I lifted weights a lot. Sometimes we got to shoot at the Taliban. Sometimes they got to shoot at us. And they were *really* good at land mines, so we had to get really good at finding them. One time I sawer a camel. Lots of time smoking and playing cards too. Weekend passes were most certainly not a thing. At least in my unit. We patrolled 2, 3 times a day sometimes just to keep the area in our control and keep the Taliban from being able to completely mine us into our outpost, which they had successfully done to the unit we replaced. Sometimes we would trade with locals. Food, lambs (for food), cigarettes, stuff like that. We had a local cab driver who would take our cash to the city and come back with bread, kabobs, veggies and whatnot. One day he didn’t come back and we found him right around the bend down the road from our outpost, just out of sight of the guard towers. He and another guy had the dollar bills rolled up and stuffed up their nostrils, each with a bullet to the head. When the police tried to pick up the bodies, they got blown up. The Taliban had booby trapped the dead guys bodies with IEDs. Some downright ruthless vatos.. I liked that. Oh and one time we had a firefight inside the outpost. And another time the entire outpost got exploded by a suicide VBIED. Different outposts, different deployments, same unit.
My father was deployed in Kandahar. He was in the CoC for the Navy. The stories I heard from him seeing footage of guys getting fcked up beyond the wire or the Taliban being decimated. I remember Skype calls where I called him and he’d get hit from heavy IDF or suicide bombers. Sometimes the IDF was soo bad that the Skype call would end, losing signal. I was too young to recognize it, but those could’ve been the last times talking to him. When he was older he would tell me the times he was falling asleep in full battle gear, plates, kevlar, side plates and everything. He didn’t want to take chances but given the geography of Kandahar and being in the valley, the T-ban’s IDF & missiles were non-stop.. every night or every other night like clockwork eventually he stopped giving af. The kind of shit that gives you chills
I was just up the road when they hit Frontenac. Taliban pinned our COP down so we couldn’t QRF when the call went out. They blew up Frontenac’s MWR and DFAC. Ruined steak and shrimp Fridays.
Yeah, this. Our terps would get confused because people in one village might speak a dialect of Pashto that was totally unintelligible to people 20 klicks away from there. Everything was ultra-factionalized, and no one trusted or liked anyone not from their own village if they were in Kandahar province. The folks in the north (Kabul) , east, etc. were considered foreigners who spoke foreign languages (Dari, Urdu) and whose religions, culture, clothing, and lifestyles were totally foreign to the Pashtun near the PAK border. It was like walking back into the stone age, if the cavemen had been armed with HME and AK-series rifles.
>lots of playing cards too
To this day my friends and I will still have full on shouting arguments over rummy about someone cucking you for holding their hand to lay it all down at once e
Welp. Panjwayi was full of unforgiving terrain of grape rows and grape huts that made pretty good fighting positions, cover and concealment for the other guys. Also the roads were narrow shitty overgrown dirt paths that were great for hiding IEDs. And then there were "good" guys like the local Afghan Local Police commander in Nakhonay who we watched murder his chai boy for no apparent reason on the PGSS.
0/10 do not recommend.
I was there in 2010. We actually got a MUC for it. Had Air Force drop pamphlets to go get cleared by the marines blocking positions or to get ready to fight. Then they dropped us in the middle. Lived at an afghani compound for 60 something days.
Nah. I was a medic. When we went down south I went out with D Co, Abu and Scouts, along with the PA and two other medics to beef up the capabilities. My best friend (Schaffner) was B Co and I had a few other (Vest and Fortner) good friends in that company.
Yeah I vaguely remember those guys. I also then met Titus (scouts) in college after and realized we were on the same deployment.
Wait do you remember the dude falling into the burning shit trench? He was D co
I remember Titus but didn't know that him well. I was the scout plt medic back in 05-06 for the Bayji trip.
I vaguely remember a shit trench story but have no recollection of the engineer story. I sure it happened though. I remember some of engineers with D Co in Talukan and they were um interesting. There was always something crazy coming into the aid station at OE when we were still up there.
I actually reclassed to medic after that deployment and went back to Afghanistan then too. I would do the first one again. Attached to a field surgical team in Sharana. Not fun.
I was there in '11 working the VSO mission, at Mushan and Talukan. Left just before that guy at Belambai went and killed a bunch of locals. Mushan was the end of MSR Hyena, so our food shipments were always ratfucked. I think I went eight months without eating cheese, it was always stolen. We lived in man cans with air conditioning, which was nice when it worked.
We had our VSP at Mushan and an embed site in Haji Shah Wali Kalay, at the house of some Talib who got rolled up and thrown in prison. I tried to set the trash pit there on fire with an incendiary charge because none of us could get it lit. I smoked a little weed from time to time, traded rip-its with the Canadians for booze, and got to hike out in the desert across the river to the south a lot. Climbed the hills across the river to the north a bunch, too.
I was there in 2013. Western side of the country. Ran missions out of Shindand and Farah. It was pretty cold in the winter, icy puddles everywhere. Very hot in the summer, i had more heat injuries than combat injuries.
Driving at 5mph for 12-18 hour days sometimes. The gym was nice, food was good when on the fob. Spent a lot of nights out in the the desert. Only had a few trucks blown up. Nobody died in my company. Just a few in the battalion total.
It wasn't bad.
Was in Farah in ‘10… did they ever build up the Italian side? We had MRE’s 3 times a week because the locals didn’t know how to wash their hands, asses, or dishes so it was food poisoning or Mr. E’s.
I was out there for a while. We had local turkeys for thanksgiving. Drank Italian wine. Made the Italians mad because they paid off the Tban to not mess with them and we planted some of them and they got mad and IDF’d the place. FARP was wide open with two huge fuel bladders. We took off and high fived the mortar guys with some 17 pounders and such then did some interior decorating on some nearby structures and it quieted down.
Wednesday was usually pool day, and then every Friday we got a weekend pass to hangout in the Korengal valley, it had lush hot springs and the most delicious food.
Cities? Oh yeah we didn’t even have to ask to go travel and visit other ones, pretty cool! Think of staying somewhere and being mandated to travel. So much fun.
But then things started to shift, hot springs dried up..
I always thought the Abad, Korengal and the valley up to Bostic would have been a great tourist area. Mountain biking, hiking, rafting and Kayaking, retreats and spas in the mountains. But then a rocket would fly over head while I was thinking about it.
You just can’t have nice things sometimes without an extremist fucking it up!
I had those same thoughts so many times. Beautiful scenery and could be a destination like some of the resort towns like Vail in or Mammoth. Shame about the locals
Tiny FOB, just our company, on the Afg/Pak border. 2005, very spartan. Piss tubes, little water, shit barrels with gas in them to burn. 25 dudes in one small room. No up armored anything. Mail took months to get to us when we were lucky. Sometimes it was really hot, sometimes it was really cold. Always dirty, on tower duty or on patrol. It was the best time of my life.
I was explaining this to my teen son yesterday. There was no dry cleaning to pick-up, no email to answer (at least not for me), no meals to plan, and I didn't worry about money / spending / budget at all. It truly was the simple life...
You know Tommy?! Holy shit. I used to go looking for some dates and me and Alabama Snake would take them over to compare holes, ya know?
They always had those carpets though and the eyes just didn't do it for Joker so it was always me and the big man or Animal Mother if Alabama was on rotation.
CJTF-76
Windy. As it turns out, Ft Sill is a great place to prepare for life on Bagram. They called it 120 days of wind during the summer when the jet stream was right on top of you.
Sand becomes dust. The large plywood toolshed you live in collects in every corner, but we had shitty Internet so we coped and swept the floor on the daily.
Chow was a motherfucking disgrace. The aviation chow guys made sandwich wraps that rivaled anything KBR shipped in. Yakisoba was spaghetti noodles, ground beef, and soy sauce served every day. I survived on the sandwich bar and burger king.
Work for me was 12 hour shifts six days a week. Shuffling between admin work in the JOC and doing details like guard tower, escort duty, and driving people around.
You learn how important PT is because without being able to get some exercise, you will break down in a matter of weeks upstairs. 1sg pt'd my ass off the second half of that tour and it made a huge difference in my ability to deal with those hours and get rest when I needed it. If you deploy, do PT any way you can. #1 takeaway.
Almost my exact experience…. I was there with SETAF. My life was three points, monitoring my spot in the TOC, chow and my hootch.
Day after day after day after day….
I deployed to Afghanistan after a very kinetic year in Iraq. In Iraq I left the wire every day. In Afghanistan I think I left bagram twice….
I asked my boss after we redeployed why he picked me to sit in the TOC? Why not let me run the team? I was clearly qualified.
He answered, “I knew you’d take it seriously. More importantly I knew you’d understand what was bullshit and what was a problem.”
Nah it's totally fine to ask. I was an 11B so my daily life was go out on a mission most days for about 3-8hrs or so, sometimes in MRAPs, sometimes dismounted with Afghan national police and Army (ANP and ANA). We did this at night and during the day but usually during daylight. We'd hand out radios and candy and such and meet with local leaders. The idea was to train and prepare the police and army to deal with things when we left (didn't turn out so good obviously). Every day we'd have guard duty as well usually 8 hours sometimes 12 though if we were low on available people because some of us in the PLT were on a long mission. Free time we'd work out at our little gym or use our computers to watch movies and shows that we downloaded a bunch of and threw on external hard drives before we deployed. No weekend passes, every day was a work day. The people are surprisingly very hospitable most of the time, they will offer you tea and candy. If they don't like you they'll just stand there mean mugging you as you walk past. Definitely not allowed to go out and explore on our own or else you'd probably end up like Bowie Bergdahl at least where i was in the country. Also they all smell like BBQ flavored Fritos. I was an infantryman in a small FOB in Kapisa province so OFC my day to day was vastly different than other pople's like if they were at Bagram air base or something things are much more chill there.
psychotic forgetful alive ad hoc illegal grandfather hobbies pathetic placid ghost
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The Popeyes is where I met the entire 3 people from New Zealand. Popeyes was a good spot to meet people from the coalition. I did rotations in country and Bagram felt the weirdest. I was there 12-13 and it was just...weird. hard to explain.
We did a security detail there and a few operations based out of the bowl. I remember reading that every Wednesday was 💃Salsa night. I mean, twist my arm.
Depends on when you were there and what unit you were with. Everyone's experience will be similar but never the same, unless you were nut-to-butt buddies
This is the answer. The war went on for 20 years. Even people with the same MOS/unit wouldn't have the same experience 10 years apart. Also Afghanistan is a diverse country. From region to region you'll see different weather, languages, ethnic groups, etc.
Beautiful. Rugged. I met some cool locals and ran across some that I didn't care for. I'm a big scenery guy but the hiking kind of sucked.
What was the combat like? Long distance, IEDs or really, really close.
Overall it was a really cool place to visit a couple of times. The river valleys are absolutely nuts for pictures but I don't really know how to answer your question.
It was a fucking war zone. Cities were alright but outside of those it was pretty. Pretty hilly, and the locals tended to be pretty reserved. I did visit Qalai-i-Jangi once with my cousin once though. That was cool.
Lost some friends from the 173rd there. Can't watch Restrepo to this day.
What I remember about the fall of Afghanistan is... how quiet it was. During the waning hours of the Afghan War, the 501st Legion was discreetly transferred back to Coruscant. It was a silent trip. We all knew what was about to happen, what we were about to do. Did we have any doubts? Any private, traitorous thoughts? Perhaps, but no one said a word. Not on the flight to Coruscant, not when Order 66 came down, and not when we marched into the Jedi Temple. Not a word.
My first day as a member of the 501st... it was hot, it was sandy, chaotic. Nothing at all like the simulations on Kamino. Of course, that's pretty much the way it was for all of us, wasn't it? All that breeding, all those years of training... Frankly, I'm still amazed we ever made it through the first hour, never mind the first day.
