WELCOME TO KANDAHAR(KAF), A-STAN

Welcome to Afghanistan. 365 days to go. GAME ON.

* NO PIXS YET-Working on that-soon come ;-)

The C-130 did it’s corkscrew approach to Kandahar Airfield (KAF) -it felt like being on a rollercoaster ride. Our plane was a mixture of Army and Air Force soldiers-as the plane began it’s swan dive toward the airfield-an Air Force soldier threw up on the floor. I just had to piss but couldn't leave the bench.-This is a safety measure to avoid possibly getting hit by missile or a rocket. The plane then accelerates and does a hard landing. We landed without incident as the C-130’s big behind opened up. The searing southern Afghan midday heat rushed in to great us. I flashed back to Oliver Stones's Platoon-where Charlie Sheen is getting off the plane in Vietnam and is passing soldiers heading back to the big PX-they stare at each other-the wizened watching the cherries go off to their destiny. Well-there was none of that-there just the blinding, blistering hot concrete and the hustle and bustle of a military airport. I had my flip camera going recording the moment of getting off the plane. Everyone was shits and giggles as we all looked around. Profusely sweating in our full battle rattle(combat gear). The low slung mountains in the distance were a dead ringer for Arizona ‘s Valley of the Sun (Tempe/Phoenix metro area and vicinity) - for which I call the Devil’s Oven(sorry Ma-just calling it as I sees it ;-) A local national-who reminded me of the fey dude in Beverly Hills Cop(expresso with a twist) greeted us and directed us to a nearby waiting, hot cramped bus. Did I mentioned how dusty it was? They call the dust out here moondust-fine like powdered sugar and it gets in everything! Anyway, we’re on the bus and the dude-I’ll call him Pannio-is trying to talk to us over the loudspeaker with the radio-blaring the BBC. A few times we had to tell him turn it down and then talk-he had a thick accent to boot. After driving around the airfield in the stifling bus-we finally found out where we had to go get our gear that was loaded on the C-130. We were then ferried to the main terminal that is called “the TLS” Taliban’s Last Stand. I quickly called it the “Alamo” -anyway-back in the day when the Taliban was running things-this terminal was theirs until the Allied forces drove them out. There’s still bullet riddled walls around the cheap plywood construction of office space. Walking through-I wondered how many Taliban caught a dirt nap for this piece of real estate. I wonder if they are enjoying their heavenly maidens. Let me digress for a minute about Mr. Talib. I call him that because I don’t believe in calling a worthy adversary a hajee/towelhead or a sandn***** or anything that I have heard used in this corporation to demonize the enemy. Taliban in it’s proper context -is term applied toward anyone studying at the madrassas(Islamic religious schools)-Talib-is Brit slang. I call him Mr. Talib because his simplicity in fighting coalition forces through the use of IED's Improvised Explosives Devices has accounted for 80 PERCENT of US coalition casualities. Mr. Talib is not stupid at some level on their organizational food chain. He is committed -like the Viet Cong/NVA in his beliefs and like Malcolm said,"By Any Means Necessary". He hides behind his interpretation of Islam-just like some of our extremist Christians in our country. Same game, different face. Mr. Talib has learned the fine art of bombmaking. No matter how big or how tough we think our MRAPS(armored trucks) or sophisticated mine clearing equipment is, Mr, Talib finds a way to make a bigger IED to blow that shit up. He's now taking a page from Timothy McVeigh's playbook and using fertilizer and various chemicals and plastic containers to make the BOOM BAP. Recently I had a counter IED class and was chilled by the ingenuity of how he uses cigarette packs, discarded batteries, bric a brac to make bombs and it's components. Not to mention, Afghanistan is the second heavily mined country in the world. The Soviets laid mines by the millions while they were here and left all sorts of munitions behind after their 10 year stay ditto the Mujahideen/warlords-in their turf battles throughout the country against each other and their Soviet landlords -so hey-use what you got(and oh yeah, we got a ton of them here too-so no one is truly without
sin). What's crazy is that the Italians are/were the largest supplier of mines -they don't care who they sell them to. Design asthetics is truly in their DNA and the mines that they produced to sell to anybody who would buy are ill works of death by design. Mines that have "portico/doric stylings" to keep them buried and deliver more bang/bounce to the ounce. The Soviets were smart to map out their mine fields and we have a legacy of that but the Mujahideens simply planted more mines and didn't put X marks the spot-so if the Mr. Talib doesn't get you-then some old shit will. One just has to go out to the countryside and see indigenious/UN/NATO markers for where them Boom Baps lie. Or most sadly it's the people: the children/the elders with missing limbs or farm animals with missing limbs. We had a crash course in spotting telltale signs of roadside bombs but at the end of the day-there's only so much you can do. If it's your time to go, then it's your time. Don't matter if your in a war zone or living in quiet/sleepy town USA somewhere. Death has a quota to meet everyday.


