Impressions of the Afghani Countryside

So I needed to go to Kandahar (KAF) to get a CAC. If you don't know what that is, it's not that important ... the point is, I needed to go to KAF for legitimate business purposes. Naturally, there were secondary reasons for the trip, namely acquiring an AFN decoder for the Chief. This allows us to receive the Armed Forces Radio and Television Services signal ... so he can watch bowl games, I can watch the Super Bowl, and we all enjoy some well-deserved telly.

I didn't get on the first flight, a Blackhawk, but I did get on the second flight, a Chinook! Woohoo, my first Chinook ride! I was hurried onto the helicopter first, and was sent all the way toward the front. I ended up sitting next to the Gunner. It is important for the Gunner to be able to shoot his weapon if he needs to, so there is a giant a window in the side of the bird. I was sitting next to this window. Awesome thing about it: I got to see outside. Terrible thing about it: it's really freaking windy, and therefore, really freaking cold. We made a few stops and it took a while to get to KAF, so I was pretty certain I would never, ever be warm again by the time we arrived.

But the trip was incredible! I finally got to see what the area around my FOB looks like! It's pretty barren and there are what looks like empty swimming pools around. Oh, and we have a moat. It's usually dry, but it's a moat, nonetheless. (The moat is actually a drainage ditch for when the rainy season hits. There is aactually a rainy season, and this area tends to flood. Yah for proactive mitigation measures!) There really isn't much around, but that's a good thing. Fewer places for baddies to hide and shoot stuff at us from. Woohoo!

As we left, I have no idea what direction we went, but the terrain made me think of the dry lake beds around Pahrump, Nevada. Pieces of land were sectioned off into what I can only guess are manageable plots for growing whatever will grow here. There was very little outside of the various shades of khaki, sand, and tan one finds around here, but every now and then, there would be some bright colors hanging on washing lines.

The houses seemed to be of two kinds: the walled compound variety and the nomad-looking variety. The walled compounds weren't very big ... I don't know how high we were flying, so I couldn't give an estimate of dimensions. The buildings inside tended to be along one wall, opposite the entrance/exit opening of the compound. It looked like the wall of the compound was the back wall of the buildings inside. Imagine a terra cotta tile ... that's what the roofs looked like ... a big terra cotta tile, except not red at all. Everything was the same color ... sand/mud. They reminded me of adobe villages of the southwestern United States, except not tall, and not carved out of mountains. Though, as we got closer to some hills, it did appear that many houses used the natural landscape to their advantage, and some of them were actual built into the side of the hills.

The nomadic-looking villages really just looked like big camp sites. There appeared to be a main living area, made of a big tent (again, no idea how high we were, so no guesses at dimensions), with a few smaller patches nearby with various things in them. There were a bunch of sites that had a little ring of something with camels inside! Camel pens! And some farming plots nearby also, but much smaller than the ones near the walled compounds.

For a while, it was the dry lake bed looking land, then it turned into kind of scrubby land. Certainly not anything with serious growth potential, but again, like something out of the American southwest. Mostly flat, with some minor changes in elevation, with sparse vegetation. That land smoothed out into the rolling sand desert that one thinks of when imagining the Sahara, or various parts of the Middle East. Southwest Asia has them too. Camels live there! In big packs! Do camels (the non-cigarette kind) come in packs? A drove of camels? A flock of camels? A gaggle of camels? A den of camels? Hmmm ...

Anywho, the camels were cool! Then we flew over a cliffy area that had actual water! River-looking things. Not necessarily actual rivers, because they appeared to start and end sporadically, but honest-to-goodness above-ground water! It was kind of exciting to see. In this area, there were actual GREEN farmlands! I'm assuming that's where they grow the pot! The cliffy area gave way to mountains (not very tall ones) and then the mountains gave way to more flat scrubby land, and then more khaki houses, more densely packed as we got closer to KAF, and then we hit to poo smell, and we knew we were almost ready to land.

Our "travel agent", the guy in charge of putting people on flights, gave us our flight briefing (don't get your head chopped off by the rotors) and told us we'd be making a couple of stops, but not to get off the helicopter until it smells like poo. Sure enough ... we hit the poo smell, landed, and voila! We were at KAF!

Another consequence of sitting by the Gunner was that my hair, unsecured, was whipped into a delightful frenzy of enormous knots that I was pretty sure I'd need to go to the barber to get out. As in, shave my head, there's no way I can get these out. Fortunately, I did not have to shave my head, though I did lose A LOT of hair getting the knots out. And the end result was me having a bad hair day for two days. Worse than normal hair day, anyway. The bad hair day got worse over the course of the day/night, but that's not what this post is about. That's another rant one.

I was hoping to get back to Howz-e that same day, but alas, the flight gods were not on my side. But the good thing about that, is that I got another daytime flight! In a warm, cozy Blackhawk, I returned to my little FOB. We went a different way this time, but the landscape didn't really change. The strongest thought that stuck out for me on the way back, was as we neared my destination ... if it wasn't for the large amount of in-ground swimming pool-looking holes, my part of southern Afghanistan doesn't look that much different from, say, rural southern Nevada, or rural southern Utah, or most of the rural southwest US. US roads are bigger and more plentiful, but that's about it.

What I assume to be normal, everyday, Afghani people were out doing normal, everyday things. Tending their animals, tending their farms, tending their houses. Life went on as if they weren't living in a war zone. While one knows life goes on, regardless of external events, it is really nice to see that war hasn't made things completely foreign to the people that still have to live here when the fighting is done. A little normalcy is nice.

Anyway, it was a cool thing ... to see what was outside the wire, without really being involved in anything bad. (It's a war zone, so the world can fall to shit at any second, but you know what I mean.) The trip to and from KAF was great. The KAF experience shall be ranted about later. Not really the whole experience, just the living arrangement part.

'Til next time, keep the brave men and women of the Armed Forces in your thoughts! :)