NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (3 page)

Only one airline flew into and around Uzbekistan at that time—Uzbek Airlines. The airplanes were rickety, ancient machines. I thought the damn things were going to fall out of the sky. I’m pretty sure parts of the wing fell off an airplane on one landing. The planes that flew us from Tashkent to Karshi-Khanabad (K2) Airbase were worse. I flew into K2 on a plane that had folding seats bolted to the floor. One passenger was holding a chicken during a flight.

Uzbekistan is a former Soviet satellite state. Like its airports and customs officials, it was dark, dank, and dreary. The people looked downtrodden. The economy was dead and jobs were scarce. The hotel in Tashkent where KBR lodged us had lawyers and doctors working as receptionists, bartenders, and bellboys. The bars were full of prostitutes. The first time I stayed in Tashkent, the going rate for a lady of the night was fifty bucks. The rednecks from Texas and Louisiana had run that price up to 300 U.S. dollars within a few months. The price pretty much stuck there until KBR moved its operations to Dubai in 2005.

After a night or two in Tashkent, KBR moved us to K2, which, at the time, was the way station for soldiers and civilians flying into and out of Afghanistan. I was part of a massive influx of new hires for the Afghan mission. Flights were limited. After a week sitting in K2, I boarded a C130 aircraft bound for Bagram Airfield. The flight was smooth running for about seventy-five minutes when suddenly we took a vertigo- inducing dive. The aircraft engines reversed into a deafening burst of combustion. Seconds later, we hit tarmac. I wasn’t certain what was happening at first. The dive was so steep that I thought we’d been fired on. We were in a war zone after all. One second we’re on a steady trajectory. The next we’re being pushed and pulled by the force of the aircraft’s change of direction. I felt a momentary surge of panic as the G-forces turned my stomach up into my mouth.

No rockets had been fired at us. This was tactical night landing—standard operating procedure—in Bagram, Afghanistan. All aircraft flying into Bagram Airfield landed in this manner. A quick altitude decline hugging the slopes of the Hindu Kush Mountains, immediate deceleration, and straight onto the ground. A big bump, a short bounce, and then we smoothed out on a runway and came to a lurching halt. A couple of poor bastards who hadn’t strapped on their safety belts were jerked out of their web seating and onto the floor.

No sooner had the aircraft come to a full stop than a ramp came down, and our tiny pitch black world inside the aircraft was flooded with light. We had arrived. We’d flown over a cascading canvas of mountains to get into Bagram in eastern Afghanistan. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Bagram Airfield is situated in a valley surrounded by the soaring ramparts of the majestic mountain range of the Hindu Kush that straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan. The mountains encircled Bagram like fortress walls. They were the reason for our sudden, terror-inducing decline in altitude. Pilots had no choice but to drop steeply in order to land at Bagram. Of course, the opposite is true on the way out. Aircraft must reach for immediate elevation when leaving Bagram or crash into the craggy, snow covered peaks.

We landed in the dead of night. When the cargo door at the rear of the aircraft opened, I inexplicably started singing an old Army tune in my head,
“C130 rollin’ down the strip!
Airborne Daddy gonna take a little trip!”
Lights flooded the cargo and passenger department. A few airfield officials and a KBR representative appeared in the light.
“Mission Top Secret, Destination Unknown. We don’t even know if we’re ever comin’ home!”
We were told to unstrap and grab our gear. “Exit from the rear of the aircraft,” a cargo specialist yelled to us. We followed directions but mostly we followed the veterans. The old guys who were returning from R&R. I watched them and mimicked. We followed the KBR representative off of the tarmac and into a passenger holding area. Our identification cards were collected and compared to the passenger manifest. “
Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door! Jump right out on the count of four.”
They called off our names ensuring that everyone who was supposed to be on the flight was actually on the flight. After an hour of waiting, they led us to our baggage in the cool Afghan air. It was a pitch black night. I pulled a flashlight out of my backpack and twisted it to on. Several clicks brought to life beams of light that sliced through the darkness. Shards of light flashed all around me. Once everyone had secured their baggage, someone yelled “Welcome to BAF!” as we were loaded onto a bus and driven off into the darkness. I sat on the bus and wondered what in God’s name had I gotten myself into, while the Army tunes buzzed around in my brain.