A sobering reminder was getting my third set of dog tags to tie in the laces of my boots if the good Lord decides to snatch me up and there's nothing much left of me.

Being here for little over a week, in some words is not describable. The 5 senses are kinda on overload. At the moment, I'm living in some type of shelter tent with other soldiers -part of that Obama surge -awaiting assignment for more permament quarters. There's wifi internet access, pizza hut, subway, Afghani rug and trinket shops along a sandbox like boardwalk, laundry service-decent dining facilities, gym, a starbucks like joint called Green Beans a Tim Hortons and various multi national base exchange stores(We are a NATO base). All these creature comforts amidst the searing heat/dust/grime and the constant reminder of war as fighter jets/predator drones/apache/chinook helicopters take off around the clock bringing the pain, the relief or delivering the grief of dead ones back to the world. My day starts at 430am. 8.5 to 10.5 hours ahead of friends and fam in different time zones. The mornings are freezing and the days blaze. Outside the wire(base perimeter) lies a beautiful country of textures/contrasts in spite of war. Mr. Talib wants to be Tony Soprano-he wants to keep the women in check and go back to them old timey days of old-he wants to reap the profits from that Poppy and finance his ambitions. but somewhere in the middle is the people -poor like their sistern and bredren in other parts of the world and caught between bombs and bullets-collateral damage. NATO is what we fall under but we are shouldering the load-via USAID(United States Agency for International Development) and giving our military industrial complex livelihood-a fucked up dichotomy. All around KAF and A-stan itself-are all these capital improvement projects in effect-American/Asian/European money-hoping that one day-A-stan will get stabilized but what also a fucked up part of this equation is Pakistan. Pakistan is that loose cannon-who looks the other way while taking our money. We are not leaving A-stan anytime soon and our European allies are feeling the heat of their people growing discontent with their sons and daughters dying. At some point how much will enough be enough? I think that Iraq and A-stan will be a soldier's tour of duty like Korea or Kosovo all under the guise of fighting global terrorism and capital market expansion...Well it's Friday night and I am in my "gabespace" created by draping mosquito netting over my top bunk and creating my tent on the bottom bunk. No incoming mortar attack announcements -causing you to grab your weapon and hit the bunkers. We had one last thursday night-a buddy of mine shared a bunker with a motley crews of fellow Americans and Europeans. All had the causal air of "here we go again". I didn't hear anything hit but Mr. Talib likes to remind KAF he's still out there-close and possibly closer than we like to think. More about that later...there's a lot to reflect on and I will bring it to you all over time. But I just want to say-is don't be afraid for me-I am in the eye of the hurricane. It's not a walk in the park by any means and I certainly don't know what lies ahead but I must focus on finding the good moments everyday and living each day one day at a time. Let me get this out of the way: I carry all of you in my thoughts and if anything should happen to me-know that I made the attempt to live a colorful, engaging , inspiring life and hope you will find a way to do the same. Signing up and doing a bid for the Army during wartime is not for everybody ;-) nor is it something I relish but I have surrendered to the Now, the present and I am at peace.

THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR

SEPTEMBER 12-16TH

Greetings from the Republic of Kyzgyrstan, one of the many "stans" in this region(One can blame the British for carving up this central Asian region).

Anyhow...


We have been in Bishek since Friday awaiting a flight to take us to Kandahar, A-stan.
I feel that mercury in retrograde has had a hand in this longer stay. Days have been spent sleeping/thinking/doing physical training/eating/making phone calls/sending emails and hanging out at the base internet cafe.

