NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (6 page)

Running parallel to the loss of equipment was the drug issue, which affected all of the Coalition Forces, both civilian and military. Drugs were ubiquitous in Afghanistan. The Taliban sold them. The Afghan National Police sold them. Random dudes on the streets of nearly any Afghan city sold drugs. Opium and hash are the primary market but heroin, cocaine, and whatever else you want to shoot up, smoke, blaze, or snort can be found as well. There were a few deaths from drug overdose in the ‘Stan. Some guys were fired for showing up to work blitzed.

One incident was always suspicious to me. A guy who worked out religiously, ate healthy foods, and happened to be sleeping with someone else’s wife was found dead of an overdose. He was in one of those surreal triangle relationships that seemed to happen in Afghanistan all the time—two married men fighting over a married woman. A few days after a fight between these two men and the woman involved, this brother didn’t show up to work. His supervisor went to check on him, thinking that he’d probably overslept. He found the guy dead in his bed with a needle in his arm. People who knew him were vehement that he was not a druggie. I always thought he was murdered. Since he was a contractor, the Army really didn’t care. The incident was swept under the rug and quickly forgotten by the authorities.

In many ways, KBR tried to model itself after the Army. I’m surprised that we didn’t have formations each morning. Some sections actually did have shift formations. My section was much too small for anything so formal. I showed up when I showed up, which was usually ten or fifteen minutes late. Trying to be Army-like wasn’t the only irksome KBR dysfunction. KBR had a security section that acted like Soviet political commissars. These guys were jokes. Basically glorified rats. They would walk around looking for safety violations and “hat violations.” Back up a truck without a ground guide, they’d write you up. Walk around outside of KBR village without your hat, they’d write you up. Not displaying your ID card, they’d write you up. They would check our living areas for contraband
while we were at work
, and sometimes thieved while they were there. A few of these guys were fired for property theft. They’d conduct room searches and take what they wanted. Laptops, iPods, cameras, and other items would mysteriously disappear if you had left them unsecured. Some of the security guys were caught drinking the booze that they’d confiscated. I know of one instance where one security guy was caught selling the drugs that he’d confiscated.

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NCO—non-commissioned officer—is a senior enlisted member (corporal through command sergeant major) of the Armed Forces.

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Up-armored HMMWVs—High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles—have mounting and firing capabilities for grenade launchers and various kinds of machine guns.

Taliban Rocket Show

January–March 2003

I had just bedded down for the night. Cozily wrapped up in my warm sleeping bag and fleece blankets, headphones serenading me after a good, hard workout. I was dozing quite nicely, comfortably drifting off to sleep, when …

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

At midnight, the Taliban struck. There were a series of loud explosions as rockets hit somewhere in the darkness. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my body armor and helmet, and lit out for the bunkers. Apparently, the Taliban wanted to help us celebrate New Year’s. A special fireworks display for the Americans at BAF. BASTARDS! It was my first rocket attack in Afghanistan. My cherry was officially busted. I was freaked out. I had that sick, nauseated feeling of fear and dread in my gut. I’d read about the attacks in Qandahar and those in Iraq, so I was expecting more explosions, more incoming. I was expecting casualties. Would there be an attack on the base? Would a horde of suicidal maniacs storm us? What was coming next?

Nothing came next. We sat in the bunkers for three or four hours. Supervisors took roll call and counted heads. KBR headquarters reported into the BAF tactical operations center (TOC). There were no casualties. Just a few concerned looks and some scared newbies like me.

That was the first of many rocket attacks that I would experience in Afghanistan. While at Bagram, we were hit once every six to eight weeks on average. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. It was rare that the Taliban or insurgents or whomever the Coalition had pissed off that week hit anything of value. Usually a single rocket would scream in and hit the middle of nothing in the middle of the night. The “Loud Voice” would sound off. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! BUNKER! BUNKER! BUNKER! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” They seemed to always attack at night. Right about the time that everyone was settling down for a good night’s sleep. It was as if their goal was nothing more than to piss us off.

