“ANP!” A NATO soldier called out. Afghan National Police, the future of the country’s security and the prodigal sons of this conflict. Most people say they are better trained and less corrupt than the Afghan Army, even though the culturally acceptable level of corruption in Afghanistan is so high few frames of reference exist. I was more concerned with the police harboring Taliban sympathies than if they shaved a little off the top.
The other soldiers didn’t seem to mind as the pickup reached the head of the formation at breakneck speed. The man in the black turban swung his machine gun deliberately over their heads, ostensibly aiming for invisible targets creeping across the frigid hillsides. As the truck approached a strange feeling came over me — my mind played a video, a bizarre pre-recorded prophecy, of the man ripping into me with his weapon just as he passed. None of the other soldiers paid the truck any attention save one who waved his arm casually in a half-hearted bid to slow the vehicle down. I pulled my M4 carbine closer to my chest, my thumb over the selector lever that could bring the weapon from “Safe” to “Fire” in a split-second and spit out bullets as quickly as I could squeeze the trigger. If the gunman did decide to shoot, I thought, in my hyperparanoia, and as long as I don’t take a round in the face, my armor should protect me long enough to fire a few rounds back in protest of my murder. The truck shot past and I flinched, trying to curl myself behind my body armor, as my creeped-out gaze met the muzzle of his PKM.
What was supposed to be only a few hundred meters march became a few thousand. SFC Stanley and I traded sweaty, exasperated grins as we trudged up yet another hill. “Well awwwright! Aff-ghanistan!” He laughed in his sugary-sweet Texahoma accent. Stanley was full of endless cheer, goodwill and optimism that belied his grim experiences fighting in Iraqi street battles, day after bloody day, over the course of three deployments. I could not have found a better friend or war-zone guide. He once awoke to the sound of a 107mm Chinese rocket crashing into his room, lodging itself into the wall without detonating. “The muh’fucker just popped in ta’ say hello I guess!” he would say. He told me he finally found a bit of the Holy Spirit after walking away from dozens of the explosive ambushes and gunbattles and IEDs that have claimed 5,000 of our brothers and sisters in arms. I wonder if my own agnosticism can be bartered for in bullets and bombs.
A village boy slipped into our formation, clearly impressed with the antennae and weapons and sundries strapped and fashioned onto our bodies, and marched blissfully along through the mud and snow and rocks in his cheap open-toed slippers. ‘Well lookey at ol’ boy here,” Stanley said. “Got the right spacing an’ everything!” The boy flashed a grin, babbled happily in Pashto and swung his arms in a dramatic soldierly flourish.
The toughness of Afghans is legendary and I felt privileged to witness it first hand. Earlier I observed a NATO medic stitch up the freshly shattered finger of an Afghan boy. Without anesthetic, the medic cut away dead tissue and nimbly weaved a fishook needle through the painful-looking injury. Maybe ten years old, the boy watched with utter calm and disinterest. How our tender American babes would scream and carry-on at such a spectacle! A few cold toes were immaterial in this environment.
Some of my readers have raised questions about Afghan girls. Here in the east, the land of the Pashtuns, women are considered socially immature and, using Western metrics, inferior to men. They are perceived to have limited moral and physical self-control and under the principle of Purdah are required to be isolated and segregated from the world as their public presence is disruptive to social order.
But they are not totally without power. Women sit atop the Pashtun altar of pride and the honor and reputation of a Pashtun family is carried firmly on the backs of womenfolk. To disgrace or dishonor a Pashtun woman — easily done with an ill-placed glance — is to incur the deadly, obligatory wrath of her husband and his clan. The status of a woman grows with her ability to produce sons and as she matures from a child to a bride to a mother and a grandmother — if she lives that long. As her sons marry the mother reigns over a new feifdom of daughters-in-law. The home is hers alone and when present men are expected to abide by her rules. A prospective jihadist, for example, must — generally speaking — obtain the permission of his mother before taking up arms. The Taliban know this very well, deliberately recruiting from madrassas filled with war-orphans or areas where tribal and family ties have been shattered by fighting.
The Taliban’s version of Purdah is not necessarily equivalent to the Pashtun version. The Taliban combine the most extreme examples of Pashtun and radical Wahabbi Islam culture into a deadly cocktail of social mores. Gross abuses by men against women are often attributed to Afghans as a whole — honor killings, stonings, executions, etc. — but these are most frequently carried out by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virute and Prevention of Vice, a twisted organization of peasant-thugs dedicated to making the lives of Afghans, especially women, as miserable and joyless as possible.
