You and your fear are fenced in together. Nowhere to run to (Photo: Loesche)

A week after our return to Germany I’m still pretty knackered. Our embed with the Apaches in the dusty country called Afghanistan just lingers there, hasn’t completely sunk in yet. It was a physical and mental challenge, bigger than I had anticipated.

For now, I have found refuge in the microcosm of the work office, where things are orderly and clean and predictable. This is the settling back into “normal” life, the Western world wants the Afghans so desperately to share with us.

I like being back in Germany where people stand for five minutes at the red lights at the pedestrian crossing even though there are no cars to be seen for miles. On the other hand, I hear, the army sends their soldiers to some Mediterranean resorts to decompress for a week. I could have lived through that, no question!

Dust

Kicking up dust. A convoy of MRAPs on the main road from Sar Howza to Urgun in Paktika Province

I still have a cough that comes and goes, which I refer to as my Afghan dust lung. The fine dust is certainly a big challenge, especially for your respiratory system – and all technical equipment. The headquarters team looking after the computer work stations in Sar Howza had their little air spray cans they used to clean the keyboards and fans with.

I spent most of the three weeks with sinusitis and couldn’t sleep for a few nights because of a extremely bad cough. I knew I should have gone to the medic earlier, when one of the private contractors, an electrician living in the next compartment, came knocking with some cough tablets. He probably got woken up by me coughing my loungs out.

Conditioning

I think it’s also down to the challenge of the body having to constantly adapt to the air conditioning. All tents, barracks and vehicles are cooled down – which certainly makes it easier to bear the heat in general, but is very hard on the body as it has to switch from hot to cold all the time.

From what I was told, many soldiers get ill after they arrive in theatre because of those conditions. What certainly didn’t help things was the burning pit right by the perimeter that on a regular basis emitted toxic fumes that clouded the camp.

Altitude

One thing I hadn’t anticipated at all were the effects of altitude, which turn a stroll up the hill into a marathon up the K2 like experience. The area of Sar Howza doesn’t really look like a challenge because it’s more hills than high peaks but the whole plateau is very high up. The air is thin.

It’s utopian to think you could get used to the conditions in less than three weeks. It probably takes more than half a year until your blood produces the needed amount of white blood cells. Next time, if there is one, I would certainly make sure my level of physical fitness is much higher.

Danger

Kicking up dust big time. A Blackhawk helicopter has landed in the COP delivering the brigadecommander Colonel Edward T. Bohnemann

The second major challenge is keeping an even keel mentally. Although I felt pretty safe in the combat outpost behind hescos and riding in the MRAPs behind mine resitant steel, there still was a nagging feeling of danger that I couldn’t escape. There could be a mortar or rocket attack, you could run into an ambush or you could get blown up by an IED.

Thankfully, during the time we visited we had no major incidents. One of the MRAPs of first platoon in the other COP Mata Khan ran onto an IED but nobody was hurt. Only after we had left, two soldiers of the same platoon got hurt in such an incident and were flown back to Germany.

We were very happy we didn’t get into a fire fight – although that’s what many journalists actually want. But the subtle pressure of some uncalculated threat was constantly with us. Along these lines, I think the non imminent threat can be more nerve racking than a threat right before you. It wears you down.

Nowhere to run

And there was nowhere to run, you couldn’t just move around on your own outside the wire. Your and your fear were fenced in together. Somebody in the know explained to me the other day that a perceived threat causes high adrenalin levels, which could be brought down by movement and physical activity, but on an embed in a COP you can’t just go for a long walk to clear your system.

This is probably the reason why the gym in Sar Howza was in the evenings constantly packed with soldiers working out to the sound of Rammstein (all US soldiers no matter where they’re from or what they listen to otherwise seem to have a few Rammstein tunes on their iPod: Next time I will do a survey of the favourite Rammstein titles).

The three weeks as an embedded reporter with the US Army were an unforgettable adventure, even without a major incidents. But it was much more of an exhausting challenge than I though it would be.

Outskirts of Kabul (Photo: Heimken)

We are finally out of the country. After 21 days. I’m sitting at the gate in Dubai typing this. It’s politically not correct to say, but when I was flying in to this filthy rich country shortly after 11.00 a.m. and I could see the well paved roads, the traffic, the high rises, I was just very glad to be back in “civilisation”.

We knew we could have trouble getting from the military terminal in Kabul first to the military main gate, which is a few kilometres down the runway, and then after passing through the security check point manned by the Belgian paras, getting onwards travel to Kabul International, the civillian part of the airport.

Getting out

The first taxi I had called the previous evening, the KBR which runs inner base shuttles of course didn’t turn up at 5.30. I called the PAO’s mobile and Staff Sergeant Carmony answered half asleep. He promised to call KBR for us.

