A Year In The Sandbox

On December 21st I went on a dismounted patrol to the Achin DC. I’ve been there several times, that’s where my knife was stolen, but we usually convoy to the place we’re visiting, set up a perimeter and conduct the assessment or meeting. This trip was a little different, we would be walking through the city and talking to the folks to find out how everything was going there. We parked at the district center and walked down in to the town. It was cool because there wasn’t anything specific we were trying to accomplish, we were just told to talk to as many folks as possible and find out what their concerns are, whether it’s security or schools or medical care, etc.

As always in Achin there were a ton of kids out, and the longer we were there the more kids showed up. By now I recognize most of them and they all gathered around me and TSgt Baker, the medic. I guess they were looking for more knives…  Turns out they found one, one of our SECFOR guys got his stolen out of his pocket on this trip.

At one point I was talking to a group of people and I heard somebody down the street a little ask if anybody was from Texas. I walked down there and found a guy that looked like any other Afghan but spoke perfect English and told him I lived in Texas. He told me he used to be in the Afghan army and spent a year in San Antonio at DLI (Defense Language Institute) at Lackland learning English. I asked him what his name was and he told me it was Bob. I remarked that that was a fairly unusual name for an Afghan, and he said his real name was something I couldn’t pronounce. I thought it was funny out of all the names he could’ve picked to call himself he chose Bob. We talked about our favorite bars on the riverwalk (his was Coyote Ugly) and stuff like that. I asked him why he wasn’t still in the army or working as an interpreter. He told me he was a Sergeant Major in the army but that all he did was serve the officers coffee and food, no real work. He said he’s not working as an interpreter because he is trying to help his tribe as much as possible. It really is a small world when I can talk about Coyote Ugly with some random guy in Afghanistan.

The rest of the patrol was fairly uneventful. We left Achin and stopped at a radio station on the way back. The radio station stop went way over the scheduled time so we skipped our stop in Bati Kot at the Marko Bazaar where we were supposed to conduct another foot patrol like in Achin.

I know I’ve said it before but I’m definitely going to start updating more regularly. There just too much good stuff to write about to not start doing it more often. I’m afraid I’m going to forget some of the interesting stuff!

There are more pictures of this mission in the Achin album.