The mistreatment of Pashtun wives by their husbands is not a component of Pashtun culture — quite the opposite, as the disrespect of Pashtun women applies to Pashtuns themselves as unequivocally as it applies to foreigners and a man caught abusing his wife is dealt with quickly and harshly by village elders. The ink-blue burka, that paragon of defiance of the liberalized Western tradition, is not a Pashtun garment but a transplant from the Sunni Arab world, foisted on Afghan women by the Taliban and their freakish parade of Vice-Prevention edicts.
While Pashtun women adhere to the strictest codes of modesty and will often cover their face in the presence of strangers, that particular symbol of female oppression is not indigenous to Afghanistan. Pashtuns traditionally shroud their females, from birth, in beautiful, brightly colored dresses and shawls, stitched with complex, flowery patterns that often include dozens of tiny glinting mirrors. The women — usually required to execute most of the chores — are just as exposed to the filth of their environment as the boys, but it is obvious that far more attention and what little wealth available is spent ensuring they look as radiant and beautiful as possible. The boys just get greasy rags and the men wear basic, bland shalwar kameez — the proverbial “man-dress” — sometimes accessorizing with a kufi cap or carefully wrapped turban. The wear and design of Afghan headgear varies widely and commonly denotes the wearer’s place in the social hierarchy.
The role of Pashtun women in Afghanistan is an exceedingly complex matrix of fact, fiction, and culture. My experiences and my readings so far don’t indicate that the overall philosophy behind the treatment of women is so different here than in the West. Like any issue of culture or society, symbols garner the most interest, discussion and, inevitably, controversy. The burka, the face-covering, and the images of abject poverty become symbols of perceived social chaos that drive us into dangerous collectivist thought, perpetuating the legendary White Man’s Burden and retarding the doctrine of cultural relativism that anthropologists have worked tirelessly for generations to force through the cracks of the Judeo-Christian monolith.
The Taliban hovers over all of this, a spectre of hatred and lunacy — but as any student of Greg Mortenson (my newest guru, the director of the Central Asia Institute and author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools — required reading for anyone who even feigns interest in this conflict) knows, Pashtuns crave education for their children, both boys and girls — children whose lust for learning shames our own and who take their diplomas, spin around on their heels, and streak back to improve their own communities unencumbered with the pressures of capital success. Even the Taliban, Mortenson shows us, are just a finger in a crack, holding up a dam behind which lies the overwhelming tide of education, waiting patiently to engulf and wash away the stink of ignorance that keeps them in power.
As we passed near mud-homes, gathering a new flock of rowdy, cacophonous boys, Afghan women peered at us from shadowy doorways, smoky fire pits, and dingy rooftops. Young girls, not yet a fully-developed threat to modesty and permitted to venture closer to communal gathering areas, appeared in full view but never closer than twenty or thirty meters. On one occasion an ancient looking man, far past the apex of life-expectancy in this village, sat under a tree next to the road, tending a small fire. A girl of maybe six stood next to him, encased in a brilliant red and blue shawl fringed with silver bells, glowing like a piece of art among the mud and squalor. When we first set out I instructed the soldiers near me to evade any eye contact with females, no matter the age. “Screw these boys, man!” SFC Stanley called out. “The girls need candy too!” He cautiously approached the elder, back bent in deference, and carefully placed a bag of candy at his feet, subtly motioning to the young girl while keeping his eyes forward. The old man continued to stir the coals in front of him, giving no indication he understood or even saw the bag of treats. We continued on and I violated my own rule by sneaking a glance back at the pair, pleased to see the girl huddled next to him, a blazing patch of color, munching a Fun Size! Snickers as the elder swatted away the chirping, marauding boys with a switch of pine.
To be continued…
–
…the Walrus said, to speak of other things — of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings; and why the Sea is boiling hot and whether Pigs have wings…
The ridge-line passed beneath us and our target came into view. I suddenly felt very vulnerable sitting so casually in a thin-skinned Black Hawk, not knowing who or what lurked — waiting — below. The sensation reminded me of swimming in the ocean (a circumstance I abhor) and of the lingering fear of sharks fluttering beneath me. We made a series of tight, low turns that transfixed and excited the village children before ghostly womenfolk in colorful shrouds hurried them indoors. My headset buzzed with the chatter of war — snappy bits of cinematic conversation that crackled across the airwaves, the perfect childhood fantasy of a dashing military operation.
