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

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!

Lets go!!

Hello again, alright so randomly our training schedule has picked up pretty substanitally.  This is good news but also very confusing.  We have been doing a lot of dismounted foot patrol tactics.  Its actually a lot more fun and interesting than what we normally do (mounted patrols) but unless something has changed we are slotted to do any so Im not sure what the purpose of it is.  It's probably our company just adding any training we can get into our schedule to satisfy us and keep us busy until we leave.  Im ok with that, the more training you have and are validated on the more well rounded soldier you will be I suppose.  A lot of people are freaking out because they think we are going to be slotted into some sort of infantry roll, which is not out of the question but highly unlikely.  Theres a lot of rumors flying around the closer we get to leaving, Im trying to ignore all of them unless they come from higher ups.  The PNN always has crazy things going through it.  The PNN is the private news network, basically lower enlisted hear something and then blow it out of proportion or drawing crazy conclusions. 

The past two days I have been doing MATV training.  It is an MRAP variant that replaced the HMMWV and its a very cool vehicle.  Today was kind of an off day and I was just doing some details around post for the company but yesterday we did the MET (MRAP Egress Trainer).  Its bascially a simulated vehicle rollover where you learn to evacuate a flipped vehicle, more specifically an MRAP.  You get flipped upside down and have to egress out of the vehicle within a certain amount of time and pull security afterwards.  Its kind of fun but I've done it about 4 times so it's not as cool as the 1st or 2nd time. 

Tomorrow is going to be a very long day.  We have daytime and nighttime driving so I will basically be driving all day and all night in order to become licensed on the MATV.  The night time driving we have to drive with a DVE (driver vision enhancer), its basically a thermal camera attached to the front of the MRAP that allows you to see heat signatures so that you can drive without headlights on.  So that should be kind of cool but from what I hear its kind of difficult since you have little to no depth perception.

I talked to a few people in the 84th and they are getting anxious for us to show up because that means they are about to go home.  That date has yet to be confirmed to us so I can't really release it yet but from what I am hearing its pretty soon, we have begun packing up all of our ACU patterns and shipping them back to Mansfield and should be switching over to multicam uniforms sometime this week, so take that for what its worth.

Continue to keep us in your prayers, we are all doing well.  We did have a bit of a tragedy today, my squad leader lost a child today and is currently en route back home.  Baby was to be due in May so it was pretty tough.  Definitely keep him and his family in your prayers. 

As always I miss and love you all, hopefully the next time I update it will be from somewhere other than the United States.  Take care!