A Year In The Sandbox

I finally made it back to FOB Finley-Shields. Traveling in Afghanistan sucks, we got bumped from 2 different flights out of Bagram, ended up being up all night, finally caught a flight at 0600 back to FOB Fenty. We called to get a ride back to FOB Finley-Shields at 0700. At 0900 we were still [...]

The Villagio Mall Qatar seems like it’s caught halfway between what it was and what it is becoming. It’s a Muslim country, you still see men in the white man-dresses and women covered head to toe in black abayas, but you also see ultra-modern buildings being built and a lot of people dressed like you’d [...]

Well I finally made it to Qatar. My post about leaving on a jet plane turned out to be overly optimistic. The flight from Jalalabad to Bagram was on a tiny twin-engine Casa 212. I had a 0400 show time at the PAX terminal in Bagram on Monday morning, so after a couple hours of [...]

Well, I’m still in Bagram waiting for a flight to Qatar. I was supposed to fly out the same day I got here but that flight was canceled. The next one was today (Friday) but we woke up to almost 8 inches of snow on the ground! It’s wet, slushy, nasty snow too. All the [...]

Here’s a quick video I took outside Our Mother of Hope school here in Jalalabad. I had climbed down out of the turret and was trying to get my bag out of the back seat and these kids crowded around asking for a pen. It cracked me up, reminded me of the gulls in Finding [...]