Hogskin
03-08-2002, 10:44 AM
Greetings to all from the extreme front lines.
Wow. So much has happened since I last wrote I almost don't know where to begin. I know it's been a couple of weeks and I apologize but there's not a lot in the way of modern communications in this war-torn ###country and
rooting out an Internet link has been both challenging and low on my list ###of survival needs. However, I've been keeping notes and today I bumped into an intelligence officer in a little Afghan village and he has this extraordinary satellite phone with an Internet connection. So, with bartering skills sharply honed in Oman, I bargained for some time on his communications rig, trading for an orange and a can of Coke I "liberated" out of the General's tent a few days ago. Let me back up and start at the beginning. Some week and a half ago my team and I arrived here in the middle of the night. As a rule, we only fly in at night to keep the Taliban - many who, contrary to reports, did not
flee to Pakistan but instead simply took off their turbans and donned Northern Alliance hats - from taking pot shots at us. The first thing that struck ###me was how dark it is for an air base. No landing lights, very little ###terminal lights, and even lights inside the cargo bay were switched to dim red as we opened the cargo doors and drove out our HMMVV. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, is there is simply very little electricity here. What precious little power is here is produced by a few Marine Corp diesel generators and used for command and control functions, leaving very little for luxuries such as light. The second reason is something called light discipline. For those of you not familiar with the term, light discipline means not revealing your position to the enemy. Thus, what few buildings do have power and light have their windows blacked-out. ###All tactical vehicles are driven in what is known as black-out mode, which are little lights that only dimly illuminate a few feet to the front and rear. The result is a place that is disconcertingly dark and eerily quiet.
Which, I suppose, just the way a combat zone is supposed to be. Without knowing the lay of the land well enough to
navigate blindly without lights, we opted to bivouac on the terminal floor that first night. ###It was a cold night, dipping to -5c and made all the more cold by a chilling wind whistling through broken windows and splintered doors, unabated by any type of heating. It was especially cold for me because, as I mentioned previously, my cold weather bag went AWOL somewhere between Oman and Qatar. However, as good fortune would have it I had
crammed my cold weather sleeping bag into a different kit bag and it was not lost with my other cold weather gear. So I was able to crawl inside my bag, still in complete uniform (sans boots), to escape the biting cold. ###SOP standard operating procedure) here is for everyone to be armed at all times. My loaded submachine gun and body armor were next to my head that night, as they have been every night since. The first thing I do after waking and donning my boots is to sling my weapon. It is now like a hat that I've always worn, it feels strange if I don't have it. We carry
arms even when we exercise, running with rifles or pistols in hand, which is good since we've been attacked twice since I've been here. ###The first time was only our second night here. One of the perimeter positions only a hundred yards or so to our left took some incoming fire and we all went to general quarters, taking defensive fighting positions in our bivouac in case they penetrated to our position. The Marines quickly repelled the attack. It will not other me should I live my entire life without having to kill a man but I have to say I'm glad to be surrounded by a thousand 19 year-old Marines who can't wait to. They will be leaving in a few weeks and turning over the base to the Army. I will miss them.
Our bomb squad team bivouac is a bombed and burned-out building on the edge of the airfield. I think it used to be a motor pool of sorts, judging by the height of the ceilings and the predominance of destroyed vehicles nearby. ###There is no tent city such as there was in Oman. The only tents the Marines use are one-man pup tents and they are everywhere. ###Each foxhole and DFP (defensive fighting position) around the camp is accompanied by two of these humble little tents. I have a renewed respect for the Marines. They arrived a month ago, dug in, and ###have been living out of these ridiculously small, 5x5' tents ever since. No heat, no latrines, no showers, nothing but backpacks, weapons, helmets and flak vests, and lots of ammo. And they've been doing it every day. Four man teams at each position, two sleeping, two on watch. God bless them every one.
Not that we have it much better. Our bivouac inside the perimeter doesn't have heat, electricity, latrines, or showers either. I'll have to layover ###in a hotel for a week on my way back just to get clean once again. But at least we are surrounded by thick cement walls that tend to stop bullets better than nylon tents, and for that I am genuinely thankful.
MREs are the fare of the day once again. Three a day is all we are allowed ###due to limited supplies but I have a hard time even eating that many. ###Unfortunately one must try to eat as much as possible because just staying warm burns up a lot of calories. I'm eating 3000 calories a day and still losing weight. I can only partially blame that on the cold. The other cause is our extremely busy work schedule. There is so much unexploded ordnance here that must be disarmed that we work from sunup to sundown every day and are just scratching the surface of the problem. I may have disarmed more bombs here in a week than I have in the last twenty years. It is both staggering and a bit overwhelming. Each day we disarm or dispose of ###hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of explosives only to begin the next day barely closer to completing the overall mission. Still, after we clear an area of bombs or de-mine an area so that the ground troops can move in and set up a fighting position, it feels good. ###I can see the relief and gratitude in the faces of the soldiers and Marines as they move their fighting position to the one I just cleared, the one that gives them just that little advantage they didn't have before, the advantage they feel is the difference between winning and loosing, between life and death. ###Yep, it feels pretty good.
