Proof of P.J.

A few months ago, attractive CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was at this very base reporting a story about the road that the U.S. is helping to build in central Afghanistan. The story aired on 60 Minutes a few Sunday’s back and was pretty good.

People here are still talking about the visit. In fact, as soon as I got off the plane, a female NCO mentioned Logan. “She’s smart, I’ll give her that,” said the woman. “But she uses her tits too much to get what she wants.”

Others here shared this view, saying that though she is definitely a good reporter who made a great story, she used her, shall we say, “feminine wiles” to great effect with the enlisted men and officers.

“A captain would pick her up at her tent and take her to the DFAC (dining facility,)” says one writer embedded here. “When she left I asked the guy, ‘Hey, when are you going to drive me to the DFAC, I always have to walk.’”

After an entire night spent waiting up for a plane to show up and take me to FOB Salerno, I finally caught a ride at dawn on a giant C-130 transport plane. I sat in back with some enormous boxes of supplies and immediately passed out to the steady thrum of the giant propellers. It was a one-hour ride.

I showed up at a tent that will be my home for the next few days and a bunch of young soldiers were standing out front.

“You new here?” One of them asked.

“Yup.”

“Welcome to hell. This place got a pretty bad bomb attack the other day. They call it rocket city.”

Wonderful.

It’s actually lovely here, with fragrant pines and jagged hills all around. We’re only about 13 miles from Pakistan, and the Hindu Kush range stands huge and imposing to the east. It’s also much warmer than Bagram and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky in the 24-hours I’ve been here. I’m rooming with a pack of hard-core war journos, including a documentary guy that I’ve been swapping stories with of my doc days in New York.

I’ll only be here for few days, until I can catch a Blackhawk to a smaller, more forward FOB.

Some general apparently thought it would be a good idea to order all military personnel in Bagram to carry a weapon at all times. As it was explained to me, “Even though this is considered a garrison-like environment, we’re all soldiers first.”

I can dig that, but because of the rule, everybody brings machine guns to dinner, the gym, even the bathroom. It’s funny when you’re sitting in the mess hall and there’s an M-4 with a grenade launcher attachment lying across your dinning companion’s lap. It’s even funnier in the Pat Tillman Memorial USO lounge (which I’m currently sitting in) when guys (and gals) try to lean their weapons against the wall in such a way that they won’t fall over.

The good news as that these soldiers don’t keep rounds chambered, so if the gun falls over (which they sometimes do,) no one gets hurt.

Accidents do happen, however.

There was this memo posted outside my barracks this morning saying essentially that a soldier was killed because he and comrade were “engaged in horseplay with a loaded weapon.” I don’t even know what it means but the memo went on to use the phrase “horse play” like nine-times.

Quit horsing around with those guns!

I spent about three hours with a military intelligence officer last night. I shouldn’t say what he does or who he is, but he was extremely candid about how the war is being fought and our chances of success. Let’s call him Bob.

Bob says that this war is not really being fought against Afghani’s as a group, but rather against a sect of Pashtuns, one of a few dominant cultural groups in the country. He says that U.S. forces are having some success in this, but that the fight has to be waged “valley by valley.” Put this way, it seems feasible that this place could be brought to some kind stability but, “We need more troops,” Bob says. “A lot more.”

Adding to this headache is the nature of rural Afghanistan. The residents of these valleys treat their area as a nation in and of itself, almost like city-states. They are violently xenophobic and can tell an outsider from a mile away. The leaders—such as they are—of these valleys, are resistant to infrastructure, like roads and electricity, because these things can only serve to weaken their power. Bob told me that when he first got to Afghanistan, some Afghanis in the mountains were under the impression that U.S. forces were Russians. They didn’t know that the Russians had been gone for thirty years, and had no way of finding out.

Bob didn’t give the U.S. initiative of building a Kabul-based federalist state much chance of success. He says the attitude of many in the villages is, “What has Kabul done for me?” Instead, Bob advocated a three state solution, not all that different than Joe Biden proposed for Iraq. Of course this isn’t going to happen, I’m just telling you what he told me.

