Vampires, Shooting Stars and Lightsabers

It’s six AM and I’m getting ready to go to bed. No it hasn’t been a late night at the dance club; I’m living the life of a vampire. Except for the blood sucking, the superpowers and the fear of garlic that is; okay, pretty much just in the sense that I sleep in the day and live at night.
In order to for our airplane to be where the guys on the ground need us at all hours of the day we operate 24 hours a day. This means that many of us work night schedules. There are pluses and minuses to this. Pluses include sleeping during the 110 degree parts of the day and getting to enjoy being outside under the stars in the coolness and quietness of the day. Minuses are the fact that you don’t see much of the sun, worry about getting run over by MRAPs careening around base in the dark and have to eat things like lasagna for breakfast and pancakes for dinner.
I do enjoy the flying at night though. There’s always been something quiet and peaceful about it. Now I don’t have my nice bubble canopy, but due to the different mission I do have more time to just look around. The other night there was a major meteor shower which showed up with unusual brilliance through my NVGs. Because of the light amplification I could see many falling stars that normally wouldn’t be visible. Stunning. Another cool parlor trick is that we have a laser on our plane that shows up in the NVGs like some sort of death ray from a Star Wars movie. We can wave it around and use it to do different stuff like point something out to guys on the ground or zap some tighter coordinates, but I just enjoy firing it cause I think it looks cool.

Apart

Tomorrow will be my Georganne's birthday. I will not be able to be with her and that is hard. Most people would say it's the special days that are harder to be apart on, but maybe it's not. It might be missing all the little things, the normal times of just doing life together that is the most difficult.
We don't get many of those.
Our normal days are spent apart from each other. More often than not it is the 20 minute phone call or the email or the card in the mail that represents the woman I love. Even that blows me away. But oh those times that we are together, how special they are!
She managed to come to my base here in Afghanistan for a conference a couple weeks ago and we got to see each other. I was walking around trying to find where she was in the maze of dusty concrete barricades that made landmarks difficult when I heard my name shouted by the voice I love to hear. Behind me was my wife dressed in anonymous camoflage, but my wife still the same. I dodged the armored vehicles roaring down the street and met her as she ran to me with tears in her eyes. I held her right there in the midst of the dust and bustle of a military machine that has no place for such displays, and it all disappeared for a moment.
It's memories like that which we hold on to.

Homemaking

We live in long metal buildings we call “the mods” for modular buildings. Each one is about 25 meters long and is divided up between seven rooms with six people per room and a bathroom at the end. If you picture a couple of double-wide trailers parked end to end then you will know what I’m talking about. Without the porch. And without the three-legged dogs under the porch.
In each room we have hung up dividers in order to give ourselves an illusion of privacy. We did this by using copious amounts of 550 parachute cord strung across the room as tightly as possible to anything we could find, including the electrical conduits with the stickers saying “Do not hang anything from this conduit.” From the crisscrossing cords we hung extra sheets purloined from the billeting office using duct tape (of course). Once you have a little space set aside, it’s time to go about the business of making it a home. Of course, this home is enough space for your bed and another 18 inches of space to one side of the bed. So it doesn’t take very much to outfit it.
That being said, there isn’t very much available to outfit it anyway. There is only about half as much furniture as advertised on the base so it is in very high demand. When the guys in my room showed up there were six beds though one had the metal bent so much that the middle actually touched the floor, it looked like a giant had decided to jump on the bed. There were also two wall lockers. This meant that four of us had no furniture and one of us had no bed. Over the next couple weeks we went on a series of fruitful missions in order to “acquire” more creature comforts. We would ask around to see when people were leaving and then jump in right after then to take their furniture.
A friend saw a set of shelves made out of plywood sitting outside somewhere and was kind enough to bring it back for me. The only problem was that it was way to big and I had to turn sideways to get between it and my bed. So, I managed to borrow an electric saw and stood outside in the gravel chopping the thing up until I had a size that would fit. Now I have a place to put my clothes.
I eventually ended up just walking through the mods opening up doors and looking for empty beds with furniture next to them. And it paid off. I managed to get a small two-shelf dresser from a room where someone had apparently just moved out. After finding it, I came back at night and furtively snuck into the room with my headlight and nabbed the dresser. It didn’t end up being as smooth as I intended though because as I was picking it up it kept getting caught on random lengths of 550 cord I couldn’t see in the dark. This cord was connected to the makeshift walls in the room and every time I moved it would shake the surrounding sheets. At the end I abandoned my attempt at subtlety as I heard someone stirring and made it through the door with a couple of good bangs and managed to get back to my mod before anyone got up the energy to see what was going on.
Now I have a nightstand. I feel quite civilized.