The locals are a mixture of Asians who can be traced back to Ghengis Khan and various ethnic Russians. I heard that the diversity is even greater in Afghanistan. I am reminded by that iconic photo from National Geographic from the late 70's of that young Afghan girl with striking eyes.
A few days ago, I met a private contractor-whom I'll call "Luke Cage" from Bed-Stuy- confirming that there's always somebody from Brooklyn wherever you go. He trains Special Forces and has been in A-stan for about 2 years. There's a great doc about how many brothers are in this private contractor arena over here.

"Luke Cage" had some cool Kemetic/hieroglyphic tattoos and was rocking a gold tooth. Forearms like Popeye. He'd make a great character actor/security advisor and consultant for film/TV. I made sure to get his info. I asked him about the Taliban. He said that they are a fraud to the Islamic religion and are a bunch of animals. He briefly described some of the atrocities that the Taliban did to some of his Afghan friends. But he did say that they are crazy/driven enough to die for what they believe in. Basically- don't sleep on them fools.

Heard. Understood. Acknowledged.


We are leaving sometime today and then it's game on. The BBC did a 6 part series on life at Kandahar NATO base that might be found online. I saw snippets of it and the place is it's own city/suburb-although a crowded one. Hopefully/prayerfully our living situation won't be too ghetto.

We can't take photos around Bishek for operational security issues. I will post some photos once I get situated in Kandahar.

SEPTEMBER 11TH

I am midway to A-stan. Stopped over in Leizpeg(sp) Germany. Stopped over someplace in Canada during the middle of the night. The tiny airport could of been a set for that old TV show "WINGS ". Just an office and a coffeemaker and a few bathrooms. The flight was a commerical contracted 757 with the crew straight outta JFK. had an entire row to myself. Food was often and I ate and slept. Here in Leizpeg, watching the 9-11 memorials and reflecting on the ripple effect that day has had on where I am now. Cause and Effect...

Leaving last night from the deployment terminal was a long walk into history. 100+ soldiers and myself formed a long single line walking out to the tarmac toward the big bird. We carried our rucks and weapons and memories of moment ago goodbyes to friends and families. We were met along the way to the Big Bird by a volunteer from the USO(united services organization) who gave each of us a hug and a small US flag as we boarded the plane. I am in still in a daze about the magnitude of this undertaking and service.

The 9-11 memorials play on the tv here at the airport. soldiers are the only occupants. I got a few minutes left on the public computer to finish off this dispatch. more to come....peace.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF WAR BLOGS

Sift thru...look around...

September 9, 2009

Links to Blogs and Military Resources

In recent months the Pentagon has created accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and started blogs to help advance its message. But even as officials seek to use the Internet to shape public opinion and humanize its troops, ambivalence runs deep among many commanding officers.

Blogs by Deployed Soldiers
In Iraq Now (at 56)
Active Duty Patriot
Doc H's International Adventure
Embedded in Afghanistan
The Gun Line

Veterans, stateside soldiers, commentators, families and compilations
Michael Yon Online Magazine
Mudville Gazette
A Soldier's Perspective
Some Soldier's Mom
VA Watchdog.com
Milblogging.com

Department of Defense sites
United States Forces-Afghanistan YouTube site
DoD live
Combined Arms Center blog, U.S. Army
10th Mountain Division's Sound Off blog
Gen. Ray Odierno's Facebook page

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Shout out to mikegenius for reminding me of this article from last Sunday's NYT. I am almost 24 hours away from getting on the big bird and heading over there. I am anxious/excited with a twinge of anxiety that has resulted in me knocking back a half gallon of Blue Bell's Southern Blackberry Cobbler ice cream. I got J. U. to blame for introducing me to that crack ;-) this past Memorial day. On a semi "seefood diet" getting a last taste of those creature comforts...

I drank my last bit of Illy expresso thinking of a Rockie Mountain friend from past who introduced me to the Illy. I am tempted to take my tiny expresso maker but my bags/gear are already weighing 200lbs+. I'll leave it in storage as something to look forward to upon return. Ditto for a bottle of wine-that I've attached a note to-sort of a time capsule note-wondering how I'll be at the end of this experience when I open it.

The apartment is almost cleared out-with the last of things heading to storage this afternoon. There's a big pile of laundry for me to do as well. This last night will be spent in reflection and solitude before heading out(calm/peace ;-). My wise old Earth said, "Sonny, something good will be coming from this." I got to believe that.

