Finally, the full V.I.P. treatment on our way back through Sharana (Photo: Loesche)

Meanwhile, Axel and I are back in Kabul. We arrived here yesterday at the military part of the airport. We are scheduled to fly on tomorrow in the morning to Dubai. The further we get from our embed, the more we wind down. Now, that we have some time to gather our thoughts, we slowly realise how exhausting this journey really was.

Three weeks were plenty.

We left the COP Sar Howza late on Saturday after we had the encounter with the mullah and mujahedeen Tuti. We were driven to the 172nd’s headquarters by MRAP convoy to Sharana and got there at around 22.00. The brigade’s PAO Major Buccino was waiting for us. He showed us our rooms. I was lucky to get room V.I.P. 2 this time. (About time. Buccino had been promising us the whole V.I.P. treatment since we first got here!).

In the news

I wrote a news piece for the agency about the mujahedeen getting involved in the peace process. Axel prepared three photos to go with it. We were both really knackered and slept in the next morning. Buccino had us signed up for a C-130 flight on Sunday afternoon.

We rode in his SUV to the terminal building, which in Sharana looks like a wooden saloon and stopped by at Green Beans Coffee, a franchise business that specialises on military bases. Once we got to the air field there were plenty of contractors and soldiers put down their names down for the flight. The roll call was at 16.55, we wouldn’t leave until 19.30. I suspected we wouldn’t make it because of the many passengers with higher priority.

The Game

Before the lights were turned off. The floor of the C-130 taking us from Sharana to Bagram (Photo: Loesche)

The most interesting thing about military air travel is that it’s so different from civilian air travel. First you don’t pay. The downside is that you – especially as a journalist – can get kicked off at any time, or the whole flight is just canceled or delayed. It’s a nerve racking game. There’s only one rule that counts: You know you made the flight when you are well in the air – even then you can just hope the plane won’t turn round.

Well, we made the flight … after standing lined up in two lines on the airfield for half an hour while the C-130 was being relived of it’s cargo it had flown in from wherever it had come from. The specialty about this flight was that we flew in complete darkness. The lights were switched off before the start and didn’t come on until after touch down in Bagram. (Axel was actually signaled to switch off his iPod because of the light from the display).

The glow of lightening

The only light source were the back ends of the night vision goggles of the two crewmen standing at the rear doors looking out the tiny round windows, probably on the look out for enemy on the ground. You could also see the faint glow of the emergency exits on the roof and the glowing of clock’s hands on our fellow passengers wrists.

It was the bumpiest flight so far. I was singing songs I learned when I was with the German paras doing my national service ten years back. At some point the few round windows in the hull lit up. Not to far away there must have been a thunderstorm. The noise of the aircraft was so loud that you surely couldn’t make out any thunder.

25 Minutes later we landed safely in Bagram. Axel an I shoved our luggage into the 24-hour holding area and made our way to the DEFAC. We had only had breakfast late in the morning. We were relieved to have made the first part of our air travel.

Hotel California

Bagram airfield before we left for Kabul. The white plane is unmarked. It wasn't a UN plane (Photo: Loesche)

Whilst we were eating chocolate ice cream sitting outside the DEFAC I told Axel that I wasn’t in favour of sleeping at “Warrior” again. On our first visit I saw a sign for a hotel on Disney Boulevard, the main road in Bagram. And, if I remembered correctly I had heard Major Buccino say something along the lines of: “Don’t all journalists stay at Hotel Such-and-Such in Bagram?” – after we had told him the story about our adventurous stay at “Camp Warrior” on our way out.

We walked for twenty minutes and were about to give up, after we had passed the Polish compound and the Egyptian field hospital, then finally we read the sign “Media Support Centre” and under it: “Hotel California”. We knocked on the door of a smallish wooden hut. We stepped inside and were greeted by a sergeant who said he had been expecting us.

At first, I though he was playing the “I’lI-pretend-I-now-what’s-going-on-even-if-I-don’t”-game. Then he showed us our names written on a white board and told us our flight for tomorrow had been booked. We were astonished. Another incident of following some instinct that leads you straight to your goal. We hadn’t known the media were so well catered for here.

Afghanistan from above

The pilot of the two propeller STOL flight took a sharp right turn and steep dive into Kabul airport. STOL stands for Short Take-Off and Landing - nuff said! (Photo: Loesche)

We slept in our own room with a bunk bed – a major improvement to the huge and crowded tent in “Camp Warrior”. It seemed befitting that the sergeant drove us all the way to the terminal the next morning. Where we were listed for a so called STOL flight (a regular scheduled flight) to Kabul.

At 13.30 we boarded a small two propeller air force plane with regular passenger seats and plenty of foot room. We clung to the windows for all of the 15 minute flight to Kabul, made some photos. It was the first flight that we could actually see where we were flying. We got billeted and put into a tent at KAIA. One step closer to home!

The deserted compound of a girls school in Sar Howza (Photo: Heimken)

After we went on patrol to the bazaar on the outskirts of Sar Howza on Monday, 3^rd Platoon took us out to what used to be a girls school today. We got the usual briefing by the mortar pit before leaving. The school is infamous for having Taliban graffiti sprawled over the inside.

