K2: A Different Ending
By: Mark T. Jackson
Tags: Veterans, K2 Airbase, Toxic Exposure, Uzbekistan, Chronicling K2

The Regestan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (150 km north of K2 Airbase)

I thought I had never heard of Uzbekistan the day I was told to pack my bags and go there. My office in Afghanistan had a large map of central Asia on the plywood wall, and I saw the strangely named place tucked in an odd scribble of borders to the north, amidst the other Stans.

As I scanned the city names, I realized I had heard of Uzbekistan or at least its ancient cities. Samarkand, where Marco Polo stopped on his trek of the Silk Road. The Aral Sea, an erstwhile saline lake starved of water and slowly drained for the production of cotton in the high desert plains. Bukhara, a city whose warren of narrow streets still wend behind dun-colored ramparts. Shahrisabz, the birthplace of Tamerlane, one of the khans, who ruled from the steppes to the gates of Vienna.

It was and remains a storied place, a former Soviet republic, and an insular and infrequently visited country double-landlocked in the near center of the Asian continent.

The flight from Bagram to K2 was only a few hours. Upon landing, I walked down the rear ramp of the C-130 and into the familiar dusty moonscapes that seemed to define every base and FOB circa 2003. I walked into the plywood terminal, signed in, and was met by the man I’d replace. I was an individual augmentee and had no unit at K2, though I was never alone.

I lived in the tent city at first, and later, at the sea huts near the MASH unit. Most of my days were spent working on K2, although I frequently traveled into Karshi. Often, I would take a translator to meet with officials in restaurants and tea houses in the city.

I went to Samarkand at least twice a month to meet with sources there. Samarkand was a fascinating place. It was frozen in two parts of time: Marco Polo and Soviet. There was really no in-between, just the ancient parts like the Regestan and the tombs of Amir Timur, and the wide avenues and boxy cars and drab apartment blocks found throughout the former USSR.

In one memorable trip, I drove from K2 through Karshi and Samarkand and a sliver of Kazakhstan en route to Tashkent, the capital. The city was huge and an almost disorienting mix of ancient and Soviet and contemporary. Madrassas hunched next to gleaming skyscrapers. Camels and donkeys trotted amidst the gridlock of modernity. It was an utterly foreign place, yet oddly familiar with its cacophony of streetcars, black-belching buses, Toyotas of every make and model, and a blend of cultures from throughout the region. From there, we went into Kyrgystan and the odd islands of borders in the Fergana valley.

But K2 was my home. It was where I slept and to where I returned, whether from outside the wire or down in Afghanistan. I kept a daily journal during my tour. I was twenty-six the day I landed at K2, healthy, and active. These edited entries provide a contemporary narrative of that time:

26 July 2003: …K2 is another old Soviet base, but a bit nicer than Bagram. Old bunkers are covered with brown grass and Cyrillic symbols. MiGs and mines and chemical dumps are marked everywhere…

28 July 2003: I ran through the minefield this morning….the running track winds its way parallel and through a marked minefield and chemical weapons dumping ground. Just beyond the single strand barbed wire fence are the mines and beyond that the low-slung grass bunkers that contain old Soviet chemical weapons. The air here is poison. The ground and the dust that covers it is contaminated. Everywhere is decay and environmental degradation. And under the hot central Asian sun, I ran through a minefield this morning, breathing deeply the dusty, poisonous air.

9 August 2003: I woke up once at 3 AM and again at 6 AM with cramps and a quick rush to the latrine tent a few hundred meters away. My stomach seems to have calmed down for now.

21 August 2003: Tonight, I am tired…my stomach virus (if that’s what it was) seems to have passed. My head hurts a little, a pinch on the right side, behind the eye. Incessant, but not especially painful.

31 August 2003: …Outside tonight, they are spraying mosquito repellant. Thick grey clouds hang in the warm night air…a pickup truck with a flashing orange light above the cab…drives slowly around, a bulbous generator with a large exhaust pipe in the bed, coughing and spraying the heavy, malodorous repellant. The gas…or wet vapor fills my lungs, tightens my chest…

1 September 2003: They are spraying again tonight, except there is no wind. The fog is thick and…hangs in the air; fills our lungs. My head hurts from breathing. Some here joke they are glad they are done having children.

27 October 2003: I ran this afternoon — about four miles — in a gritty warm wind. At the landfill [burn pit] just beyond the perimeter wall, our trash was being burned. The smell of burnt plastic filled the air, and my lungs as I ran.

28 October 2003: …The burning plastic smell was gone today, replaced by the regular grit and airborne dust, the smoky haze of fallow fields and cotton fields.

1 November 2003: …Woke up exhausted and suffering from a headache that grew progressively terrible by mid-afternoon. The pressure behind my eyes made me nauseous and I slept for hours…

2 November 2003: …I still feel ill — like a headache hangover from yesterday…

20 November 2003: The mountains to the south and east were visible today. The haze that normally hangs in the air clings to the horizon and obfuscates the view was gone.

9 December 2003: Headache tonight. Behind the eyes….I need sleep.

11 December 2003: Snowflakes drift in the spotlights at the perimeter. South, the white frozen desert plains are glowing red from gas flares…

11 February 2004: …sick to my stomach all day…headachy…

12–15 February 2004: So that stomach-ache turned out to be a bit more serious than I had anticipated… I woke several times in the night. It was as though my stomach and diaphragm were being twisted and stabbed and burned all at once. Unlike any pain, I have experienced… and it did not abate for a moment. It was relentless…. I walked to the MASH tent. The pain absorbed my abdomen…tore at my guts…It appeared to be my appendix, they said. I walked into the surgery tent and slept for two days. When I awoke, the tent was shaking from a windstorm. It hurt to move…my appendix was gone…

28 February 2004: …My cough persists, and I am exhausted all of the time…

29 February 2004: My cough remains persistent. I will mention it to the doctor when I see him in a few days.

1 March 2004: I went to the doctor today, this time for the cough. He gave me antibiotics… He also checked my incisions, pressed down on the scar tissue, and approved me to return to the war.

Truth is held in our hands or spread like a seed. It filters into the sky like smoke and sinks each night like the sun surely does in the west. But facts are mountains and mesas and trees. Facts are immovable and implacable and certain. The truth is that a mountain might not change in a thousand generations, but the fact is I saw it, and it did.

We have been denied our existence for nearly two decades. A byzantine bureaucracy has denied us our basic right to recognition. Not anymore.

I had four combat tours. I volunteered for each and would do so again. A few years ago, before her husband was deployed to Afghanistan, my eldest daughter asked why I kept going back. It was a poignant question informed by the many years it stole from us, but I knew the answer: it was because I needed a different ending.

That is why I am returning to K2: we need a different ending.