My buddy Larry

The past week or so has been quite interesting, even in spite of our aircraft being down for maintenance. Lots of little reminders about how good it is to be alive.

First, although I have never lived through any really extreme weather (hurricanes, tornados, etc) I do have a great appreciation, screw that, I love crazy weather. The stormier, the louder the thunder, the brighter the lightning, THE BETTER! But I talk about that too much…so anyway, we’ve been having some crazy weather here. It seems that every few years a really rainy season strikes and just soaks the entire country. Of course up north it manifested itself in huge blizzards that unfortunately killed a couple hundred Afghans. Down here though we just had a lot of flooding.

The day of the worst, my buddy Larry who lives next door, woke me up with a quick pound on the door. I looked at my watch and it was 0330, a little early for breakfast so I threw a shirt and my flip-flops on and wandered out to see what was what. It turns out that the entire eastern half of our compound had a thick chocolate covered river flowing through it. I could see a van with water up to the windows still forlornly blinking its emergency lights. In the distance an MP truck had gotten stuck and a wrecker truck was rapidly getting itself stuck trying to get to it. Some crashing over the concrete T-walls got my attention and we ran up to the second level of our hooches and I shined my flashlight into the container yard adjacent to our compound, it was a total lake! The water had flipped over a few 20’ conex shipping containers and floated them around like bath toys, it was crazy. So over the past few days it has been fun to watch the base dig itself out of a mud-hole. Once again I feel old when I tell people that this has nothing on the big flood of ’04 here on Kandahar. Have I really been here that long?

One of the other crazy things that happened was one of the security guys I processed through Kuwait with got hit by a rocket, or part of a rocket. In the middle of the night a rocket came screaming in and pancaked on the road in front of our compound. The whole bottom half of the rocket tore through a chain link fence, ripped through a parked van, and flew up and hit the wall of one of the bathroom containers and exploded through the mirror as the guy was standing on front of it brushing his teeth. It took off part of his hand, a big chunk of his shoulder, and punched a hole in his lung. He hauled ass out of the container screaming and once again my buddy Larry came to the rescue. He was running out of his room to the bunker when he heard Dennis screaming and he ran back and grabbed his first responder kit and came over and patched him up and stopped the bleeding and loaded him up when the ambulance showed up. Good guy to have around in a pinch…or a flood or rocket attack lol.

So wherever you are, give Larry a round of applause.