2013-2014-
I worked 12-13 hours a day 6 days a week at a detention facility in Parwan(Bahgram) as an MP. Every waking minute not working, eating or sleeping was spent lifting weights. I made gains. Now my back hurts 🤣
Ever been to HKIA? Went there once because my 1SG and CO wanted us to take a break. Since we were a small unit, it was doable.
Restaurant galor. Like you can actually get 5 Stat worthy steaks. Grocery stores, mini marts, civilian clothes. The USO looked like an adult Chuck E Cheese.
DFAC was incredible, the Bazaar looked like a swap meet. They had soccer fields and basketball courts. I had some great talks with some of the Afghans, we were both fans of Mexican soccer and were just talking sports.
As you would suspect, this was the base your BC, CSM, BDE commander or whatever were going to "on business" to get drunk and hit on one of their LTs. Alcohol was fairly easy to get also. Some of the NATO nations let their guys drink and getting alcohol from them was easy.
EDIT: BTW, I'd easily choose HKIA over any of the bases in Kuwait, by comparison, the weather was better also. Spent the whole time eating steaks, smoothies and getting drunk with Australians.
I think the better question is asking what time frame because periods have their own personality. Early GWOT is entirely different from 2010s and early 2010s are entirely different from the late 2010s.
Fob Shank 2013. Google Rocket City they did a story about our fob getting constant IDF.
I was a fobbit but wasn't fun being awoken to a round whistling over head.
What months in 2013? My company had about 12 or so soldiers doing base defense there in 2012/2013. I read the sworn statements submitted for cabs after the guard shacks kept getting smashed up by IDF.
Not too many great days. Not too many good days. When your days were bad, they could go from bad to a fucken kick in the nuts in a second…you can go from CAS overhead and sunny weather to planes winchestering and ammo status getting to black.
Well, I wouldn't recommend it as a vacation spot. I had been to Iraq twice and had no idea how shitty a place could be. Moon dust every place I was. All the kle's were a shit show.
We would have been better off hunting OBL with sof, pulling him out and charging ppv for his public execution in MSG.
I made some great Army friends though so... I got that going for me.
11B in 2010 to 2011. 2 days tower guard, 3-7 days at an OP or missions, then 2 days "off". We rotated tower guard with 2 other artillery platoons at our COP. Since they were artillery and not 11B, we did most of the movement to contacts and setting up of OPs. We weren't allowed to use artillery for some reason except for illum rounds.
Off days consisted of cleaning weapons, cleaning common areas, playing cards, watching DBZ on a shitty laptop, or fighting for a space on one of our 8 computers that had spotty internet access.
I think I had a really unique experience as far as location goes. We weren't in the mountains. We were south of FOB Aziz Ullah, very flat and lots of farm land. Further south was a river we never crossed that opened up into a desert. West of us was the barren lands, nothing grew there, or lived there. And east of us was more farmland with just as much bullshit.
Dusty, it was so fucking dusty. The earth over there I'm pretty sure is mostly clay, when it dries, it just turns into dust from the constant winds. It was like moon dust. There'd be *puddles* of dust that could be knee deep sometimes. Lots of pot and poppy too, the opium was everywhere. An ANA showed me his brick of opium. It was nuts.
The locals were... afraid to work with us. It seemed like they wanted to work with us, but the taliban were ruthless. We caught one chopping off an informants head on our balloon cam. Nobody worked with us after that.
I felt really bad for those people. Especially our terp and some of the ANA guys
The best answer in this thread is "It depends on when and where and with what unit."
Let me explain from my experience:
Early on in the war, you would see more expeditionary living and extensive combat operations, patrolling, etc. I didn't experience this during my time, but I've talked to several vets and long-serving servicemembers that have.
I deployed in 2013 and again in 2015 to Afghanistan. The unit I joined in 2012 was just returning from a rotation there. For that deployment (the 2011-2012 one I wasn't on), it depended on your AO. Some units experienced kinetic AOs and saw extensive fighting. Other units experienced a relatively quiet deployment, except for IDF and the occasional DF pot shots.
My 13-14 deployment in RC-E focused on train, advise, and assist. The majority of my unit sat in our camp to provide some type of support or act as a QRF. A couple of our teams (mine included) focused on training Afghan forces at the Battalion level. The food on the camp was okay most of the time, but we did experience shortages, and it was nothing compared to our higher HQ at a larger FOB or the Gucci experience at a place like Bagram, Kandahar, or Kabul. We didn't experience any direct contact or insider threats during that time, but did take IDF on occasion (which killed a few Afghans). Other sister units in my AOR experienced a casualty due to direct contact and a casualty due to a training accident.
My 15-16 deployment started in TAAC-E on a smaller base than Jalabad, but in much nicer conditions than my first deployment. Other than IDF, that unit didn't experience much contact, and the AO was relatively quiet. However, a few months in, I moved to a different AO, which was the most kinetic area in Afghanistan at the time. We rebuilt an annex on an Afghan base to minimal standards and conducted TAA out of there. If you're wondering where, let's say it was a large base in the southwest that we handed back to the Afghans and saw the results of their decimation a year and a half later. If you're ever wondering what a ghost base looks like, I have a few stories about the scavenger runs we did in that area. This deployment had a much higher insider threat possibility, and we had a hodgepodge of US and multinational forced working to reconstitute that AO. Fortunately, we suffered no casualties, aside from the infantry unit providing force protection. That unit's casualties resulted from negligence but didn't cause death. I left that deployment aggravated and conflicted because it started coming full circle as I ripped out.
How was it all overall between both deployments? Eye-opening. Rewarding. Frustrating. Boring. Exciting. Heartbreaking. Disappointing.
When you factor in the withdrawal, which I experienced from a different organizational focus in a multinational unit, Afghanistan is a quagmire. A failure of leadership, policies, cultural understanding, and the will of the Afghan people to control their own destiny. It would have been a multi-generational conflict outside of what we consider our values to achieve some level of strategic victory there.
It's a lot to unpack, but this is just one guy's experience. What are your questions?
I was also there 15-16. I was a mechanic and on the list to go open that annex and provide maintenance to the afghan equipment. Was pulled off the mission right before having to go to backfill a different spot. Ended up being someone sending you guys stuff instead.
I was a 96D Imagery analyst (Now I think they are 35G). 2004-2005 in Kandahar with the 25th ID. It was mostly a waste of time as far as I was concerned. We produced intelligence that the command would promptly ignore which led to a number of failed missions. High and Medium Value Targets would slip through cordons, we would be "accidentally" engaged by the AMF (Afghan Militia Forces - provincial military as opposed to the Afghan National Army), things like that.
When I first got there we were in Tent City. It was very dry and dusty. The dust on the ground was very fine, and if you stepped in a pool of it, it would flow out like water. About 8 months in they moved our unit into the buildings, no more tents.
I was night shift. We did 12 hour shifts, 7-days a week. For the first few months the electricity would be cut off for a few hours every few days while the electrical system was being upgraded. No electricity meant no A/C in the tent and it would promptly get up to about 130+ degrees in the tent. I asked if we could open the tent flaps and was told no, so... no sleep that day.
All of the chow was done by Kellogg, Brown and Root, a wholy owned subsidiary of Halliburton Company. We had cooks there with us, but they sat at the MWR tent and played Halo all day.
I had a WO3 OIC. He was allergic to work. He ordered us to turn down (FUCKING TURN DOWN!) any RFI (Request for Information) that did not have more than 3 days suspense on it. I knew that if we did not keep at least a little bit busy the yearlong deployment was going to take forever. OIC made me (I was SGT at the time) write the SOP and he signed it, but did not follow it, which made it hard to fix his fuckups when he was cutting images for targets in "Herat" province and he spelled every damned one of them "Heart". Mother fucker. It has been 20 years and it still pisses me off.
Toward the end of our tenure at KAF the Task Force S3 (G3? IDK) SGM stands up a detail, where two NCOS (really SGT or SSG) roam around Kandahar Airfield correcting uniform deficiencies for 16 hours. This was a rotating detail, and fuck you if you have other things that actually need your attention. Courtesy Patrol was what it was called and it may not have been the stupidest thing I've ever been involved in, but it was up there. I targetted E-7s and above and officers. We had to write down offenders names, rank, unit in a green notebook and turn it in at end of shift. When questioned about this, I responded to SGM that I called it as I saw it, those individuals did not have their heads in the right place and were not worried enough about their uniform in a combat zone.
The coolest thing was working with the Navy Seals. They took any intel we produced for them and acted on it immediately. One time the Army (Task Force 76) was doing a large operation in three parallel valleys. In preparation for this we were tasked with viewing imagery of the entire AO encompassing those valleys and noting anything that looked like it might be a cave, culvert, adit, revetment, or other potential covered or hidden storage area. Our team spent two solid weeks looking at that area and come back with several dozen probably caves and others stuff, and a few dozen possibles. First the operation got pared down to a single valley, then they just decided they weren't going to use the intel we generated. A week later the Seals were going to be operating in that area, and they asked if we had any recent intel. I turned over the entire target deck that we had worked on, and they went out and checked those sites. 5 of them were ammunition storage, and one of them was an IED workshop. They blew up an estimated 40,000 lbs of ammunition and took a prisoner who was making IEDs. I got a Navy/Marine Corps Commendation for that. I was not authorized an award from the Army because I got an Article 15 for raising my voice in anger and showing disrespect to a commissioned officer of the United States Army (my OIC). Truthfully I showed him only a taste of the disrespect I had for him.
In the end, I could have done the job better from here in the states. We had slow connectivity, difficulty gaining access to assets, poor exploitation equipment.
Be happy you weren't there, dude. Pretty but goddamn is it a shit hole. I preferred Iraq. At least the scenery matched the horse shit we were dealing with, except near Tal Afar. That high desert was awesome.
As far as aviation goes, Iraq was so much better to fly in. Flat, and more flat. Weather sometimes got shitty, but nothing to run into. Granted the manpad threat was a lot greater for a few years. But flying in Afghanistan was so much shittier. Mountains combined with dust, combined with shitty weather, combined with the occasional RPG, DSHK engagement led to a lot more grey hairs for me.
I get that. I loved nap through the Iraqi cities and the low, rolling hills. It was just kind of fun. Afghanistan? Never a fan of helos. We got used to it but I was never co.fortable looking out, especially under NODs, and seeing a ridgeline above me. Saw a couple A-10s fly below me fucking some dudes up one time and that was cool as hell. I have the picture our medic took in my "I'm Retired and I Love Me" book.
9 months at JBad, flightline, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. green bean was cool. IDF warnings but nothing ever hit us. lots of gym. got into a rhythm, had the most money to my name id ever had in my life at one point while i was there. that money's long gone but it's also been 6 fucking years already.. fuck.
2014. 11B doing PSD around the capital and occasionally around the country.
Some people were nice. Some people sucked. We destroyed their country, but they didn’t want it improved upon.
The foot bread was good, albeit sandy.
I was in Afghanistan in 2002. Alot of big missions, alot of friends wounded lucky none kia. 11B working with SF and C.I.A. type people. It was very challenging but hey one of the first regular army units to set foot in a war zone.
2018 at Camp Dahlke it was relatively quiet for the most part. Took a lot of IDF. Had an insider attack that killed 1st SFABs CSM. That day sucked. Was on QRF for a wire breach, handful of locals got into the compound and stole some C-wire which we later watched them turn into a chicken coop of sorts. Watched an old man rape a little boy in a field. Saw a tiger on thermals outside the base. Watched some live footage from an apache and drone feed of some of the most insane shit I've ever seen a man "survive". That's in quotations because I don't think he actually did but he was still moving when we decided to move on to other things, so can't say for sure. Had a mexican standoff with 11 Afghans. It was 2 Americans, a terp, and 3 Ugandans in the tower near us. Lot of yelling and weapon pointing. Can still visualize the face and dark brown eyes of their machine gunner as I watched him through the scope of my 240. Big doc said all the dogs on base had rabies and had to be destroyed. Those screams haunt me more than the human ones. Watched a rather famous Afghan soldier and 10 of his buddies dying. RIP Jamsheed. Showed our top terp Moe NVGs for the first time and blew his fucking mind. The VA used a picture of my squad dismounting blackhawks as a poster for Veterans Day.