-
-
-
This is very much the “good stuff” — the exciting, thrilling aspect of military service that is so far removed from life back in the world that it appears before you as a dream. While the consequences can be terrible — and they frequently are — your confidence soars and your heart swells with pride as you watch these brothers in arms carry on, jaws locked, with the grim task at hand. It is a special and dark experience that leaves you with blood pumping furiously through your veins.
I write with a sad heart today. Two of our soldiers died recently at the hands of the Taliban. The Army is very conscious about rumors and gossip and takes every step possible to ensure tragic news does not crawl along the grapevine before families can be officially notified. If you do not hear from me for a few days this communication blackout is likely the reason.
The incident underscores the caustic brilliance of our enemy and the profound effort required in combating him. The Taliban is no longer an ordered battalion of bearded, battle-hardened wildmen but a kinetic omniscience, a fresh and grim culture of violence and destruction and fatalism without direction or coherence. Long past are the days of Afghans rallying around Mullah Omar — the Sun King — to expel the corruption and banditry favored by the warlords that once ruled the land and terrorized its peasants. Only shattered factions remain, staffed and oiled with the blood of the Pakistani underclass, streaming mechanically from madrassas in ceaseless waves and damning women and art and culture into irrelevance. These two young soldiers encountered the gasping simulacrums, possessed with a futile obsession with death, that remain.
But how do you fight cancer? It’s an affliction without viral purpose or bacterial quarrel neither ingested nor contracted. Its existence is a tumbling snowball trundling down a shallow, endless slope that populates and grows only with the momentum of time. No amount of armor or MRAPs can astonish or arrest such a force.
We get the cancer, too — a sickness of the heart and mind that obscures judgment and reason with the blinding red rage of revenge. Your love of the ancient beauty this land represents and the ability to reconcile all of this with the fetid pools of sub-humanity you sense below shutters your mind and your own humanity.
Is it wrong to be pleased — even charmed – in the brutal killings of bearded drones that endeavor with unrelenting fierceness to destroy every cynosure of good, of compassion, of humanity, femininity and justice? Do they not deserve the fate they forsake everything to seek?
Maybe a part of me is lost forever now that the images and splatters of entrails and fascia glitter as banners of progress on the road to Golgotha.
How fascinating and terrible that – on all sides – we toss our youth into this paradigm shift, this maelstrom and fury of apotheosis, corruption, and sin. What are these young soldiers to make of it? How can they possibly understand the profundity of the forces arrayed against them?
And so they carry on as an aging nonpareil of steadfastness, humming Tennyson’s maxim through the dust to meet the enemy once again:
“Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”
Rest in peace, brave soldiers, brave sons.
——————
Of course it was, because you asked if he had any necklaces with bells (that’s what your wife likes) and he showed you eighty different necklaces with bells. He’s got you with the tea, the almonds, the stool and the old uncle. He knows you don’t know the first fuckin’ thing about Afghan bell-necklaces — how could you possibly say you don’t see one you like when the floor is covered with them? You’re so screwed. The uncle huddles closer behind you, jabbering in Pashto to his young accomplice. Better buy something.
I was recently sent to the south, a wild land under the control of a NATO partner whose swarthy soldiers drink liberally and abstain from showers. We have a MEDEVAC (MEDical EVACuation) unit stationed in this backwater, far from the periwigged charioteering and hot-watered comfort of the larger US FOBs. MEDEVAC crews fly their unarmed helicopters in direct, urgent support of battlefield casualties — swooping in and rushing them to the nearest capable field hospital. They are on duty 24/7, walkie-talkies tucked into their pockets, ready to sprint to their aircraft when the scramble crackles through: “MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC!”
We left for this hinterland on Blackhawks early in the morning. We floated through thin breaths of clouds, windswept across the bottomlands and carried up and over the lethal spires of the Spin Mountains. Our route carried us through a treacherous high-altitude pass where the peaks soar so high they connect in a ceiling and the sheer ridges squeeze so tightly you’d swear the rotor blades would chip the mountain slopes. The Hindu Kush, the roof of the world. The sun is so blisteringly bright pilots wear sunglasses beneath their opaque helmet visors.
