Boots on the ground

My first view of Afghanistan from the airport in Kabul.

Boots on ground (BOG) time is a big deal with the troops. BOG time is how much time you've been in a combat theatre. As the wars have escalated, so has BOG time, while it's counterpart, dwell time, the time spent state-side, as decreased. BOG time can only go so high before they send you home, meaning as soon as you step into theatre your counter starts.

My counter started 19 June.

"Theatre" includes any combat zone, as well as the "gateway" territories. (This is for my purposes, at least. There were some people deploying to Eygpt and Bosnia at my CRC class. Since those aren't combat zones, I don't know how they're deployment time is counted.) Currently, that would include Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with gateway zones being Kuwait or Kyrgyzstan. So as of landing in Kuwait at 1600 local time (8 hours different from central time in the states), I was officially a deployed analyst. My orders say I will be here 181 days, though I have another piece of paper that says 179. In actuality it will probably be a few less than that, in order to ensure I leave theatre before my orders run out. If I go over my orders period there will be a nightmarish batch of paper work, and no one wants to mess with that. For those of you trying to count in your heads, I'll save you the time: 19 June + 181 days is 16 December. Baring the Army screwing something up, which is still a real possibility, I will be home for Christmas. Yay!

I arrived in Kuwait after a couple hours of lay over in Leipzig, Germany, and about four hours of flight time. I was hoping to catch a good view of Kuwait city from the air, but it was so hazy that I couldn't see much of anything until we were only a couple thousand feet off the ground. Once on the ground, I found out the haziness was just as bad looking up. All of the sand in the air turned the normal light blue into a dirty, gritty gray color.

The Kuwaiti desert. Beautiful, isn't it? Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

And the heat. Gasp! It was 109 degrees farenheit when we landed, and that was one of the cooler days of the last few weeks. The high just a day earlier had been 122. There was a strong wind that helped to stall choking to death on the blazing blanket of air, but retreat indoors as quickly as possible was the only reliable solution to combating the heat.

The first snafu of our trip happened right after we got on the ground. The Army officer in charge (OIC) of the flight was the designated keeper for the soldier's rifle bolts. If you aren't familiar with firearms, the bolt on a rifle is the moving part that strikes the powder behind the bullet and makes the whole thing go boom. If you remove it, the weapon fails to function. All bolts had been confiscated and placed in a tool box that sat next to the OIC. When we left the airport, we were driven by bus to a staging area where we could get some water while waiting for our bags to be offloaded to a couple of semi trucks. When we got ready to leave the bus area, the OIC realized the box of bolts was missing.

Ruh roh.

Thinking he may have set them down in one of the trucks loaded with bags, he proceeded to force 20 poor saps to unload ~800 40 lb duffel bags in 109 degree heat to correct his mistake. Only after both trucks had been completely unloaded did it occur to him to call the airport and see if he had left the box on the airplane. Of course, he had. All told, we sat on the buses for four hours before driving 45 minutes to Ali Al Saleem, Kuwait, home of Task Force Gateway, the people responsible for moving us to our final destinations. Arrival time was around 2100 local time.

After a few briefings on procedures and schedule, we unloaded the semi trucks (much faster with 249 people set up in a chain gang) and were turned loose. The basic idea from this point on, regardless of destination, is to register yourself with the aviation folks, then turn up exactly when and where they tell you to see if your name has come up yet. Seats on flights are given on a first come, first serve basis, with the exception of high ranking officers and enlisted who get to go first. You could be number 500 on the list and have to wait a week to get a flight, or you could be number 5 and have to wait a few hours. It depends on how soon you get signed in and how many flights for your destination are slated. If your name gets called and you aren't there to accept the slot, you go to the bottom of the list. I found a very quick and efficient way to work through this process: I cheated.

For the thousands of people a week coming through this camp, there are only two, yes TWO, personnel registering people for flights at any given time. I didn't even pick up my bags, I went straight to the counter and signed up. I had also e-mailed ahead and told them I was coming, which was equivalent to showing up two days early. When my paper got stamped, the lady crossed out 19 June and put 17 June. Cheat code verified. Score.

The end effect of this was that I got out of Kuwait in 14 hours, very near a record for a worker bee like me. The first flight I had a chance to be on the manifest for, I was. Out of 38 seats, I was number 22. This was fantastic, as I had spent the night sleeping in a chair, followed by an "air conditioned" tent on a cot left over from the first Gulf War. The less time spent in Kuwait the better.

This is where my travel experience really got interesting. From this point on, I was flying on military aircraft, since we were in theatre and all. We were also required to wear our body armor for the trips, just in case someone took a shot at the plane. We were bused to the airfield to load a C-17. Near the planes were concrete bunkers meant to hide fighter jets in the event of bombing. The looked like they had done their job at some point, as the tops of the buildings had moving-truck sized hunks of concrete missing, yet were still being used to house equipment. We walked into the plane through the loading ramp on the back of the aircraft and strapped in. Most of us sat in normal airline seats (sans tray tables) in the middle of the plane, but others sat on the sides in the seats soldier's would use during parachute ops. Accommodations were cozy to say the least, exacerbated by the fact that we're all wearing 40 lbs of body armor.