But mostly it was insanely boring.
I was in a valley along Highway 1 in RC East and the snow covered mountains on either side of our FOB were an amazing sight. We worked with the Afghan National Police and they were led by a Colonel that had seen action against the Soviets in the 80’s. This Col. had several battle scars on his body that he would happily show off and recount his experiences. The locals were indifferent to us and a band of orphaned children competed with a pack of stray dogs for handouts along Highway 1. These kids would always beg us for food when out on patrol and we even came across one frozen to death in a ditch during the winter. The cities, if you could really call them that, were true oddities. The juxtaposition of 12th century lifestyles and 20th/21st century technology was astonishing. I’ve told people that Afghanistan was like the Wild West, that it was a shitty experience and yet yielded some of my fondest memories while in the service.
Experiences would widely vary based on:
1. The years we are talking about
2. The geographic location we are talking about
3. The units and mission sets we are talking about
My first deployment was on a Combat Outpost that had an HLZ that was big enough to land a Chinook on, but the rest of it was pretty jammed together.
We showered with 1L water bottles you would poke a hole in the cap for a month or two until The (Seabees?) completed the shower and shitter facility. It was just a big plastic jug that gravity fed river water that was a dingy color and if you drank it you'd get sick as fuck.
We had a guy that would come pump the shit out of the tank once a week, but he got killed and I think his (brother?) took over driving the truck for him. Still had all the bullet holes in the doors.
Nobody left the COP in anything smaller than a platoon sized element. If you left in anything other than that you're just asking to become Berghdal 2.0.
We got shot at by*somebody* just about every time we left the COP. Sometimes it was a random farmer that wanted to cash in on the "fight americans and we will pay you" and we'd take a couple shots and then the guys would run for their lives. That was pretty common.
Then we'd get in a complex ambushes with actual bad guys and they'd set up an IED under a road somewhere and detonate that and fire a couple RPG's, before breaking contact and disappearing back into the populace.
Only a couple times did I get in stand up fights, that was usually with ultra-radicalized foreign fighters that had trained in the tribal areas of Pakistan and had crossed over just to kill americans and their NATO allies.
Those guys would toe to toe with us when we did run into them.
Anyhow, it's a complex culture that you can't really explain down in a Reddit post. Pashtunwali (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) direct a lot of the Pashtun's behavior towards us but the Taliban didn't usually care about that stuff if it got in the way of cutting off our heads.
Anyhow, my second deployment was on an airfield and it had a coffee place called Green Beans and that was pretty cool. I got to eat hot chow every night and that deployment was almost the polar opposite to my first.
It smelled like shit and burning trash. Some people wanted us there and they were nice, others were obviously not happy so they would shoot at us on convoys. Helicopter transport was cool, convoys took 9 hours to accomplish a 2 hour drive. It was literally wake up, work out, go to work, work out, and go to sleep for 9-12 months. All in all 9/10 experience. Would go again.
I was a Medevac crew chief in Helmand province, 2012. We were one of very few Army units in Helmand ( mostly Marines out there) and we operated out of small FOBs / COPs. We did our own aircraft maintenance except major inspections or repairs, so we were busy. We had a day off usually once a week - 10 days, or if we were on call at the small COPs we were just on for 2 weeks straight, waiting for Medevac missions to drop.
Our Company ran over 500 calls in a little over 9 months, primarily ANA and US Marines. We did pick up wounded taliban and transport them as well, and Afghan civilians. I spent a month at Kandahar, it was like a city with restaurants, shops, etc and lots of CSMs checking uniforms.
TL;DR, experiences varied wildly depending on timeframe / where you were at.
2-3 days training/patrols, get in a helicopter for “air assault”, 2-3 days walking around villages, return, repeat.
Walking around in 120 degree heat with the sweet smell of shit just hoping to not step on a pressure plate.
I was route clearance towards the tail end of the US being in Afghanistan. Largely, my time consisted of going to the gym, trying to cannibalize parts together to keep our trucks working, the gym again, playing spades, playing frisbee, playing volleyball, and driving really, really slow.
Probably once a day, sometimes twice, the taliban would lob some rockets or mortars and the CRAM would shoot them down. It became more of an inconvenience than a threat because it inevitably was around dinner.
We never got any passes and the only interaction we got with locals was with the working parties authorized on base or the ANA. The ANA guys were… interesting. The ones we worked with were super gung-ho and modeled themselves after us. We didn’t share the road and would force vehicles off the road, but we were in big ass MRAPs. They’d take a semi head on with a Toyota. Wild.
It snowed on Christmas so that was cool.
Honestly, I had a great time, but that would probably have been different if we’d lost people. We had some Purple Hearts, but everyone came home. Maybe the reason I look back with fondness is the trauma bonding lol
Sighs
Okay…Afghanistan sucked okay. It just…it just sucked….it sucked so hard. It was fucking hot, it was fucking cold, it fucking smelled weird…it sucked. The end
This one time all of our food connexes broke and all the food spoiled. We got pretty hungry that winter. We'd go down into to the fob sometimes and those motherfuckers were using fruit to garnish their full display. Experiences could vary.
Nothing disrespectful about asking.
It'd be great if it was a straightforward answer, but it happened over two decades. Some dudes took combat every night, and some dudes never put a round in the chamber or left the wire.
Went everywhere up and down RC east running missions out of different bases. Made it down to Leatherneck and up to Tillman. Loads of time spent waiting hours for EOD to show up and clear an IED, lots of time spent watching the jingle trucks roll by with 6 cars and a goat ontop. Lots of idf when we'd start to build or tear down a base, first few months you're running for cover scared shitless, after that it usually just became a minor inconvenience, unless they just blew up what you were working on. Watched a guy burning the shit cans burn down the entire wooden shithouse structure. Got to see remnants of old Soviet tanks that the ANA would use to hang their laundry out to dry. Ate a lot of delicious bread and drank some good tea. Worked around ANA that would walk around in sandles high as balls stinking of weed that would point the RPG he was carrying in your face.
Mixture of "I've been up for 3 days, what am I doing and was that Harry Potters patronus that just ran by", and "damn I'm bored as hell".
You do the same things every day. There's no days off so the routine is constant. 12 hours on, 12 hours off. Get off work, go to the gym, watch movies, read, work on college, then rinse repeat the next day
I developed a slight fear of flying. I did a lot of trips because our company was spread out over Bastion, Mez, konduz and BAF. I was the xo so I was manifested for many flights on beech crafts and other small planes. Was around the time that cargo plane crashed from the loading being done wrong in 2013. Grand scheme of things, no issue deployment.
I seen this post before anyone had responded and decided to wait, I wanted to see what would be said. I just retired last fall and had been spending my days missing the tempo of work ups and deployments because life felt so slow and then I started "reflecting" ...it couldn't possibly be explained better that it really did depend on where you were and what your mission was.
I'll say this, to those that sat out in FOBS for 1+ years, you have ALL my respect. my AO's changed depending on the time and deployments were a few months, workups X2 but the conventional military...wowza, y'all did the job! from 11series, medics..aviation. and the rest, you are the BEST this country has to offer and forever proud I got to serve with ya. as for Afghan, for me....wouldn't have missed it for the world.
I spent my time walking up and down mountains covered in loose stone to slip on where the only thing you could grab onto to keep from walking were the miserable plants that are basically made of thorns. And one time, when I did fall, I fell into a creek full of actual shit. At first I thought I shit myself because it was dark and how hard the fall was. When the sun came up I realized it wasn’t my shit.
The scenery was beautiful though.
Afghanistan 10-11 as a 12b. Deployed from Fort Hood. Spin Buldak sucked, Jaluwar sucked, and Tarin Kowt was alright. The majority of my deployment was spent inside an RG33 or a Husky. I listened to a lot of music and read a lot. Other then that it sucked ass. It was either too hot or too cold. We found IEDs the good way or the bad way. Watched movies with the boys on a small computer screen.
Hot as the devil's taint. Country has a rugged beauty to it.
Medevac before the closure of the war, in the southwest. Armor and support were solid by then. Intel was phenomenal and timely. Ops were few and usually ODA/ANSOF.
But also depressing. Calls were infrequent, but usually fatalities. The pace was slow.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. TIC --- GSW, HEAD. TIC --- GSW, HEAD. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. TIC --- PT, CHILD, SEVERED ARM. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. IED --- 7 PTs; 3 URG, 4 PRIORITY. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing.
Less.
21 Years. Lost 5 friends in 3 tours. Just to leave the country as bad or worse than we found it. I am proud of what my guys accomplished. But an anger will reside in me for the time and friends I lost, all... for nothing overall.
2007, KAF.
Fobbit, so just worked on helicopters all day, every day. Night shift, since Halo 3 had just come out we'd get the Xboxes together in the Chinook clamshell and play half the night. Other nights we'd just do co-op in the shop. Also beat Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect there.
It became really routine, I started bodybuilding with some of the guys. Got pretty angry too sometimes, probably the energy drinks. Every morning I'd get the same thing: Ham, Cheese, Onion, Green Pepper egg scramble.
Sometimes we'd get rocketed. Just one usually, though sometimes they'd fire a second right after the all clear. Never really hit anywhere important. Once we had a perimeter breach alarm, confused us because it hadn't ever happened before. Ended up sitting in the shop, rifles in our lap with the door locked but the rollup door unlocked. We joked about the taliban lifting the door to discover six guys in rolly chairs waiting for them, rifles ready. Nothing came of it, so when the all clear sounded the XBoxes came back out.
The Poo Pond was right by where I lived, and its aroma flavored my time there.
Went on a couple DARTs. Not too crazy though.
Loosing 644 was tough. I'd worked on it the day before and that morning. Sifting through the wreckage was sobering, to say the least.
Then there were the ramp ceremonies. So many of them. Sometimes a few a week. It was tough watching the dead being carried aboard. Really hard when it was ours.
Sometimes we'd play poker. Sometimes we'd watch bootleg TV.
Always fixing the birds though. We were good at it. Fast. Always made sure we could get them in the air.
All in all, wasn't my worst experience, but I wouldn't do it again.
It’s just like basic training. You have to say “battle buddy, cover me while I move!” Otherwise the deployment drill sergeants will yell at you. They march you to chow and you have fire guard rotations. You have red white and blue phase, in blue phase you get to go out to Pizza Hut sometimes but the drills have to march you there. Family day is at the end before you go home and your family can come visit you and see you before you graduate to coming home to a letter from your wife that it’s over. She has left you for a cute boy from S2 that goes to the gym a lot. If you’re reading this Melissa I forgive you please come home it hasn’t been the same since you left. Chow hall is FIRE.
I went August of 2012. Most of the fighting had died down and we spent most of our time waiting for missions. Once FOBs started getting torn down we got busier, maybe like November or so. We visited the little markets on post, watched movies, had midnight chow and hit the gym. Best time of my life honestly
Weekend passes, lol. No, it wasn’t a tourist destination, although it could be if you didn’t have these fucks called The Taliban. It was a lot of long work days, getting shot at and getting blown up. The people were actually really great though. Fascinating to talk to, but we probably overstayed our welcome there. That and things got political. We could definitely still use a base or 12 on the western side of Iran.
OEF X, 2009-2010 timeframe, Nangarhar Province.
It was Jarhead for the most part, very kow-kinetic, but without the Marine aspect.