–
An hour later we descended 7,000 feet into a sea of foreign flags and unfamiliar uniforms. Shaggy Afghan National Army soldiers strolled lazily about, attracting the suspicion of everyone in the immediate area. Pockmarked Russian buildings shored up with sandbags and plastic bits of trash floating through the alleyways was warzone cinematic. “You could go native down here,” my Major mumbled.
The MEDEVAC guys introduced themselves and found me a room in their concrete Soviet leftover. We dined at a makeshift restaurant shack called “The Oasis” where local townspeople whipped up unbelievably delicious Afghan staples — nan (soldiers call this unleavened loaf “footbread” because it’s traditionally kneaded using one’s feet), rice, and the best tandoor-ish chicken I’ve ever had, served in a cloud of garlic that made my eyes water.
I then went about my own spooky business, networking with bearded English-as-a-third-language individuals as they escorted me in and out of several guarded compounds where the strict rules of behavior we are obligated to follow don’t apply. (Was that a stripper pole?)
Returning to the MEDEVAC building, we settled into an episode of Jeopardy on their spiffy flat-screen TV. Plopping into a camp chair and unlacing my boots I noticed both cupholders occupied with bottles of half-full tobacco spit. The crews sleep, eat, and lounge fully dressed and ready to scramble. Showers and bathroom breaks must be carefully coordinated lest a precious few seconds be lost — often the difference between a life saved or lost.
The call came in a moment later over the walkie-talkie: “MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC!”
Goddamnit, I had just gotten my boots off. A mad rush followed.
“You comin’, LT?” One of the medics asked me as he tossed his body-armor into the air like pizza dough, landing inside it. Of course I was. We sprinted to the airfield, pulling boots and hats and gloves on. I had to get my earplugs in before the Blackhawk’s turbines spun up and shattered my eardrums. After strapping in, I somehow managed to stuff two earplugs in one ear. I looked down at my boots helplessly — they were on the wrong feet. I tucked them awkwardly under my seat, hoping no one would notice.
Within a few minutes we were strapped into the aircraft and BweeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEE the turbines ignited and the rotors began turning faster and faster before settling into a tornadic chop. The pilot yanked the collective and we shot straight up into the air — in a second we were two hundred feet above the FOB where my stomach remained. We nosed down and blasted off for the casualty site. We would arrive eight minutes after the call came in. The number of lives and limbs saved by this impossibly fast response time cannot be counted.
The Afghan casualty had a mouth full of gold teeth stained bronze by whatever it was he was chewing. Betel nut? Hashish? Probably something third-world and mind-altering — the heroin produced in Afghanistan is so pure it will melt through a cinderblock. He probably needed the buzz — he was missing a silver-dollar sized piece of his back. Shot in the gut, the bullet travelled through his colon and out, narrowly missing his spine, which was visible. The medic poked and prodded the stick-thin man, maybe in his 20s, dressed in a traditional shalwar kameez and sporting a rancid Taliban-mandated beard. It looked like pubic hair.
–
I had never seen a gunshot victim before. The entry wound look surprisingly innocuous — a small hole, the size of a pencil eraser, with very little blood. The medic turned the groaning man over onto his stomach to examine the hastily field-dressed exit wound. Thin rivulets of blood ran down his sides. Not knowing what lay under the crimson-tinted piece of gauze, I was worried my mouth would involuntarily fill with vomit.
The man had been shot with a 7.62mm bullet, a calibre common to the AK-47s common in Afghanistan. The shape of the projectile causes the bullet to “tumble” when it enters a body, intentionally turning over instead of passing straight through, creating a wider aperture of tissue and organ damage. If you are lucky the bullet exits your body anyway — often sideways — blasting out whatever flesh lies in its path like hole-punch through a sheaf of paper.
He was in considerable pain but would survive. The absence of profuse bleeding or dark, rich blood indicated the bullet had not encountered any arteries or organs. His toes flexed in pain — the bullet had missed his spine. Blood squirted out and pooled in the wound with every flex of his abdomen. A heady scent of urine exposed his fear. It’s probable the Afghan had never experienced flight, much less the redline, top-speed urgency of an aerial ambulance. The medics were barely recognizable as people, their bulky flight suits covered with pouches and their heads cocooned in Vader-esque helmets. He must have felt much like an extraterrestrial abduction victim, helpless and afraid of whatever bizarre instrument of torture comes next.
