RED MEANS STOP, GREEN MEANS GO, BLUE MEANS…?
This place is always under construction.
Buildings pop up overnight, and others take months to slowly come together, the local construction workers crawling around the site like ants for weeks on end. Plots of land are cleared, covered with gravel, and fenced in to become motor pools. Guard towers rise and concrete barriers move from one place to another.
There’s a stretch of road on the North side of post that desperately needs work, and they’re finally getting to it. The road floods when it rains and some areas have potholes you could lose yourself in. They’ve closed the road before, but each time they work on just one small portion, or even on areas off the road. Often, their work is undone by the next rain. Filling in potholes with
gravel is not the most effective.
This time it looks like they may be doing it right, as they actually have some heavy equipment out there, and it appears as if some long overdue heavy paving is in order.
They’re working on one half of the road at a time and they have a local handling traffic on the other half, letting one direction through at a time. I drive up to the 
work area with Izzy in the car and the local on the side of the road, clad in his reflective vest and hard hat, hold up a blue plastic marker.
Usually these guys have flags which they hold up to stop and wave to usher you through, or those round signs with green on one side and red on the other. Blue is a new one. What the heck does blue mean in the context of driving?
I stop at first and then inch toward him and into the lane, thinking he’ll stop me if blue means stop in his culture. He just looks at me blankly, not giving me any indication if I should sto
p or proceed.
I make it all the way through the construction without encountering anyone else head-on, and
see the line of cars going in the other direction stopped behind another guy holding up a blue marker.
***
A MOST EXPENSIVE DRINK
This was not fun.
Two days after the Health & Welfare check, Izzy calls me with bad news. One of our guys got caught with something illegal. I ask a flurry of questions.
“Are they sure it was him? Was it alcohol or drugs? Where was it found? Has he been
notified? What’s the next step?”
Izzy knows some of the details, but not all. We have an appointment to meet with the BTN CDR where hopefully we’ll get more information. I know LTC M fairly well, and at least I see him around a lot. We’ve always been on fairly good terms.
Izzy and I walk into his office and LTC M flips through some pages to find the information on our guy, Rick. He tells us they found whiskey mixed with cranberry juice in a mouthwash bottle on top of his locker. The searches were conducted with personnel from the BTN and BDE along with MPs and military working dogs.
There were multiple witnesses to each discovery, sounds like they did the search correctly. The only thing I could have asked for was for personnel to be present while their area was searched, which is how it was done in Iraq, but that does raise other complications.
LTC M throws the ball into our court, though the next course of action is fairly straight-forward. We ask him what the next step is if our guy denies and fights the finding, and he refers us to the BDE CSM who will have access to all of the MP reports from the searches. We tell him that we’ll dot our I’s and cross our t’s, but that if our guy is guilty we’ll get him on the first thing smoking
out of Afghanistan.
We head up the hill to talk to the BDE CSM, who is luckily in his office.
CSM C remembers finding our guy’s contraband. He tells us exactly where it was located, how they went about testing it, and who was present. He calls in a MSG from down the hall who verifies his account of the event. He asks us what we’re going to do and we tell him we’ll get Rick out of country as fast as we can - what else can we do? We ask him what recourse we had if our guys wants to fight it, and the answer is: none.
Then we get talk to Rick. Which sucks.
When we catch up with him, he’s pushing a wheelbarrow full of water bottles for the office. We call him over to us and he approaches smiling as he often is. We put an end to that.
He denies it, which is the worst case scenario for us. We tell him we’ve spoken to the BTN CDR and the BDE CSM and the evidence against him is pretty solid. He outlines the living situation with shared space and how easy it would be for someone else to put something in his area. He flat-out denies that it was his. We tell him to start packing. We would try a few more angles, but it
didn’t look good.
Izzy and I leave that meeting not feeling great. Izzy is much more confident that he’s guilty, but I feel similarly. Any scenario that absolved him seems too unlikely.