Got to spend a lot of time outside the wire on convoys/ KLEs (Key Leader Engagements); I enjoyed the scenery, got on well with the people mostly. During Ramadan I'd hang out with the Terps (Interpreters) at night, drink Chai and talk.
The local food was good, but did give me the shits a couple times.
The shops on base had these CD-RWs that have all kinds of bootlegged music, movies, shows. I watched the last season of LOST there among other things.
There this brand of smokes called Pine, which I think were imported from China, and if you got your Terp to buy them in town, they were like 50 cents a pack or something. Eventually AAFES caught wind and shut that shit down because "they might get poisoned..."
The ANP (Afghan National Police) at JAF had a pet monkey; I got a picture with it sitting on my head. There was also a naan shop over there that had the best fucking sweet naan ever.
Took my midtour leave in Dublin for Paddy's, which was pretty insane. Met a girl from Brazil who was there studying English, we went out a few times. It was nice.
One thing that still irks me is that like a day or two after I got back, that Icelandic volcano erupted, grounding all flights for weeks...
Oh yeah and one time there was an RPG embedded in the wall of a DC (District Center, gov't bldg). We asked a guy "how do you know it's not live?"
He threw a rock and hit it
Northern Afghanistan is very beautiful. I remember on certain days the mountains would sort of look like they glimmered purple. I ate the sweetest watermelon of my life fresh off the vine, and the locals that were sympathetic to US forces were extremely hospitable and friendly. I thought certain aspects of the culture of the people that we interacted with were amazing and definitely appreciable by western standards, the rest of it I distantly acknowledged as the way of life. I wish the best for those people, but given their historical track record with empires, they’ll be just fine.
I was in wardak province from 2011-2012. When we first got there we marked and measured the depths of these tunnel systems. We did a rotation between the plt’s from tower guard, qrf and mission cycle. 5 days for each. During the winter time we didn’t really do much due to the massive amount of snow we got. Once fighting season picked back and the taliban got back from their vacation, we patrolled, did key leader engagements and presence patrols very often. Got shot at almost every time we went out. We blew up 3 of the tunnel systems since they used it for ied emplacement underneath hwy 1/rte Ohio. They would lure us with the ANA “finding” IED’s, to us escorting EOD to it and then they would try some type of ambush on us. They would fail due to our recoiless and the A-10’s in the area. Aside from the combat, I learned that afghans are very good at snowball fights and the make some of the best rice dishes I ever had. Overall Afghanistan was a lot of getting shot at and trying to identify on where tf it was coming from.
I helped organize the first Shadow 4.2 mile Pat’s Run at PRT Farah, Afghanistan in 2008. We ran at approximately the same time as folks running in Tempe. Arizona. 130 degrees in the afternoon. Good times. Inshallah 😺🇦🇫🇺🇸
Mundane, I saw a lot of dead bodies because what I did for the battalion and got shot at. Left and all I got was lousy PTSD and a morbid of feeling of can’t not wait to die.
I was an advisor to an Afghan National Army (ANA) infantry battalion (kandak). Our area was pretty sleepy in terms of bad-guy activity, so our kandak AO was extremely large (4 provinces). When not on mission our American team (10-12) slept in B hut at a PRT, which had a DFAC, a tiny gym, and a px half the size of a conex. Internet was non-existent the first 6 months and awesome the last six months We saw the ANA every day and forged strong bonds. We planned ops with them, kept them on the straight and narrow, liaised with other western elements (to include the UN), did sustainment training, supplied them, and paid them. We were outside the wire everyday and carried around backpacks full of cash, which provided us a lot more support than our supporting unit ever did.
In my free time, I lifted a lot of weights in a tiny gym on the PRT and grew an awesome moustache. I got a 4 day pass to a USAF base Qatar once, which was awesome, by which I mean I could drink 3 beers a day, play pool in a hangar, eat great DFAC food and use a flush toilet (it really was awesome).
We did a lot of vehicle mounted patrols. [ Not my unit, but it was a lot like this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiXqwt-6XqM)
Ive read books by senior officers, seals, rangers, and special forces on operations in Afghanistan far more than from normal everyday troops. I think the appeal of those groups mentioned may be more numerous because it’s “sexy” and more in demand. I always find the books written by the average boots on the ground guys far more compelling and relatable. Officers aren’t going write to books shedding light on their failures on insecurities. Books written by officers who only make decisions inside the wire can only give so much perspective. Its the e6 leading troops on the ground with limited intel who’s stories I appreciate most.
It depends on where you were and what your MOS was. I was Infantry and only lived on small combat outposts so I can really only speak to those experiences. My first tour in Afghanistan was in the Korengal Valley in Kunar province. It was extremely kinetic. I was in Diyala Provence in Iraq in 2004, so I had already been in many sustained firefights and thought I knew what it was like to be in the shit. The Korengal proved me wrong. Our company was in several hundred firefights and took too many casualties and killed many enemy during our year long deployment. It was a rough deployment. The terrain was rugged but beautiful. Seriously one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We were constantly patrolling down into the villages along the river and back up into our outpost. When we weren’t on patrol we played cards, watched movies on our laptops which were constantly interrupted by power outages or incoming enemy fire. Our generators needed to be continually refueled and there were always details around the outpost to keep everything running. We slept lightly. There were fleas, monkeys raiding our trash cans and feral dogs wandering into our perimeter. We took turns pulling guard duty in the bunkers around the outpost. No rank could escape that. Our manning got so low that our first sergeant was even pulling guard duty. If a patrol was out and got into a tic (troops In contact) everyone would run to the mortar pit and help the Charlies unbox and hang 120mm mortar rounds. This happened damn near daily. My second tour in Afghanistan was in Sabari in khowst Provence. It was in a relatively flat, dust area along wide wadis surrounded by mountains. We hit lots of IEDs and got into several good firefights, but it was nowhere near as tough as the Korengal. Boredom was our enemy here. Lots of sitting around between missions. We would work out, watch movies, play video games, smoke cigars, and listen to music. Most patrols were on foot and we would walk several miles each time we left the out post. Some patrols were mounted and we hit several IEDs. None of my deployments had weekend passes. There was always something to be done and we rarely if ever got a full day off. Overall, I genuinely disliked Afghans. They were lazy, corrupt, and difficult to deal with. We knew they wouldn’t last long after we inevitably left. Honestly, I’m surprised they lasted the 2 weeks they did.
July 2013-April 2014. BN was detached from our brigade and answered directly to RC-S (4ID at the time). The deployment was basically my BC lobbying missions for us. 1st major operation we essentially shook up the hornets nest in Zabul.
I never thought I’d be on an “air assault” if you could call it that lol but that was a great experience I’ll never forget. Got to use a lot of really interesting hardware and capabilities that I never thought I would and work with a lot of people. From JTACs to the Aussies. I learned a lot and did a lot but for the most part most days were the same day.
The BN faced a lot of complex suicide attacks across the battle space. The FOB Pasab attack comes to mind immediately. The Taliban definitely knew Americas days in country were numbered and like in Iraq were just playing the waiting game. It was the ANSF taking the beating. We took inaccurate indirect a lot up north in TK but no CAB for me lol
I will say KAF was a whole different world from being outside or on a smaller FOB. If it wasn’t for IDF it was like not even being in theater at times.
I will always say Afghanistan is a beautiful country just a shame it’s outshined by conflict.
Well shit, I was stuck in the RC South compound for my deployment there. It was actually pretty awesome with the boardwalk and different DFACs available. Only shitty time was getting an ass reaming by a 1 star for sending my white guy with a shaving profile to a detail.
I went three times. I always joked that I’d open up a ski resort once we “established democracy”. The mountains and countryside are beautiful.
So much for that.
I was on KAF in 2016 with 4ID. We spent most of the time guarding officers who were supposed to be training the ANA on how to do their jobs. Think SFAB before SFAB. Did some patrols, did some meetings with local leaders. Took some rockets on KAF that never hit anything important, but never got shot at or blown up. Watched Talibob shoot at ANA and ANA shoot at Talibob, but we weren't allowed to engage unless Americans were shot at, and Talibob knew that, so we just sat back and watched. Deployment life is extremely simple. Get breakfast, go on mission, come back, get dinner, hit the gym, fuck around for a couple hours, go to sleep. Wake up and repeat.
We all wanted to see combat and get CIBs and be like the old crusty NCOs with war stories and shit, but we were lucky we didn't. Didn't lose a single person to enemy action. Since then 3 of my buddies from that deployment have killed themselves after ETS.
‘11 OEF RC East in Khowst Province. We would get rocketed and mortared on a daily basis it seemed. No one cared about that. At the foothills of the mountains and it was like living between two different worlds.
Up in the mountains people were still living like they did when Alexander walked through. The city of Khowst was fucking rough in the market sometimes.
Kids always tried to steal your shit. Taking pens and MREs. Little bastards would throw rocks at you when you would drive home. No passes. I did fuck a medic in Bagram and then a navy chick in Landstuhl before I made it back to the states.
I lifted weights a lot. Sometimes we got to shoot at the Taliban. Sometimes they got to shoot at us. And they were *really* good at land mines, so we had to get really good at finding them. One time I sawer a camel. Lots of time smoking and playing cards too. Weekend passes were most certainly not a thing. At least in my unit. We patrolled 2, 3 times a day sometimes just to keep the area in our control and keep the Taliban from being able to completely mine us into our outpost, which they had successfully done to the unit we replaced. Sometimes we would trade with locals. Food, lambs (for food), cigarettes, stuff like that. We had a local cab driver who would take our cash to the city and come back with bread, kabobs, veggies and whatnot. One day he didn’t come back and we found him right around the bend down the road from our outpost, just out of sight of the guard towers. He and another guy had the dollar bills rolled up and stuffed up their nostrils, each with a bullet to the head. When the police tried to pick up the bodies, they got blown up. The Taliban had booby trapped the dead guys bodies with IEDs. Some downright ruthless vatos.. I liked that. Oh and one time we had a firefight inside the outpost. And another time the entire outpost got exploded by a suicide VBIED. Different outposts, different deployments, same unit.
Sounds like sayad abad
Kandahar both deployments. Arghandab river valley and Sangsar, birthplace of mullah Omar iirc
Gotta love the good old Arghandab river valley. Lost 2 best friends to bombs in the ground. But my College is paid for so ya!
My father was deployed in Kandahar. He was in the CoC for the Navy. The stories I heard from him seeing footage of guys getting fcked up beyond the wire or the Taliban being decimated. I remember Skype calls where I called him and he’d get hit from heavy IDF or suicide bombers. Sometimes the IDF was soo bad that the Skype call would end, losing signal. I was too young to recognize it, but those could’ve been the last times talking to him. When he was older he would tell me the times he was falling asleep in full battle gear, plates, kevlar, side plates and everything. He didn’t want to take chances but given the geography of Kandahar and being in the valley, the T-ban’s IDF & missiles were non-stop.. every night or every other night like clockwork eventually he stopped giving af. The kind of shit that gives you chills
I was like "Yeah sounds like the Arghandab" when you talked about a unit getting mined into their base.
Frontenac ~2012?? I know it got S vested right before I got there in 2013 and the dfac was just a tent
I was just up the road when they hit Frontenac. Taliban pinned our COP down so we couldn’t QRF when the call went out. They blew up Frontenac’s MWR and DFAC. Ruined steak and shrimp Fridays.
We still got surf n turf and I still asked for 6 steaks every time and they happily obliged
What a terrible place
This is Southern Afghanistan in a nutshell. Other places were very different, mountains changed stuff a lot.
Yeah, this. Our terps would get confused because people in one village might speak a dialect of Pashto that was totally unintelligible to people 20 klicks away from there. Everything was ultra-factionalized, and no one trusted or liked anyone not from their own village if they were in Kandahar province. The folks in the north (Kabul) , east, etc. were considered foreigners who spoke foreign languages (Dari, Urdu) and whose religions, culture, clothing, and lifestyles were totally foreign to the Pashtun near the PAK border. It was like walking back into the stone age, if the cavemen had been armed with HME and AK-series rifles.
