Short Trips

About forty minutes from Sharana and 400 feet lower lies Forward Operating Base Ghazni. I’d like to buy a t-shirt to commemorate this place, but it’s so small, there’s not even a PX, just a very small Hadji Mart where I could buy another toothbrush if I was so inclined and, since I brought a spare and also got a nice one from the bathroom of the hotel in Dubai, I won’t be indulging.


Small to be sure, and totally Polish. Well, more than half Polish, with a squadron of attack helicopters and a good sized fleet of Strykers. The balance is American, with a lot of kids from various locations in Illinois, presumably with a shared Polish heritage. We’re here to give them a huge new runway to land coalition C-130’s although, with most of the projects the team is working on, the work is so far in the future. Peace could break out before we break ground.

You’d like to hope so. I’d like to hope so, but the activity former known as the Global War on Terror (now: Overseas Contingency Operations) is in full swing here, evidenced by the boneyards of broken, bashed and blasted Strykers that fill a large storage yard here, as well as hundreds of mangled Humvees, MRAPs, Bradleys and whatever else we put on Afghanistans roads in our effort to do whatever it is we Mission Accomplished how many years ago?

This afternoon, while the Polish Command Master Sergeant was showing us a couple of acronyms around the base perimeter, a large and distant boom could be heard to the north, towards the town. Apparently, some martyr thought it was time to see Allah, and blew up a market, killing who knows how many countrymen, maiming and wounding others beyond repair.

Some time later, while outside an adjacent building with my electrical tracking down some aerial data, a half dozen casualties arrived for treatment at the base medical facilities, blowed into smaller pieces than they were when they started the day. Surprisingly little blood on those that made it this far, and more burns and dangly bits than I would have initially expected.
Strangely disturbing.