Eat Letters, Shit Words

Personally, this one was probably the worst day I had while in Afghanistan. One of the worst days of my life if the recurring nightmares mean anything. Now, this happened back in 2012, and it still crosses my mind often. It rarely pops up in my dreams, but damned if a week goes by where I don't think of it. This is a little story about Travis "BotBot" Botkin. We were on a fairly routine kind of mission. Basically just be a military presence in our local area so that the Taliban knew we were still active and patrolling, as well as show the locals that we were still there and getting shit done.We did happen to take a new route, which lead us past some new farming fields we hadn't had a chance to visit previously. For most of this patrol things were pretty tame. I was up front with the minesweeper, my shitty place of honour. Dill was behind me, then SGT Krisch (our team leader), behind him was Purk carrying the Thor (Metal box with electronics capable of jamming wirele...

Told this story to a coworker the other day, and it put me in the mood to share it on here. It's a short story of how I lost my knife. So, right when I got to FOB PK (Forward Operating Base Pain-Kalay) I found a SOG folding knife left behind by the guys in 10th Mountain Division, whom we replaced. I wore it on my vest for much of my deployment in the beginning. It was a nice knife, used it for random shit like cutting line and other random shit. Became attached to it if only for the reason that I carried it everywhere and it was handy. Fast forward to later on in our deployment, we were on a somewhat large scale mission to clear Route Chilliwac and some of  the villages along it so that it'd be safe for American/Friendly forces to use the road. It was something like day two or three of the mission, and we had moved into a larger village area right alongside the road. The ANA (Afghan National Army) troops accompanied by local militia/police spread out ahead of us since they ...