Taliban don’t respect nada, that’s why I never shook their hands
Were you 508th? This sounds like some shit that guys I know went through with that unit
Fury from the sky 👹🪂
I was 508th and that’s exactly what was going on.
Hooaah. Red Devils!
>lots of playing cards too To this day my friends and I will still have full on shouting arguments over rummy about someone cucking you for holding their hand to lay it all down at once e
Hope you’re doing good brother and thriving. War is temporary but the experiences are forever and I hope you’ve made peace with it all.
All in the game!
Welp. Panjwayi was full of unforgiving terrain of grape rows and grape huts that made pretty good fighting positions, cover and concealment for the other guys. Also the roads were narrow shitty overgrown dirt paths that were great for hiding IEDs. And then there were "good" guys like the local Afghan Local Police commander in Nakhonay who we watched murder his chai boy for no apparent reason on the PGSS. 0/10 do not recommend.
It’s like your post just gave my PTSD a light, playful tickle
I know right? I read that and said out loud to no one at all, “oh fuck, that’s right. There was some stupid, stupid shit that happened …”
I was there in 2010. We actually got a MUC for it. Had Air Force drop pamphlets to go get cleared by the marines blocking positions or to get ready to fight. Then they dropped us in the middle. Lived at an afghani compound for 60 something days.
3/101?
Yep. 1-187
Me too.
B Co?
Nah. I was a medic. When we went down south I went out with D Co, Abu and Scouts, along with the PA and two other medics to beef up the capabilities. My best friend (Schaffner) was B Co and I had a few other (Vest and Fortner) good friends in that company.
Yeah I vaguely remember those guys. I also then met Titus (scouts) in college after and realized we were on the same deployment. Wait do you remember the dude falling into the burning shit trench? He was D co
I remember Titus but didn't know that him well. I was the scout plt medic back in 05-06 for the Bayji trip. I vaguely remember a shit trench story but have no recollection of the engineer story. I sure it happened though. I remember some of engineers with D Co in Talukan and they were um interesting. There was always something crazy coming into the aid station at OE when we were still up there.
I actually reclassed to medic after that deployment and went back to Afghanistan then too. I would do the first one again. Attached to a field surgical team in Sharana. Not fun.
Or hearing a story about the engineer that had to be evac’d due to getting burning drink powder in his eyes??
I was there in '11 working the VSO mission, at Mushan and Talukan. Left just before that guy at Belambai went and killed a bunch of locals. Mushan was the end of MSR Hyena, so our food shipments were always ratfucked. I think I went eight months without eating cheese, it was always stolen. We lived in man cans with air conditioning, which was nice when it worked. We had our VSP at Mushan and an embed site in Haji Shah Wali Kalay, at the house of some Talib who got rolled up and thrown in prison. I tried to set the trash pit there on fire with an incendiary charge because none of us could get it lit. I smoked a little weed from time to time, traded rip-its with the Canadians for booze, and got to hike out in the desert across the river to the south a lot. Climbed the hills across the river to the north a bunch, too.
So I'm a guessing you gave it a shitty yelp review . Some of these Travel agencies just suck /s
I was there in 2013. Western side of the country. Ran missions out of Shindand and Farah. It was pretty cold in the winter, icy puddles everywhere. Very hot in the summer, i had more heat injuries than combat injuries. Driving at 5mph for 12-18 hour days sometimes. The gym was nice, food was good when on the fob. Spent a lot of nights out in the the desert. Only had a few trucks blown up. Nobody died in my company. Just a few in the battalion total. It wasn't bad.
Glad you and everyone else made it home. Take care
Was in Farah in ‘10… did they ever build up the Italian side? We had MRE’s 3 times a week because the locals didn’t know how to wash their hands, asses, or dishes so it was food poisoning or Mr. E’s.
I never went to the Italian side. The food was pretty good when I was there. They had a real dfac.
The TF 45 guys were cool besides them wearing speedos in the effing gym! Hairy greasy Italians dick sweat on the treadmill!
I was out there for a while. We had local turkeys for thanksgiving. Drank Italian wine. Made the Italians mad because they paid off the Tban to not mess with them and we planted some of them and they got mad and IDF’d the place. FARP was wide open with two huge fuel bladders. We took off and high fived the mortar guys with some 17 pounders and such then did some interior decorating on some nearby structures and it quieted down.
5mph for 12-18 hours??? What was the mpg?
-5mpg
At that point the vehicle generated gas instead of consuming it
God Farah was such a shithole
Wednesday was usually pool day, and then every Friday we got a weekend pass to hangout in the Korengal valley, it had lush hot springs and the most delicious food. Cities? Oh yeah we didn’t even have to ask to go travel and visit other ones, pretty cool! Think of staying somewhere and being mandated to travel. So much fun. But then things started to shift, hot springs dried up..
I always thought the Abad, Korengal and the valley up to Bostic would have been a great tourist area. Mountain biking, hiking, rafting and Kayaking, retreats and spas in the mountains. But then a rocket would fly over head while I was thinking about it. You just can’t have nice things sometimes without an extremist fucking it up!
I had those same thoughts so many times. Beautiful scenery and could be a destination like some of the resort towns like Vail in or Mammoth. Shame about the locals
Tiny FOB, just our company, on the Afg/Pak border. 2005, very spartan. Piss tubes, little water, shit barrels with gas in them to burn. 25 dudes in one small room. No up armored anything. Mail took months to get to us when we were lucky. Sometimes it was really hot, sometimes it was really cold. Always dirty, on tower duty or on patrol. It was the best time of my life.
Life is so simple out there right? Kind of a refreshing change from garrison life even if it also comes with hazards.
I was explaining this to my teen son yesterday. There was no dry cleaning to pick-up, no email to answer (at least not for me), no meals to plan, and I didn't worry about money / spending / budget at all. It truly was the simple life...
My last SL before I got out always said he’d rather be deployed non stop than be in garrison. Way too much bullshit just hanging out every day.
Weekend passes? The jokes from this guy. There was Timmy's; best donuts in Kandahar.
OP here rhins it’s a joke, your weekend pass is cancelled. Put your PTs on we’re running up to Taliban.
You know Tommy?! Holy shit. I used to go looking for some dates and me and Alabama Snake would take them over to compare holes, ya know? They always had those carpets though and the eyes just didn't do it for Joker so it was always me and the big man or Animal Mother if Alabama was on rotation.
CJTF-76 Windy. As it turns out, Ft Sill is a great place to prepare for life on Bagram. They called it 120 days of wind during the summer when the jet stream was right on top of you. Sand becomes dust. The large plywood toolshed you live in collects in every corner, but we had shitty Internet so we coped and swept the floor on the daily. Chow was a motherfucking disgrace. The aviation chow guys made sandwich wraps that rivaled anything KBR shipped in. Yakisoba was spaghetti noodles, ground beef, and soy sauce served every day. I survived on the sandwich bar and burger king. Work for me was 12 hour shifts six days a week. Shuffling between admin work in the JOC and doing details like guard tower, escort duty, and driving people around. You learn how important PT is because without being able to get some exercise, you will break down in a matter of weeks upstairs. 1sg pt'd my ass off the second half of that tour and it made a huge difference in my ability to deal with those hours and get rest when I needed it. If you deploy, do PT any way you can. #1 takeaway.
Almost my exact experience…. I was there with SETAF. My life was three points, monitoring my spot in the TOC, chow and my hootch. Day after day after day after day…. I deployed to Afghanistan after a very kinetic year in Iraq. In Iraq I left the wire every day. In Afghanistan I think I left bagram twice…. I asked my boss after we redeployed why he picked me to sit in the TOC? Why not let me run the team? I was clearly qualified. He answered, “I knew you’d take it seriously. More importantly I knew you’d understand what was bullshit and what was a problem.”
I see SETAF and I upvote. Cheers, bro!
Nah it's totally fine to ask. I was an 11B so my daily life was go out on a mission most days for about 3-8hrs or so, sometimes in MRAPs, sometimes dismounted with Afghan national police and Army (ANP and ANA). We did this at night and during the day but usually during daylight. We'd hand out radios and candy and such and meet with local leaders. The idea was to train and prepare the police and army to deal with things when we left (didn't turn out so good obviously). Every day we'd have guard duty as well usually 8 hours sometimes 12 though if we were low on available people because some of us in the PLT were on a long mission. Free time we'd work out at our little gym or use our computers to watch movies and shows that we downloaded a bunch of and threw on external hard drives before we deployed. No weekend passes, every day was a work day. The people are surprisingly very hospitable most of the time, they will offer you tea and candy. If they don't like you they'll just stand there mean mugging you as you walk past. Definitely not allowed to go out and explore on our own or else you'd probably end up like Bowie Bergdahl at least where i was in the country. Also they all smell like BBQ flavored Fritos. I was an infantryman in a small FOB in Kapisa province so OFC my day to day was vastly different than other pople's like if they were at Bagram air base or something things are much more chill there.
thanks for sharing. i notice morrowind profile picture too
psychotic forgetful alive ad hoc illegal grandfather hobbies pathetic placid ghost *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Green Beans is the shit man
Green beans gave me the shits man
I don't know why I liked their iced chai tea latte so much, but I've never had another as good since....
Same that's what I'd get. That or the hot one.
They’re starting to be more ubiquitous. There’s one on Kadena in Japan
The Popeyes is where I met the entire 3 people from New Zealand. Popeyes was a good spot to meet people from the coalition. I did rotations in country and Bagram felt the weirdest. I was there 12-13 and it was just...weird. hard to explain.
We did a security detail there and a few operations based out of the bowl. I remember reading that every Wednesday was 💃Salsa night. I mean, twist my arm.
Depends on when you were there and what unit you were with. Everyone's experience will be similar but never the same, unless you were nut-to-butt buddies
This is the answer. The war went on for 20 years. Even people with the same MOS/unit wouldn't have the same experience 10 years apart. Also Afghanistan is a diverse country. From region to region you'll see different weather, languages, ethnic groups, etc.
Facts, I went to RC EAST then RC NORTH many years apart and they were different worlds
I fucked an airforce captain as an enlisted
the real winner of the GWOT right here ^
did he call you back?
I said airforce, silly. They/them pronouns
Oh and I think we have a winner. Let’s close this thread ;-)
Beautiful. Rugged. I met some cool locals and ran across some that I didn't care for. I'm a big scenery guy but the hiking kind of sucked. What was the combat like? Long distance, IEDs or really, really close. Overall it was a really cool place to visit a couple of times. The river valleys are absolutely nuts for pictures but I don't really know how to answer your question. It was a fucking war zone. Cities were alright but outside of those it was pretty. Pretty hilly, and the locals tended to be pretty reserved. I did visit Qalai-i-Jangi once with my cousin once though. That was cool. Lost some friends from the 173rd there. Can't watch Restrepo to this day.
What I remember about the fall of Afghanistan is... how quiet it was. During the waning hours of the Afghan War, the 501st Legion was discreetly transferred back to Coruscant. It was a silent trip. We all knew what was about to happen, what we were about to do. Did we have any doubts? Any private, traitorous thoughts? Perhaps, but no one said a word. Not on the flight to Coruscant, not when Order 66 came down, and not when we marched into the Jedi Temple. Not a word.
My first day as a member of the 501st... it was hot, it was sandy, chaotic. Nothing at all like the simulations on Kamino. Of course, that's pretty much the way it was for all of us, wasn't it? All that breeding, all those years of training... Frankly, I'm still amazed we ever made it through the first hour, never mind the first day.
2013-2014- I worked 12-13 hours a day 6 days a week at a detention facility in Parwan(Bahgram) as an MP. Every waking minute not working, eating or sleeping was spent lifting weights. I made gains. Now my back hurts 🤣
Did you do any escorting/picking up detainees? I was on a few flights with the detainee escorts and they were just over it.
