A Year In The Sandbox

Last Wednesday I was leaving the chow hall after dinner headed back to the office when the Civil Affairs Captain grabbed me and asked if I wanted to go on a long mission Friday. I said, “Sure, how long is it?” expecting to hear 14 or 16 hours, and he said “3 days”. Ok… Whatever, it’ll be fun. Then I asked him where it was and he held out his palm and drew an imaginary map. He said, “Here’s a river, here’s where we’ll be (pointing at one side of the river), and here’s Pakistan (pointing at the other side)”. The place we were headed was just North of the Khyber Pass and Torkham Gate to a couple small villages up there. Torkham Gate just reopened after being closed for a week or so while the Pakistan military conducted counter-insurgency operations on their side which flushed all the Taliban fighters across the border in to Afghanistan. Sounds exciting!

UXO

We left the FOB at 0500 Friday morning and headed to the Lal Por district center. We were supposed to meet up with an element from 2-1 ID STB and they were going to lead us to where they were camped. They never showed and while we were waiting in the DC a couple locals came up to us and told our interpreter that they had some unexploded ordinance. A week or so ago we had been to the DC and handed out fliers saying we’d pay for any UXO they turned in, so they gathered up everything they could find. Well, now that they showed it to us we had to sit on it until EOD showed up to take care of it and we were a 4 hour drive from the FOB. They finally showed up and we left for the first village, Renee.

Blue circle is us, thick line is the border

We drove up through a river valley and eventually came across a coalition convoy parked in a meadow. We stopped and talked to them and they were the ones we were supposed to meet in the DC. They thought we were going to meet them there at their campsite and thought we were late. Par for the course as far as communication goes around here. We drove on up to Renee and entertained the kids while the CA guys did their thing. The villagers were a lot more reserved than what we usually see, the kids all hung back and didn’t crowd around us like usual. Only a few of the adults came out to talk to CA and they wouldn’t let us inside their village, we had to stay outside the walls. The CA guys said they were probably either hiding weapons or bad guys inside but we never saw any of either.

Chai Tea

The locals did bring us some tea, which CA said they didn’t do last time we visited. The tea was really good, but they didn’t drink any with us. We left Renee and stopped in two other villages but I don’t remember their names. The 3rd village we stopped at was only 1km or so from where we were camping that night and by the time we were finished there the sun was starting to set.

Sunset over our campsite

We set up a hasty vehicle patrol base and then got to work cleaning weapons. Once everything was clean we ate dinner. We brought MREs but we ended up sending the Afghan National Police (ANP) guys along with an interpreter and some cash back to the DC to pick up some real food. They came back with bread and kebabs that were awesome. I don’t know what kind of meat was in it, but it was good.

The light spot in the sand is where I slept

After dinner we got ready for bed and worked out a watch schedule. I had turret duty from 11pm till midnight, then again from 4am till 5am. I laid out my sleeping bag and was getting ready to lay down when a couple of the STB guys came by and asked if anybody wanted to go on a patrol with them to over watch the last village we visited since they suspected they were hiding some bad guys. TSgt Baker, SSgt Rolon and I volunteered to go with the 4 STB guys and we headed out across the meadow to the village.

The village we watched and the ridge to the left we watched from

The seven of us made our way across the meadow and through some farm land to the base of the ridge and started the climb. This ridge would have been a tough climb during the day with no gear on but we were doing it with 80 pounds of gear using night vision optics and trying to be as quiet as possible. To say it was tough would be a huge understatement. We made it to the saddle and settled in to observe the village. As cool as it sounds it was incredibly boring. Nothing happened. At all. The only movement we saw was a guy come out of a building to take a dump. After an hour or so we made our way back down the ridge and back to the camp site.

Mmm, bread!

My two stints in the turret were cold and uneventful and the next morning we broke camp and headed back to the Lal Por DC. We walked through the market there talking to folks and bought some food and candy, then drove up to a village called Parchaw. The kids were a little more curious here and the whole village seemed a lot friendlier than the one the day before. When we were leaving one of the CA guys jokingly told the interpreter that we were going to leave him in the village to gather intel over night and pick him up the next morning. He said if we did that he’d be dead within an hour of us leaving. Guess they don’t like us there either.

My bed on the right

That night we stayed at an ANP outpost near the DC. We acquired a few beds which was nice after sleeping on the ground. We only had to keep one guy up at any one time instead of one guy per truck and I wasn’t on the schedule so I got to sleep the whole night! We sent out the ANP with some money again that night to get us some food, but this time they kept the money and never came back. Bastards. We ate MREs.

Kuz Konar

Sunday morning we left Lal Por and drove over to another district, Kuz Konar. It was a 4 hour drive and we spent another 3 hours there in the village talking. Everybody was beat and we finally got back on the road to Jalalabad and FOB Finley-Shields. By the time we made it back it was dark again and we were just in time for dinner. After we ate I took a very long hot shower then went to bed. Monday I was on the FOB for the day, then Tuesday and Wednesday I was back out on the road to Achin and Goshta. It’s been a busy week but tomorrow I’m on the FOB again so that will be a nice break.