Reality Check - Paragraph Five Finally Gets to the Point
So it was the ass end of February, and Your Humble Narrator was deploying to Afghanistan! What a momentous moment! Of course, it wasn't too exciting at first. Gathered my bags, got in line, put my bags in a pile, got on a giant scale so the pilots would know how heavy the load would be on their 747, and eventually got on the bird for a long ass flight over the puddle..I mean, Atlantic Ocean, to land in Shannon, Ireland. The flight was cool. They had movie screens all over the place, TV on the back of the chair in front of you so you could watch cheap programming. It was the bombdiggity, and I slept through all of it. Absolutely wonderful!
The plane landed, we shuffled through security, leaving our rifles on the plane, naturally, and were told we had a whole eight hours to kill! Well, Shannon Airport was small, and we were not allowed outside of it. Awesome. Managed to kill an hour eating some kind of delicious beef sandwhich, while completely mesmerized by the waitresses accent (I would have married her on the spot for it, despite the fact that I was engaged at the time), and then bought a pack of European cigarettes, which cost about €14, which is a lot in US dollars. It even had a nifty little warning on the pack. "Smoking will kill you" on the front, and "Smoking causes impotency" on the back. In case you were wondering, being impotent means you can't get an erection. No sex. I have yet to hit this roadblock. I also bought a camera while I was there, stared at a $1,000 bottle of whiskey for awhile, bought some other knicknacks, like a reed whistle (It broke by the time I reached Afghan), and took a nap. Then we re-boarded our plane for...
A 14 hour flight to Manas, Kyrgyzstan! Woohoo! I was only able fully sleep for the first five or so hours. The rest of the time I spent flipping through shitty TV channels, watching the map that tracked our progress across Europe and Asia, and fantasizing about the Irish chick. She really was cute, by the way. She didn't just have the most beautiful accent I had ever heard in my life. Well, after suffering more plane boredom, we arrived!
We were shuffled into a tent where we lived for several days, 10ft away from a 24 hour dining facility with unlimited amounts of candy! It was great! We also had Wifi in our tent, and some stores, club included, down the road. Didn't really do much Army-wise, other than get the plates for our "bullet-proof" armor checked out. All they did was tap the plates a few times with their finger and drop them on the table. They used what info they got from that to decide if they worked. Lastly, we boarded an Army C-17 full of old, broken airline seats for our last leg of the trip to Afghanistan
A short flight later, we arrived at Kandahar Air Field, or KAF. We got our "Welcome to the Shithole Brief" and were given a giant tent full sweat smell to live in for a few days. Gathered up all our bags, accounted for our equipment, and went to sleep for a few hours, since it was late at night. That next day, we got a few more briefs about enemy tactics and other cool stuff. Spent a few hours at "The Boardwalk", which is an outdoor shopping square where they had restaurants (for real, there was a shitty TGI Fridays), gear stores, lots of music stores and whatnot. I even ran into a few guys from my basic training who were on their way out. Afghanistan didn't seem so bad. It was like a little vacation. Sure, the weather was shitty, but the food was decent and you were in good company, but then, shit got real...
We were all told we were assigned to a Ramp Detail. My first reaction, "Oh, great. Been here a day and they're already assigning us details. Wonder whose trash I'm going to have to pick up...", but then it was explained. Being on Ramp Detail means that you're in formation on the airstrip as fallen soldier's pass through to be loaded onto the plane to be sent back to the States. My first real day there, and I stood in on ceremony for men who died. They were also in my Brigade. Their work area here at Bragg was barely 30 seconds from mine. They were shot in the back by their ANA (Afghan National Army) partners. One of my buddies in my unit went to basic training with one of them. A few hours later, we were ready to go.
We started off in formation off of the airstrip itself, and marched out onto the airfield. We were one of several formations comprised of US troops from ours and other units, Marines, Air Force, a few Navy, and several formations of soldiers from Australia, Britain, Romania, Germany, Canada, and several countries I couldn't identify. After marching to our position we all faced the center where the soldier's caskets would move through, and waited. It wasn't long before I heard the bagpipes. Those depressing Godforsaken bagpipes, playing Amazing Grace. That song carried far, and lasted long. It played the song of suffering, of sadness, of lives lost and tears wept. A long, melancholy song of goodbye, and it washed over everyone as we saluted our brothers one last time before they took the final journey home.