I've been posting a lot of good articles from the NYT and look forward to posting additional pieces from various news sources/perspectives-like this one:

http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/Afghanistan/news

I am also being mindful of having this blog be low key and under the radar.

For those unfamiliar with the terrain-here's a link from wikipedia about where I will be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar

Tomorrow, I will experiment with my flip video camera(damn Apple!!! -why you gotta announce that ipod nano w/videocamera the day before???) before we get on the bird and upload a video to drop.io for folks to see- in the moment vblogging as myself and others step into the arena of current events.

Lastly, here's that food for thought from Nicolas Kristof/NYT below:

September 6, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Afghanistan Abyss

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.

These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.

“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”

I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.

Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.

Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.

Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.

In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.

That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

Nicolas Kristof: I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

WAR READING...2

September 9, 2009
NY TIMES

Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog

By JAMES DAO

Over the course of 10 months in eastern Afghanistan, an Army specialist nicknamed Mud Puppy maintained a blog irreverently chronicling life at the front, from the terror of roadside bombs to the tyrannies of master sergeants.

Often funny and always profane, the blog, Embrace the Suck (military slang for making the best of a bad situation), flies under the Army’s radar. Not officially approved, it is hidden behind a password-protected wall because the reservist does not want his superiors censoring it.

“Some officer would be reviewing all my writing,” the 31-year-old soldier, who insisted that his name not be used, said in an e-mail message. “And sooner or later he would find something to nail me with.”

There are two sides to the military’s foray into the freewheeling world of the interactive Web. At the highest echelons of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are newly hailing the power of social networking to make members of the American military more empathetic, entice recruits and shape public opinion on the war.

Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of American forces in Iraq, is on Facebook. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has a YouTube channel and posts Twitter updates almost daily.

The Army is encouraging personnel of all ranks to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of its field manuals. And on Aug. 17, the Department of Defense unveiled a Web site promoting links to its blogs and its Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites.

The Web, however, is a big place. And the many thousands of troops who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to communicate with the outside world are not always in tune with the Pentagon’s official voice. Policing their daily flood of posts, videos and photographs is virtually impossible — but that has not stopped some in the military from trying.

The Department of Defense, citing growing concerns about cybersecurity, plans to issue a new policy in the coming weeks that is widely expected to set departmentwide restrictions on access to social networking sites from military computers. People involved with the department’s review say the new policy may limit access to social media sites to those who can demonstrate a clear work need, like public information officers or family counselors.

If that is the case, many officials say, it will significantly set back efforts to expand and modernize the military’s use of the Web just as those efforts are gaining momentum. And while the new policy would not apply to troops who use private Internet providers, a large number of military personnel on bases and ships across the world depend on their work computers to gain access to the Internet.

To many analysts and officers, the debate reflects a broader clash of cultures: between the anarchic, unfiltered, bottom-up nature of the Web and the hierarchical, tightly controlled, top-down tradition of the military.

“We as an institution still haven’t come to grips with how we want to use blogging” and other social media, said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

One of the Army’s leading advocates for more open access to the Web, General Caldwell argues that social networking allows interaction among enlisted soldiers, junior officers and generals in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago.

He requires students at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth to blog, and the college now sponsors 40 publicly available blogs, including his own, where policies are freely debated.

But getting approval for those blogs, as well as for YouTube and Facebook access at the college, was a struggle. “At every corner, someone cited a regulation,” General Caldwell said. In recent months, however, “the Army has made quantum leaps” in embracing the Web, he added.

Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s national security blog, Danger Room, which has reported extensively on the new policy review, said he recently asked students at West Point whether they would allow soldiers to blog. Almost every cadet said no.

“Then I asked, ‘How many of you think you can stop the flow of information from your soldiers?’ ” Mr. Shachtman recalled. “Everybody agreed there is no way to stop this information from going out anyway. So there is this sort of dual-headedness.”

Skeptics of the Pentagon review say it is motivated partly by a desire among certain officials to exert control over the voices of troops on the Web.

Since the advent of military blogging during the Iraq war, some commanders have remained uncomfortable with the art form, citing concerns about both security and decorum.