We call Izzy’s boss in Kuwait and my boss in Maryland. We explain the situation and they have us follow up once more with the BDE CSM to get copies of the MP reports - which won’tt be available for some time. We’re out of options.
The next night we take Rick to the APOD and sign him up for a flight out of country. It all happened so fast, but that’s the way things go out here. He is defiant to the end.
Izzy and I deal with some backlash from our other guys, Rick’s colleagues who think he got a raw deal. But slowly the pieces start to fall into place and I become much more comfortable with having shipped him out. The mouthwash bottles on his locker were always there, we’re told, and were definitely his. He has a history of drinking problems. He had recently made some new friends who were of questionable character. Izzy doesn’t feel he reacted the way someone innocent would react. He slept late sometimes, when he was working from his living area, and one colleague says he hadn’t seemed right lately - that he was up and down.
It’s hard to interpret changes in behavior out here, because we’re all under stress and you nev
er know what’s happening with someone’s home life that might be affecting them out here. Some days are worse than others, for all of us.
But this was adding up, and any reservations I had slowly ebbed away.
I liked Rick a lot. In addition to being a go-getter, he was friendly and funny, a good addition to the office. I always got along very well with him. Unfortunately, it ultimately fell on our shoulders, from the BDE’s and BTN’s perspectives, to solve the problem. And there is only one consequence of violating General Order Number One. The
company he works for considers that a fireable offense, and so he was removed from theater and let go immediately.
We hoped that his wife knew what he was doing - maybe even that she supplied him with the alcoh
ol. It would be better, we thought, if she were in on it and could share in the blame of what happened instead of Rick having to explain to her what he’d done. Of course, he could continue to deny the accusation, and maybe he’ll get a lot of mileage out of that.
Our command leadership here expressed some surprise t
hat we got out guy out so quickly, and thanked us for doing so. I didn’t see what option we had, but apparently other companies will delay and linger and keep people in country for days.
We thought it best to handle it as soon as possible.
BTN CDR = Battalion Commander
LTC = Lieutenant Colonel
BDE = Brigade
MP = Military Police
BDE CSM = Brigade Command Sergeant Major
MSG = Master Sergeant
***
CONTRABAND
In the course of our research about Rick, we learned about other instances of people being caught up in the Health & Welfare net.
At one point, one of the searchers who was asked to explain Rick’s situation to us said “Oh, was that the guy with the heroin?” It was not, but interesting that there was one. We heard about cocaine and hash, and several other instances of alcohol.
The BTN CDR hinted that there were some “”big names” among the guilty, but nobody else I know left because of this.
I always find it surprising when people get caught with such things in theater. It's made very clear that it's not allowed, that you will be removed from country and, in many cases, lose your job if it is found in your possession. The explanation, of course, is that these people have serious substance abuse problems.
I can honestly say I've never seen or been offered any alcohol or drugs in theater. I certainly hear about it a lot, but it's all hearsay and rarely connected to anyone I'm familiar with. I
prefer to stay away from it, of course.
***
MAY I HELP YOU STEAL THAT?
The B-Hut next door has been cleared out.
It’s on Izzy’s side of the condo and he’s gotten to know some of the guys that live in it, but seemingly overnight they were evacuated and all of their possessions moved out. Izzy ran into one of the guys who used to live there who told him they were moved out because of bugs. This was news guaranteed to make me feel as if things are crawling on me at night.
The residents were moved to another hut elsewhere in Dragon Village and left behind a shell. B-Huts are just big wooden shacks, and to make them more livable the people assigned t
o each hut scrounge plywood and build walls to separate each living area, giving themselves a modicum of privacy.
Izzy and I walked into the B-Hut and got a good look at the rooms, wooden platforms serving as beds, the whole room was only slightly larger than a mattress. They had built-in shelves and areas to prop up televisions. Everything constructed of the same cheap wood that everything else is around here. Wires were run haphazardly in the fine Afghan fashion we’ve grown accustomed to.