We soon turned onto a main road where there were Afghans working an ancient asphalt machine. The first real road was being laid in Bagram. All other roads, if you can call them that, were sand pits on which vehicles would slide haphazardly with tires spinning nearly hopelessly, fishtailing down the road. The Afghans working the asphalt were the only light source that I could make out in the immediate vicinity. Bagram in 2003 had no lights and precious few hard surfaces. Most of the base was covered either in fine sand or ankle-twisting, fist-sized gravel. As we passed the Afghans, the old timers broke out into applause. Some of these guys had already been in Afghanistan for up to a year. All of us newbies joined the applause as we sensed the significance of asphalt being laid after sloshing around in that sand outside the airfield earlier.

KBR deposited us in transient tents and told us to bed down for the night and report to the building next to the tent at 8 a.m. to finalize our in-processing. The tents were long and filled from front to rear with green Army cots. There were a few people in them already. Men and women coming and going to other places or departing contract. A few other newbies were in there as well. They’d been there a day or two and were awaiting their assignments in the outer base camps in places like Kabul, Qandahar, Jalalabad, or Gardez.

I woke up at 0500hrs. All of the newbies reported to the KBR administrative building that morning. It was the only permanent structure in the immediate area. I was told that it was an old Soviet-era barracks. A leftover from the Soviet occupation. Bagram, which is about twenty-five miles northeast of Kabul, was a major point of entry during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as well as the main Soviet airfield in this region of the country. From here, the Soviets protected Kabul and struck out to the north and east at the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud~the Lion of Panjsheer. Massoud was a complicated character. He was a major foe of the Soviets in the war of the ‘80s. He helped to defeat the Afghan communist government after the Soviets tucked tail and ran from American stinger missiles. He and other warlords bombed the hell out of Kabul after the Soviets left it unscathed. Massoud became the leader of the Northern Alliance-led United Front that held out against the rise of the Taliban. The Taliban sent assassins to murder him prior to the 9/11 attacks. Taliban and al Qaeda agents, disguised as journalists, successfully infiltrated Massoud’s camp and set off an explosive hidden in a camera as they were “interviewing” him on September 9, 2001. Massoud died shortly thereafter.

When America invaded in October 2001, British SAS
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and Army Pathfinders
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were dropped into Bagram. Those guys prepared the way for the U.S. military to move into BAF, which is how everyone referred to Bagram and its airfield. Scattered across the area were buildings that hadn’t been destroyed during the Soviet occupation. KBR HQ was one of those buildings. It was a two-storey, white building about the size of a small gymnasium. KBR had come in and improved the building. The upper floor became offices for the project manager, his deputy, and staff. The first floor they’d made into administrative offices to run the LOGCAP contract. Within LOGCAP, KBR was tasked with every aspect of supporting the war effort in Afghanistan from troop movement and housing to feeding the troops and getting them bombs and bullets.

We spent that first day at Bagram Airfield filling out forms and attending classes. The classes were more in-depth repeats of earlier briefs with a few twists. They annoyed me because most of it was common sense. We were barraged with “Don’t feed the animals” messages. I sat there thinking, “NO SHIT!” Until I came to the realization that they had us sitting there because some real life imbecile had actually made these rules and warnings necessary. Just as that thought whizzed by, the guy briefing told us straight up, “Look, I don’t want to be up here anymore than you want to be sitting there. But, we gotta tell you this stuff because we’ve had people do these things.”

Rule #1
: “Don’t attempt to keep camel spiders as pets. They get big. REALLY BIG. The camel spider got its name from its appetite. They grow to be anywhere from six inches to a gigantic two feet in diameter. They feed in groups. Eight to ten of them will attack a camel and sting it with their venom. The venom incapacitates the camel, which then collapses. Once the prey is down, the camel spiders swarm the poor beast and proceed to eat it. Yes, camel spiders ARE carnivorous.”

