Damned Dutch

If asked to judge my favorite shitholes, Kandahar would rank right up there. And it not just the southern breezes from over the sewage lagoon that lead me to that conclusion. No, it’s much more. It’s crappy and sterile all at once. Disciplined yet filled with indiscipline. Great fun one moment and abject boredom the next. Schizophrenic in the mornings and bipolar in the afternoons.

And to make things more interesting, NuSurge ™ will plant another ten to fifteen thousand persons here within the next year, doubling the local population and putting such a strain on the airfield infrastructure that it could collapse at any moment except that the momentum of the mission here just won’t allow it.


The job, then, the challenge, is to keep one step ahead of the imminent failure of this site such that the sites mission, to support the GWOT, is not compromised. It’s all very fast, as the troops are coming, very soon, and they’d better have roads, fuel, housing, dining facilities, waste management, and airfield improvements in place when they get here - and can it be completed yesterday? All told, our mission will provide preliminary designs for worth well over $500 Million at Kandahar Air Field (the KAF) and a few Forward Operating Bases (the FOBs) in the southern region of Afghanland.

This half billion, though, is not alone in its spendiness. The housing projects don’t include the actual housing units, as those are already being manufactured in Italy somewhere. The vehicle maintenance facility doesn’t include any of the tools or equipment. The hospital is a mostly bare shell. Equipping these various structures and sites can easily cost another $200 Million.

And then there’re the NATO and Coalition improvements to the base, as they try to treat the huge volumes of liquid waste that we generate here every day, or successfully route both 50 and 60 Hertz power to the old sections of the base, or to pave a few kilometers of dusty roads (the American Dream).

The result is constant change. Stuff is always being built here. Things are always being moved around to make room for other things. Facilities are enlarged. New facilities are torn out to make room for even newer facilities. It’s necessary, because more people are shipped in by a couple of planeloads each day and it’s not going to stop until we’ve successfully invaded Iran.

Or captured Bin Ladin.

Or something like that.

The rate of change is really impressive, though. Even outside of our Red Horse office, their construction yard morphs every day. In the two or three weeks since we hit the ground, they have encircled their 20 acre site with concertina wire (later adding sniper screening), erected a dozen office tents, drilled a well, completed this building, started another, and filled and refilled the lot with materiel. Every time I take a look outside, I see something different.

On the walk home it’s the same change everywhere, from housing to buildings, to new shops on the Boardwalk and a new NATO gymnasium, to 1,000 more CONEX boxes or another 5,000 feet of T-wall.

Keeping track of the changes isn’t as problematic as describing landmarks affected by it, as the references are in a constant state of flux. “Do you know where the American PX used to be? Well, it’s right behind that.”

The planning types here are in a constant state of war with the war making types, whose blind focus on expediency is the probable cause of a number of these problems. With the base growing so fast, command has never justified the time required to plan, and facilities just spring from the earth wherever makes sense at the moment. Planners get steamed, and then they stop caring, and master plans never get developed nor updated

It’s one of our frustrations, and another we can blame on the Dutch. I’m not particularly sure why they get the blame, but they do, so what the heck.

I’m sure the dust is their fault, too.