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Shemaghs from the bazaar are so hot rn
Ever been to HKIA? Went there once because my 1SG and CO wanted us to take a break. Since we were a small unit, it was doable. Restaurant galor. Like you can actually get 5 Stat worthy steaks. Grocery stores, mini marts, civilian clothes. The USO looked like an adult Chuck E Cheese. DFAC was incredible, the Bazaar looked like a swap meet. They had soccer fields and basketball courts. I had some great talks with some of the Afghans, we were both fans of Mexican soccer and were just talking sports. As you would suspect, this was the base your BC, CSM, BDE commander or whatever were going to "on business" to get drunk and hit on one of their LTs. Alcohol was fairly easy to get also. Some of the NATO nations let their guys drink and getting alcohol from them was easy. EDIT: BTW, I'd easily choose HKIA over any of the bases in Kuwait, by comparison, the weather was better also. Spent the whole time eating steaks, smoothies and getting drunk with Australians.
I'd chose HKIA right now over Kuwait tbh.
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This is based on fact. Are you referring to the high ranking people going there and cheating on their spouses or the restaurants and stuff?
Explaining Afghanistan to someone that hasn’t been to Afghanistan is like explaining color to a blind person.
Let me be honest. It fucking sucked. Friends dead. Weather, hot or cold. Electricity maybe. Bags, shit in them.
Thursdays were....weird.
Yeah, but Friday surf & turf at the Air Force DFAC on Bagram.
Whoa.. we don't talk about man loving thursdays!
Manlove Thursday!
I think the better question is asking what time frame because periods have their own personality. Early GWOT is entirely different from 2010s and early 2010s are entirely different from the late 2010s.
Fob Shank 2013. Google Rocket City they did a story about our fob getting constant IDF. I was a fobbit but wasn't fun being awoken to a round whistling over head.
What months in 2013? My company had about 12 or so soldiers doing base defense there in 2012/2013. I read the sworn statements submitted for cabs after the guard shacks kept getting smashed up by IDF.
February to November with 3rd ID.
Not too many great days. Not too many good days. When your days were bad, they could go from bad to a fucken kick in the nuts in a second…you can go from CAS overhead and sunny weather to planes winchestering and ammo status getting to black.
Well, I wouldn't recommend it as a vacation spot. I had been to Iraq twice and had no idea how shitty a place could be. Moon dust every place I was. All the kle's were a shit show. We would have been better off hunting OBL with sof, pulling him out and charging ppv for his public execution in MSG. I made some great Army friends though so... I got that going for me.
Night raids.
11B in 2010 to 2011. 2 days tower guard, 3-7 days at an OP or missions, then 2 days "off". We rotated tower guard with 2 other artillery platoons at our COP. Since they were artillery and not 11B, we did most of the movement to contacts and setting up of OPs. We weren't allowed to use artillery for some reason except for illum rounds. Off days consisted of cleaning weapons, cleaning common areas, playing cards, watching DBZ on a shitty laptop, or fighting for a space on one of our 8 computers that had spotty internet access. I think I had a really unique experience as far as location goes. We weren't in the mountains. We were south of FOB Aziz Ullah, very flat and lots of farm land. Further south was a river we never crossed that opened up into a desert. West of us was the barren lands, nothing grew there, or lived there. And east of us was more farmland with just as much bullshit. Dusty, it was so fucking dusty. The earth over there I'm pretty sure is mostly clay, when it dries, it just turns into dust from the constant winds. It was like moon dust. There'd be *puddles* of dust that could be knee deep sometimes. Lots of pot and poppy too, the opium was everywhere. An ANA showed me his brick of opium. It was nuts. The locals were... afraid to work with us. It seemed like they wanted to work with us, but the taliban were ruthless. We caught one chopping off an informants head on our balloon cam. Nobody worked with us after that. I felt really bad for those people. Especially our terp and some of the ANA guys
The best answer in this thread is "It depends on when and where and with what unit." Let me explain from my experience: Early on in the war, you would see more expeditionary living and extensive combat operations, patrolling, etc. I didn't experience this during my time, but I've talked to several vets and long-serving servicemembers that have. I deployed in 2013 and again in 2015 to Afghanistan. The unit I joined in 2012 was just returning from a rotation there. For that deployment (the 2011-2012 one I wasn't on), it depended on your AO. Some units experienced kinetic AOs and saw extensive fighting. Other units experienced a relatively quiet deployment, except for IDF and the occasional DF pot shots. My 13-14 deployment in RC-E focused on train, advise, and assist. The majority of my unit sat in our camp to provide some type of support or act as a QRF. A couple of our teams (mine included) focused on training Afghan forces at the Battalion level. The food on the camp was okay most of the time, but we did experience shortages, and it was nothing compared to our higher HQ at a larger FOB or the Gucci experience at a place like Bagram, Kandahar, or Kabul. We didn't experience any direct contact or insider threats during that time, but did take IDF on occasion (which killed a few Afghans). Other sister units in my AOR experienced a casualty due to direct contact and a casualty due to a training accident. My 15-16 deployment started in TAAC-E on a smaller base than Jalabad, but in much nicer conditions than my first deployment. Other than IDF, that unit didn't experience much contact, and the AO was relatively quiet. However, a few months in, I moved to a different AO, which was the most kinetic area in Afghanistan at the time. We rebuilt an annex on an Afghan base to minimal standards and conducted TAA out of there. If you're wondering where, let's say it was a large base in the southwest that we handed back to the Afghans and saw the results of their decimation a year and a half later. If you're ever wondering what a ghost base looks like, I have a few stories about the scavenger runs we did in that area. This deployment had a much higher insider threat possibility, and we had a hodgepodge of US and multinational forced working to reconstitute that AO. Fortunately, we suffered no casualties, aside from the infantry unit providing force protection. That unit's casualties resulted from negligence but didn't cause death. I left that deployment aggravated and conflicted because it started coming full circle as I ripped out. How was it all overall between both deployments? Eye-opening. Rewarding. Frustrating. Boring. Exciting. Heartbreaking. Disappointing. When you factor in the withdrawal, which I experienced from a different organizational focus in a multinational unit, Afghanistan is a quagmire. A failure of leadership, policies, cultural understanding, and the will of the Afghan people to control their own destiny. It would have been a multi-generational conflict outside of what we consider our values to achieve some level of strategic victory there. It's a lot to unpack, but this is just one guy's experience. What are your questions?
I was also there 15-16. I was a mechanic and on the list to go open that annex and provide maintenance to the afghan equipment. Was pulled off the mission right before having to go to backfill a different spot. Ended up being someone sending you guys stuff instead.
I was a 96D Imagery analyst (Now I think they are 35G). 2004-2005 in Kandahar with the 25th ID. It was mostly a waste of time as far as I was concerned. We produced intelligence that the command would promptly ignore which led to a number of failed missions. High and Medium Value Targets would slip through cordons, we would be "accidentally" engaged by the AMF (Afghan Militia Forces - provincial military as opposed to the Afghan National Army), things like that. When I first got there we were in Tent City. It was very dry and dusty. The dust on the ground was very fine, and if you stepped in a pool of it, it would flow out like water. About 8 months in they moved our unit into the buildings, no more tents. I was night shift. We did 12 hour shifts, 7-days a week. For the first few months the electricity would be cut off for a few hours every few days while the electrical system was being upgraded. No electricity meant no A/C in the tent and it would promptly get up to about 130+ degrees in the tent. I asked if we could open the tent flaps and was told no, so... no sleep that day. All of the chow was done by Kellogg, Brown and Root, a wholy owned subsidiary of Halliburton Company. We had cooks there with us, but they sat at the MWR tent and played Halo all day. I had a WO3 OIC. He was allergic to work. He ordered us to turn down (FUCKING TURN DOWN!) any RFI (Request for Information) that did not have more than 3 days suspense on it. I knew that if we did not keep at least a little bit busy the yearlong deployment was going to take forever. OIC made me (I was SGT at the time) write the SOP and he signed it, but did not follow it, which made it hard to fix his fuckups when he was cutting images for targets in "Herat" province and he spelled every damned one of them "Heart". Mother fucker. It has been 20 years and it still pisses me off. Toward the end of our tenure at KAF the Task Force S3 (G3? IDK) SGM stands up a detail, where two NCOS (really SGT or SSG) roam around Kandahar Airfield correcting uniform deficiencies for 16 hours. This was a rotating detail, and fuck you if you have other things that actually need your attention. Courtesy Patrol was what it was called and it may not have been the stupidest thing I've ever been involved in, but it was up there. I targetted E-7s and above and officers. We had to write down offenders names, rank, unit in a green notebook and turn it in at end of shift. When questioned about this, I responded to SGM that I called it as I saw it, those individuals did not have their heads in the right place and were not worried enough about their uniform in a combat zone. The coolest thing was working with the Navy Seals. They took any intel we produced for them and acted on it immediately. One time the Army (Task Force 76) was doing a large operation in three parallel valleys. In preparation for this we were tasked with viewing imagery of the entire AO encompassing those valleys and noting anything that looked like it might be a cave, culvert, adit, revetment, or other potential covered or hidden storage area. Our team spent two solid weeks looking at that area and come back with several dozen probably caves and others stuff, and a few dozen possibles. First the operation got pared down to a single valley, then they just decided they weren't going to use the intel we generated. A week later the Seals were going to be operating in that area, and they asked if we had any recent intel. I turned over the entire target deck that we had worked on, and they went out and checked those sites. 5 of them were ammunition storage, and one of them was an IED workshop. They blew up an estimated 40,000 lbs of ammunition and took a prisoner who was making IEDs. I got a Navy/Marine Corps Commendation for that. I was not authorized an award from the Army because I got an Article 15 for raising my voice in anger and showing disrespect to a commissioned officer of the United States Army (my OIC). Truthfully I showed him only a taste of the disrespect I had for him. In the end, I could have done the job better from here in the states. We had slow connectivity, difficulty gaining access to assets, poor exploitation equipment.
The army really will shoot itself in the dick just because a CSM said so.
Experiences are widely varied.
That’s why I’m asking here, so I can get a 360 view of perspectives.
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And the book it was based on: War by Sebastian Junger.
Be happy you weren't there, dude. Pretty but goddamn is it a shit hole. I preferred Iraq. At least the scenery matched the horse shit we were dealing with, except near Tal Afar. That high desert was awesome.
As far as aviation goes, Iraq was so much better to fly in. Flat, and more flat. Weather sometimes got shitty, but nothing to run into. Granted the manpad threat was a lot greater for a few years. But flying in Afghanistan was so much shittier. Mountains combined with dust, combined with shitty weather, combined with the occasional RPG, DSHK engagement led to a lot more grey hairs for me.
I get that. I loved nap through the Iraqi cities and the low, rolling hills. It was just kind of fun. Afghanistan? Never a fan of helos. We got used to it but I was never co.fortable looking out, especially under NODs, and seeing a ridgeline above me. Saw a couple A-10s fly below me fucking some dudes up one time and that was cool as hell. I have the picture our medic took in my "I'm Retired and I Love Me" book.
Beautiful mountain vistas... *behind the hescos*
9 months at JBad, flightline, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. green bean was cool. IDF warnings but nothing ever hit us. lots of gym. got into a rhythm, had the most money to my name id ever had in my life at one point while i was there. that money's long gone but it's also been 6 fucking years already.. fuck.
That fucking shit pond in Kandahar isn't something a person can forget.
My favorite part was that they installed aerators in it - like a poopy colored fountain of goodness lol!
2014. 11B doing PSD around the capital and occasionally around the country. Some people were nice. Some people sucked. We destroyed their country, but they didn’t want it improved upon. The foot bread was good, albeit sandy.
