Letters from Afghanistan and Les Fleurs Finish at Last

You know you love your cat when you let her sit on an applique quilt you've been working on for a year:

Slowly ever so slowly, she did the final steps to complete the Les Fleurs quilt:

Not believing that the dratted, er wonderful, quilt was almost complete, she added the borders. And it was done (to flimsy stage, that is):

Timmy wrote a letter in Afghanistan on February 3rd that I received today, on March 3rd. It is long, but I thought several of you might enjoy reading it:

03Feb2011

Dear Mamaceta,

I can finally cross “invade a foreign country” off my Life’s To-Do List. We landed here in Afghanistan a few days ago on a military-funded C-7 flight from Kyrgyzstan. The flight wasn’t bad at all, except for the distinct lack of complimentary in-flight snacks. We had to execute what’s called a “combat landing” at the end of the flight. That’s where the plane rapidly descends from around 20,000 feet to the ground in about five minutes. It did not feel good.

After we landed, I had this mental image of my platoon and I gallantly striding off the airplane, the sun glinting off our weapons and our white American teeth, as we looked out over the panoramic Afghan mountains. Instead, we stumbled off the plane, heads spinning from the rapid descent, with the sun blinding our eyes. As soon as I’d blinked the tears out of my vision, I was greeted by my first view of Afghanistan: a flaming 20-foot-tall mountain of burning garbage. My team leader, CPL S--, clapped me on the back and assured me that “it only gets worse”.

We spent a couple of days at the main base doing classes on IEDs, truck maintenance, push to primers, and that sort of stuff. One major source of funding for the Taliban is drug money from the opium trade (Afghanistan pumps out 90% of the world’s supply of opium). The Corps has seen fit to bring in several counter-drug experts from the DEA, FBI, INTERPOL, and every other government agency with an acronym. Our counter-drug expert is a regular beat cop from Atlanta. Apparently working the night shift in downtown Atlanta is excellent prior experience to qualify you to serve as a military liaison officer fighting fundamentalist narcoterrorists in an active war zone.

From the main base, we convoyed out to our smaller FOB. It is more rustic than the main base. No running water, no infrastructure, and no internets (ed.note: ”internets” is a private joke: I was amused on a job many years ago where a co-worker, dim as they come [but who, mind you, makes twice as much money as I do without doing a minute of work, so who is really the dim one], earnestly explained to me, a very competent computer user, that a particular desktop icon, when clicked, would take me to the “internets”; Timmy and I forever after speak of the internet as a plural land) anywhere in sight. Mamaceta, if you tried living like this, you might have second thoughts about your idealistic “primitive Amish lifestyle” death wish.

Hey, it isn’t all bad. I have a cot. We have one power outlet that we fight over to charge our iPods, and hopefully a working mail system that will bring this letter to you (ed.note: shall we say a not-very-speedy one).

We are partnered with a large contingent of Afghan soldiers (Afghan National Army or ANA) here on the base. They tear around the base in Ford Rangers with machine guns mounted on top, blaring music on their radios, no helmets or body armor anywhere on their bodies. Basically, they’re living my dream.

They speak broken English and my Pashto vocabulary is limited to such violent phrases as “stop or I’ll shoot”, “get down or I’ll shoot”, and “put your hands up or I’ll shoot”. It makes healthy interaction difficult.

We pantomime to one another and somehow communicate. They seem like good guys and have a great sense of humor. Our guys trade cigarettes with them and they show one another their tattoos. Cigarettes are the currency here. For a carton of Marlboro Reds, I could get a goat at the Haji shop here on base.

The ANA aren’t nearly the bearded fundamentalists I thought they would be. Our interpreter (codename: “Chuck”) told us that his fondest dream is to go to America, presumably for the liberty and freedom and such. No, it is because he says American women are sexy.

Mostly, they seem to just want to do their jobs, get paid, have families, worship Allah, and get stoned. Not unlike a lot of my friends back home.

Love you Mama. Timmy