This was not my favorite trip away from Bagram.
For one thing, I’d been to Kandahar before and so the novelty of visiting somewhere new wasn’t there for this trip. I get to get out of Bagram, and I’m always grateful for the change of scenery, but this trip offered little else to recommend it. I wasn’t terribly impressed with KAF the first time anyhow.
I get down to Kandahar jumping through the normal sets of hoops. There are waiting lists, plenty of
waiting, a few flights with not enough (or no) seats, wasted trips to the APOD, and hours sitting in a cramped area with other miserable travelers.
By the time I’m given a seat, I’m grateful to put on my body armor and Kevlar (helmet), get squeezed onto a C-130, and treated as cargo, so long as I’m delivered to my destination.
Rich picks me up form the APOD in KAF, but it’s too late to complete my work, so we retire to his office and living quarters. We catch up before I take a familiar spot on the air mattress we set up on the floor of his office, my feet beneath a chair, my head under his desk.
Traveling in theater always wears me out, and I sleep like a rock.
Rich doesn’t wake me in the morning, and I sleep a little late, but after a quick tooth-brushing I’m ready to get to work and hopefully get back to Bagram, which I inevitably and disturbingly refer to as ‘home’ more than once.
I’ve made this trip for the sole purpose of getting hands-on a vehicle we’ve been seeking for months. It finally turned up in Kandahar, and now I need to get to it, and remove a piece of equipment my colleagues installed on it in the autumn of 2007.
It’s raining lightly when we pull into the boneyard, a gravel lot fenced in and out of view that holds primarily battle-damaged vehicles like the one I’m looking for. They’re a familiar view for me, as my job brings me into these types of lots a fair amount, and I don’t stop to think about all of the destruction I see or what it probably meant for the people in the vehicles when it occurred.
We find the vehicle I’m looking for, an M916 line haul truck, sort of like a big rig, up against one of the fences, the engine and front tires violently absent. The driver’s side windshield is missing, too, but it looks like it was removed purposefully, probably by a unit that needed it as a replacement part for another vehicle.
Rich knows the unit who owns the truck, and he tells me nobody was hurt in the explosion. It makes sense. I’ve seen a lot worse, and the cab is untouched.
I scramble around the vehicle for a few minutes, the light rain adding up the equivalent of a heavy rain the longer I’m in it. I’m looking for a box we attached to the vehicle, but it’s not where I thought it would be. I check a few other locations. No box.
It doesn’t take long to realize that somebody’s made a mistake, and Rich soon points out that the number painted on the
bumper is not at all the number we’re looking for. We’re looking for 446. This is 447.
We look around the yard a little, but our vehicle isn’t there. It never was. We drive over to the TOC of the owning unit and ask them about the vehicle we need. We tell them what we saw in the boneyard, they make some phone calls, and then excuses.
Turns out they reported the wrong vehicle as damaged and deadlined, and they’d been reporting it that way for weeks.
The vehicle I need is still out there. Somewhere. I flew down here for no reason.
Exasperated, I ask Rich to drive me to the APOD to check on flights. It’s mid-afternoon and there’s nothing until after 1900, so we’ve got some time to kill. I let Rich get some work done; he lends me his vehicle and I drive around post aimlessly and see nothing I don’t see on every other military base.
I suggest we go to the Dutch restaurant for dinner, for a change of pace from the DFAC. Despite my offer of paying for grub, Rich gets only a coffee while I order a “meat plate” sampler, which turns out to be hit-and-miss.
Standing in line, I recognize a MAJ behind us from Bagram, and we chat for a few minutes until our food comes. We invite him to join us for dinner, he initially declines, but then changes his mind when he can’t find another seat. As it turns out, it’s his birthday and he celebrates by ordering what passes for a milkshake with his own meat plate. He is not impressed with the milkshake.
We take out time eating and talking about the States, our families, home. We go through the usual litany of questions: where from, how long, married, how many, etc etc.
As the months have gone by and I find myself in the chewy middle of my deployment, I find that I have been here longer than most people I meet, and likewise have longer yet to be here because my deployment is so darn long.
Rich drives me back to the APOD and I bring all my belongings inside, piling them in a corner next to a bookshelf of foreign fashion magazines. He asks me to call him if I don’t make it out tonight, but I tell him I’m in it for the long haul and that I’m not leaving the APOD until I get on a flight to Bagram.
While this would ultimately prove to be a winning strategy, success would not come swiftly….
KAF = Kandahar Air Field
APOD = Arial Port of Debarkation
TOC = Tactical Operations Center
DFAC = Dining Facility
MAJ = Major