Apart from being told to watch out for IEDs by the graveyard the guys were warned by Lieutenant Wood and Staff Sergeant Nuñez not to get pissed off if the kids started pelting them with rocks again.

If the Afghan police who were to join the parade started firing in the air to scare off the youngsters, then so be it. This was there country. The soldiers were told not to hand out any presents. It hadn’t worked out last time, added Wood.

The Graveyard

The armored vehicles climbed up the slope to Sar Howza and passed the graveyard that stretched on both sides of the road. It seemed a spooky place, but in a fascinating way – very different from our grave yards.

Some of the graves had tall masts next to them, some with fluttering flags. Stones lay on most graves and brush was growing through out the huge field. The whole atmosphere was strange. For the first time since we got here, the sky was overcast. It seemed that summer is beginning to loose its grip.

The local workers were making head way paving the street into the city. However, the asphalt ended just before the graveyard began. Captain Perkins said the insurgency starts where the paved road ends.

Red Adobe

War graffiti drawn by children on the walls of the school compiled by Axel

Soon after, we passed the typical red adobe buildings the typical wooden ladders leading up to the roofs. At the end of the streets we dismounted. Together with the Afghan police we made our way through alley ways towards the school.

At one point a bunch of kids ran off into an open gate leading into one of the bigger Qalats, compounds, once Axel started taking photos. His long lenses could be mistaken for gun barrels. They seemed genuinely scared.

Some of the kids were dressed in amazing colors. It seemed as if some wealthier families were living here on the outskirts. But you can’t really tell, because all is hidden behind the red adobe walls of the compounds.

Problem Area

One of the classrooms

The school lay right at the edge of town, a steep and rocky ridge rising up behind it. Because there were caves in the ridge some of the soldiers went up to check them for any traces of the insurgency. “This is a problem area”, Staff Sergeant Nuñez let me know.

Next to one on the caves they found a firing position made of rocks. The strangest thing about this war is that the enemy is almost like a ghost. This cliff on the edge of town is where the low intensity insurgency begins. Behind it lies Talibanland, an area so remote and inaccessible, that the soldiers would only seriously venture into it by helicopter.

To choose such a site for a girls school seemed pretty thoughtless – with the benefit of hindsight. The school was built in 2008 by the local Provincial Reconstruction Team. It operated for two months, before it was shut down.

The inside of the school was indeed sprawled with graffiti. Most of the ones I picked out for the interpreter to translate, he said were poems. Anything that could be removed had been taken away. Windows and doors had all been removed. It almost seemed as ghostly a place as the graveyard.

It would be interesting to find out if it really were the hard line Taliban who closed the school down. Perhaps the ultra conservative ways of the people of this town stood in the way of this project too.

Once again nothing much happened on this patrol – we didn’t get pelted with rocks – but there is a strange feel of enigma to this country. To a Westerner it seems unreal. To grasp it’s reality it probably would take more than dismounting from our armored spacecrafts and just dipping into the world outside the gated community of the cop.

Mortars

A mortar round exploding on target on the mountain ridge

In the afternoon we drove back out with three MRAPs and did some military stuff closer to home. This time we just drove a few hundred meters off road to secure the target area for a Mortar rehearsal.

They were shooting live mortar ammo half way up the mountain ridge in some kilometers distance to the west of the COP. The 120 and 81 grenades were close on target and sent out detonations echoing through the whole area.

We just sat in the desert near a wadi on some rocks chatted and watched.

Veranda in the Foward Operating Base Sharana (Photo: Loesche)

We slept in. I got up at 8.30 a.m. Axel and I had breakfast and prepared for our over land travel to Sar Howza. We were driven to the headquarter barracks of 3-66 Battalion and met the commander Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Taylor from Texas in charge of the western part of Paktika province.

We were briefed on the activity in our area and how the war was going in general. The most interesting point he made was that the structure or make-up of the insurgent force was changing. Taylor said that there was a split occurring within the movement.

The older generation of fighters who had joined the mujahedin in the 1980s to fight the Russians was retiring. Incoming were young more radical fighters from Pakistan who Taylor described as a more thuggish type of insurgent who unlike the older generation had less respect for the general populous and wouldn’t care for civilian casualties.

Just after we had our chat in Taylor’s office we met Lieutenant Wolfsley who was going to take us with him to the combat outpost some 10 kilometres from Sharana. The drive would take us 30 minutes.

We were relieved to hear that the threat of an attack wasn’t that great. The road to Sar Howza was paved, which means the insurgents couldn’t bury pressure plates to set off roadside bombs. All the military vehicles also have so called jamming devices which block any attempt to detonate explosive devices via mobile phones.

MRAPs

Four huge Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs) were waiting for us. Axel got into one, I into another. I drove in the last vehicle under the command of Staff Sergeant Travis Colter, 26, from South Carolina and three other soldiers.
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In those vehicles you feel like driving in a submarine with wheels. They are stuffed full of electronic equipment from radios to fire extinguishers. The armour that protects the passengers from anything from gun rounds, rocket propelled grenades to roadside bombs is probably more than 10 cm thick.