We returned as quickly as we had arrived. An ambulance waited at the tarmac to take the man to the field hospital. I joined our casualty there, after a quick piss, where an interpreter explained to an American surgeon that the man was refusing surgery. “He has no education, sah. He thinks you will take away all his insides.” The young Afghan had never experienced modern medicine. His eyes darted around the room and across unfamiliar, masked white faces as doctors from three countries crowded around him. He cried out as an IV catheter was coaxed into his vein. The interpreter tried to calm him with hushed, warmly-inflected Pashto as x-ray machines snapped away and an oxygen mask pumped anesthetic into his lungs.
The poor guy probably thought he was going to be cut into little pieces. And, should he encounter any Talibs on the streets of his dusty village with the expertly-stitched tattoo of Western medicine across his torso, he can expect nothing less.
I walked back to the MEDEVAC ready-room, where Jeopardy was still playing and crews filled out logbooks. I had just bitten into a sour, grenade-sized Afghan apple when a crew-chief’s walkie-talkie crackled:
“MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC! MEDEVAC!”
“You comin’, LT?”
Of course I was.
Such a beautiful country. Such a beautiful country.
I’m privileged to see this wild land from the air nearly every day. I insist we fly with the doors open, despite the blasting cold, because the view below me is so profound. With one leg dangling out I float in free space as we swoop across the palatial wilderness. Plains flow freely into infinite mountain ranges, orange and brown and blue and spread beneath me like an endless quilt.
—-
The beauty of Afghanistan, wholly without the urban blight and fester of roads and development, is so freaking urgent. The alpine largesse consumes you whole. Often I bite my lip in loneliness – I am usually by myself in the back of the helicopter, the pilots tucked away in the cockpit and coaxing the bird as it claws its way through the wisp-thin air. There is no one to share the experience with. Not even a tiny, cheek-smeared portal to smash your face against.
–
–
What terrible beasts the Taliban are for seeking to tame this land with its destruction.
The only impressions they leave on this landscape are symbols of chaos.
–
-
‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the FOB
Every dark post was manned
No matter the job
Guns at the ready, clear and aware
We hope Mullah Omar will finally scare
The soldiers are cold, nestled in fleece
Hoping rockets and mortars fall not from the east
The bugles are blowing, the sirens are clear
The rockets are falling, no Christmas is near
When out on the plains there arose such a clatter
Soldiers abandoned their bunkers and scaled their tall ladders
Away to their posts they flew with a flash
Uncovered their sights, ready to mash
But the thud of cold steel, so loud and so rude
Was not Omar’s calling, despite his bad mood
The din was our boys, driven and pissed
That such a foul goblin would dare to persist
Fire One, Fire Two – Fire ThreeFourFiveSix
Come, boys, let’s hammer, our message not mixed!
In every dark corner, down every damp well!
We’ll show them our Christmas is worth all their Hell!
Finally in darkness the guns came to rest
The boys at the ready, barely put to the test
As I drew from the bunker and was turning around
From the TOC came St Nicholas, grinning and proud
He was dressed all in camo, from his head to his foot
And his clothes were all tarnished with shrapnel and soot
A bundle of mail he had flung on his back
And he looked like a soldier, body straight with no slack
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work
And passed out the mail, then turned with a jerk
And laying his finger aside of his nose
And giving a nod, in his Blackhawk he rose!
He pulled the collective, the rotors they roared
And away flew St Nick, over Logar and Wardak
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he flew out of sight:
“Rot in Hell, Mullah Omar, and fester with blight!”
The most acute, tragic aspect of war is — and always has been — the death of its participants. The hope is always that death calls only for the enemy belligerents. The opposite happens all too frequently.
The generation currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (and other places) has endured relatively little hardship in its collective life. We’re not a generation of warriors, like our grandfathers — whose memory is quickly fading — or a generation of confused, reluctant and brave conscripts like our fathers, compelled to forget. We blossomed in an age where our nation experienced unprecedented wealth and security. Individual circumstances of tragedy, violence, and neglect abound — but as a whole we’re a healthy-cheeked, white-toothed herd.