There were, of course, casualties out in the field where the real fighting was going on. BAF, though, was a relative oasis of peace in the midst of the storm. The warlords made too much money from construction contracts and the weekly bazaar to let the cash cow that was BAF be endangered. Eventually the Task Force command element caught on to this funding relationship. When BAF was attacked, the bazaar was shut down for a couple of weeks. Closing the bazaar pissed everyone off. Operation Enduring Freedom was relatively boring for most people. Places like BAF were seldom in any real danger. The Taliban didn’t have the manpower to put together a large enough force to endanger BAF. They’d need air support. They’d need tanks and artillery. The Taliban had the capability for guerilla warfare only. Harassment, as deadly as it could be, was their only recourse.

Another challenge faced by the Taliban was that the Coalition was excellent at triangulating the point of origin of their attacks. Coalition response times are incredibly swift. Once a rocket is launched it takes three to five minutes for Coalition Forces to hone in on the geographic location from which the rocket or mortars are launched. Artillery response is nearly instantaneous, as are the quick reaction teams dispatched to interdict, kill, or capture. If the insurgent is anywhere in the area within that three-to-five minute window, they’re as good as dead.

That left the Taliban with a decision. Stay and guide their launch with death staring them down, or set a timer, aim as best as possible, and head for the hills. Amazingly, the Taliban chose life. Usually they’d lean a rocket against a rock, improvise a timer out of batteries or some other mechanism, and then un-ass the AO (area of operations). They needed luck to hit anything but they’d have needed more luck to get out alive if they stayed on too long to aim, gloat, or scream
“Allahu Akhbar!!!”

* * *

A few weeks later, the Taliban attacked again. This time, I was in my office. I had stayed late to finish up some work and to catch up on Kentucky basketball news. I was sitting at my desk inside our office deep within the Supply Support Activity (SSA), which was located in a large Soviet hangar that had survived the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent Mujahideen wars. Afghan blackbirds screeched loudly in the rafters above and my CD player thrashed out Metallica on blast. I didn’t hear the explosions or the resultant sirens.

Once I’d finished catching up with the home front, I called it a night, locked up, and started back towards my hooch. Leaving the hangar, I had to pass through the stockyard to get to Disney, which I’d follow in the darkness to KBR village. The blackbirds chirped away to a deafening crescendo in the rafters. Loud noises such as explosions usually quieted them so I suspected nothing out of the ordinary. The stockyard was a maze of shipping containers. The same twenty- and forty-foot containers that you see on huge ocean liners. It was a cold, wet night. Slush and ice covered the ground from the recent snow. Bundled up in my heavy Kentucky jacket with my head snuggled up to my chest against the brutal winds of Bagram, I wasn’t paying attention to the path in front of me. I was more intent on the icy road before me than on the situation around me. As I meandered through the storage container-created labyrinth, someone jumped out from the shadows brandishing a weapon. I found myself staring down the barrel of a 9MM Beretta pistol.

“What the hell?” I yelled and then looked straight into the wild panicked eyes of Chief Lansing.

“Dude! What the heck are you doing?”

“Oh, it’s you, Dave.”

“Yeah, it’s me. Get that thing off me. Don’t they teach you Army guys weapons safety anymore?”

“We had another rocket attack, Dave. I was checking the stockyard for intruders.”

“Chief, if the intruders are this far inside the compound, you’d better have a squad with you because we’re in deep shit.”

“Well, it’s my job as the senior officer on site.”

“That’s all good and dandy Chief, but next time, be careful. Your scared ass might have shot me.”

“Well, it’s over now. They just called ‘all clear’ over the Loud Voice. Where were you anyway? What are you doing here so late?”

“I was cyber surfing. Checkin’ basketball scores.”

“Alright, Dave. Be safe out there. Don’t fall into any holes. We won’t find you ‘til the morning.”