Thankfully, our team is not alone in this mission. We have Marine, Navy, and ###Army EOD teams here as well, some twenty EOD troops in all. In fact, this is not only a joint service operation, it is an international one as well. We have Australian, Danish, and even Norwegian forces here. I am working daily with the Norwegian demining team. A more hardy, professional, and all around great bunch of guys one ###would be hard pressed to find. I seemed to have formed a particularly close connection with them. I'm not sure if it is because of our common cold climate origins or because of my Norwegian relatives from Dena's side of the family. (I didn't tell them, they seemed to have smelled it on me.) ### Regardless, they have taken me in like a brother, granting me access to their precious supply of Kaffe and heated tents for a few short minutes a day.
The Navy and Marine EOD teams were here before we arrived but they were certainly glad to see us. Not only did we bring desperately needed manpower, but some luxuries as well. The Navy and Marine teams tend to travel very light. They only bring more or less what they can carry on their backs. Which is a considerable load but still bereft of luxuries. We, on the other hand, flew in with a truck and trailer.
After all our required equipment was loaded there were nooks and crannies left to squirrel away a few opulent amenities. So we brought lots of cots and foam pads, a multi-fuel stove for heating water, and a few cases of
soda liberated from Seeb. Needless to say we were very popular when we first arrived. Some of the guys had been sleeping on cold cement floors with nothing between their sleeping bags and the floor other than thin foam pad. We were so glad to be able to help.
I finally shaved this morning after more than a week. Combat areas don't seem to concern themselves with details like shaving and, following suit, I decided to save what remaining charge I have on my electric shaver by only shaving occasionally. I dug out the plastic mirror with the magnet on the back that a friend (Dena's Aunt Dar) sent to me after reading my comments about the bizarre mirrors in Oman, and found a steel pipe outside the building that had been sheared off by a bomb blast at about head height. I stuck the mirror to it and began to trim my beard with some scissors I happened to bring with me. Just before I started to shave with my razor, I noticed in the mirror several guys behind me staring. ###Soon another face appeared behind me in the mirror, and then another, until I
had a small gallery watching. Resigned to asking the obvious, I turned around. "Uh, is everything all right?" I asked, a bit confused. "Where the hell did you get a mirror? " one of the Marines asked. "A friend sent it," I replied warily. "Would you like to use it?" I barely got the question out before one of them snatched it off the pipe and a chorus of, "Me first," began. "Actually, after I was finished with it was what I had in mind, " I muttered to deaf ears already lining up to shave and brush teeth. An hour later I was able to continue shaving. We all started an hour late that day.
One of the guys who borrowed the mirror is a Navy Chief called Mike. ###Just plain Mike. Just plain Mike was out on a mission far enough away from camp the other night that they had to take a squad of Marines with them for security. After arriving at the operation location and setting up a small defensive perimeter, he began to work. "There were unfriendlies in the area ###so we requested air cover," just plain Mike told me. "After a while I
could hear a C-130 gunship overhead, making lazy circles around our position. It was like a warm blanket. You know what the loneliest sound in the world is?" he asked. I shook my head. "The sound of that gunship finally flying away."
There are some things we do pretty darn well in this military and some things we don't. But here's a bomb tech just like me, out in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere, who is able to pick up a satellite phone, call a desk in Florida and ask for help, and minutes later, help is flying over his head 6000 miles away. I guess that's one of the things we do pretty well. I'm proud to be a part of that Air Force. Every day I keep something close to me from home. I have a picture of Dena and my sons in the ID card holder I wear around my neck with my dog tags.
That's always with me. But besides that, I try to take something else ###that reminds me of home. Today, it is a fleece pullover that my thoughtful brother-in-law, John, and his wonderful girlfriend Steph, gave me last Christmas. I have it on under my uniform and it is one of the few remaining pieces of warm clothing I have. It was in with my civilian
clothes and as such was not lost with my military cold weather gear. It is a wonderful shade of green that is just close enough to military green that it passes for standard issue gear. I was wearing it today when I safed some rockets and projectiles, cleared some mines, spoke with the Marine General in charge of the base, and had lunch with some very nice Afghan Anti-Taliban Forces nearby. I just thought you'd like to know that John and Steph. Thanks again.
I'm afraid there is no mailing address for here as of yet and I don't have anything that resembles my own email account. I'll send this to Dena so she can forward it to everyone. Please, don't respond to the e-mail I'm using because it's borrowed.
