Its all uphill from here.

Greetings! So the latest news here is that everyone is pretty angry and frustrated.  I know I am.  I won't get into all the details mostly because they won't make any sense out of context.  Basically, here is what is happening.  Our battalion is beginning to really piss everyone off.  They keep making rules and regulations that make little to no sense whatsoever and we get no explanation as to why they were created.  For example, we are no longer allowed to deblouse anywhere.  If you don't know, deblousing means taking off our MCU (Multi-Cam Uniform) top.  It may not seem like a huge deal except that it was 120 degrees the other day and we were in the motorpool for most of the day prepping our vehicles for an upcoming mission.  I drank an entire case of water by myself within a matter of 4 hours.  In any other setting I would've been in the hospital for over hydration but I was still dehydrated due to the heat.  Another doozy is that we are no longer allowed to wear PTs (shorts and a tshirt) anywhere unless you are doing actual PT.  The reason it is frustrating is that the people making these rules sit in an air conditioned room all day and seldom are seen in the motorpool or maintenance tents.  It wouldn't be nearly as bad if they came out and said "hey this is the reason we did this" but they don't, the orders are issued and no questions are asked.

The other thing bothering people here is that the 1486th is being pulled by other companies and used as supplements for their missions.  Which is fine, we are happy to be out on the road, its what we came here to do.  The issue is that they putting people on missions, when they are prepping for another mission.  This means double the work and half the amount of time to do it, this is going to lead to our guys and girls being burned out twice as fast.  Being on missions is the time we get messed with the least and that is not how it should be in my opinion.  But enough of me complaining, thats not why you're reading this.  On to the missions!

So we just got back from a run up north to resupply a FOB using those fine NAT drivers...If you aren't picking up on my sarcasm, you need to get to know me a bit better.  This mission started off pretty awful  but ended up much better.  Lets start from the beginning here.  We were scheduled to leave, we were loading up and gearing up in our staging area and literally everyone was in their trucks, guns locked and loaded ready to roll out of the gate and then battalion calls.  Mission has been suspended until the next day because not enough NATs showed up to warrant a mission run north.  Fantastic.  So we parked our trucks back in the motorpool and tried again the next morning.  This time we got the release to continue mission, with about 7 more NATs than we were supposed to have.  This was not good news-remember me mentioning that these trucks break down alot? Well they lived up to that reputation on this run for sure.  The first break down occurred about an hour outside of KAF, a blown radiator.  We found out about it because one of the Afghani truckers stopped his truck in the middle of the convoy and began pouring bottles of water into his radiator...for 3 hours...Clearly not the ideal solution in the States, but here in Afghanistan that was probably the best solution at the time.  That got us about 1 hour more driving and then his truck just decided that the driver was an idiot (no arguement here) and stopped altogether.  We had to tow him with our wrecker.  We ended up dropping him at an SF base along the way (again SF is none too pleased but were cool enough to let us drop him there).  I won't get into all the stops because there ended up being about 10 of them.  We were on the road for a total of about 22 hours or something stupid like that and we didn't even make it to the base we were supposed to end up at.  We spent the night, rather the day because the sun was coming up, at a Romanian base about an hour south of the FOB we were supposed to.  It would've taken us about 3 more hours because of the NATs driving so slow.  We finished the run the next day. 

While up north a few things happened that delayed our departure.  1. our wrecker had some engine trouble.  This is bad because we cannot leave without them, they tow our broken down vehicles and with NATs you may need multiple wreckers.  So we had to spend the day fixing it before we were able to leave. 2. a bridge along our route got blown up by a suicide bomber in a car.  Real cool.  No one really seemed to mind because as I mentioned earlier, when we are on the road no one messes with us which meant we were able to relax, sleep, play cards, watch movies, whatever we wanted to do without being called down to the motorpool because something wasn't EXACTLY where it was supposed to be (that has literally happened).  So what was supposed to be a 3 day mission ended up being a 5-6 day mission.

The ride back was great because we only had 6 NATs and I was driving scout and I was doing about 80kpm...er Im not sure how fast because my speedometer was broken.....We got back in about 8 hours but only because we had to stop at the SF base to pick up our old friend water bottle NAT.  We could've made it in 6 hours easily if we didn't have to stop.  Oh, Im that good.

So we got back and I have been with my truck in maintenance ever since performing maintenance and fixing the AC unit.  Our AC wasn't working real well so we took it for our maintenance shop and they are the best, hard working dudes for sure.  They found some animal nest in our AC unit which was blocking the intake.  No animals in there, just some kind of nest.  If it was a camel spider nest Im never driving that vehicle ever again....ever.

Well I have to go get ready for yet another mission...I think this is my 8th or 9th...time is starting to fly by a little bit.  Still, January/February can not get here fast enough.  Thank you to everyone who has sent packages, letters and cards.  They are EXTREMELY appreciated.  As it seems people are asking what to send/not send, heres a little list.