Over the years, blogs have been censored or shut down, and several years ago the Army instituted requirements that bloggers register with their commanding officers and submit posts for review. As a result, some bloggers say, blogs have become tamer — or, as in the case of Mud Puppy’s blog, gone underground.

Officials knowledgeable about the review say it is a result of growing concerns at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees the military’s use of the Internet, that social networking sites make military computers vulnerable to viruses, hackers, identity thieves, terrorists and even hostile governments. (Those concerns are not focused on the military’s secure system for classified material, which does not use the public Internet.)

The review may already be having a chilling effect. The Marine Corps recently restated a ban on using any social media on its network. And the Army, which in June gave some bases access to Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites, recently urged units to avoid creating new social media pages until the final department policy was issued.

Still, even as they consider restricting the troops’ access to social media, the most senior Pentagon officials have clearly come to view Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging as crucial elements of their public information operations.

“This department, I think, is way behind our curve” in using social media, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said in July as he extolled the use of Twitter by Iranian dissidents.

To critics, the Pentagon’s social media sites are goofy at best, propagandistic at worst. “It’s like your parents’ using modern slang and failing miserably,” said Sgt. Selena Coppa, who writes a blog, Active Duty Patriot, which frequently criticizes the Iraq war and, she says, has gotten her into trouble with her superiors.

But to many troops, the deeper question is whether the military will allow personnel in the field to use the sites the Pentagon itself wants to exploit. For a generation raised on the Web, any restrictions will damage morale, those people say.

“What comes out of my blog is the experiences of a soldier right in the middle of all of this,” Mud Puppy (a nickname for military police), who recently returned home to Illinois, wrote in a recent e-mail message. “I think that people need to hear from us, more than they need to hear from the big whigs. War has a cost, and that cost is paid by soldiers.”

THE BLOGS OF WAR

September 8, 2009, 10:51 pm

Leashing the Blogs of War

By James Dao

The Pentagon may have helped invent the Internet, but these days it is vigorously debating just how to use the Web.

In the coming month, the Defense Department, citing growing concerns about cybersecurity, plans to issue a new policy on social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

People familiar with the department’s review expect it will set limits on who can access networking sites from their unsecure military computers. A public information officer, for instance, probably could; a cook on an aircraft carrier might not.

(The Defense Department also maintains a secure network for classified documents that does not use the public Internet.)

The debate is fueled by the increasing number of grunts who use blogs and social media to communicate with friends, family and the world beyond their wire. But it comes, paradoxically, at a time when the Defense Department itself is increasingly using social media for official purposes, including public relations, recruiting and policymaking.

Some examples can be found here, here, here, here and here.

The military has long had a complicated relationship with the Web, in all its freewheeling, nonhierarchical glory. Blogs since the start of the Iraq war have been censored or shut down by commanders worried about security leaks, or poor decorum.

Last year, a popular blog called Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal was taken offline after the author satirized a commanding officer’s attempts to pressure him into taking an unwanted promotion. And in 2007, the Army issued rules requiring troops to submit blog posts and other Web writings for review, a move that was widely viewed as an onerous clampdown on front-line bloggers.

But some bloggers, like Jean Paul Borda, a reservist who has done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said that scrutiny varies widely from commander to commander and that troops who avoid discussing sensitive material are usually left alone.

“I had the full support of my chain of command,” said Mr. Borda, who created a Web site called milblogging.com that includes an index to more than 2,400 military-related blogs.

In Vietnam, letters home were often censored. But in the Civil War, they typically were not, and many of those letters were printed in hometown newspapers, providing front-line correspondence for papers that could not afford to send reporters into battle.

Military blogs and other social media serve much the same purpose today, said Terry L. Beckenbaugh, who teaches history at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Matthew Currier Burden, a former Army intelligence officer who started one of the earliest military blogs, BlackFive.net said that military blogs have expanded and diversified, with sites by and for almost every group: parents and spouses, veterans, analysts and troops with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Blogs by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come and go, thriving and withering with each deployment. Examples can be found here, here and here.

“It’s been a long fight to convince” commanders of the usefulness of the Web, said Mr. Burden, who wrote a book on military blogs titled, “The Blog of War.” “My tenet is: If you restrict it to much, the only ones blogging will be the ones who don’t care about the rules.”