Take care and I'll email again when I am able,
-mike-
Wow. So much has happened since I last wrote I almost don't know where to begin. I know it's been a couple of weeks and I apologize but there's not a lot in the way of modern communications in this war-torn ###country and
rooting out an Internet link has been both challenging and low on my list ###of survival needs. However, I've been keeping notes and today I bumped into an intelligence officer in a little Afghan village and he has this extraordinary satellite phone with an Internet connection. So, with bartering skills sharply honed in Oman, I bargained for some time on his communications rig, trading for an orange and a can of Coke I "liberated" out of the General's tent a few days ago. Let me back up and start at the beginning. Some week and a half ago my team and I arrived here in the middle of the night. As a rule, we only fly in at night to keep the Taliban - many who, contrary to reports, did not
flee to Pakistan but instead simply took off their turbans and donned Northern Alliance hats - from taking pot shots at us. The first thing that struck ###me was how dark it is for an air base. No landing lights, very little ###terminal lights, and even lights inside the cargo bay were switched to dim red as we opened the cargo doors and drove out our HMMVV. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, is there is simply very little electricity here. What precious little power is here is produced by a few Marine Corp diesel generators and used for command and control functions, leaving very little for luxuries such as light. The second reason is something called light discipline. For those of you not familiar with the term, light discipline means not revealing your position to the enemy. Thus, what few buildings do have power and light have their windows blacked-out. ###All tactical vehicles are driven in what is known as black-out mode, which are little lights that only dimly illuminate a few feet to the front and rear. The result is a place that is disconcertingly dark and eerily quiet.
Which, I suppose, just the way a combat zone is supposed to be. Without knowing the lay of the land well enough to
navigate blindly without lights, we opted to bivouac on the terminal floor that first night. ###It was a cold night, dipping to -5c and made all the more cold by a chilling wind whistling through broken windows and splintered doors, unabated by any type of heating. It was especially cold for me because, as I mentioned previously, my cold weather bag went AWOL somewhere between Oman and Qatar. However, as good fortune would have it I had
crammed my cold weather sleeping bag into a different kit bag and it was not lost with my other cold weather gear. So I was able to crawl inside my bag, still in complete uniform (sans boots), to escape the biting cold. ###SOP standard operating procedure) here is for everyone to be armed at all times. My loaded submachine gun and body armor were next to my head that night, as they have been every night since. The first thing I do after waking and donning my boots is to sling my weapon. It is now like a hat that I've always worn, it feels strange if I don't have it. We carry
arms even when we exercise, running with rifles or pistols in hand, which is good since we've been attacked twice since I've been here. ###The first time was only our second night here. One of the perimeter positions only a hundred yards or so to our left took some incoming fire and we all went to general quarters, taking defensive fighting positions in our bivouac in case they penetrated to our position. The Marines quickly repelled the attack. It will not other me should I live my entire life without having to kill a man but I have to say I'm glad to be surrounded by a thousand 19 year-old Marines who can't wait to. They will be leaving in a few weeks and turning over the base to the Army. I will miss them.
Our bomb squad team bivouac is a bombed and burned-out building on the edge of the airfield. I think it used to be a motor pool of sorts, judging by the height of the ceilings and the predominance of destroyed vehicles nearby. ###There is no tent city such as there was in Oman. The only tents the Marines use are one-man pup tents and they are everywhere. ###Each foxhole and DFP (defensive fighting position) around the camp is accompanied by two of these humble little tents. I have a renewed respect for the Marines. They arrived a month ago, dug in, and ###have been living out of these ridiculously small, 5x5' tents ever since. No heat, no latrines, no showers, nothing but backpacks, weapons, helmets and flak vests, and lots of ammo. And they've been doing it every day. Four man teams at each position, two sleeping, two on watch. God bless them every one.
Not that we have it much better. Our bivouac inside the perimeter doesn't have heat, electricity, latrines, or showers either. I'll have to layover ###in a hotel for a week on my way back just to get clean once again. But at least we are surrounded by thick cement walls that tend to stop bullets better than nylon tents, and for that I am genuinely thankful.
MREs are the fare of the day once again. Three a day is all we are allowed ###due to limited supplies but I have a hard time even eating that many. ###Unfortunately one must try to eat as much as possible because just staying warm burns up a lot of calories. I'm eating 3000 calories a day and still losing weight. I can only partially blame that on the cold. The other cause is our extremely busy work schedule. There is so much unexploded ordnance here that must be disarmed that we work from sunup to sundown every day and are just scratching the surface of the problem. I may have disarmed more bombs here in a week than I have in the last twenty years. It is both staggering and a bit overwhelming. Each day we disarm or dispose of ###hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of explosives only to begin the next day barely closer to completing the overall mission. Still, after we clear an area of bombs or de-mine an area so that the ground troops can move in and set up a fighting position, it feels good. ###I can see the relief and gratitude in the faces of the soldiers and Marines as they move their fighting position to the one I just cleared, the one that gives them just that little advantage they didn't have before, the advantage they feel is the difference between winning and loosing, between life and death. ###Yep, it feels pretty good.