At  5.45 we were on our way to the main gate. I called our next taxi, gladly the guy from Safe Trip Kabul, I had talked to the evening before, answered straight away. He was already waiting. We walked the couple of hundred meters past the Belgian soldiers manning the check points.

Socalled "Hinds" just took off from the airfiled as we left the military main gate. They're russian built helicopters (Photo: ISAF)

Two ancient soviet built attack helicopters, the ones you know from Rambo III, just started flying low over the airport.

Zee picked us up in a red car and a green T-shirt. He said business was low these days and the situation in Kabul was getting worse. He told us about  the deadly attack on the former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was bombed to death by insurgents who hid explosives in a turban yesterday evening.

From a roundabout onwards there was a traffic jam. Axel and I had to get out the car, were patted down. Got back in the car. Drove to the next check point, were patted down. Our luggage was screened. We got back in the car drove to the terminal. Said our goodbyes to Zee and paid him.

From then onwards our passports were checked three more times. We went through security twice more and stood in three different queues for another hour at least. We got on board of the Safi Air plane ten minutes after it was supposed to fly. This time the A230 was aircraft was in pretty good shape. After half an hour we were high up in the sky over Kabul.

We got on out Emirates flight from Dubai to Frankfurt. After three weeks of deprivation the cute stewardesses pampering me and smiling all along was rewarding experience. Emirates have a real good choice of music and playlists available.

I had a whole middle row of the middle isle for myself. Watched a movie, listened to Bill Withers, Lauren Hill and the Chili Peppers, typed away on a story about our encounter with the Mullah… Had a little to eat, slept a bit. I read a little in the XXL I bought at the PX in Bagram with 2Pac on the cover.

Not a worry in the world. We had gotten out alive.

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 Afghan DJ in his studio in the combat outpost Sar Howza (Photo: Heimken)

Today, we did an interesting story on an Afghan DJ who runs a radio station on camp, for the population outside the wire. The station was set up by ISAF. Interestingly Iranian music seems to be all the hype. It’s what the 20-year-old plays a lot.

Apart from playing music he also reads out news he gets from the 3-66 Battalion headquarters in Sharana and he reads out jokes every now and then. It must be hard for him living on base with all the Americans, the only company he has are the interpreters working for the unit.

Lobster and Steak

Captain Perkins and his two platoons came back inside the wire, the outpost, from their five day mission yesterday evening. The company’s cook made them a special welcome meal – lobster and steak – to greet the men that were living without showers and good food for almost a week.

When the MRAPs and armoured transporters came rolling through the gate and the soldiers started dismounting we met a couple of familiar faces. Some greeted us recognizing us from when we last met them at the casing of the colours ceremony in Grafenwöhr in Bavaria at beginning of June.

The Burning Pit

The burning pit (Photo: Heimken)

We’ve been in the combat outpost for three full days now. On a normal day it’s already hard to breathe at 2700 meters above sea level. Today it’s almost impossible. Thick toxic fumes billow through the outpost.

It’s trash burning day. All waste goes into a pitch by the perimeter of the outpost. A sergeant pours fuel onto the black plastic bags that have been collected from all over the post. The wind carries the fumes of burnt waste through the base.

Southerner

Earlier in the day, I had long chat with mechanic and shop foreman Sergeant Bruce Anderson, sitting on the wooden veranda just outside the tactical operations centre. Here the soldiers congregate to smoke and have a chat. They even built a rocking chair. They’ve got a big black plastic box with a frog and a pet tortoise called “Little Mac”.

Sergeant Bruce Anderson, mechanic in the combat outpost Sar Howza (Photo: Heimken)

Anderson is 37 and has a broad southerner drawl, he likes beer and rides dirt bikes in his past time. He joined the army in 2004 and was first deployed to an unusual area of operations – the 2005 debacle in New Orleans caused by hurricane Katrina.

He says the hardest thing about being deployed is being away from the family, or rather making your loved ones worry for such a long time. He’s got two kids and a wife. He, likes most of the other soldiers here, have been very welcoming.

Beyond the Wire

We feel pretty safe on the combat outpost. It doesn’t really feel like a war zone here. The world behind the barbed wire seems remote. We haven’t left the wire, the COP, since we got here. But company commander Perkins has promised to take us out, to see the village of Sar Howza and the outposts, they have set up during their mission.

In the evening the sub-governor of Sar Howza, the local police chief and the deputy chief of the afghan intelligence agency in the district came to visit and exchange some courtesies on the veranda in front of the TOC.

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.