F.O.B. living...a taste of home and of what's to come...

I look forward to an article about the F.O.B's(FORWARD OPERATING BASES) in A-stan at some point. The FOBs in A-stan are not as well developed as Iraq but the article will give one a sense of what's life is like. P.S. I hope the NATO dining hall has afternoon tea ;-)

Big U.S. Bases Are Part of Iraq, but a World Apart

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

At the Subway at Joint Base Balad, workers from India and Bangladesh make sandwiches for American soldiers.

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By MARC SANTORA

Published: September 8, 2009

JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq — It takes the masseuse, Mila from Kyrgyzstan, an hour to commute to work by bus on this sprawling American base. Her massage parlor is one of three on the base’s 6,300 acres, and sits next to a Subway sandwich shop in a trailer, surrounded by blast walls, sand and rock.

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Americans in the pool at Joint Base Balad, one of the largest bases in Iraq, which is on the grounds of an old Iraqi airbase.

At the Subway, workers from India and Bangladesh make sandwiches for American soldiers looking for a taste of home. When the sandwich makers’ shifts end, the journey home takes them past a power plant, an ice-making plant, a sewage treatment center, a hospital and dozens of other facilities one would expect to find in a small city.

And in more than six years, that is what Americans have created here: cities in the sand.

With American troops moved out of Iraq’s cities and more than 100 bases across the country continuing to close or be turned over to Iraq, the 130,000 American troops here will increasingly fall back to these larger bases.

While some are technically called camps or bases, they are commonly referred to as Forward Operating Bases, or F.O.B.’s. The F.O.B. is so ingrained in the language of this war that soldiers who stayed mainly on base were once derisively called Fobbits by those outside the wire. But increasingly, the encampments are the way many Americans experience the war.

To be sure, thousands of Americans are with Iraqis at small bases, where they play an advisory role, and thousands more are on the roads and highways providing the protection needed to carry out the withdrawal.

But the F.O.B. has become an iconic part of the war, both for those fighting it and for the Iraqis, who have been largely kept out of them during the war.

They are in some ways a world apart from Iraq, with working lights, proper sanitation, clean streets and strictly observed rules and codes of conduct. Some bases have populations of more than 20,000, with thousands of contractors and third-country citizens to keep them running.

But the bases are also part of the Iraqi landscape. Mortar shells still occasionally fall inside the wire, and soldiers fall asleep to the constant sounds of helicopters, controlled detonations and gunfire from firing ranges.

“It is definitely a strange place,” said Capt. Brian Neese, an Air Force physician. “I’ve asked the Civil Affairs guy if there is anything that I can do off base, and there just isn’t anything for me to do. What kills is not the difficulty of the job but the monotony.”

At the height of the war, more than 300 bases were scattered across Iraq. Over the next few months, Americans hope to be at six huge bases, with 13 others being used for staging and preparing for a complete withdrawal.

The first people you encounter driving up to an American base are not actually American. They are usually Ugandans, employed by a private security company, Triple Canopy, and those at Balad had enough authority to delay for five hours an American Air Force captain escorting an American reporter onto the base.

The Ugandans make up only one nationality of a diverse group of workers from developing nations who sustain life on the F.O.B.’s for American soldiers. The largest contingents come from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India. They live apart from both Western contractors and soldiers on base, interacting with them only as much as their jobs demand.

“Everyone stays pretty much separate,” said Mila, the massage therapist, whose last name could not be used out of security concerns. She has been in Iraq a year, but she said other workers had been here as long as six years, some never taking a break to go home. “You miss nature, trees and grass,” she said.

The base has two power plants, and two water treatment plants that purify 1.9 million gallons of water a day for showers and other uses. The water the soldiers drink comes from yet another water treatment plant run by a bottling company, which provides seven million bottles of water a month for those on base.

Fifteen bus routes crisscross the complex, with 80 to 100 buses on the roads at any given moment. The Air Force officers who run the base have meetings to discuss road safety; with large, heavily armored vehicles competing for space with small sedans, there are bound to be collisions.

There are two fire stations as well, and because Balad has the single busiest landing strip in the entire Defense Department, they can handle everything from an electrical fire in a trailer to a burning airplane.

The Americans also installed two sewage treatment plants, given how deeply troubled Iraq’s sewage system remains.