Do not send
-baby wipes (please...no more baby wipes)
-q tips
-kleenex
-gum (thanks for the cavities!)
-soap
-hygentics in general (I sweat, but not that much)
-plastic bags

Do send
-Easy mac (best.thing.ever.)
-anything Browns related (the trash talking has begun)
-Ohio state stuff
-Black pens (they get lost...A LOT)
-video games (this is really for my Mom or Lindsey to send me mine...Im not sure how much more Call of Duty I can play while in an actual warzone)

That's it, thanks in advance and again for those that have already sent things, please coordinate with my Mom, Dad, Lindsey or Jaime because I dont have much room in here for a lot of stuff.  I lvoe you all and hope all is well in Ohio, I heard its getting warm and the Tribe is in 1st!! Goto the Jake, don't take them for granted!  Go tribe and there's a lot of things I would like to say to the Heat but I fear that little kids are reading and will ask what a lot of words mean..mostly the cursing.

Cya!

                                             James             Stutz            Me            Atwood

            You will see both watermelons and these motorcycles EVERYWHERE

             Typical Afghan village along HWY 1 selling sodas and other forms of crap

      Not all of Afghanistan is sandy..but Im pretty sure theres an opium field in there somewhere

                                                                           I love this

Well that was neat.

Hey everyone, since my last post I have been on about 4-5 missions, I cant remember.  I just got back from a 3 day mission to a base up north.  Its currently Sunday (June 10) and we got back at about 5pm or something, I cant remember its been a long few days.

For this mission it was all 1486th, our first mission as a stand alone company.  Almost all of 1st platoon went (my platoon) and it went really well and it was nice to work with people you actually know.  We went in the trucks we were assigned to which meant I was driving the scout vehicle.  I gotta say, I really liked it for the most part.  You get to see everything in front of you which is a lot, or a little depending on where you were at in Afghanistan.  Some parts were very desolate with little to no population whatsoever and other were very dense.  A few of the cities along the route had big bazaars, which if you don't know what that is, is basically a big outdoor shopping area where the Afghanis get a lot of their things.  One in particular in a city called Shah Joy was very busy and made traveling through the village pretty difficult.  I was trying to focus on driving, keeping control of the mine rollers (a contraption that sits on front of your truck to roll over any possible pressure plates for IEDs) and keep look out for people doing a variety of things and making sure we wouldn't get attacked.  The Taliban really enjoy shooting at us while we travel through busy areas because they know we don't want to shoot back into a crowd of people.  Luckily, we didn't see anything through Shah Joy.

I digress, we left in the morning from KAF at about 10am or so and got up to the FOB at about 1030pm.  We hit a few snags on the way, we were escorting HNTs or NATS (local nationals that transport supplies on their trucks to different bases) and they aren't exactly the most reliable means of transport on the world.  That is a severe understatement.  They break down ALL THE TIME.  If you go out with NATs and you don't have a breakdown, it is a literally a miracle.  We had one blow a tire and the convoy had to stop and pull security which basically means we block off the road and don't allow traffic through, which obviously pisses off the locals.  No one is allowed to get through our convoy when we have boots on the ground for obvious reasons.  So after we fixed the one's blown tire another's radiator blew out.  We ended up pulling that one back to a nearby FOB run by SF (special forces) who were none too pleased about that at all, but they were pretty cool about it.  We had to pick him up on the way back to KAF today.  We were stopped in the road for a total of about 5 hours or so between the two NAT breakdowns. Oh, also apparently they just randomly get out of their trucks for no real reason whatsoever.  Not while we are stopped, we are still moving as a convoy and they stop and get out and do..whatever it is they do and then hop back in and keep driving.  Thats not very comforting when you're rollign through an area known for their IED nad insurgent activity.  Not too mention before we left KAF we were supposed to have 20 NATs and only 10 showed up.  Either they forgot they were supposed to go (very unlikely because they wanted to get paid) or they got word of something thats going down on the route we were taking.  (Much more likely)

After we got the radiator fixed, we ran into something no soldier really wants to see.  The wonderful IED.  It didn't hit us, luckily it was caught so we had to stop AGAIN and wait for EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) to come and detonate it on site because it was dug in.  It only took them about an hour to get there and then they blew it and we had a front row seat.  I'll just say it was pretty awesome...and LOUD and it wasn't even a big one I guess.  They do a hell of a job clearing routes for us.  We got messages from the Romanians (they do a lot of route clearance as well) that the locals were claiming the Taliban had another one somewhere up the road, so we rolled pretty slow looking for it but we never found any indicators so we rolled through without incident. What we did see was a bunch of previous craters from either IEDs or us blowing the road up with MK-19 grenade launchers or howitzers.  Whoops.

So the base we went to was a blackout FOB, which basically means that after a certain time of the day there is no lights, no radio transmissions (including cell phones), no noise allowed, nothing because it is kind of in enemy territory and it is an SF FOB that they run missions out of.  We also found out at about 2am that they have artillery at this base.  Im sleeping very well after being o nthe road for 13 hours or so and I hear a voice over an intercom "Fire mission, fire mission, fire mission."  I was groggy so I didn't think much of it...Stupid me.  a few minutes later...BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!  Those howitzers were lighting somebody up, I mean raining hell on someone it was crazy and almost gave me a heart attack.  The next morning I woke up and saw that the howitzers were about 50m from where we were sleeping.  It was nuts.

My camera kind of died on the way there so I don't have any pictures, but I know some people on convoy did so when they put them online I will steal them and put them up on here for y'all.  Yes I said y'all, deal with it.  Time for me to go shower and get some rest.  Love you all!  Take care!

                                                            Bearcat 5

                                                              Scout Truck