How do these young soldiers reconcile the fear of a violent death at the hands of an omnipresent enemy?
Let me preface this articulation with the affirmation that there is a considerable amount of stratification in the Army when it comes to combat exposure. Grunts understandably blister at any indication that their experiences are being translated for them. (They also firmly believe they are the only ones fighting this war.) I am not an infantryman. There are those that leave the wire, in wheeled vehicles on the ground, day after day, night after freezing night, with the sole intention of waiting for the enemy to engage them in order to engage back. I am not one of these brave souls.
Neither am I a Fobbit (someone who never leaves the FOB, under any circumstances, for the duration of his or her tour). The fulfillment of my mission requires me to leave the wire quite often and the Flying Machine was chosen, by my higher-ups, as my conveyance.
(In defense of Fobbits, they endure the threat of rocket and mortar fire every minute of every day.)
With the submitted caveat that I can only offer what I see and what I experience in place, let us continue.
A common question soldiers get is “Aren’t you afraid?” And I believe, at some level, I’m beginning to understand how to answer that. The answer lies in the old axiom “It can’t happen to me.”
Because, quite frankly, it can’t. You don’t descend from Bagram into chaos. You aren’t thrown into the pool. You are eased in, day by day and week by week. You don’t experience some fantastical war-zone tunnel vision. Every particle, synapse and thought-process exists just as it did back in the World. You are just as much alive and capable and your existence is absolutely as entrenched in reality as it ever was. You snuggle in your blanket at night, sip coffee in the morning, and comfortably fart into your computer chair during the day. You get distracted by the same thoughts, miss the same people, and enjoy the same things. Afghanistan has no immediate, urgent effect on your personality.
Only when the rockets fall, or the bullets zip by your head or Flying Machine, does fear grab you. It comes in a wave, a wash, that throttles and paralyzes you — but only for a moment. The brain churns out a reaction just as quickly, whether it’s to shoot back, defecate in your britches, or dive headlong for the nearest bunker. The wash recedes and returns with the frequency of the event.
But other than an instant of colliding neurons, has my existence been challenged yet? Has my mind had the time to process an algorithm whose final line was death? Nope. I don’t think that comes until the final kicking moments, when the brain is losing red-bloods but remains coherent enough to interpret its circumstance.
We — as humans — are simply too smart to be afraid. The air and the dust and the mountains are too real to be terrible. We’re going to get up, eat breakfast, go on a mission, and return. There is no other point of reference, no other reality or dimension from which to base an alternative conclusion. Death would be a bizarre and incomprehensible equation for which we have no answer, its finality so acute that none exists.
How could you possibly fear something that makes no sense?
It can’t happen to us.
I found a pirated copy of Dr. Zhivago lying around one of the ready rooms the other day. No one else had heard of it (sigh, typical) so I dusted it off and promptly went home to my Wanktuary for six uninterrupted hours of epic Russian cinema.
(Okay, I only offered that anecdote so I could write “Wanktuary.”)
In other news, my mustache is growing in very nicely. Bri says I now look like a Wehrmacht officer and that mustaches aren’t really her thing. They’re fine from afar, she says, but she’ll be damned if she brings a third eyebrow home or to a dinner party. Ouch. I guess I better get all the mustache-ing that I can this tour.
My main man and confidant is Sergeant First Class Stanley, a veteran of five different combat tours, from Desert Storm to Somalia to Bosnia to Iraq (twice) and now to Afghanistan. Included among his many charming colloquialisms is the preface “ol’” before every noun.
“Hey LT, you try the ol’ crabcakes? Wooo-ee! I had some of them and grabbed us a few of them ol’ Diet Cokes so we’ll be set for the ol’ poker game tonight.”
He also says “Awwww-riiiight!” frequently — frequently enough that, along with the ol’ noun preface and the amount of time we spend together I’ve begun talking like a 46-year-old Oklahoman.__
He has helped steer me through some of the trickier aspects of deployed life and has become a good friend.
I’m also including some other photos from different missions I’ve participated in.
___
___
———–
———–
———–
———–
———–
My hair was shaggier than ever and I needed a haircut. I was teetering on the edge of flagrantly violating the Army’s regulations regarding personal appearance. Thing is, my hair is my personality — my joie de vivre. But rules are rules and I needed to eighty-six the mop-top.
