One mission down...??? to go

Hey everyone, ok so I went on my first mission the other night.  I cant really go into the specifics of what we did or how we went because it will be a recurring mission for us so i dont want any OPSEC to leak out.  Basically, we left at night because we had to run through Kandahar City (KC) and didn't want to run into a crazy amount of traffic.  KC is the second largest city in Afghanistan next to Kabul the captial city.  KC is also the birthplace of the Taliban, so really the less time we have to spend in KC the better. 

I was driving a PLS for this particular mission which is basically a commodity truck.  We were hauling some supplies to a base on the west side of KC.  We hit KC at night and the city was still extremely busy. Traffic and pedestrains EVERYWHERE, like literally everywhere. Roads are basically suggestions here. In Afghanistan, there are no traffic laws, there are no police to keep order on the roadways, there are no dividing lines to speak of, it is truly the wild west and they drive like it.  I will never again speak badly about drivers in America, they are like surgically precise in comparison to Afghani drivers.  Cars would cut in and out of our convoy within feet, keep in mind that our trucks weigh approximately 15-40 tons depending on the vehicle, compare that to a 2002 Toyota Corolla.  Who do you think wins that fight?  We are told to share the road and basically drive normally like we would in America while on convoy.  Screw that.  VBIEDs (vehicle bourne IEDs) are a big weapon for the Taliban and if a car won't stop for us, we go through escalation of force procedures and if they still don't stop we open fire and take it out.  Most of the Afghanis know what those steps are and will stop before we get through all of them so at least they know that. 

There are trucks loaded above their racks and then on top of their load...they put cars.  They strap down cars on top of whatever it is they are hauling.  It is the craziest thing I have ever seen in my life.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take any pictures of the convoy because it was kind of impossible with everything going on. 

We made it to the base and unloaded our supplies for them and got back on the road shortly after.  We ended up getting to KAF about 7am or so.  I was wrecked. There was no bus to take us back so we had to walk back in all of our gear and weapons to the CHUs which is about 1.5 mile.  So needless to say I was extremely tired, I threw my gear off on to my floor and got in the shower and fell asleep for about 4 hours.  Then I went to chow and waited for my roommate, Delong, to come back and we went to the gym.  So here I sit, tired and ready to sleep.  So thats what I will do. 

All in all it was a good experience and I am already scheduled for another mission in a few days and I will be in my MATV so I am excited about that.  I will try to post some pictures of my next mission so you can see what the real Afghanistan looks like, we drove back in morning light and I got to see some of the landscape and its actually really cool and parts are very pretty.  But there are also parts where you can see what "shock and awe" did.  I'll just say this, our military firepower is insanely good you dont really know until you see the craters and "buildings" left behind.  There is a reason we are the best military in the world.

Ok off to bed I go.  Love you all, take care!!

Sunburnt...oh so sunburnt

Ok...It has been a while since I last wrote, like almost two weeks.  I apologize for the delay things have been kind of nuts.  I don't really know where to begin here. So, its currently Sunday night (May 20th) and today was an extremely long day and I am sunburnt a lot...and I never sunburn really.  Apparently desert sun is slightly different.  Intense! Ok so let me travel backwards a few days here.

The unit we are replacing, the 1484th is preparing to leave country and head back stateside within a few days here.  I reccommend you attend their welcome home ceremony on June 2 at the JAR at UAkron.  It'd be a cool thing to see and you may get to see and hear some of the things we are doing currently in Kandahar.  Anyway, I digress.  Since the beginning on this week the 84th has been training us up on some of their convoy operations and what all goes into it.  Its a lot of work but it is all pretty important.  Once you get the notice that you have an upcoming mission, it kind of sets into motion a bunch of different things.  First you have to inspect all your equipment.  Everything from your IOTV (body armor) to your MRAP or whatever vehicle you happen to be driving on that particular mission.  We as 1st platoon have been designated as a majority guntruck platoon, but we do have some commodities trucks (pretty much anything that is not convoy security related).  I have been reassigned from a gunner to a driver in the scout vehicle for the convoy.  Although by the end of the tour I am sure I will be doing a little bit of everything.  The scout vehicle is out in front of the convoy and is a very uparmored truck with dual mounted weapons in the turret and mine rollers on the front.  I know it sounds dangerous but I promise you it isnt as bad as it sounds.  I cant get into any of the tactics and battle drills we go into for obvious reasons but we do a lot of those and pretty much have them memorized by now. 