The brightest spot in our conversation was the efficacy of U.S. soft power in the region. “Hollywood has a lot more power here than they know,” he says. He also pointed to the stability of the area surrounding Bagram. The base employs hundreds, possibly over a thousand locals from surrounding villages for all kinds of jobs. These people and their families don’t want to kill the golden goose. Bob says that by providing jobs for folks from surrounding villages, the U.S. has essentially bought both goodwill and safety for their effort in this area.

On the other hand, Bob also says, “There’s an old saying. You can’t buy and Afghani, but you sure can rent one.”

Rockstar!

I spent yesterday morning with the helo wing of the 101^st Airborne Division out of Clarksville, TN. The unit is set up in the edge of Bagram Airfield in a series of hangars and large open tents called clamshells.

The guys I was with are helicopter mechanics, pilots and test-pilots who make sure that the birds are ready to fly and fully operational. I was blessed with the opportunity to sit in an Apache cockpit, learn the weapons systems and get a quick lesson on how to fly the thing.

After that, we headed to a zillion-dollar Apache flight simulator where I once more strapped in to the cockpit and got an hour-long lesson in flying and shooting insurgents. The Apache is an amazing weapon of destruction. Last month Popular Mechanics listed it as one of the six most lethal aircraft in history. The chopper is mounted with a laser guided missile system, equipped to shoot Hellfire missiles, as well as an assortment of other heavy, deadly munitions.

The most remarkable aspect of this beast however, is the MTADS (Modernized Target Acquisition Designation Sight) system. The Apache is a two seater and the guy in front does the shooting. He wears a helmet that connects him to the powerful 30 Cal machine gun, loaded just under the Apache’s nose. All he has to do is turn his head and the machine gun goes wherever he looks. “It’s literally point and shoot,” says CWS Bob Braswell, who has flown the Apache I combat over both Iraq and Afghanistan. When I asked him what kind of lethality the gun dealt out he said simply, “Hamburger. It turns people into hamburger meat.”

He showed me some videos, taken from the night-vision camera mounted on the Apache. I could clearly make out insurgents engaging U.S. ground forces in a village not far from here. The grunts called in air support and when the Apache’s started shooting that 30 Cal, the insurgents bodies were blown to pieces in perfect, digital detail.

“That could be his arm,” says Braswell, pointing to a glowing chunk of insurgent lying near some bushes. “Then again, it could be his ass. There’s really no way to tell once this gun goes to work.”

For the past two and-a-half days I’ve been at Bagram Air Force Base, reporting stories and waiting for a flight to Forward Operating Base Salerno.

I feel like I’m in a small city in the mid-west U.S. There are 16,000 plus people here, both military and civilian contractors. There’s Burger King, Popeye’s Chicken, Subway, DQ, and Pizza Hut (who deliver, base-wide.) There’s all night gyms, churches, a spa and local Afghani’s selling rugs and knickknacks. The PX has about as much stuff as a small Wal-Mart, from deodorant to external hard drives. There are also thousands of unexploded mines lying in fields just outside the 11-mile perimeter.

The airfield here is huge. F-15 and A-10 fighter planes, Apaches, Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters take off constantly. Watching an F-15 light up its afterburners at night, streaking down the runway and off to engage in the business of killing is a strangely exhilarating sight.

And then there are the Fobbits. Fobit is a derogatory term for military personnel that never venture “outside the wire,” meaning they never leave the base. They are primarily support personnel, logistics, intelligence or even kitchen workers. The U.S. army is a vast bureaucracy and it takes many, many kinds of people and jobs to make this bureaucracy go. Many of these folks are basically working office jobs, they’re just doing so in a war zone.

But the secret is this: their lives here are pretty boring. They work very long shifts and when off-duty, they’re still stuck around their bosses and co-workers. There are endless rules, from where you can wear a hat (not in the mess hall,) to how fast you can drive (five miles-an-hour or you end up in the brig.) And of course there is no drinking.

More than one Fobbit has told me, “You have no idea what I would do for a Saturday night away from this place.”