You have two options on this FOB if you desire a refreshing chop:
Your other option is the guy over there (I’m pointing) who runs General’s Convenience Store. He moonlights as a barber and next to his trinket bazaar he offers an extravagantly appointed — yet curiously unheated — salon. He’s a stone’s throw from work and there are no potholes, snipers, or exploding fetuses. Remember when I mentioned Angelina Jolie haircuts? Same guy.
I plan on celebrating the birth of Our Lord and Savior with a sculpted Tom Selleck. It’s growing in as well (poorly?) as I expected but now I need the appropriate ‘do to accessorize my little brown caterpillar. Quaffs are out, so are pompadours. The ski-jump is too ’90s and I don’t trust bald men. It hit me like a punch in the dick: flat-top! Tom and I would be the belle of the ball with the State Highway Patrol riding shotgun.
I found the best example I could, printed it off, and headed over to see if the Haji (derogatory term for all mocha-skinned man-dress wearers) barber could pull it off.
“Yesh sah! Five minutes sah!” Haji said as he flashed ten fingers at me. Floor to ceiling glass covered the walls, bouncing the cheap neon light around the room. Six barber’s chairs were draped with leopard-print aprons and Soviet-occupation era issues of Cosmo and Redbook had been stacked against the wall. A small sticker on the glass identified my barber as “Hercules.” Apparently Haji thought making the place look as gay as possible would put our tender American sensibilities at ease.
I’ve decided to move to a more predictable update schedule — I’ll be adding new posts on Tuesday and possibly Friday, depending on how much I have to say. There’s a nifty subscription feature over there on the right that will automatically update you via email when something new is posted. It shouldn’t send you any spam or put you on any email lists. I may have developed a solution to my no-picture problem, so look for photos in the next few posts.
As for your posted comments, be assured that I read and appreciate them all. Unfortunately I must focus what precious little time I have to publishing updates. Please do not be offended if I fail to respond to a question.
I’m gearing up for an operation with a NATO unit as I write this. Outside it’s cold and gray and our FOB is thick with low-slung clouds. It’s hard to decide what to bring — too much and you’re lugging heavy shit around all day, too little and, in the event you find yourself marooned, chances of survival drop dramatically. Ammunition (of which I carry 210 rounds), water, first-aid kits, candy bars, gloves, sunglasses, fleece and fancy light-weight Gore-Tex — it all seems necessary but it can’t all be taken.
The temperature has been dropping recently. The stars are remarkable on these cold, clear nights — not a city or street lamp for miles, only the bobbing flicker of flashlights as soldiers stumble around on their way to work or the latrine. I’ve tried to take some photos of the sky but the camera only captures a whisper of what I’m seeing.
Diet Cokes! I finally fell off the fully-leaded-soft-drink wagon and the pounds are already dripping off. There is more Diet Coke in Afghanistan than you can shake a stick at. I’ll drain a six-pack of DC (we call it DC ’cause we’re soldiers and we’re cool) every shift. When I get off work, I head outside to the “gym”, pick up a sledgehammer and beat on a truck tire for twenty minutes. I can already feel my dormant muscles rippling and flexing with delight. I’ll return to you all (mostly Bri) a glistening Roman warlord.
Soldiers call deployments “Groundhog Day” and I’m beginning to see why. Particularly in my position the day-to-day tasks don’t necessarily vary much — when we’re successful it’s only because a long, detailed process got us there. Every day I journey between the same short list of places: my hooch, the shitter, work, chow hall, shitter, work, chow hall, shitter, hooch. There are no days off, no weekends to staunch the pressure of tasks present and pending — just work, shitter, work. The only thing that breaks up the day is an inconveniently timed (use your imagination) rocket attack. What a weird little world.
At least I have my electric toothbrush.
It has been a busy week. Anecdotes and timelines are jumbled around in my head. I’ve been struggling with maintaining a proper sequence of events — old thoughts are pushed out quickly as new thoughts and experiences are formed. It always amazed me how writers of memoirs and diaries are able to recount their thoughts — at every point on the trajectory of their story — so completely.
I’ve begun to settle into life on my little FOB. The first few days were madness — especially Thanksgiving, when rockets, IEDs, and belt-fed weaponry popped off with enough regularity to make me wonder if I’d last a week, much less a year. We recovered some of the shrapnel from a rocket attack — melon-sized pieces of twisted steel that grimly sailed the length of three football fields in every direction.
