Tour of Duty

“Shit, fucking shit, okay.” I reach behind me with one arm and rip apart my day pack to find my flashlight, but this makes me swerve, and I get yelled at again.

“Okay, calm down. I got it.” I turn on my mini-light. “There we go. The AC’s up.”

“Hey, turn that shit off! It’s just blowing dust back here.” Great. I’m sweating buckets, our AC is bust, and the engine is roaring beside me, making my compartment feel like a sauna.

As we near the gate of Kandahar City, a landmark known as the Golden Arches that dates back to the Soviet invasion of 1979, the traffic thickens even more. A family of five, all piled up on one motorcycle, whizzes by. We pass a semi stacked sky high with anything and everything. Horse-drawn wagons are sharing the road with shiny new Honda Civics. People everywhere, most of them dressed in the kind of gown your grandmother sleeps in, are looking at us, and we don’t have the foggiest fucking idea who’s friendly enough to let us through and who’s so holy they just want to blow us up. Gardens of marijuana flood the alleys and streets. The smell, mixed with those of feces and rotting meat, is so pungent it would make a dog turn and run. Everything except the mosques and old Taliban property is run down, dirty, and bombed out; from the people to the buildings, the city looks tired from the fighting and weak from the unrest.

As we pass into Ambush Alley, our panic shifts from the urban chaos to the intercom chatter. “From reliable source, attack is imminent, attack is imminent, possible ambush from grape huts to the south, keep eyes on. Out.” I train one of my periscopes on the huts, supposedly where they make raisins but often used as hiding places, waiting, almost wishing for something to happen, just to replace the awful, quiet tension. Nothing does. We’re through.

And suddenly, there it is: Patrol Base Wilson, a ramshackle, poorly fortified staging area that we can fight out of. The middle of the compound has three modular tents with cots, which is where we’ll be sleeping. South of us is Pashmul, a Taliban stronghold. We pull in, and a voice comes over the radio: “Shut her down, fuel up, get some food.”

Yes, sir.