The facilities, like much in Iraq, are run by KBR, a company based in Houston. But as Americans prepare to turn bases over to Iraqis, they are working to bring in Iraqi companies to run some facilities, a process that has been slow and complex largely because of safety concerns.

One of the few places Iraqis can be seen, in fact, is the “Iraqi Free Zone,” a fenced-in area enclosed with barbed wire and blast walls. There, Iraqis sell pirated movies, discount cigarettes, electronics and Iraqi tchotchkes.

Each large base in Iraq takes on its own distinct flavor. Most large American bases were once Iraqi bases, but some, like Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border, were created where there was only sand.

An Iraqi interpreter at Bucca who was living in Texas with his family when the war started said that when a contracting firm approached him, he asked where he would be working.

“They told me, ‘You would be going to a place called Bucca,’ ” said the interpreter, whose name the military asked not to be printed for security reasons. “I said, ‘There is no city called Bucca.’ They showed me it on the map and I said, ‘I am from Iraq and there is no city called Bucca.’ ”

It turned out that the interpreter was correct. Bucca, which would house the largest American-run prison in Iraq, was named after Ronald Bucca, a soldier with the 800th Military Police Brigade and a fire marshal in New York who was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Entertainers come to American bases here, the most frequent being N.F.L. cheerleaders. When the Minnesota Viking cheerleaders visited Bucca this spring, one could only wonder what the thousands of detainees, among them Muslim extremists for whom the flash of an ankle is cause for severe punishment, would have made of the spectacle less than a mile from their cells.

WAR READING...

Here's a link from the NYT's war correspondent blog that I recommend checking out time to time...

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/

DOLLAR, DOLLAR BILL Y'ALL....C.R.E.A.M.

Lotto has been on my mind as of late. Powerball, Mega Millions... A hefty win would be an exit strategy. As the slogan goes...."Hey, you never know..."

Randomness is the spice of life.

ON HOLD

Got a call from the mid level managers that the ubercorporation's affiliate; the Air Fish were now taking us to A-stan 4 days from Sunday. So we get to enjoy the labor day weekend. Gives me a few days to stretch out the home experience before jumping into the game.

THE OTHER SIDE OF WAR IN A-STAN

I came across this article in Mother Jones about the hi jinks going on at the American Embassy in Kabul. Despite the threat of combat, I have heard recently that deployment especially at big bases, which resemble small suburbs or cities(Kandahar is 7 miles long)-sex, drugs, alcohol are often the preferred activities to kill time. Regardless, still not a place to get complacent, especially since everyone is walking around with a loaded weapon...

This cub reporter will make best efforts to bring you the scoop once he knows what the fuck is going on and what he'll be doing once his boots hit Afghan soil. Maybe I get inspired like P-Diddy and throw a few tent jams...

Peep the MoJo(Mother Jones) article:

→ Afghanistan, Corporations, Military, Regulatory Affairs

Animal House in Afghanistan

— By Daniel Schulman | Tue September 1, 2009 10:19 AM PST

Drunken brawls, prostitutes, hazing and humiliation, taking vodka shots out of buttcracks— no, the perpetrators of these Animal House-like antics aren't some depraved frat brothers. They are the private security contractors guarding Camp Sullivan, otherwise known as the US Embassy in Kabul.

These allegations, and many more, are contained in a letter sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight, which has been investigating the embassy security contract held by ArmorGroup North America (a subsidiary of Wackenhut, which is in turn owned by the security behemoth G4S). The contractor was the subject of a congressional probe earlier this summer that found serious lapses in the company's handling of the embassy security contract, which internal State Department documents said left the embassy compound "in jeopardy." Nevertheless, the government opted to extend the company's 5-year, $189 million contract for another year.

• Contractors Gone Wild

  Theft, hookers, melting down Iraqi gold to make cowboy spurs? All in a day's work for private military contractors in Iraq?

• The Cowboys of Kabul

• Afghan Oversight AWOL?

  The effort to monitor billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts is understaffed and underfunded. So says the guy in charge.

Underscoring the scope of the problems within ArmorGroup's Afghanistan operation, POGO says that nearly a tenth of the company's 450-man embassy security force contacted the watchdog group to "express concerns about and provide evidence of a pattern of blatant, longstanding violations of the security contract, and of a pervasive breakdown in the chain of command and guard force discipline and morale."

