Fitting in

25FEB09
COP TERMINATOR, AFG


There is tons of dust here and it affects how everything works from the keyboard I'm using now, to the phone lines, to the weapons. Maintenance is key.

Life here is good. My company has their own COP in the middle of nowhere with very little oversight. My CO is great, a hooah guy who pretty much just wants me to kill bad guys. The hard part is the bad guys here drop their weapons and radios when we get close so we can't catch them. It's really frustrating. My guys are awesome. My PSG is acting 1SG right now while he's on leave. Until 1SG gets back I have an E6 PSG and 4 E5 SQD leaders. Not really MTOE but they're all great at their jobs and eager to engage the enemy. I lucked out. (For those who don't speak Army, I'm sorry. Just know that it means I'm undermanned)

The platoon has had some hard times. I'm their fifth PL (Platoon Leader) in a year, the last four were all fired for one reason or another. As I said before my boss is pretty cool, so there had to have been extenuating circumstances to get canned. At least the bar has been set nice and low for me. There is nowhere to go but up.

The COP is cool. It's called Terminator which beats our parent base, FOB Ramrod. We live 16 to a tent, have wooden latrines with burn barrels, a tent for a mess hall (it's got a big screen TV though), a tent for a reaching home (8 PCs, 3 phones), and a large wooden building with four big screens for movies and video games. We have a huge Hesco wall surrounding us with a number of large guard towers. This is a contemporary castle. It's kinda cool.

We are out in the middle of nowhere, in a country in the middle of nowhere, and it shows. The people here are straight out of the stone age. I tried asking a kid the other day if he knew where the closest school was. He didn't even grasp the concept of a school, probably twelve years old. The old men know everything, and tell us nothing. They have a hard life. If we don't trust them we can search their homes, even jail them for a few days. If the AAF (Anti-Afghan Forces) don't trust them they'll kill them or their kids. The houses are clay huts with sheets on the walls for decoration and dirt floors. The animals stay inside on cold nights. Rice is an expensive food for them. It really makes jack-in-the-box and porcelain feel like upper class. Pray for them.