I'd be a Goddamned liar if I said I didn't cry a little. I almost started to tear up just remembering and typing this. The moment those notes started playing I knew we weren't on vacation. We weren't there to have a good time. We were there to do bad things to bad people, and try to make this world a better place. We got after it with a fucking vengeance.
The plane landed, we shuffled through security, leaving our rifles on the plane, naturally, and were told we had a whole eight hours to kill! Well, Shannon Airport was small, and we were not allowed outside of it. Awesome. Managed to kill an hour eating some kind of delicious beef sandwhich, while completely mesmerized by the waitresses accent (I would have married her on the spot for it, despite the fact that I was engaged at the time), and then bought a pack of European cigarettes, which cost about €14, which is a lot in US dollars. It even had a nifty little warning on the pack. "Smoking will kill you" on the front, and "Smoking causes impotency" on the back. In case you were wondering, being impotent means you can't get an erection. No sex. I have yet to hit this roadblock. I also bought a camera while I was there, stared at a $1,000 bottle of whiskey for awhile, bought some other knicknacks, like a reed whistle (It broke by the time I reached Afghan), and took a nap. Then we re-boarded our plane for...
A 14 hour flight to Manas, Kyrgyzstan! Woohoo! I was only able fully sleep for the first five or so hours. The rest of the time I spent flipping through shitty TV channels, watching the map that tracked our progress across Europe and Asia, and fantasizing about the Irish chick. She really was cute, by the way. She didn't just have the most beautiful accent I had ever heard in my life. Well, after suffering more plane boredom, we arrived!
We were shuffled into a tent where we lived for several days, 10ft away from a 24 hour dining facility with unlimited amounts of candy! It was great! We also had Wifi in our tent, and some stores, club included, down the road. Didn't really do much Army-wise, other than get the plates for our "bullet-proof" armor checked out. All they did was tap the plates a few times with their finger and drop them on the table. They used what info they got from that to decide if they worked. Lastly, we boarded an Army C-17 full of old, broken airline seats for our last leg of the trip to Afghanistan
A short flight later, we arrived at Kandahar Air Field, or KAF. We got our "Welcome to the Shithole Brief" and were given a giant tent full sweat smell to live in for a few days. Gathered up all our bags, accounted for our equipment, and went to sleep for a few hours, since it was late at night. That next day, we got a few more briefs about enemy tactics and other cool stuff. Spent a few hours at "The Boardwalk", which is an outdoor shopping square where they had restaurants (for real, there was a shitty TGI Fridays), gear stores, lots of music stores and whatnot. I even ran into a few guys from my basic training who were on their way out. Afghanistan didn't seem so bad. It was like a little vacation. Sure, the weather was shitty, but the food was decent and you were in good company, but then, shit got real...
We were all told we were assigned to a Ramp Detail. My first reaction, "Oh, great. Been here a day and they're already assigning us details. Wonder whose trash I'm going to have to pick up...", but then it was explained. Being on Ramp Detail means that you're in formation on the airstrip as fallen soldier's pass through to be loaded onto the plane to be sent back to the States. My first real day there, and I stood in on ceremony for men who died. They were also in my Brigade. Their work area here at Bragg was barely 30 seconds from mine. They were shot in the back by their ANA (Afghan National Army) partners. One of my buddies in my unit went to basic training with one of them. A few hours later, we were ready to go.
We started off in formation off of the airstrip itself, and marched out onto the airfield. We were one of several formations comprised of US troops from ours and other units, Marines, Air Force, a few Navy, and several formations of soldiers from Australia, Britain, Romania, Germany, Canada, and several countries I couldn't identify. After marching to our position we all faced the center where the soldier's caskets would move through, and waited. It wasn't long before I heard the bagpipes. Those depressing Godforsaken bagpipes, playing Amazing Grace. That song carried far, and lasted long. It played the song of suffering, of sadness, of lives lost and tears wept. A long, melancholy song of goodbye, and it washed over everyone as we saluted our brothers one last time before they took the final journey home.
I'd be a Goddamned liar if I said I didn't cry a little. I almost started to tear up just remembering and typing this. The moment those notes started playing I knew we weren't on vacation. We weren't there to have a good time. We were there to do bad things to bad people, and try to make this world a better place. We got after it with a fucking vengeance.
Comments
Post a Comment