{"id":994,"date":"2011-04-23T14:53:09","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T19:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/?p=994"},"modified":"2017-04-19T06:20:38","modified_gmt":"2017-04-19T11:20:38","slug":"report-from-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/2011\/report-from-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Report from Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi, family!<\/p>\n

\"Lt.<\/a>
Lt. Heather Lane in Kuwait<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Kuwait was amazing.\u00a0 It reminded me of Tatooine from Star Wars!\u00a0 Flat and desolate and full of sand!\u00a0 The sky is blue-brown with dust and hazy.\u00a0 On a windy and cloudy day you can barely tell where the earth ends and the sky begins!\u00a0 I slept in a 30-woman reinforced tent with about 16 other females.\u00a0 There was no indoor plumbing.\u00a0 We showered in what we called a “cadillac”, which essentially is a raised trailer with showers, sinks, mirrors, and a large water heater.\u00a0 The water flows on gravity from a holding tank outside.\u00a0 For toilets, we had porta-potties that were gravity flushed from \u00a0an outside water tank. These porta-potties reek from the many moth-balls placed in there to repel the cobras, vipers and scorpions.\u00a0 Some people saw scorpions and one person I spoke to saw a large “camel-spider”.\u00a0 Just about all of us there, encountered the desert mice, who seem not to be afraid of people at all.<\/p>\n

The sand is very fine and gets everywhere–you can never get completely clean.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I eventually got used to being constantly dirty. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The car ride from the airbase to my compound was quite a trip!\u00a0 We rode in up-armored Suburbans, all passengers in full battle rattle (body armor) and armed with loaded weapons.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are no traffic laws either!\u00a0 The biggest car has the right of way. Of the local population, some people love us, and others hate us.\u00a0 An Afghan man flipped us a middle finger, and our vehicle commander in the passenger seat flipped him off right back!<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I saw farmers tending their crops and work-horses grazing in fields.\u00a0 This is definitely an agrarian society.\u00a0 Kabul is the cleanest city in the country, even though the trash is dumped in heaps on the side of the roads.\u00a0 Children will dig through it to find things they can eat, sell for money, or recycle.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are two bases close to one another within a few blocks walk.\u00a0 Even though the city blocks between them are considered part of the “green zone”, we traverse the distance between them with our weapons loaded.\u00a0 Everything on-base and off, looks so surreal to me–like the set of a movie or a theme-park.\u00a0 The base I reside on is an international base.\u00a0 There are more countries represented here than I could reasonably keep track of. <\/p>\n

Walking off base among the local population was a shock as well.\u00a0 Afghanistan is a racially d\u00a0very\u00a0iverse 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.\u00a0 The children accost you and try to get you to buy bracelets and scarves.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

The children here may be relatively uneducated, but they are very smart.\u00a0 Many of them speak a fair amount of English, and one girl selling scarves told us good evening both in English and in Spanish!\u00a0 They know military ranks also because with rank comes money!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 “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.\u00a0 “He’s not my boyfriend.\u00a0 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?”<\/p>\n

Well, that’s it for now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 It reminded me of Tatooine from Star Wars!\u00a0 Flat and desolate and full of sand!\u00a0 The sky […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,25],"tags":[33,60,70],"class_list":{"0":"post-994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-duty","8":"category-heather","9":"tag-afghanistan","10":"tag-military","11":"tag-service","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41027,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions\/41027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}