Queue second trip snafu. As we sit inside this nice, metal plane, with the 118 degree desert air pouring in the open back door, sweating to death in body armor, the crew chief told us that the air condition wouldn't be working until we started the engines in another 30-45 minutes. Until then, we would just have to suffer. However, we could remove our body armor.

Sigh. Small mercies.

The flight itself wasn't bad, though it was strange to not have windows on the aircraft. That was probably a good thing when it came to the landing. Because there is always an outside chance that some Taliban is sitting outside the airstrip with an anti-aircraft missile, planes land at full speed while jinking (pilot speak for dodging, making oneself hard to hit) up and down, left and right. When the wheels hit the ground, it was hard to tell whether we had landed or crashed. When I stepped outside, the Bagram Air Force Base flight line was a greeting crew to our arrival. Welcome to Afghanistan.

The waiting game for airplane space at Bagram wasn't as suspenseful as in Kuwait. For one, there were fewer people flying to Kabul than there were to Bagram, so there was a better chance to get a seat. I also caught hold of the coattails of a couple of colonels, so I knew very shortly after landing what time I'd be leaving. Unfortunately, after landing at 2100 (9 PM), roll call for my flight was at 0400. Not enough time to check out a bed, really. Another night sleeping in an airline terminal, this time on the concrete floor.

Throughout the evening, numerous aircraft could be heard outside on the tarmac and airstrip. Helicopters, cargo planes, a few fighter jets. I was close enough to watch the airfield, but not much could be seen because it was so dark. Unlike a civilian airport where lights are an important accident avoidance measure, military airfields run blacked-out so as to avoid putting out a sign that says "Taliban, please shoot mortars here". The only light coming from the flight line was the occasional glow of twin afterburners on a fighter jet as it lifted off. For an aviation geek, the experience was pretty awesome.

When we got bused out to the flight line around 0600, I could finally see the machines making all the racket. Medivac Blackhawks, other C-17s, EA-6B Prowler aircraft designed to jam or intercept electronic communications, and several C-130s. Across the runway were the fast movers, F-15s lined up one after another, canopies gleaming in the sun. I was sad we didn't get to drive by those up close like the rest. We pulled up to a C-130 from the Minnesota Air National Guard and loaded up for the last flight of the journey.

This flight was something of a joke. Bagram and Kabul are eight minutes from each other by air. Eight. Minutes. We sat on the tarmac doing pre-flight checks and taxiing to the runway approximately five times longer than the flight times. The only reason they do this is because convoys over the mountains between the two cities are infrequent, due to the high level of insurgent activity in the area. Only a few weeks ago, a force of twenty insurgents armed with rifles and suicide vests attacked the front gate of Bagram AFB. It was massively unsuccessful, but it shows that they are indeed out there, and the road to Kabul is far less than secure. By air is the much safer route.

From the Kabul airport to Camp Eggers, my final destination, was by car. When we called for transport, we thought we'd be riding in MRAPS, huge, hulking, 10-20 ton vehicles designed to eat explosions, but instead we got up-armored SUVs. Our first escort that showed up only had enough room for one person, so we had to wait for a second. The leader of that first vehicle was an interesting find. An Air Force captain trained to fly F-22s, a $140 million aircraft, driving VIPs in Afghanistan. I'm not sure what this indicates: we have so many people here that we can't find work for them all, we have to few people here and have to force people to do jobs outside their expertise, or F-22s are really THAT useless in the current fight. I'm leaning towards the third one.

The drive across town was short, mercifully. For those confused by the time zones, I was on hour 58 of travel, and now 9.5 hours (yes, POINT FIVE - Afghanistan is backwards) ahead of my home time zone. I was fried, and ready to be done. I was alert enough to observe the city and all its mysteries. Small children everywhere, including walking out in the street unattended, carts pulled by donkey on the same road as semi trucks, traffic circles with four layers of cars, with drivers completely oblivious to the rules of the road. The poverty of it all was striking, and the chaos. Nothing was clean - nothing - and with all the people and things so close to the road, it would be almost impossible to ascertain whether that pile of stuff was a bomb of someone's dropped laundry. I was glad I wasn't driving, and doubly glad I wouldn't need to be out here often.

And that was that. Travel over, trip complete. I'll cover my impressions of Camp Eggers and my work experience in the coming days. I've rambled on long enough here.

*****

Other interesting travel experiences:

- Flying on an airplane full of people carrying pistols and assault rifles. Yet for some reason, we weren't allowed to carry on fingernail clippers.

- Learning the truth of the adage "soldier's can sleep anywhere". Its not a joke. Sitting up, bent fully in half at the waist, curled into a ball in the bottom of a chair WHILE WEARING BODY ARMOR. It didn't matter. If these guys had a spare minute, they were out.

- Eating bacon cooked by a Muslim.

- Being accosted by security for having my camera out at the Kabul Airport. Thankfully they didn't see me actually taking pictures. I guess they had reason to be antsy though, as 20 minutes later a three-star French general walked through the area to load a helicopter.

- Sweating WHILE showering in Kuwait.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. Out here.