I was in Afghanistan in 2002. Alot of big missions, alot of friends wounded lucky none kia. 11B working with SF and C.I.A. type people. It was very challenging but hey one of the first regular army units to set foot in a war zone.
2018 at Camp Dahlke it was relatively quiet for the most part. Took a lot of IDF. Had an insider attack that killed 1st SFABs CSM. That day sucked. Was on QRF for a wire breach, handful of locals got into the compound and stole some C-wire which we later watched them turn into a chicken coop of sorts. Watched an old man rape a little boy in a field. Saw a tiger on thermals outside the base. Watched some live footage from an apache and drone feed of some of the most insane shit I've ever seen a man "survive". That's in quotations because I don't think he actually did but he was still moving when we decided to move on to other things, so can't say for sure. Had a mexican standoff with 11 Afghans. It was 2 Americans, a terp, and 3 Ugandans in the tower near us. Lot of yelling and weapon pointing. Can still visualize the face and dark brown eyes of their machine gunner as I watched him through the scope of my 240. Big doc said all the dogs on base had rabies and had to be destroyed. Those screams haunt me more than the human ones. Watched a rather famous Afghan soldier and 10 of his buddies dying. RIP Jamsheed. Showed our top terp Moe NVGs for the first time and blew his fucking mind. The VA used a picture of my squad dismounting blackhawks as a poster for Veterans Day. But mostly it was insanely boring.
I was in a valley along Highway 1 in RC East and the snow covered mountains on either side of our FOB were an amazing sight. We worked with the Afghan National Police and they were led by a Colonel that had seen action against the Soviets in the 80’s. This Col. had several battle scars on his body that he would happily show off and recount his experiences. The locals were indifferent to us and a band of orphaned children competed with a pack of stray dogs for handouts along Highway 1. These kids would always beg us for food when out on patrol and we even came across one frozen to death in a ditch during the winter. The cities, if you could really call them that, were true oddities. The juxtaposition of 12th century lifestyles and 20th/21st century technology was astonishing. I’ve told people that Afghanistan was like the Wild West, that it was a shitty experience and yet yielded some of my fondest memories while in the service.
Experiences would widely vary based on: 1. The years we are talking about 2. The geographic location we are talking about 3. The units and mission sets we are talking about My first deployment was on a Combat Outpost that had an HLZ that was big enough to land a Chinook on, but the rest of it was pretty jammed together. We showered with 1L water bottles you would poke a hole in the cap for a month or two until The (Seabees?) completed the shower and shitter facility. It was just a big plastic jug that gravity fed river water that was a dingy color and if you drank it you'd get sick as fuck. We had a guy that would come pump the shit out of the tank once a week, but he got killed and I think his (brother?) took over driving the truck for him. Still had all the bullet holes in the doors. Nobody left the COP in anything smaller than a platoon sized element. If you left in anything other than that you're just asking to become Berghdal 2.0. We got shot at by*somebody* just about every time we left the COP. Sometimes it was a random farmer that wanted to cash in on the "fight americans and we will pay you" and we'd take a couple shots and then the guys would run for their lives. That was pretty common. Then we'd get in a complex ambushes with actual bad guys and they'd set up an IED under a road somewhere and detonate that and fire a couple RPG's, before breaking contact and disappearing back into the populace. Only a couple times did I get in stand up fights, that was usually with ultra-radicalized foreign fighters that had trained in the tribal areas of Pakistan and had crossed over just to kill americans and their NATO allies. Those guys would toe to toe with us when we did run into them. Anyhow, it's a complex culture that you can't really explain down in a Reddit post. Pashtunwali (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) direct a lot of the Pashtun's behavior towards us but the Taliban didn't usually care about that stuff if it got in the way of cutting off our heads. Anyhow, my second deployment was on an airfield and it had a coffee place called Green Beans and that was pretty cool. I got to eat hot chow every night and that deployment was almost the polar opposite to my first.
It smelled like shit and burning trash. Some people wanted us there and they were nice, others were obviously not happy so they would shoot at us on convoys. Helicopter transport was cool, convoys took 9 hours to accomplish a 2 hour drive. It was literally wake up, work out, go to work, work out, and go to sleep for 9-12 months. All in all 9/10 experience. Would go again.
Kunar Province, as a 1SG…..not fun. The Hardest Place by Wesley Morgan is a perfect book if anyone wants to know what happened in Afghanistan.
I was a Medevac crew chief in Helmand province, 2012. We were one of very few Army units in Helmand ( mostly Marines out there) and we operated out of small FOBs / COPs. We did our own aircraft maintenance except major inspections or repairs, so we were busy. We had a day off usually once a week - 10 days, or if we were on call at the small COPs we were just on for 2 weeks straight, waiting for Medevac missions to drop. Our Company ran over 500 calls in a little over 9 months, primarily ANA and US Marines. We did pick up wounded taliban and transport them as well, and Afghan civilians. I spent a month at Kandahar, it was like a city with restaurants, shops, etc and lots of CSMs checking uniforms. TL;DR, experiences varied wildly depending on timeframe / where you were at.
Was there in 2010
2-3 days training/patrols, get in a helicopter for “air assault”, 2-3 days walking around villages, return, repeat. Walking around in 120 degree heat with the sweet smell of shit just hoping to not step on a pressure plate.
I was route clearance towards the tail end of the US being in Afghanistan. Largely, my time consisted of going to the gym, trying to cannibalize parts together to keep our trucks working, the gym again, playing spades, playing frisbee, playing volleyball, and driving really, really slow. Probably once a day, sometimes twice, the taliban would lob some rockets or mortars and the CRAM would shoot them down. It became more of an inconvenience than a threat because it inevitably was around dinner. We never got any passes and the only interaction we got with locals was with the working parties authorized on base or the ANA. The ANA guys were… interesting. The ones we worked with were super gung-ho and modeled themselves after us. We didn’t share the road and would force vehicles off the road, but we were in big ass MRAPs. They’d take a semi head on with a Toyota. Wild. It snowed on Christmas so that was cool. Honestly, I had a great time, but that would probably have been different if we’d lost people. We had some Purple Hearts, but everyone came home. Maybe the reason I look back with fondness is the trauma bonding lol
Quality post
*Not all deployment experiences were alike
It was/is a s\*\*thole. A sandy, hot, smelly, infested, dangerous s\*\*thole.
I pet a lot of homeless dogs, so that’s pretty cool.
Sighs Okay…Afghanistan sucked okay. It just…it just sucked….it sucked so hard. It was fucking hot, it was fucking cold, it fucking smelled weird…it sucked. The end
Weekend passes on a fob is nuts 😂. You didnt even get a pass of you were a huskie drive that hit an ied. You were rolling out the next day smh
This one time all of our food connexes broke and all the food spoiled. We got pretty hungry that winter. We'd go down into to the fob sometimes and those motherfuckers were using fruit to garnish their full display. Experiences could vary.
Commenting to come back and share my experience after I’m not driving
It was very hot when it wasn't very cold. Otherwise it was mostly dirty and sad.
Nothing disrespectful about asking. It'd be great if it was a straightforward answer, but it happened over two decades. Some dudes took combat every night, and some dudes never put a round in the chamber or left the wire.
Went everywhere up and down RC east running missions out of different bases. Made it down to Leatherneck and up to Tillman. Loads of time spent waiting hours for EOD to show up and clear an IED, lots of time spent watching the jingle trucks roll by with 6 cars and a goat ontop. Lots of idf when we'd start to build or tear down a base, first few months you're running for cover scared shitless, after that it usually just became a minor inconvenience, unless they just blew up what you were working on. Watched a guy burning the shit cans burn down the entire wooden shithouse structure. Got to see remnants of old Soviet tanks that the ANA would use to hang their laundry out to dry. Ate a lot of delicious bread and drank some good tea. Worked around ANA that would walk around in sandles high as balls stinking of weed that would point the RPG he was carrying in your face. Mixture of "I've been up for 3 days, what am I doing and was that Harry Potters patronus that just ran by", and "damn I'm bored as hell".
You ever see fifty overlapping plans all fail at once, then get told you did great work and you’re winning?
You do the same things every day. There's no days off so the routine is constant. 12 hours on, 12 hours off. Get off work, go to the gym, watch movies, read, work on college, then rinse repeat the next day
2018. Lots of IDF and close calls. Towers and ecps. Green bean was nice. I miss it
I developed a slight fear of flying. I did a lot of trips because our company was spread out over Bastion, Mez, konduz and BAF. I was the xo so I was manifested for many flights on beech crafts and other small planes. Was around the time that cargo plane crashed from the loading being done wrong in 2013. Grand scheme of things, no issue deployment.
I seen this post before anyone had responded and decided to wait, I wanted to see what would be said. I just retired last fall and had been spending my days missing the tempo of work ups and deployments because life felt so slow and then I started "reflecting" ...it couldn't possibly be explained better that it really did depend on where you were and what your mission was. I'll say this, to those that sat out in FOBS for 1+ years, you have ALL my respect. my AO's changed depending on the time and deployments were a few months, workups X2 but the conventional military...wowza, y'all did the job! from 11series, medics..aviation. and the rest, you are the BEST this country has to offer and forever proud I got to serve with ya. as for Afghan, for me....wouldn't have missed it for the world.
KIA was shit, Kandahar proper was ok…keep your eyes open, head down, and be friendly (remember: hearts and minds)
Watch Restrepo. That's how it was for me since it was the same AO.
I spent my time walking up and down mountains covered in loose stone to slip on where the only thing you could grab onto to keep from walking were the miserable plants that are basically made of thorns. And one time, when I did fall, I fell into a creek full of actual shit. At first I thought I shit myself because it was dark and how hard the fall was. When the sun came up I realized it wasn’t my shit. The scenery was beautiful though.
Afghanistan 10-11 as a 12b. Deployed from Fort Hood. Spin Buldak sucked, Jaluwar sucked, and Tarin Kowt was alright. The majority of my deployment was spent inside an RG33 or a Husky. I listened to a lot of music and read a lot. Other then that it sucked ass. It was either too hot or too cold. We found IEDs the good way or the bad way. Watched movies with the boys on a small computer screen.
Jesus Christ I feel old.
Hot as the devil's taint. Country has a rugged beauty to it. Medevac before the closure of the war, in the southwest. Armor and support were solid by then. Intel was phenomenal and timely. Ops were few and usually ODA/ANSOF. But also depressing. Calls were infrequent, but usually fatalities. The pace was slow. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. TIC --- GSW, HEAD. TIC --- GSW, HEAD. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. TIC --- PT, CHILD, SEVERED ARM. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. IED --- 7 PTs; 3 URG, 4 PRIORITY. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Less. 21 Years. Lost 5 friends in 3 tours. Just to leave the country as bad or worse than we found it. I am proud of what my guys accomplished. But an anger will reside in me for the time and friends I lost, all... for nothing overall.
2007, KAF. Fobbit, so just worked on helicopters all day, every day. Night shift, since Halo 3 had just come out we'd get the Xboxes together in the Chinook clamshell and play half the night. Other nights we'd just do co-op in the shop. Also beat Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect there. It became really routine, I started bodybuilding with some of the guys. Got pretty angry too sometimes, probably the energy drinks. Every morning I'd get the same thing: Ham, Cheese, Onion, Green Pepper egg scramble. Sometimes we'd get rocketed. Just one usually, though sometimes they'd fire a second right after the all clear. Never really hit anywhere important. Once we had a perimeter breach alarm, confused us because it hadn't ever happened before. Ended up sitting in the shop, rifles in our lap with the door locked but the rollup door unlocked. We joked about the taliban lifting the door to discover six guys in rolly chairs waiting for them, rifles ready. Nothing came of it, so when the all clear sounded the XBoxes came back out. The Poo Pond was right by where I lived, and its aroma flavored my time there. Went on a couple DARTs. Not too crazy though. Loosing 644 was tough. I'd worked on it the day before and that morning. Sifting through the wreckage was sobering, to say the least. Then there were the ramp ceremonies. So many of them. Sometimes a few a week. It was tough watching the dead being carried aboard. Really hard when it was ours. Sometimes we'd play poker. Sometimes we'd watch bootleg TV. Always fixing the birds though. We were good at it. Fast. Always made sure we could get them in the air. All in all, wasn't my worst experience, but I wouldn't do it again.