Pretending to work at Kabul International Airport. Relieved to have reached the first base (Foto: Heimken)

It has only just sunk in: I’m in Afghanistan and I’m with the military, going on an embed. It hit me hard whilst sitting on a bunk bed in an air conditioned tent full of US marines, US army and British soldiers and their gear. This is real, and Axel, the photographer, and I are complete rookies in this biz. Glad to have him with me though, may I say.

We touched down at Kabul International at 06:40, landing with the Afghan carrier Safi Air on a misty morning. I hadn’t slept at all since we left Frankfurt at 15:20 with Emirates flying to Dubai and landing there close to midnight – getting hit by 38 degrees Celsius leaving the aircraft.

The malls in the terminal were nicely air conditioned though. We sipped on a café latte from Costa, talking about our plans of what we might be able to cover in the three weeks in Afghanistan. To be honest we didn’t really have a clue what we were in for.

Vintage

At 3:30 we boarded our Safi Air flight. This part of the journey was quite different from the all inclusive flair of the Emirates. This Airbus A320 was furnished with what very likely was 1970s Lufthansa fake leather upholstery. The nets at the backs of the seats were completely torn. On the ceiling the jet sported retro TV-sets which didn’t work. Strangely enough, because the machine looked okay from the outside – nice paint job – I felt comfortable.

The passengers on the flight were a rag tag bunch of Afghans, European aid workers and what looked like private security personnel, the latter travelling with big hold all rucksacks with karabiners attached – a military air about them, but with the aura of mercenaries. One of them was this beefy type of guy, a bodybuilder in his fifties graying, with upper arms with the diameter of a thigh, growing fat slowly with barbed wire tattooed around his biceps.

Luggage

We got to Kabul on time. No sleep to be had. The sky at 6:40 in the morning was overcast. You could only just make out the rugged mountain range flanking the capital. After we got off the plane we went through immigration. Stickers on the barriers between the lanes indicated Germany had sponsored them. The officer on duty didn’t seem too welcoming as he stamped the visa.

Once we got to the baggage reclaim, we couldn’t believe it – both our duffle bags got here with content, flak jackets and helmets. We were convinced from the outset that we would have to get along with only the content of our hand luggage for the three weeks – and had packed accordingly.

A guy at the exit directed us to the only kiosk in the pretty minimalistic main terminal building. I rang up the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) handling all ISAF embeds in Kabul, Petty Officer First Class Daniel Gay, from the shop owner’s mobile and paid two dollars for two minutes. I hoped Gay would come from the military part to the civilian part of the airport and pick us up. He insisted we should get a taxi.

Coincidence

We exited the building. Trailing just behind us was a guy, I turned, looked, and his face seemed familiar but I couldn’t place him immediately. He seemed to recognise me too. We quickly figured out he was a fellow student from ten years back, when we studied International Politics in Wales together. We were both so baffled we didn’t quite know what to say.

Axel and I were a bit worried, because of the prospect of having to get a taxi. Thoughts of abduction and ransom money crossed our minds. We went with the guy we just met, who works for a German government development agency, the GIZ, in Northern Afghanistan, where the German army is in command and seemed to know his way around. He had already been working in Afghanistan for a year.

The Ride

He said we might be able to hitch a ride with him and courtesy of his personal pick-up driver, although he said straight away, that he would be breaking strict rules of his agency not to take any non-employees with them. Since the security situation seems to be deteriorating, everybody is looking into reducing risks.

Walked passed some Afghan National Police (ANP) in their gray bluish uniforms armed with AK-47 assault rifles. We left the airport compound and got to the main parking lot. The guy found his driver. The car was full, he said apologising. They already had to take others with them. So, we somehow had to get to the military main gate ourselves.

20 Bucks

We went over to the “taxi stand” – a row of pretty battered looking vehicles – and got into a yellow cab. The driver seemed okay. At least he understood where we wanted to go. Some parts of the taxi were carpeted. On the inside of the wind screen he had a picture of a guy, who looked like the popular Northern warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just before 9/11 by Al Qaida.

We drove down an alley around a lawless roundabout and then along the perimeter of the airport fence with fortified towers along a potholed street. Heaps of garbage lined the sidewalk, then a herd of goats, children playing in between. Some black plastic bags were fluttering in the concertina wire of the fence.

Long five minutes later we got to our destination unscathed and highly relieved. The promise of a far too high fare of 20 dollars might just have helped keep our driver on track and us out of trouble.

We checked in with a bunch of Belgian paratroopers in full gear manning their sand bagged bunker. Gay came to pick us up. He had our ISAF media badges ready. We had completed the first stage of our mission and were happy to hear that just a few hours later we could catch a military lift to Bagram …