Blast to the Past

Call me crazy but I am so happy right now being back here in Kandahar. At the moment I’m living in a big transient tent with about 200 other guys in bunk beds with a 300 yard walk to a cold shower or porta-potty, but in spite of that I couldn’t be happier. The atmosphere in Afghanistan is absolutely electric; people here act like they actually have a mission rather than just sitting around punching their tickets like in Iraq.

It has been a trip down memory lane as well. I arrived just in time to see the last vestiges of my old company being dismantled on this base. I watched as the tent that I lived in for over 4 years was torn down and discarded. I had to laugh when I saw the workers struggling to break apart the huge and sturdy bookshelf that I had built. I built it extremely tough so that I could stack sandbags against it on the outside wall of the tent so that I wouldn’t have to roll out of bed when the rockets started hitting. But eventually after a good 10 minute struggle against 3 men and a 20 lb sledge-hammer, it was beaten down small enough to fit into the back of a pickup to be hauled to the burn pit. It’ll probably be 20 years or so before anyone finds my last little parting gift that I left here though. I went out late one night in 2006 when they were resurfacing the runways and taxiways and buried a time-capsule with some pictures, letters, and a few trinkets. Maybe someday I’ll come back and dig it up.

One really annoying thing here is our little subcontractor guys from India. I normally get along great with Indians but when there’s a whole mass of them, they get really annoying. They tend to have really bad hygiene and listen to incredibly annoying music. But the worst thing is their mysterious nocturnal activities that we’ve come to call “Tag! You’re her!”

It goes like this: imagine a big huge tent, probably 80 x 300. There are 4 rows of bunk beds with all kinds of bags, footlockers, cans, electric cables, etc all over the place. Well these guys wait until like midnight and then one of them will jump out of bed and you’ll hear him tear-assing around the tent in the dark like a damn drunken jackrabbit, knocking stuff over and bumping into things, and then when they get wherever they’re going, it gets quiet for a few minutes and then starts all over again. And seeing as how a number of the Americans in the tent are former Marines, they immediately started throwing out accusations of homosexuality. Not entirely unfounded though, dudes in this part of the world are so screwed up. But that’s where the tag! you’re her jokes started.

It’s midnight here and I’m starting to laugh at things that aren’t funny and my eyelids are getting heavy. Lemme go hike down and take my icy-cold shower and crawl into my cozy sleeping bag. Tomorrow is a slow day, the weather is bad and our choppers are grounded so I don’t have to fly! Happy day!