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File: 110796_aactl_04.txt
Page: 04
Total Pages: 25

 conditioning and all that. We helped them do all that the
 first day and a half when we didn't have any of the
 prepositioned assets here.
 
 Another obstacle we Had to overcome that first couple of
 days was, we had an extremely large amount of personnel
 inflow into this base, and we had only a limited number of
 places to billet people.  Thats why we ended up with
 people sleeping in the hangar and the gym and Tab Vees and
 everywhere else they could possibly get. We shoved a lot of
 people on this base, and we had no prepositioned assets here
 when we arrived to even put anything up. We were stuck with
 what was available. We put a lot of our people out in the
 hootches. Now there are two to a room out there, but we had
 up to eight or ten to a room during that first week or so.
 We were "hot bunking" them and we were working shift work
 so that one shift was sleeping while the other shift was out
 working, and then they would swap off so that people could
 get quality rest.
 
 Q: So a lot of people shared the same bed?
 
 F: They were sharing the same bed; almost everybody was.
 
 The prepositioned asset didn't start bowing up until
 2 days after we had arrived. One of the obstacles to
 overcome there was that items started showing up on the
 flight line, yet we had no way of transporting it to the
 site, which, given the route we had to take initially, was
 about a 20-minute drive. This was new to the hosts for us
 to be here.  They were concerned with what would be going
 on. They made us take the long way around to get to the
 site, and that was a big inconvenience. We had to borrow or
 beg any kind of transportation we could. We even had to beg
 the MAC ALCE [Military Airlift Command airlift control
 
 4
 

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