Rule #2
: “If you are digging a ditch and you suddenly notice a viper staring at you, don’t try to beat it to death with a shovel. Another bit of common sense, I know. Only it’s not. Some guy actually did this. He and his co-workers dug a trench about six-feet deep in which they were going to install water and sewage pipes for a shower facility. They took their lunch break. When they returned to the pit, a viper had crawled down into the trench. Instead of calling Vector Control—the animal guys—this guy jumped down into the trench with the viper and starting bashing the damn thing with a shovel. That viper got a hold of him and didn’t let go. It bit him six or seven times. They got the guy out and he miraculously survived.”

We also sat through a few administrative classes, such as how to post to our time sheets as well as the R&R policy. KBR made it compulsory to go on R&R every four months. We were allotted fourteen days on the first and second R&Rs, and a twenty-one day mid-tour if you stayed for a second year. If you didn’t stay for a second year, KBR flew you to your home of record after the twelfth month.

We were also given our “uniform.” It consisted of a baseball cap that had KBR sewn on it. These we had to wear at all times. The contract officer who presided over the original contract negotiations had insisted on these hats as a way to identify KBR employees. He was one of those military guys who hated contractors. Anytime he saw a person wearing a KBR hat smoking or standing around too long, he’d head straight for the project manager’s office and complain.

The last part of the brief was new to me—
General Order #1
. It was a multi-page order signed by the commanding general of the United States Forces–Afghanistan (USFOR-A) with an encyclopedic list of prohibited actions for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The gist of General Order #1 is this:
No Fucking, No Drinking, No Drugs
. That’s how it was briefed, and we were all given a copy to sign and a copy to keep with us. We were also told that we weren’t to fraternize with the “customer.” This was KBR Order #1. By the “customer” they meant anyone who was not KBR.

American forces were the only personnel who were prohibited from drinking alcohol. This was a manifestation of American puritanism mixed with the cognitive dissonance that is American political correctness. The U.S. military “big wigs” had convinced themselves that Afghans do not drink. Reality, however, never stopped a politician or an American general from making broad assumptions. I also never understood the sex thing. People were going to meet. They were going to hook up. They were going to have sex. That’s what people do. The generals drank and, if half of the rumors were to be believed, generals fucked in the war zone as well. There is an old Napoleonic maxim: “Never give your men an order that you cannot enforce.”

I never bought the “respect the culture” slogans. That seemed just one more bit of military hypocrisy. Brits, Romanians, French, and Germans had bars and restaurants all over Afghanistan that served alcohol and pork. The American commands bristled against the ISAF
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policy on alcohol. That puritanical, politically correct U.S. attitude towards alcohol caused friction between the various Coalition partners. As one Brit put it, “You Yanks know how to put on a war but you don’t know how to enjoy one.”

After in-processing was completed, we were sent to the front of the Admin building to wait on our sponsors to show us where we’d be working and sleeping. I was the last one to be picked up. A guy named Jimmoh came by and told me to chill for the rest of the day. I was surprised and a little disappointed. I was information starved.

“HUH?! Just chill out?” I answered. Jimmoh was a short dude with a long ponytail running down his back. He looked like he was in a Biker gang. “So, Mister Jimmoh, what should I do for the rest of the day?”

“Not Mister Jimmoh. Just Jimmoh. And I don’t care what you do. Your supervisor will come check on you tonight or tomorrow morning.”

“Well, okay. Not what I’d expected. But whatever.”

I had no idea what was going on. So, I wandered around and checked out the base. I stopped one guy and got directions to the Post Exchange. The Post Exchange, or PX, was the store operated by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES). It always had plenty of DVDs, cigarettes, and CDs but was usually out of shampoo and soap. While at the PX, I grabbed a cup of coffee from the Green Bean (ghetto warzone version of Starbucks). While I was sitting there, I heard people talking about the bazaar. I asked a guy next to me, “Dude, what is the bazaar?”

He looked at me like I was a Martian, and then said, “Newbie. Got it. The bazaar. It’s a big-ass Afghan flea market. They sell everything. Old firearms. Carpets. Bootleg Rolex watches. Tons of gems. They’ve got all kinds of shit there. They even bring in a two-humped camel that you can pose with for a photo.”