View to a Hill

I never did make it out to a FOB. Two of my boys did, but just barely, then they got stranded there overnight while negotiating a return flight. And the rest of the team? Caught in Detention (our term of endearment for our austere wooden conference room at the edge of the base). I’d still like to see something outside of our camp here, but duties call, so my only exterior view will be through the perimeter fence.

If I want the view, all I need to do is walk up to the fence and look out. There’s no sniper screening on most of it. There’s only one layer of fence. There’s electronics associated with the fence, of course, but it seems like such a fragile thing, this single chain link fence, that separates me from the rest of Afghanistan.


Kandahar Airfield is a dust bowl, with more rocks than you can shake a gazillion sticks at. Much of the outside, though, when you don’t look south towards the desert, is irrigated and green. There’s water here, but it’s all underground, and takes some effort to bring it to the land. There’s mountains out there, too, but they are miles away and only on the rare clear days can you see much detail with the naked eye.

The biggest one, or perhaps just the closest one, lies to the northwest. You can see it from most anywhere on the camp. Likewise, someone on the mountain can probably see most of the camp. With such a vantage point, it seems a shame not to launch a few missiles from there.

So they do. Two or three times a week. After they hit, the Giant Voice activates, and we go back to sleep. I suppose that should be “after *it* hits”, as there’s never more than one projectile, and the attack is over before the Big Voice even clears its throat. As I’ve seen before, the Bad Guy’s aim is pretty bad. They use cobbled systems, and Gerry rigged timers to send a lot of duds this way. The ones that actually blow up impact randomly across the camp.

So, assuming 2,000 square meters of destruction (about a 50 meter circle), about 14 square kilometers of base and 2.5 attacks per week (one of which actually blows up), my odds of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is about 1 in 50,000 on any particular day. Probably worse than getting whacked in a car crash, but less likely than being bored by something surfed through randomly on commercial televasion.

That’s not the point, just a digression. The point was that I can walk up to the single chain link fence (with associated electronics) and look at Afghanistan. I can drive across the tarmac at numerous locations (if they’d let me borrow the car) with only a “Mandatory FOD Check” sign to keep me in line. I can walk deep into operations buildings without anyone checking to see who I am. In fact, the only time I’ve ever needed to show my identification since I arrived is to enter the local trinket bazaar the base hosts every Saturday morning.

Surreal as ever.