Taliban Farming: Suicide Tractors

I stumbled to catch myself as the metal trailer I was in jumped off its supports and then crashed back down with a thunderous rattle which itself was eclipsed by another boom of much more power. It clearly wasn't thunder, but my civilized brain couldn't find any other classification for what that noise could have just been. But as the cold metal of my 9mm pistol touched my elbow I was instantly brought back to the war zone I was in and the one thing that noise could have been.
"To the bunker, everybody, now!" I yelled to the equally confused airmen in the security trailer.
Ironically, we had just finished listening to an intelligence brief warning us to be wary of a potential Taliban attack on our base. Literally, two minutes ago! It had been summed up with, "We expect an attack any day now."
It had happened. As I ran outside, about 400 meters away I could a cloud of dust rising a couple hundred feet in the air. With the curiosity of a newbie, I paused for a second until the rattle of machine gun fire spurred me on toward the concrete slabs constructing our bunker. On the way I heard three, maybe six, explosions and the stacatto sounds of AK-47's and M16's competing in my eardrums. I kneeled down and loaded my pistol if not quite with practiced skill then at least efficently, and waited to see what else would happen.
I found out later that an insurgent had managed to drive a tractor full of explosives near to the fence and then blow it and himself up. Right behind him another jihadist ran to the fence and blew himself up with a suicide vest causing a small hole in the fence. However, his fellow soon-to-be so-called matryrs didn't get a chance to run through it as they were shortly cut down by Coalition fire. They did manage to shoot off a few RPGs, but the gunbattle was over shortly and they began detonating themselves as they were wounded.
All of this mayhem was uncorrelated noise to me as I stood under concrete with other members of my squadron. After the initial craziness, the curiosity of some overtook their caution and they climbed on top to get a better view (not me, I promised my wife I would be very careful). Indeed there was much to see. Helicopters were instantly swooping down on the area ready to go to work. I even saw an unmanned MQ-9 Reaper flown overhead by some pilot in Nevada that wanted to help. High above everything else was my adopted aircraft the MC-12 taking video and helping to coordinate. Everybody on the base wanted to do their jobs, and they were all trying. I could even imagine 5,000 marines sprinting from 4 miles away on the other side of base just hoping for a chance to "get some action."
If nothing else, this attack actually made me feel more safe. There is no way that 10 or even 100 poorly trained men could do much damage to this place. Even if they were to get inside the wire they would be facing 30,000 people armed at all times with well-prepared defensive positions everywhere. This place was designed to withstand full infantry attacks against 1,000's of troops. All in all, the damage they cause was 3 slightly wounded soldiers and $70 of chainlink fence repair. $70. I can't help but wonder what these people are thinking. It's not even like Clearly we can't hold them to rational standards though. They willing choose to blow themselves up.

Dust to Dust

“Gentlemen, from this point on you need to have your body armor and helmets on and there will be not more getting up.” The loadmaster of the C-17 put down his handheld microphone and slung his own body armor over his head. Meanwhile, the two hundred marines and army grunts began to shuffle as those who had wiggled out of their protective gear tried to get it back on while crammed shoulder to shoulder with each other.
I, the lone Air Force pilot other than the ones flying this load of guys into the war zone, didn’t have to move because I never took my gear off. I had figured that it was probably the only time I would actually have to wear it so I might as well get the full experience to see what it was like. Georganne had complained, rightly so, that the back plate bruised her hips and I could see now what she was talking about. As I cinched my helmet down I peeked out the lone 4 inch window on the side of the plane and saw some of the highest mountains I have ever seen. While they would be very intimidating were I down climbing in the midst of them, from 35,000 feet they looked pretty benign. It was weird to think that the mountains might reach out and try to bring down our airplane. Rather, it was the men in mountains wanted to cause us harm.
Despite the pinch of ceramic and Kevlar some were seemed quite comfortable. At least I assumed from the way a few soldiers had their heads thrown back and mouths wide open in sonorous slumber that they were as comfortable as they could be. Others were trying to appear relaxed but they gripped their M4’s with white knuckles. None of us knew what we were going into not just on this steep tactical descent into Kandahar but what would come later. This was the beginning for all of us of a long period in which we would be in harm’s way. Most of the marines and soldiers on the plane would be away from their families and in the sights of the Taliban for a full year starting the moment we touched down. Reading books about how people react to stress is one thing but it was another to witness the various ways these young men dealt with it.
I was most encouraged by the youngest of the marines who didn’t know enough about what they were getting into to be worried. Or maybe they hadn’t experienced their own mortality yet. Things always happen to someone else right? Whatever the reason, over the clinking of weapons I began to hear the skinheads in the back singing “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling.” The song was quickly picked up by more of the marines and soon it rose over even the ever present drone of the C-17’s four engines. They barely made it to chorus though when the tight-lipped First Sergeant bawled at them to “shut the hell up.” I think he was just worried they were embarrassing the Marine Corps in front of the Army and Air Force. Too bad, I liked it.
With a crunch and a lurch we touched down on Afghan soil. After a short taxi, which was disorienting without any windows, the ramp lowered and the cabin was flooded with light. Being one of the first ones out since I was an officer I squinted down the tarmac and walked away from the plane. Kandahar is a bustle of activity. There were choppers whumping whumping around everywhere and small planes dodging them as they battled to takeoff from the one runway. The most noticeable thing though was the dust. There was dust everywhere!
It was like trying to breath in a hot sauna that no one had cleaned in three years with a layer of dust everywhere. It was in my eyes, I could taste it, and I what was that smell? There was a smell reminiscent of being in an old port-a-john. The legendary stench of the Kandahar Poo pond was indeed real. I’ll have more to say about that. Through the dusty haze I could make out a little mountain that had to be pretty close or I wouldn’t have been able to see it in the nasty visibility. It reminded me of Sunrise Mountain which stretches over the flightline at Nellis AFB where I have spent so much time in the past. This would not be any deployment full of glorious flying like a Red Flag though. Nor would I land and be a short drive from the Las Vegas Strip, the most decadent location on earth. No, this would be very different I thought as I stopped to cough and a 20 year old Marine ran into my back poking me with the barrel of an M-249 SAW.