Its easier if I just write it here.

From July 2009-2010 I deployed to a unit in Kuwait and forward deployed to Afghanistan as part of a 2 person information assurance review team. We traveled around the country and visited the major, and some minor, US Army bases to perform friendly audits to improve the information security posture of the installations on the ground. We were constantly traveling. I think I went on 25 assignments while there.

When I wasn't traveling I was living at Bagram Airbase about 40km north of Kabul. As a Texan this was the most beautiful place I had ever seen as Texas is generally very flat. There were mountains visible on 3 sides of the base and the tallest of them appeared to jump sharply a mile into the sky. Its like a quarter of the way from flat horizon to straight up was a view of mountains on the west side. This was perhaps the cleanest and driest air I have ever experienced. On a perfect summer day I remember being able to see hundreds of miles away because there was minimal atmospheric distortion and the mountains were so damn tall. This is hard to explain because on a flat surface the sky meets the horizon at only 30 miles away.

Most of the housing there was something called B-huts which were shacks composed of half-inch particle board and then internally subdivided with particle board walls to create 8 rooms. In the corner was a desk composed of a particle board triangle nailed to the walls. I had space for the twin bed, a dresser (also made out of particle board) and a walking path between them. Due to warping from the weather there would sometimes be gaps between the particle board exterior panels where all your heat would leak out.

The most beautiful base, hands down, was Camp Eggers. It no longer exists. This was downtown across the street from the US embassy. It was essentially an urban neighborhood sectioned off with tall walls. The residences were transformed into offices. The office buildings were transformed into barracks. Some two-story commercial shopping properties were transformed into multipurpose buildings. This base contained beautiful tall shade trees with well manicured lawns and grapevines on terraces. It also contained an elaborate rose garden. Some of the buildings were an urban maze. It was weird that this was a military base with a little slice of heaven right in the middle of a busy civilian urban city.

Travel was interesting. Unless you were a VIP you were always space available. VIPs were colonels, sergeant majors, emergency leave personnel, and CW5s. Once your name goes on a list its good for 10 days before its scrubbed off. On the larger bases it would sometimes take 3 days to get to your name, so we would show up at the terminal will all our gear hoping they would call off our names and it wouldn't happen. Also there would be times when your name did get called, but you would get bumped from the flight, even as you were already sitting on the aircraft. As an example special forces doesn't wait on lists so they would just show up and bump people off a flight.

You could see amazing, and I mean absolutely stunning, things while flying. Afghanistan is an exotic place that's really isolated and hard to get to. I remember flying over villages that were in small impossibly isolated valleys. I remember flying over a blood-red hill. I was later told that red color was a high concentration ultra valuable form of copper. I remember flying in a Chinook from FOB Salerno (about 1200ft elevation) to FOB Sharana (about 7200 ft elevation). It felt like we were just going straight vertical and somehow the ground was stalking us.

There is no FAA or other aviation regulation limiting US pilots in Afghanistan which can make for some unique adventures. There was one time we hopped on the short US civilian flight from Jalalabad back to Bagram, but the pilots wanted to take a scenic detour through a tiny canyon. The canyon was deep but narrow, maybe only 2-3x wider than the aircraft's wingspan. Every time there was a canal or tributary feeding into the canyon the plane would immediately lift vertically into the air and then would immediately drop to the prior altitude as that gap was passed. This was the only time I have experienced motion sickness, but it was an amazing adventure.

There was another one where some senior Taliban leaders were captured and awaiting transport from Bagram to Kabul. I had the fortunate treat of making that flight. The pilots wanted to shock or frighten the Taliban personnel, who may have never ridden on an aircraft before, so they attempted some wild turns and dives. Keep in mind that a C-130 is a giant bus so it can only maneuver so much, but that was also an interesting experience that I will likely never experience in the US.

Some of the most interesting people I talked to were the translators. The US census of 2000 identified that there were just over 8,000 people living the US who fluently spoke either Pashtun or Dari. That is every man, woman, and child. By the time I was there in 2009 5,000 of these people had or currently were back in Afghanistan working as translators. These people had amazing stories about the culture and history that I couldn't find in books. I suspect many of these people had returned to Afghanistan partially because they felt a patriotic duty after the 9/11 attacks, but the primary reasons were the high pay and some yearning to help US military provide increased security in a country that was now destroyed by decades of warfare.

Towards the end of all this I remember developing some minor combat fatigue after getting stuck in the transient barracks in Kandahar. The air in Kandahar was everything that Bagram wasn't. It was humid, dusty, unclean. Kandahar Airfield (KAF) has this giant cesspool about the size of 4 football fields. It is jokingly named poo-pond. You can find photos on the internet. It started out on the far west side of the base, but because of civilian land property boundaries the base could only grow in one direction and so over time poo-pond became the center of base and the smell was extremely foul. The transient barracks were directly adjacent to the pond. The transient barracks were actually a giant 500-person circus tent. Because of the high traffic of transient personnel these tents were rarely cleaned and because outside smelled like an ripe toilet people tended to stay inside with minimal circulating air. With that many people living in a super giant tent a different kind of foul air like aging foot smell seemed to permeate. I remember having to go outside to the shit smell because I had grown so tired of the foot smell. Because of the high people traffic it was really challenging get off that base to something further downrange and so there I was stuck.