Probably owing to their relocation to smaller living areas, the departed left a lot behind. Free-standing bookshelves and tables, plastic chairs, and wood littered the rooms. Izzy and I went through it and took what we thought we could use in our rooms or in the office across post for our guys. It was all crap, but sometimes crap is better than the nothing you currently have.
The next night Izzy and I are out chatting on his porch when a couple of female airmen walk by looking at the scrap laid against the abandoned B-Hut. They tell us they just got to Bagram and maybe could use some things for their rooms. I suggest they look inside.
They’re reluctant at
first, but Izzy and I show them inside the B-Hut and point out that the rooms are empty, the people have left. They pounce on a couple of chairs and small tables, excited for the free stuff, and I help them carry their loot out of the building.
We chat for a few minutes outside the building. They’re grateful for the free things, and are only starting to realize how hard it is to get things here. Izzy and I are old pros at scrounging on post, and are not above retrieving items from dumpsters.
I offer to help them take the stuff back to their rooms, but they decline and instead balance it precariously and stumble off under the weight.
Welcome to Bagram, ladies.
***
I’LL MISS THE NEIGHBORHOOD
I’ll be moving soon.
I’ve been here just over 7 months and my name has slowly crawled up the OML (the wait list) for a room to be provided by my command. I have been living in “the condo” on the other side of post, but the goal has always been to move into a room with my unit, a room that would provide that luxury of all luxuries: indoor plumbing.
There will be many advantages to moving across post, in addition to the convenience of peeing at 0300 without having to put a jacket again. Most of the meetings I attend are on that side of the base, as are the offices of my CDR and his staff with whom I interact on a regular basis.
Most of my KTRs live and work on that side, and it will be good to see them more regularly. Though we’re just 5 miles apart right now, I don’t see them nearly enough. When I visit them on their side, I don’t have a place to work, so it’s a quick visit. They rarely come to see me, as I work out of my room and they feel like they’re in my personal space. Which of course they are.
So it will be good to move, but the transition will come with some costs.
For one, I have enjoyed being away from the offices of my CDR and his staff. I’ve enjoyed the autonomy, working on my own hours and doing my own thing. I will be changing my hours to work with my personnel and to come more in line with the rest of my unit when I’m working alongside them.
Most of all, though, I’m going to miss the neighborhood I live in now. Dragon Village is a hodge-podge of military, civilians, and contractors doing a wide variety of different jobs.
I’ve gotten to know the native Afghans who live next door, who invite me to share tea and cookies with them on a regular basis. The locals in the next row of huts always wave and I’ve had a few very interesting conversations with them. The Kiwi soldiers on the other side of the bunker can be annoying at times with their Sunday morning music, but I enjoy that they train in our gravel lot, a couple of their female soldiers are awfully cute, and they all have those cool accents.
The soldiers in Dragon Village generally keep to themselves, but many weekend nights they congregate in front of their B-Huts to grill and watch movies. They used to play video games projected on the side of the bunker, but I don’t see that anymore. Perhaps as summer draws on they’ll return to it.
I see the same people every day, walking to and from the shower, the chow hall, or the gym. I’m used to them, they’re used to me. We wave and exchange pleasantries, occasionally we stop and chat.
It’s not like this on the other side. Where I’ll be moving is much more homogeneous, with a shared mission and comprised almost entirely of US KTRs and DA Civilians (like me), There are some soldiers (not no airmen, sailors, or marines), and TCNs, but relatively fewer than I see on a regular basis right now.
Though I’m only moving 5 miles away, I’ll rarely have occasion to return. I’m going to miss this neighborhood for the variety of people I see on a daily basis, and the friendships I’ve made.
Also, the food is better on this side.
OML = Order of Merit List
CDR = Commander
KTR = Contractor
DA = Department of the Army