Thankfully, our team is not alone in this mission. We have Marine, Navy, and ###Army EOD teams here as well, some twenty EOD troops in all. In fact, this is not only a joint service operation, it is an international one as well. We have Australian, Danish, and even Norwegian forces here. I am working daily with the Norwegian demining team. A more hardy, professional, and all around great bunch of guys one ###would be hard pressed to find. I seemed to have formed a particularly close connection with them. I'm not sure if it is because of our common cold climate origins or because of my Norwegian relatives from Dena's side of the family. (I didn't tell them, they seemed to have smelled it on me.) ### Regardless, they have taken me in like a brother, granting me access to their precious supply of Kaffe and heated tents for a few short minutes a day.
The Navy and Marine EOD teams were here before we arrived but they were certainly glad to see us. Not only did we bring desperately needed manpower, but some luxuries as well. The Navy and Marine teams tend to travel very light. They only bring more or less what they can carry on their backs. Which is a considerable load but still bereft of luxuries. We, on the other hand, flew in with a truck and trailer.
After all our required equipment was loaded there were nooks and crannies left to squirrel away a few opulent amenities. So we brought lots of cots and foam pads, a multi-fuel stove for heating water, and a few cases of
soda liberated from Seeb. Needless to say we were very popular when we first arrived. Some of the guys had been sleeping on cold cement floors with nothing between their sleeping bags and the floor other than thin foam pad. We were so glad to be able to help.
I finally shaved this morning after more than a week. Combat areas don't seem to concern themselves with details like shaving and, following suit, I decided to save what remaining charge I have on my electric shaver by only shaving occasionally. I dug out the plastic mirror with the magnet on the back that a friend (Dena's Aunt Dar) sent to me after reading my comments about the bizarre mirrors in Oman, and found a steel pipe outside the building that had been sheared off by a bomb blast at about head height. I stuck the mirror to it and began to trim my beard with some scissors I happened to bring with me. Just before I started to shave with my razor, I noticed in the mirror several guys behind me staring. ###Soon another face appeared behind me in the mirror, and then another, until I
had a small gallery watching. Resigned to asking the obvious, I turned around. "Uh, is everything all right?" I asked, a bit confused. "Where the hell did you get a mirror? " one of the Marines asked. "A friend sent it," I replied warily. "Would you like to use it?" I barely got the question out before one of them snatched it off the pipe and a chorus of, "Me first," began. "Actually, after I was finished with it was what I had in mind, " I muttered to deaf ears already lining up to shave and brush teeth. An hour later I was able to continue shaving. We all started an hour late that day.
One of the guys who borrowed the mirror is a Navy Chief called Mike. ###Just plain Mike. Just plain Mike was out on a mission far enough away from camp the other night that they had to take a squad of Marines with them for security. After arriving at the operation location and setting up a small defensive perimeter, he began to work. "There were unfriendlies in the area ###so we requested air cover," just plain Mike told me. "After a while I
could hear a C-130 gunship overhead, making lazy circles around our position. It was like a warm blanket. You know what the loneliest sound in the world is?" he asked. I shook my head. "The sound of that gunship finally flying away."
There are some things we do pretty darn well in this military and some things we don't. But here's a bomb tech just like me, out in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere, who is able to pick up a satellite phone, call a desk in Florida and ask for help, and minutes later, help is flying over his head 6000 miles away. I guess that's one of the things we do pretty well. I'm proud to be a part of that Air Force. Every day I keep something close to me from home. I have a picture of Dena and my sons in the ID card holder I wear around my neck with my dog tags.
That's always with me. But besides that, I try to take something else ###that reminds me of home. Today, it is a fleece pullover that my thoughtful brother-in-law, John, and his wonderful girlfriend Steph, gave me last Christmas. I have it on under my uniform and it is one of the few remaining pieces of warm clothing I have. It was in with my civilian
clothes and as such was not lost with my military cold weather gear. It is a wonderful shade of green that is just close enough to military green that it passes for standard issue gear. I was wearing it today when I safed some rockets and projectiles, cleared some mines, spoke with the Marine General in charge of the base, and had lunch with some very nice Afghan Anti-Taliban Forces nearby. I just thought you'd like to know that John and Steph. Thanks again.
I'm afraid there is no mailing address for here as of yet and I don't have anything that resembles my own email account. I'll send this to Dena so she can forward it to everyone. Please, don't respond to the e-mail I'm using because it's borrowed.
Take care and I'll email again when I am able,
-mike-