That was a distinct danger at Bagram at the time. There was limited lighting and Disney was lined by a drainage ditch. People fell into it all the time. I was walking to the PX one night when suddenly, I was three feet down with bloody shins. You could walk with a light but it had to be either blue or red. A white light was a beacon for a sniper. Even so, I saw plenty of guys walking around with bright white lamps shining from straps on their foreheads. Usually, it was either a civilian contractor who’d never been in the military or a Coalition Forces member. The guys from Egypt, Jordan, and a few other places knew nothing about tactical discipline. I’m surprised that the Taliban hadn’t picked a few of us off yet. Anytime I was surrounded by mountains or hills, I was nervous about snipers. Bagram was surrounded by mountains. It was the town after which BAF was named, and it was close enough that a sniper could station himself on a rooftop and choose his targets at leisure.

As a result, I became a bit skittish about silhouetting myself in open areas or in windows. When I was in Chiang Rai, Thailand in 2011, I walked outside for a smoke. I lit my cigarette and unconsciously began surveying the hills that surrounded my resort for sniper positions, ensuring that I had a place to duck and cover. Apparently, a decade in a war zone makes one a bit paranoid.

I never had the “pleasure” of receiving small arms fire while at Bagram. However, on a few rides into Kabul, we took small arms fire near the Kabul Airport. Eventually, the Coalition Forces or the U.S. military went into the hills surrounding the airport and cleared out enemy combatants. After that, it was relatively safe in Kabul. The only thing that one did have to fear was improvised explosive devices. A couple of friends were killed on the road to Bagram from Kabul by roadside IEDs. I drove that road alone in a thin-skin Toyota Hilux a few times and never received a cross look. Then again, I always felt safer alone than in a convoy. Convoys, especially military convoys, were targets. They attracted enemy attention.

I did have a chance to venture out early on. Fire Marshall Bill asked me if I wanted to help him inventory a cargo of non-military vehicles that had just arrived. “Dave, some trucks just got jingled into the other side of the airfield. Can you come help me drive them back to the SSA?”

I didn’t know the answer. The other side of the airfield was technically “outside the wire.” I was told that we weren’t supposed to go out there. Outside the wire meant that the location was beyond the confines of base defenses, so protection from any Taliban or insurgents was limited. “Let me ask if I can do that?” I responded. I walked down to Rob’s office and said, “Chief wants me to go to the other side of the airfield to help drive back some trucks? Can we do that?”

Rob shrugged, “If it’s part of the job, you can do it. Go for it.”

I was about to go outside the wire for the first time. As we drove over there, I was nervous but excited. The area where the trucks were arriving was a huge field that had been recently de-mined. There were dozens of old, leftover Soviet aircraft from the ‘80s there. Soldiers had climbed all over them and covered them with graffiti. “Kilroy was here,” “I love Mary,” and half a dozen other slogans were spray painted on the largest of the aircraft. Supposedly, they’d not been de-mined yet. Rumor was that a soldier had been killed as he climbed over one of the aircraft and set off a mine. I wasn’t keen to get too damn close but I was looking forward to checking them out.

It took about twenty minutes to reach the convoy of jingle trucks. In Central Asia, the owners of long-haul rigs decorate their trucks with chains and paint pictures or calligraphy all over the cabs. Some of these things had so many chains and other items dangling from them that they made a jingling noise as they rolled down the road. Hence, the name “jingle truck.” I don’t know who coined the term. Everyone called them jingle trucks including the Afghans. Each truck had a flat bed with a truck loaded on to it. A forklift operator was in the process of offloading the trucks. There were ten vehicles that needed to be driven back onto the base.

The first problem that we ran into was that all of the tires were flat and every battery was dead. Someone had taken all of the valve stems out of the tires and drained the batteries of acid water. We had to call maintenance to come out and repair the vehicles. While we were waiting, Chief and I inventoried the vehicles. We annotated VIN numbers, makes, models, and other useful information. When we finished, Chief signed for the vehicles from the drivers. As soon as he signed, the Afghan convoy leader walked over to us.

“Mister, I have valve stems if you need them.”

Chief looked at him suspiciously and asked, “How much are you charging?”

The Afghan dude smiled and said, “Five dollars each.”

I started laughing. My first real experience with Afghans and they were running a scam on us.