Duty

On April 28, we caught up with Lt. Heather Lane by Skype. She was in Kuwait packing to leave for Afghanistan. Among the things she communicated was an emotional account (and she is generally pretty skilled at managing her emotions) of the send off the good people of South Carolina extended to her unit as they left Camp McCrady, Fort Jackson, near Columbia.

Sailors at sendoff — Veterans and volunteers greet sailors at sendoff in South Carolina

On reflection, it was one of those times you wish you had a recorder going; no gift of words can adequately convey the gratitude in her voice and expression as she told of trainees being taken to a hangar and greeted there by a line of appreciative people, some veterans some not, waving flags, voicing their own gratitude, and sometimes giving hugs.

Heather sent the photos shown here after our call, and in her e-mail with the photos described her unit as “U.S. Narmy Saildiers: Army trained, Navy true.” She wrote of walking “to the plane through an aisle lined with volunteers holding flags. Among them, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Blue Star Mothers, VFW, American Legion, and other patrols.

volunteers applaud soldiers — Trainees leaving Ft. Jackson, SC for Afghanistan, receive applause from volunteers and veterans.

Hi, family!

Just want to let you all know that I made it safely to Kabul. I had a five-day stay in Kuwait giving me a chance to acclimatize and get adjusted to the time-zone.

Kuwait was amazing. It reminded me of Tatooine from Star Wars! Flat and desolate and full of sand! The sky is blue-brown with dust and hazy. On a windy and cloudy day you can barely tell where the earth ends and the sky begins! I slept in a 30-woman reinforced tent with about 16 other females. There was no indoor plumbing. We showered in what we called a “cadillac”, which essentially is a raised trailer with showers, sinks, mirrors, and a large water heater. The water flows on gravity from a holding tank outside. For toilets, we had porta-potties that were gravity flushed from an outside water tank. These porta-potties reek from the many moth-balls placed in there to repel the cobras, vipers and scorpions. Some people saw scorpions and one person I spoke to saw a large “camel-spider”. Just about all of us there, encountered the desert mice, who seem not to be afraid of people at all.

The sand is very fine and gets everywhere–you can never get completely clean. I would take a shower, but on the walk back over to my tent, I would be covered in dirt all over again, not to mention sweaty also, because it is 20 degrees hotter than hell over there. I eventually got used to being constantly dirty.

My air travel from Kuwait to Kabul was a 24-hr process with a connecting flight in Kandahar. I sleep well on commercial planes, but I barely slept a wink on either of the military flights over.

The car ride from the airbase to my compound was quite a trip! We rode in up-armored Suburbans, all passengers in full battle rattle (body armor) and armed with loaded weapons. The drivers drive very offensively in order to get through the red-zone fast and give little opportunity for RPG, suicide bomber or car-bomb attacks. There are no traffic laws either! The biggest car has the right of way. Of the local population, some people love us, and others hate us. An Afghan man flipped us a middle finger, and our vehicle commander in the passenger seat flipped him off right back!

The terrain includes snow-capped mountains, rolling hills, and dusty plains. There are few trees and many planted fields. Villages and family compounds are separated by walls of rock and mud that have become solid as concrete via generations of sun-baking. I saw farmers tending their crops and work-horses grazing in fields. This is definitely an agrarian society. Kabul is the cleanest city in the country, even though the trash is dumped in heaps on the side of the roads. Children will dig through it to find things they can eat, sell for money, or recycle.

Security is very tight, where I reside…there are multiple checkpoints on all of the bases and many measures and procedures to keep the avert the adversary.

There are two bases close to one another within a few blocks walk. Even though the city blocks between them are considered part of the “green zone”, we traverse the distance between them with our weapons loaded. Everything on-base and off, looks so surreal to me–like the set of a movie or a theme-park. The base I reside on is an international base. There are more countries represented here than I could reasonably keep track of.

Walking off base among the local population was a shock as well. Afghanistan is a racially d very iverse country, and I find many of the boys and girls here to be very beautiful…suntanned light-brown skin with beautiful facial features including strikingly gorgeous eyes, some light-blue and some brown. The children accost you and try to get you to buy bracelets and scarves. I practiced some of the Dari that I have learned from audio CD, “Hala ne,” for “not now”, or “ne, tashaquor,” for “no, thank you.”

The children here may be relatively uneducated, but they are very smart. Many of them speak a fair amount of English, and one girl selling scarves told us good evening both in English and in Spanish! They know military ranks also because with rank comes money! We had a female air force colonel in the group yesterday, and a boy selling bracelets immediatly accosted her and clung to her right up until we got to the gate. He tried everything to get her to buy a bracelet…”you have money. You give to me; I have change” he insisted after she tried to tell him that she had no money today. “Buy for your boyfriend…for your girlfriend…you have kids…where is your husband?” He went and on and on, and the colonel responded back to all of his lines. “He’s not my boyfriend. I’m already married…my husband would be very upset if I married someone else…my husband is in the U.S., where is your Father?”

Well, that’s it for now.

An emotional sendoff

Report from Afghanistan