Beef Jerky

I handed out some beef jerky to break the ice. We rolled past a rugged semi-desert landscape. All traffic that came our way from motor cycles with men with black turbans to battered cars and colourfully painted trucks loaded with firewood stopped ahead of the convoy pulling up by the roadside to let the MRAPs pass.

Somehow the trip was less nerve racking than I thought it would be. After 35 minutes we reached Sar Howza without any incident. When we entered the home of Apache Company 2-28 we had after four days of travel reached our final destination for the trip – some 8300 feet (2700 meters) above sea level.

We boarded the C-130 Hercules at around 4.30 a.m. Our first military flight in Afghanistan. The palette with our luggage had just been loaded into the plane (Photo: Heimken)

The flight yesterday to Bagram – well, we didn’t make it. It didn’t take passengers after all – cargo only. The flight after that one – well we weren’t that lucky, they couldn’t take the usual pay load – it was too hot (I don’t know how the correlation works out). So we dropped off the low priority list for the flight: It’s all persons military first, then contractors, then journalists.

At the end of the day we were able to sign up for a 9:40 p.m. flight. We checked our luggage in and were sitting in the terminal watching the Boston Red Sox play on a flat screen. The lady from behind the check-in desk came into the waiting area and announced that due to maintenance work on the runway the flight was going to be delayed six hours.

We grabbed our sleeping bags out of our luggage which already had been put on a pallet ready for transport. Although this is a military airfield the terminal works in principle like any other airport, everybody still has to put their luggage through scanning, which seems a bit strange, because most soldiers travel with their guns at their side.

Sleep

On the up side of things, we had the first three hours of sleep since the beginning of our journey 25 hours earlier. Then at 3:30 a.m. we were once again sitting in the terminal building, now watching the Animal Planet about mammals going out of control.

We, a bunch of journalists and a few soldiers, got on a bus at 4:30 a.m. rolled to the waiting C-130 Hercules Air Force transporter. It was still dark when we walked up the ramp and took up our seats. Then after us, the palette with our luggage got heaved into the plane by a fork lifter.

Full Throttle

The ramp closed. The hall like inside went dark. We taxied across the runway, taking sharp turns. Once the pilot pulled back the throttle the sound of the four propellers rose to a deafening level, we mimicked the soldiers across from us and held on to the netting behind us.

Military transporters from the inside look as if those assembling them weren’t quite finished attaching the interior panels – you can see all the wiring and cables. After 15 minutes we were at our next stop – Bagram Airfield (BAF), the central US transport hub for Afghanistan. It was light when we got of the plane. We had made our first mil flight.

Palette

Once again we though we had gotten lucky in Bagram. We were already checked in, our luggage on the pallet for a flight to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Sharana; all systems go, waiting in the holding area, when our names were called up over the loudspeakers.

We were taken off the flight to Sharana at the last minute. We went down to the loading area and collected our bags from the pallet. The provincial capital of Paktika province, where the brigade headquarters of the 172^nd Separate Infantry Brigade is located would have to wait.

Action

I called the brigades Public Affairs Officer, Major Joseph Buccino from an internet café of sorts. He said, him and the brigade commanders, Colonel Edward T. Bohnemann, were looking forward to seeing us. Buccino added that there was expected to be a lot of “action” in Paktika, especially after Ramadan had just ended on Friday. The fight was going to pick up.

We took the bus that drives around the Bagram Airfield and rode it for half an hour. We checked into Camp Warrior on the other side of the airfield with the huge runway behind us. We both had our first shower since arriving in Afghanistan.

After getting some good food at the so called DEFAC dining facility we spent the night in a huge tent holding approximately 80 bunk beds, most of them occupied by civilian employees, contractors. Every now and then, we awoke to the sound of a pair of fighter jets roaring down the runway and taking off.

At 09:00 p.m. we rode the bus back to the terminal and were told there were going to be three flights for Sharana tomorrow. One at 1.35 a.m. the next at 5.30 a.m. and the last one at 7:30 a.m. check-in time. We decided to try and get a night’s sleep and opted for the latest flight, taking the risk that if we didn’t get on the passenger list, we wouldn’t make it to Sharana.

Angst

Axel and I had a long talk about whether this trip actually made sense at all. Why take the risk and put up with the dangers of a war zone. No picture or story will ever be worth dying for. We left that question unanswered. We turned to fear itself.

Former US-President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said something along the lines that nothing had to be feared but fear itself. That’s not true. Fear shouldn’t be feared because it’s an important indicator that you might be in danger.

We both had our spouts of anxiety and subsequent doubts about our mission. I’m glad I didn’t venture out into this adventure on my own, like I had planned to do at the beginning. Now having somebody to confine tp is extremely important.

We’ve both agreed that we will venture out to the Combat Outpost (COP). We’ll go through to our actual area of operation and then decide what to do or not to do. We have agreed that if one of us doesn’t feel comfortable with either staying on or going on a specific patrol, we both abort mission.