I have not yet gone on any missions but our company has been getting a lot more now that the 84th is done and hopefully by June we will be a self sufficient unit and won't have to attach onto other companies convoys.  Things are going well over all I think.  I am starting to get used to the heat and such, the dust however I dont think I will ever get used to.  It plain sucks, it blows all over the place and gets on EVERYTHING and in your mouth.  This place is completely desolate, KAF is the only thing around except for Kandahar City which I hear is a madhouse. Its the birthplace of the Taliban so take that for what its worth.

We are all safe and no one has been hurt or anything like that.  Things are as good as they can be and I think I just want to go out and do some missions and see what Afghanistan is REALLY like as opposed to KAF only.  I am going to try and post some pictures from around base and I will label them accordingly.  I am cutting out a lot of things and I apologize for that but its a mix of me being really tired and some of it being borderline classified.  So I will answer questions the best I can.  Aaaand heres some pictures!

outside of our CHUs

inside our CHU...and yes, that is a pink TV.  It rules

CHU alley, leads into the DFAC at the far end.  Rocket attack bunkers at the end with sandbags around it

Our motorpool, all of our trucks and such are here.  We spend a lot of time here.

Walking back from the motorpool.  Pretty much all the roads look similar to this, this one is in the process of being paved.

What the cities/villages look like on mission.  MRAP Maxxpro ahead.

Greetings from Kandahar, Afghanistan!

Well we made it! It was a looooong ride but we made it Kandahar finally!  We ended up leavin Saturday (May 5) at about 8am or something. I dont really know, over the past few days time has become a completely abstract thing, I am just know starting to know what time and day it is here.

We left El Paso and flew directly to Hahn, Germany which is near Frankfurt, about an 9.5 hour flight, I dont really know what time we arrived there, something like 7am German time. It is an old Airbase and now serves as a transit center for people flying from here in the Middle East back stateside.  It looks a lot like an old prison, rundown buildings with barbed wire and stuff.  Kind of crazy.  We were there for all of about 2 hours and didn't leave the little reception area they had us in.  Kind of disappointing but I guess I can say I have been to Europe?  I got myself a German pretzel though, pretty delicious.

                              Manas AFB and the mountains along the side, pretty sweet.


So we boarded back on the plan about 2 hours later and took off from Frankfurt, Germany and then flew towards Manas AFB in Krygzstan.  Its the only country I have ever seen with almost no vowels in it so I have no idea how to pronounce it, thus I will not.  But its was a very beautiful place.  Mountains, like legitimately big mountains that I have never seen before.  I thought the mountains in El Paso were cool, these made those look like southern Ohio.  It was cool though, there were all the NATO countires there and people coming from and going to Afghanistan.  The Air Force runs that base and its a deployment site for them.  There was a bar that they could drink at, some movie theatres, USOs, awesome 24 hour DFACs.  I wish our deployment was there the whole time! It was pretty cool I liekd it there a lot.  Unfortunately, we were only there for about a day and slept for about 3 hours of that time.  The time difference kicked our butts real bad and then you add in minimal sleep and bam, exhaustion sets in.  So on our 2nd day there, we boarded a C-17 and began our trip down here to Kandahar. 

