Rolling Deep

Our primary means of transportation over here are big armored trucks called Cougars.  Almost every day we head out the wire on some mission or another.  Protected by steel, and bristling with weapons, we–as our soldiers from the inner city say–”roll deep.”  It’s always a heady experience to leave the FOB.  Glad to leave the confines of the camp and ready for whatever’s next, we chatter away on our intercoms and radios.  A couple of songs always run through my head at such times.  One is a country rocker called “Free and Easy Down the Road I Go” by Dierks Bentley.  The other is a punk rock chestnut called “You’re a Rebel,” by a group called Iron Cross.  Not too free and easy around here, and I’m not much of a rebel, but the blend of the two seems to get my mind right for whatever we have to do.

Hootch

 

When I was home on leave, everyone but everyone wanted to know about my living arrangements in Afghanistan.  Always eager to please, I’ve attached a couple of pictures of my hootch.  It’s better and bigger than most billets on my FOB; most of the others are open-bay barracks divided by plywood partitions into individual rooms.  I share a bathroom with my sergeant major, we also share a small common area that contains a refrigerator and TV, neither of which we use much.  I have commercial Internet service in my room:  $75 a month, slower than dial-up.   When it rains hard, which it does surprisingly often here, the room floods with about two inches of water.

Home on Leave

…and one of the first stops is Lindenwald, the home of our eighth President, Martin Van Buren.  In the non-military academic world I live in, if you don’t have a decided opinion on MVB, yea or nay, you’re weak.  My take:  Interesting man, first President not of the Virginia-Massachusetts aristocracy or a former war hero (like Jackson).  First President born an American, not a British subject.  Spoke Dutch as his first language.  Consummate politician, bridge-builder, negotiator, on the right side of most issues.  Lackluster President, though–economic crisis, Trail of Tears happened on his watch, and VB did little to prevent or mitigate them.  May have been victim of circumstances beyond anyone’s control, but ultimately takes the rap for not being forceful or talented enough to shape events to the nation’s advantage.

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and look forward to seeing or speaking with everyone.

Kuchi

The Kuchis are Afghanistan’s nomadic tribe.  In the spring they drive their herds of sheep and camels from the Afghan-Pakistan border to their summer homes in northern Afghanistan.  On the narrow roads through the mountain passes, we slow to a crawl to pick our way through their caravans.

Ghost Wars

Wars pile upon wars in Afghanistan. The old ones linger on, making the new ones even more complicated. While on an operation here, we were tipped off that an old Soviet scout vehicle lay buried in a nearby cave. Back in the day, the mujahedeen had stolen the vehicle and hid it there. The Soviets, suspecting where it was, bombed the hillside above the cave and collapsed the cave roof. The locals claimed that the vehicle was still in there, perfectly preserved, along with the remains of six mujahedeen martyrs also buried in the landslide.

Recovering the vehicle excited the Afghan soldiers with whom I work. War trophies are important to them, especially ones that might help establish their links to the glorious mujahedeen. The soldiers set to work with a purpose, and received plenty of help from us. After two-and-a-half days we extracted the hulk shown in the picture. Ruined beyond transport or repair, and useless as a trophy, we had to blow it in place and then remove the parts. We couldn’t leave it where it lay, even in bits and pieces. The locals would sell the scrap in Pakistan for good money, and I suspect the soldiers wanted to do the same. One officer pointed to a piece of machined metal, from the transmission or drivetrain, and said it would be worth $100 US in Pakistan. But there were other, more sinister reasons why we had to remove the scrap. The officer explained that almost every bit of it could and would be recycled into bombs and weapons meant to hurt us.

And we didn’t find any mujahedeen remains, either.

TIC

TIC stands for “Troops in Contact.” That means good guys vs. bad guys, on the ground, shooting at each other. The good guys are US and Afghan troops. The bad guys are the insurgents and their foreign-fighter friends. The troublemakers don’t like TICs, because they almost always come out on the short end of a “direct fire engagement.”  If small arms fire doesn’t get them, then artillery and helicopters will.  Instead, the insurgents fight using indirect means–rocket and mortar attacks, IEDs, suicide bombers.

On patrol with Afghan forces near a TIC site.

Mail Call

We retrieve our mail from a nearby camp about once a week.  When the convoy bringing it back to our FOB is about ten minutes out, the convoy commander alerts our operations center to gather all available personnel to help download the trucks and trailers full of packages.  These days, letter mail is rare; most mail comes in the white “Priority Mail” cartons you buy at the post office.  When the convoy arrives, we stack the mail in piles organized by section and unit.  It is a happy, democratic time.  Everyone pitches in, and we are all eager to see who got what.  Lots of packages–especially those containing food–are opened publicly and the contents distributed quickly.  Others we bundle back to our rooms to see what friends and family have sent us.  “To Any Soldier” deliveries fill the void for those who otherwise have received nothing.  Mail-induced euphoria lasts for a couple of hours, and then it’s back to the routine.

Wahoo-wah!

At Fort Riley, they taught us that if you compliment an Afghan about anything he owns, he will immediately try to give it to you.  I forgot that tidbit when I told this Afghan soldier that the logo on his stocking cap represented my dear old alma mater, the University of Virginia.  On the spot, he doffed the cap and offered it to me.

The Afghan codes of politeness are strong.  I’ve drunk tea and had the most civilized conversations with Pashtun locals who I know are sympathetic to the Taliban and may well have had knowledge of efforts to kill Americans.  But it would only exacerbate things here to be rude in the face of their hospitality, and we can’t detain and question them without strong evidence. 

So, the tea-drinking time is one thing, the fighting time is another.

Wish It Were All So Pleasant

Storyboards

There’s what happens, and then there’s the story of what happens. An Army maxim is that “first reports are always wrong,” and I’ll testify to its truth. The first report that crackles over the radio is almost always too garbled and hurried to act on. The truth takes time to sort itself out, but most events generate a host of immediate decisions and trigger a blizzard of secondary reports, so one cannot wait too long. Once the dust settles, a final summation is required and the “Information Operations” (“IO”) campaign begins. That’s a coordinated effort to make sure everyone has a common understanding of what took place.

A storyboard is how the Army summarizes significant events. Imagine a one-page Powerpoint slide packed with as much relevant information as possible. All white space disappears as maps, pictures, text boxes, graphic symbols, timelines, diagrams, and analysis are compressed into one relatively easy to comprehend slide. The completed storyboard then constitutes the de facto official record of the event. Longer reports may get written, but probably not—there’s just not enough time, and events pile up rapidly. The pressure to quickly produce an accurate storyboard is intense, and every staff has one or two officers who are expert at it. To illustrate, I’d make a storyboard that covers a trivial aspect of my life, such as “what I eat in a typical day,” but, as always, time is short. Perhaps though it is not so hard to picture what a storyboard looks like, if one just considers the possibilities.

The analogy of storyboards to a well-designed webpage is clear, but they remind me most of a feature that used to be a staple of sports pages in my early youth: full-page drawings of a stadium or sports arena, say Yankee Stadium or the Boston Gardens, adorned with lots of text-boxes and arrows pointing out significant details and aspects of the venue’s history. I used to stare at those elaborate, oversize cartoons for hours, basking in the flow of pleasingly-transmitted information.