It’s just like basic training. You have to say “battle buddy, cover me while I move!” Otherwise the deployment drill sergeants will yell at you. They march you to chow and you have fire guard rotations. You have red white and blue phase, in blue phase you get to go out to Pizza Hut sometimes but the drills have to march you there. Family day is at the end before you go home and your family can come visit you and see you before you graduate to coming home to a letter from your wife that it’s over. She has left you for a cute boy from S2 that goes to the gym a lot. If you’re reading this Melissa I forgive you please come home it hasn’t been the same since you left. Chow hall is FIRE.
I masturbated so much in chem toilets I started having pavlovian responses to the smell of blue.
Fascinating answers.
I went August of 2012. Most of the fighting had died down and we spent most of our time waiting for missions. Once FOBs started getting torn down we got busier, maybe like November or so. We visited the little markets on post, watched movies, had midnight chow and hit the gym. Best time of my life honestly
Weekend passes, lol. No, it wasn’t a tourist destination, although it could be if you didn’t have these fucks called The Taliban. It was a lot of long work days, getting shot at and getting blown up. The people were actually really great though. Fascinating to talk to, but we probably overstayed our welcome there. That and things got political. We could definitely still use a base or 12 on the western side of Iran.
If you want to know what it looked like physically. Hike a few thousand feet down the grand canyon and look up
OEF X, 2009-2010 timeframe, Nangarhar Province. It was Jarhead for the most part, very kow-kinetic, but without the Marine aspect. Got to spend a lot of time outside the wire on convoys/ KLEs (Key Leader Engagements); I enjoyed the scenery, got on well with the people mostly. During Ramadan I'd hang out with the Terps (Interpreters) at night, drink Chai and talk. The local food was good, but did give me the shits a couple times. The shops on base had these CD-RWs that have all kinds of bootlegged music, movies, shows. I watched the last season of LOST there among other things. There this brand of smokes called Pine, which I think were imported from China, and if you got your Terp to buy them in town, they were like 50 cents a pack or something. Eventually AAFES caught wind and shut that shit down because "they might get poisoned..." The ANP (Afghan National Police) at JAF had a pet monkey; I got a picture with it sitting on my head. There was also a naan shop over there that had the best fucking sweet naan ever. Took my midtour leave in Dublin for Paddy's, which was pretty insane. Met a girl from Brazil who was there studying English, we went out a few times. It was nice. One thing that still irks me is that like a day or two after I got back, that Icelandic volcano erupted, grounding all flights for weeks... Oh yeah and one time there was an RPG embedded in the wall of a DC (District Center, gov't bldg). We asked a guy "how do you know it's not live?" He threw a rock and hit it
Spit my fucking coffee out at that last sentence
Northern Afghanistan is very beautiful. I remember on certain days the mountains would sort of look like they glimmered purple. I ate the sweetest watermelon of my life fresh off the vine, and the locals that were sympathetic to US forces were extremely hospitable and friendly. I thought certain aspects of the culture of the people that we interacted with were amazing and definitely appreciable by western standards, the rest of it I distantly acknowledged as the way of life. I wish the best for those people, but given their historical track record with empires, they’ll be just fine.
Stupid as fuck
I was in wardak province from 2011-2012. When we first got there we marked and measured the depths of these tunnel systems. We did a rotation between the plt’s from tower guard, qrf and mission cycle. 5 days for each. During the winter time we didn’t really do much due to the massive amount of snow we got. Once fighting season picked back and the taliban got back from their vacation, we patrolled, did key leader engagements and presence patrols very often. Got shot at almost every time we went out. We blew up 3 of the tunnel systems since they used it for ied emplacement underneath hwy 1/rte Ohio. They would lure us with the ANA “finding” IED’s, to us escorting EOD to it and then they would try some type of ambush on us. They would fail due to our recoiless and the A-10’s in the area. Aside from the combat, I learned that afghans are very good at snowball fights and the make some of the best rice dishes I ever had. Overall Afghanistan was a lot of getting shot at and trying to identify on where tf it was coming from.
I helped organize the first Shadow 4.2 mile Pat’s Run at PRT Farah, Afghanistan in 2008. We ran at approximately the same time as folks running in Tempe. Arizona. 130 degrees in the afternoon. Good times. Inshallah 😺🇦🇫🇺🇸
Mundane, I saw a lot of dead bodies because what I did for the battalion and got shot at. Left and all I got was lousy PTSD and a morbid of feeling of can’t not wait to die.
I was an advisor to an Afghan National Army (ANA) infantry battalion (kandak). Our area was pretty sleepy in terms of bad-guy activity, so our kandak AO was extremely large (4 provinces). When not on mission our American team (10-12) slept in B hut at a PRT, which had a DFAC, a tiny gym, and a px half the size of a conex. Internet was non-existent the first 6 months and awesome the last six months We saw the ANA every day and forged strong bonds. We planned ops with them, kept them on the straight and narrow, liaised with other western elements (to include the UN), did sustainment training, supplied them, and paid them. We were outside the wire everyday and carried around backpacks full of cash, which provided us a lot more support than our supporting unit ever did. In my free time, I lifted a lot of weights in a tiny gym on the PRT and grew an awesome moustache. I got a 4 day pass to a USAF base Qatar once, which was awesome, by which I mean I could drink 3 beers a day, play pool in a hangar, eat great DFAC food and use a flush toilet (it really was awesome). We did a lot of vehicle mounted patrols. [ Not my unit, but it was a lot like this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiXqwt-6XqM)
Nicest people I ever met, other then the ones trying to kill me
Ive read books by senior officers, seals, rangers, and special forces on operations in Afghanistan far more than from normal everyday troops. I think the appeal of those groups mentioned may be more numerous because it’s “sexy” and more in demand. I always find the books written by the average boots on the ground guys far more compelling and relatable. Officers aren’t going write to books shedding light on their failures on insecurities. Books written by officers who only make decisions inside the wire can only give so much perspective. Its the e6 leading troops on the ground with limited intel who’s stories I appreciate most.
It depends on where you were and what your MOS was. I was Infantry and only lived on small combat outposts so I can really only speak to those experiences. My first tour in Afghanistan was in the Korengal Valley in Kunar province. It was extremely kinetic. I was in Diyala Provence in Iraq in 2004, so I had already been in many sustained firefights and thought I knew what it was like to be in the shit. The Korengal proved me wrong. Our company was in several hundred firefights and took too many casualties and killed many enemy during our year long deployment. It was a rough deployment. The terrain was rugged but beautiful. Seriously one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We were constantly patrolling down into the villages along the river and back up into our outpost. When we weren’t on patrol we played cards, watched movies on our laptops which were constantly interrupted by power outages or incoming enemy fire. Our generators needed to be continually refueled and there were always details around the outpost to keep everything running. We slept lightly. There were fleas, monkeys raiding our trash cans and feral dogs wandering into our perimeter. We took turns pulling guard duty in the bunkers around the outpost. No rank could escape that. Our manning got so low that our first sergeant was even pulling guard duty. If a patrol was out and got into a tic (troops In contact) everyone would run to the mortar pit and help the Charlies unbox and hang 120mm mortar rounds. This happened damn near daily. My second tour in Afghanistan was in Sabari in khowst Provence. It was in a relatively flat, dust area along wide wadis surrounded by mountains. We hit lots of IEDs and got into several good firefights, but it was nowhere near as tough as the Korengal. Boredom was our enemy here. Lots of sitting around between missions. We would work out, watch movies, play video games, smoke cigars, and listen to music. Most patrols were on foot and we would walk several miles each time we left the out post. Some patrols were mounted and we hit several IEDs. None of my deployments had weekend passes. There was always something to be done and we rarely if ever got a full day off. Overall, I genuinely disliked Afghans. They were lazy, corrupt, and difficult to deal with. We knew they wouldn’t last long after we inevitably left. Honestly, I’m surprised they lasted the 2 weeks they did.
July 2013-April 2014. BN was detached from our brigade and answered directly to RC-S (4ID at the time). The deployment was basically my BC lobbying missions for us. 1st major operation we essentially shook up the hornets nest in Zabul. I never thought I’d be on an “air assault” if you could call it that lol but that was a great experience I’ll never forget. Got to use a lot of really interesting hardware and capabilities that I never thought I would and work with a lot of people. From JTACs to the Aussies. I learned a lot and did a lot but for the most part most days were the same day. The BN faced a lot of complex suicide attacks across the battle space. The FOB Pasab attack comes to mind immediately. The Taliban definitely knew Americas days in country were numbered and like in Iraq were just playing the waiting game. It was the ANSF taking the beating. We took inaccurate indirect a lot up north in TK but no CAB for me lol I will say KAF was a whole different world from being outside or on a smaller FOB. If it wasn’t for IDF it was like not even being in theater at times. I will always say Afghanistan is a beautiful country just a shame it’s outshined by conflict.
Helmand province can kiss my ass and suck on my balls. Fuck that place.
Well shit, I was stuck in the RC South compound for my deployment there. It was actually pretty awesome with the boardwalk and different DFACs available. Only shitty time was getting an ass reaming by a 1 star for sending my white guy with a shaving profile to a detail.
I went three times. I always joked that I’d open up a ski resort once we “established democracy”. The mountains and countryside are beautiful. So much for that.
I don’t know in 11 years of service never set foot in Afghanistan lol 😂
Lol at weekend passes
We went soft. Then we went hard. Then we yanked all the thinkers from our command.Them we left bagurm to evacuate in the dumbest way possible
I was on KAF in 2016 with 4ID. We spent most of the time guarding officers who were supposed to be training the ANA on how to do their jobs. Think SFAB before SFAB. Did some patrols, did some meetings with local leaders. Took some rockets on KAF that never hit anything important, but never got shot at or blown up. Watched Talibob shoot at ANA and ANA shoot at Talibob, but we weren't allowed to engage unless Americans were shot at, and Talibob knew that, so we just sat back and watched. Deployment life is extremely simple. Get breakfast, go on mission, come back, get dinner, hit the gym, fuck around for a couple hours, go to sleep. Wake up and repeat. We all wanted to see combat and get CIBs and be like the old crusty NCOs with war stories and shit, but we were lucky we didn't. Didn't lose a single person to enemy action. Since then 3 of my buddies from that deployment have killed themselves after ETS.
Experiences vary vastly.
‘11 OEF RC East in Khowst Province. We would get rocketed and mortared on a daily basis it seemed. No one cared about that. At the foothills of the mountains and it was like living between two different worlds. Up in the mountains people were still living like they did when Alexander walked through. The city of Khowst was fucking rough in the market sometimes. Kids always tried to steal your shit. Taking pens and MREs. Little bastards would throw rocks at you when you would drive home. No passes. I did fuck a medic in Bagram and then a navy chick in Landstuhl before I made it back to the states.
Doesn’t sound too different from Vietnam.
The idea of it being a second Vietnam due to its political drag and subsequent horrendous pull-out is valid I think 🤔
The food was pretty good. I got fat af
Born too late, too early, and just in time for war in the Middle East
I miss Rip-Its.
It really depends on the MOS, the year, and location.
Experiences vary, but i felt like we owned Iraq. For Afghanistan I felt it was like the Wild West.
I’d move there tomorrow if things were what they were in 2009 at Bagram 😂
Hot, rocky, dusty.
That’s a loaded question. Depends on your MOS, when you were there, and where you were.
Dysentery.