In the letter to Clinton, POGO executive director Danielle Brian writes:

This environment has resulted in chronic turnover by U.S./ex-pat guards. According to the State Department, "nearly 90% of the incumbent US/Expats left within the first six months of contract performance." According to POGO sources, the U.S./ex-pat guard turnover may be as high as 100 percent annually. This untenable turnover prevents the guard force from developing team cohesion, and requires constant training for new replacement recruits. The guards have come to POGO because they say they believe strongly in the mission, but are concerned that many good guards are quitting out of frustration or being fired for refusing to participate in the misconduct, and that those responsible for the misconduct are not being held accountable.

Brian's letter suggests that Wackenhut Vice President Sam Brinkley, who testified before a Senate panel in June about ArmorGroup's performance of the embassy contract, may have misled Congress.

Despite Wackenhut Vice President Sam Brinkley's sworn Senate testimony that "…the Kabul contract has been fully-staffed since January 2009…" the truth is that chronic understaffing of the guard force continues to be a major problem. And evidence suggests Mr. Brinkley knew that. Around March, according to numerous participants, he was confronted by some 50 guards at Camp Sullivan who complained to him directly about a severe, ongoing guard shortage. Then, in an April 2009 memo to a State Department official, U.S. Embassy Kabul guard force Commander Werner Ilic reported that guard shortages had caused chronic sleep deprivation among his men. He described a situation in which guards habitually face 14-hour-day work cycles extending for as many as eight weeks in a row, frequently alternating between day and night shifts. He concluded that "this ultimately diminishes the LGF's [Local Guard Force's] ability to provide security." The contract with the State Department specifies that guards may not be on duty for longer than 12 consecutive hours. Interviewees and documents reveal that short-staffing frequently results in the denial of contractually guaranteed leave and vacation, and that those who do not comply are threatened with termination or actually fired.

But criticisms of failing to meet manpower obligations are nothing compared to the bacchanalian activities ArmorGroup's personnel were allegedly engaged in.

Guards have come to POGO with allegations and photographic evidence that some supervisors and guards are engaging in near-weekly deviant hazing and humiliation of subordinates. Witnesses report that the highest levels of AGNA management in Kabul are aware of and have personally observed—or even engaged in—these activities, but have done nothing to stop them. Indeed, management has condoned this misconduct, declining to take disciplinary action against those responsible and allowing two of the worst offending supervisors to resign and allegedly move on to work on other U.S. contracts. The lewd and deviant behavior of approximately 30 supervisors and guards has resulted in complete distrust of leadership and a breakdown of the chain of command, compromising security.

Numerous emails, photographs, and videos portray a Lord of the Flies environment. One email from a current guard describes scenes in which guards and supervisors are "peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity…." Photograph after photograph shows guards—including supervisors—at parties in various stages of nudity, sometimes fondling each other. These parties take place just a few yards from the housing of other supervisors.

Multiple guards say this deviant hazing has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired. The result is an environment that is dangerous and volatile. Some guards have reported barricading themselves in their rooms for fear that those carrying out the hazing will harm them physically. Others have reported that AGNA management has begun to conduct a witch hunt to identify employees who have provided information about this atmosphere to POGO.

These allegations raise serious questions about why ArmorGroup has been allowed to retain this important contract, which gives the company the responsibility for protecting the lives of the hundreds of diplomats, officials, and others who work within the embassy compound. Also in question is the State Department's ability to provide adequate oversight of contractors under its jurisdiction. It should at least be able to ensure that its embassy doesn't provide the backdrop for a Contractors Gone Wild video.

POGO is calling on the State Department to launch an independent investigation of the Kabul embassy contract and to "consider initiating suspension and debarment proceedings against the companies ArmorGroup North America." As for the State Department officials who were supposed to be providing oversight, the watchdog says they, too, should be held accountable. Perhaps as punishment they ought to be forced to watch the buttcrack vodka shot video.

UPDATE: The State Department responds. Plus: Why did a top State official tell Congress in June that ArmorGroup's performance in Afghanistan "has been and is sound" when internal documents suggest he had reason to belive otherwise?