The ballistic interruptions notwithstanding, Thanksgiving dinner was a wonderfully prepared meal. No processed turkey here — everything was more-or-less fresh. Turkey and ham and stuffing and mac-n-cheese and beans and salad and this and that — all the traditional players represented.
Our chow hall has its own kitchen where food is prepared daily (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and served, buffet-style, by coffee-skinned Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Asiatics vetted and employed by a transnational food contractor. (The irony of the scheme is hard to dismiss: millions of American dollars spent on foodstuffs from the UAE (it ALL comes from the UAE), packaged by Arab hands, shipped to Afghanistan on foreign boats and in foreign trucks, prepared by foreign workers, and served to American soldiers fighting to protect the American national interest. Then we shit the food out into latrines serviced by local Afghan shit-suckers driving German shit-sucking trucks. On both ends the American remains the consumer.)
I won’t go into much detail here, obviously, but here is what I can tell you: Our FOB is laid out much like a mining camp. Long, rocky dirt avenues separate the various “buildings” and shelters and tents and roughly divide the FOB into working and living areas. When it’s sunny clouds of choking dust follow the dozens of Humvees, MRAPs, and shit-sucker trucks that lumber around. When it rains, the avenues turn to thick gray mud that slops and splatters about.
The FOB is surrounded by the blisteringly high snowbound peaks of the Hindu Kush. These ranges are in their tectonic adolescence — their jagged, fresh beauty makes our poor Rockies look tired and worn. If only we could venture out and enjoy them without worrying about the Taliban kidnapping us and cutting off our heads on YouTube.
We stay in large insulated tents divided with pine boards into small rooms called “hooches” (or, more colloquially, “spank-shacks”). They are heated, lit, and “furnished” with an extra-long twin bed/mattress
combo that has probably seen more spilled seed than I care to imagine. The raw pine lends a warm, rustic scent that — combined with glowing laptop screens and camouflage — creates the feeling of a postmodern
hunting lodge.
Many hooches, like mine, are spartan. Others are adolescent paradises of the very first order: Xboxes, flat-screen TVs, stereos, carpets, bean-bag chairs and christmas lights abound. So long as it does not
interfere with the physical integrity of the overall structure, you are given free reign to modify and improve your hooch as you see fit. Wood and tools are readily available for projects of any size. A friend of mine is assisting me with my first project: sealing off my current door and cutting out a new one to more easily facilitate a private entrance/exit. Others have built desks, wardrobes, and, in one case, a vaulted ceiling complete with joists.
Where does one acquire large, expensive objects of creature-comfort? I’m still in the process of determining that. From what I can tell it’s a prison economy, where goods change hands surreptitiously between friends in the dark of the night. If you need, say, a box of screws and a Skil saw, then you must go find the box-of-screws-and-a-skil-saw guy. There’s a guy for everything.
Local Afghan people are also permitted — after significant vetting — to open up small shops on our FOB, clustered together in a little “shopping district.” Afghan merchants have held a legendary reputation through the ages and no pitiful modern war keeps them from their slippery duties.
Old Abe’s General Convenience Store is my favorite. Old Abe is probably in his mid-twenties, but with an average male life expectancy of 45, he’s old enough. Along with “all kind of electronics devices” he peddles every trinket and piece-of-junk imaginable. Pirated Chinese DVD box-sets are a hot seller — the complete Star Trek: TNG in Chinese with German subtitles! — and if you’re feeling extra-fancy he’ll even tailor you an extra-fancy zoot suit from fine imported silks. Next door you can get a “masaje” and an Angelina Jolie haircut.
The prices are all hilariously inflated, apparently based only on Old Abe’s perception of how much money you have currently in your pocket. Fortunately prices are very fluid things in this country and items can be had reasonably after significant negotiation.
The internet guy is harder to find. I still don’t have internet in my hooch and thus I can’t upload any of the photos I have taken. The day is drawing near, however, and rest assured my readers will be the first to know.
Unfortunately I cannot discuss the specifics of most job-related endeavors. I am quickly becoming more familiar with our AO (area of operations) and look forward to having my finger on the pulse of the Taliban. I have already been assigned my first mission “outside the wire” and look forward (kinda) to seeing this country as it exists outside a military base.
