast the middle man, so I fielded dozens of irrate phones calls. I did the right thing and held my ground and helped as best I could. I know they are just stressed and its easy to call the english speaking person at the French base and yell at him than try to calmly explain it the a non English speaking FR soldier. The job had long hours (about 7am to 10pm) but there was always time for a coffee break and meal time was at a French pace, which is very leisurely. Lunch usually was about and hour and a half and dinner was close to two hours everyday. Some days I could not give up that much time and would have to skip out on them, but somehow they always made time. They would say "the war will still be here after dinner". My response, in my head, was "No shit the war will still be here will an attitude like that..."

Probably one of the harder lessons to learn while there was how they have a less aggressive attiutde toward day to day operations. Other countries seem to have a very different approach to the little scuffle we have going on over here. Much different than anything the US Army has ever taught me. A lot of the time it seems like they're are just tagging along because their" big brother" the US came here and they don't want to not help out and have it bite them in the ass later. I understand that we have been here for a long time and that there is no real "goal" to end all this, so the idea of winning will boil down to who has the best PR campaign when we pull out of here.

The FR in particular took very hard losses (relative to the number of FR troops on the ground here) last summer when they decided to go head first, house by house, in some of the nastiest places over here. It didn't turn out well. They gained a lot of ground and rid the area of a lot of bad people, but the continued bad press back in Paris of the losses being sustained ended up letting all the progress from the summer slip away in vain when they were told to fall back in to a more defensive role. It is an election year in France and it appears that Paris wants no such news of it's young men and women dying before the upcoming elections. They have gone to great lengths to ensure that won't happen but it's impossible to not have any losses over here. I will elaborate more on this in a later post.

I could go on and on about my counter-parts while I was there. The FR are wacky. I know I have just been kind of rambling about the different things I learned and witnessed in this post. I will try to pull out stories and unique experiences for you in some future post. But for now, know that I am back here in my little room, back to doing what I enjoy doing. If I didn't enjoy it I would have stayed out there with the French... I loved it.

Even though Christmas is over, I am still signing Christmas songs everyday. I only have one holiday album on my iPod. It's Elvis - Blue Christmas, and its prefect for a Christmas away from home. So today's song quote is from that album, mostly because that's what I am listening to right now...

"Well I am feeling mighty fine, got good music on my radio... Well I want to kiss you baby, underneath your mistletoe..." - Elvis