We did a combat landing into KAF (Kandahar Air Field), basically you land like twice as fast and drop altitude extremely fast in order to avoid the Taliban locking on to your plane and shooting it down.  It was nuts.  So we landed and the rear of the C-17 opened up and we got our first view of Afghanistan and it was hot....Oh so hot.  Again, I went into no grass, there was a couple of random trees which was weird.  We loaded on to some buses and drove to our CHUs where we will live for the next 9 months or so.  Then we drove past the poo pond.....Its pretty self explanatory and the smell is pretty epicly bad.  It smells like crap piled on top of crap and then set on fire.   KAF itself is really hard to describe in words.  There are concrete T-walls EVERYWHERE along with bunkers for pretty much daily rocket/mortar attacks (dont worry they are extremely inaccurate and random, pretty much they are always aimed at the flightline where the jets and helicopters take off).  The CHUs themselves arent terrible but are pretty tiny, we have 3 to a CHU.  We are still in the process of setting everything up but so far so good, I'll post a picture now and then one later after its all done.

I got to see a lot of my friends fromthe 84th and thats been really good to have them here to kind of show us around and see what its all about.  Today I met up with Freeders, Kreger and Tomey and we went to the Boardwalk. Its crazy theres a TGI Fridays, KFC, pizza shops and a bunch of Afghani shops n such.  Pretty cool.

So I am going to go and pick up our TV and stuff from Freeders so thats pretty sweet.  Hopefully by the end of tonight we will be about set up.  I will try to post more stuff as we go, Im still kind of figuring everything out here.  I'll answer questions if you have any I guess!  I will post again soon, love you all!

And here we go..

Hey everyone, Im sorry its been so long since my last post.  It has been a combination of being incredibly busy over the past few weeks and me just being straight up lazy when we are done for the day.  So I will try to catch you all up on what has been going on and whats coming up.

So I was licensed on the MATV which is pretty cool.  The driving portion of actually becoming licensed sucked really hard though.  We were driving from about 1215 until 0130...It was a very long day.  Most of that was spent riding in the back of the truck which is not especially comfortable and your butt falls asleep in about 10 minutes.  We split it up into day driving and night driving.  The night driving was a little more difficult, we had to drive a portion of it with night vision and that has very little visibility especially since when I used it the sun was down but still had whitewash (the light was still coming over the mountains and made nightvision pretty much useless.) It was cool none the less.

      As you can see there is very limited visibility through the NVGs and no peripheral vision.

The following day began our validation process. Its a 5 day process where basically they check to make sure you are ready as a unit to deploy.  It included some convoy practice in different scenarios, it was pretty boring which I think is something I am going to have to get used to.  It will be long periods of bordem followed by some sporadic activity of some sort and then right on back to being bored.  Good thing I will have a PS3, I should be a pro by the time I come back.  On day 2 of the validations, we had to conduct base security.  My position was in a tower along the entry point of the base.  It was a really good piece of training.  They had actual Afghanis and Iraqis come in the play people attempting to enter the base.  Everyone had a different responsibility.  Mine was to watch those entering and make sure they didnt start trouble and if they did. Light em up.  Towards the end of the day, they sent over about 30 villagers and they started a protest outside of our gate and demanded to talk to our commander or else it would get "ugly".  This went on for about 30 minutes the whole time the other soldier in the tower with me had a M240B in case thigns got out of control.  Oh and to top things off, all radio traffic was going through me into HQ.  It was a madhouse with everyone needing to tal kto the commander and me having to relay messages thigns got a little chaotic.  We did the best we could but in the end a van pulled up and opened fire on the villagers.  No US personnel were hurt and we were able to kill those i nthe van but it could have all been avoided.  Thats why we train, make the mistakes here and learn from them instead of figuring it out over there and getting innocent people and your fellow soldiers killed.  It was a really good training exercise and I enjoyed it. 

So after the validation was done, that was it.  Our training here is complete and now we sit and wait for our ride to Afghanistan.  The anxiousness of all of us here is growing and you can sense people just want to get over there.  We are sick of waiting around and are ready to get started.  Im ready to relieve the 84th, let them go home to their families and friends and let us wait for that day 9 months down the road when our relief comes so I can do the same.  Its a very exciting time and a sobering one as well.  When I signed my contract I knew this day was going to come and now that it has, its just so surreal.  Its going to be an interesting 9 months and one I know I am never going to forget.  I am ready to go and so is the 1486th. 

So for probably the last time stateside..Adios!