Our location an a map (Photo: Loesche)

The sun’s out. It’s a little after 9.00 a.m. Axel and I spent our first night in our new home. We slept in a wooden hut without windows, the interior divided into smaller rooms with every compartment having their own door outside. Shortly before midnight we were told off by the one of the mechanics, we weren’t supposed to have our light on because of black out rules.

The combat outpost is about as a big as three football fields. It’s guarded by four Towers. They’ve got cameras on all of them. One of the towers is unmanned and has a remote controlled machinegun on its roof. The perimeter of the compound is made of so called Hescos, huge square blocks made from wire lined with fabric filled with rocks and sand.

Heavy Metal

Soldiers chillin out in COP Sar Howza (Photo: Loesche)

They’ve got everything they need on the base. A kitchen container, a dining facility, a gym where the soldiers were working out last night to heavy metal when I was sitting just outside the exercise room, on one of the computer workstations connected to the internet. They even have a laundry facility where Axel washed his T-Shirts this morning.

Three platoons of Apache Company live here, more than 100 men in total. I haven’t seen any women, like on the bigger based in Bagram or Sharana. The company commander, Captain James Perkins left the compound with most of his men late last week. So we haven’t seen him yet. They are busy setting up check points and observation posts at a vital crossing a few kilometers from here.

When the district governor is not in the provincial capital Sharana he resides on the outpost, the district centre is located on base. So when there are shuras the town elders come to the base to hold the meetings here. We’ve been told that after more than 100 insurgents were killed by US special forces in July just North of here in the mountains they transported the bodies here for biometric screening.

No TICs

A mechanic (Photo: Loesche)

The soldiers who were left behind at the COP seem pretty chilled out. None of them are wearing their flak vests or helmets. The outpost didn’t get attacked for a while. That might change after Ramadan is over since last Friday. Everybody seems surprised there haven’t been any attacks or TICs, troops in contact – fire fights with insurgents.

Where Perkins and his platoons are setting up the posts the insurgents had established check points of their own they just gave up because most fighters went home for the holy month of Ramadan. It would make sense for the insurgent fighters to now come back and fight the infidels and the Afghan National Army (ANA) to regain control of the area.

At one point it looked like we might be able to join Perkins and his men and spend the night out in the field. A convoy with fuel was going to be sent out with resupplies. They didn’t drive out after all so we stayed on base.

Axel later pointed out that this was a good thing. Before we left Kabul we were talking to a first sergeant of the US marines. He had been deployed four times and his motto was: “Don’t get killed on the first day – and don’t get killed on the last”. This wasn’t the first day of our journey, but the first of our stay in Sar Howza. We need to settle in first.

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 …