At about half-past nine, my driver and I arrived at a roadblock set up just outside of Bagram Air Field manned by U.S. soldiers and some Afghan military. I would later learn that a VBIED (vehicle borne IED) threat had been called in to the checkpoint so traffic was stopped dead. Forty or so cars—driven by local Afghanis—were stuck, waiting to get onto the base. Even U.N. vehicles were being turned away.

I got out of the car and approached the soldiers, who were all heavily armed and very testy. I explained my situation to a young grunt. He was extremely courteous and told me that as soon as the roadblock was lifted, my driver and I would be the first ones through. He accompanied me back to my car and as we were walking, a sedan gunned its engine, coming straight for us. I dropped behind the soldier and he immediately shouldered his weapon, marching towards the car, screaming, “What the fuck are you doing?!? Stop NOW!” The sedan stopped and the soldier lowered his machine gun. He smiled and looked at me. “Everybody speaks weapon,” he said, chuckling.

I checked out of the fabulous Safi Land Hotel in downtown Kabul this morning and took a taxi about an hour outside of town to Bagram.

It was my first time seeing Kabul in the daylight. The city revealed itself to be a dazzling mashup of endless poverty, punctuated by brand new buildings of glass and steel, all ringed by stunning, jagged, snowcapped peaks.

The poverty is much like what you’d find in southern African cities. Underfed livestock and people live together in mud shacks or shipping containers that seemed to be randomly scattered throughout the city. Women in head to toe burkas float like specters amidst the trash and animal shit while children walk barefoot to school through traffic that has neither rules or compassion for pedestrians.

Police and Afghan military personnel lounge about with rifles hanging like afterthoughts from their shoulders, stopping cars at random and hassling taxi drivers.

The smog is unbelievable. Overloaded trucks belch nimbus clouds of black smoke, which mixes with the smoke coming off the fires that everybody is burning to keep warm. There’s no grass here, and the dirt on the ground swirls into the air, creating dust devils that only add too the choking, gritty atmosphere.

As we moved out of town the land opened up, stretching out to the horizon in brown, hard-packed flats, broken only by clusters of mud-walled huts or the occasional emaciated cow.

Every twenty minutes or so, we’d speed through a village center. These were mostly clusters of three sided, tin-roofed stores selling cokes, cookware and trinkets. Hundreds of people crowded the side of the road, waiting for taxis or minibus rides into a neighboring town or Kabul. The minibuses are similar to minivans and drivers will often cram a dozen or more people into them, charging a few dollars a head.

Of course these guys drive like maniacs. Sometimes they’ll pass two abreast on the left-hand side, playing double chicken with oncoming traffic.

My driver was pretty good, abstaining from any high-speed theatrics and getting me where I needed to go with a quickness.

Dubai is an extremely hectic city.

There is tons of traffic, construction and about at least a dozen languages being spoken on any given block. I spent my first full day there traipsing around, looking for Afghanistan’s consulate. It wasn’t next to the “American Hospital” as I’d first been told and I had a hell of a time finding it behind the “Dubai Immigration Office” as the Afghani’s themselves told me.

Turns out it was hidden in a residential neighborhood off the beach in an unmarked, walled compound.

The whole day I’d been working myself into a lather over my situation in Kabul. Contractors on the plane over from D.C. told me that I was insane to fly into Kabul, stay at a hotel and then take a taxi to Bagram Air Field. These are guys who walk with a tremendous, military swagger but don’t go to the supermarket in Afghanistan without an armed convoy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they have no sense of what actually goes on in Kabul day-to-day.

Anyway, by the time I found the embassy I was convinced that my trip to Kabul would be a suicide mission.

While waiting for my visa to be processed I met a man named Jassim. Jassim is a businessman from Bahrain, who travels to Kabul a few times a year on business. I shared my fears with him and he told me to relax. “I take care of everything for you,” he said. He proceeded to buy me lunch, a taxi to the airport and get me set up in a four-star hotel in Kabul.

The trip to Kabul was crazy. The plane was a Jordanian 737 from the late sixties with peeling carpets and filthy seats. Food was decent though, I had some byrani.

The whole time Jassim, who insisted on sitting next to me, was telling me to relax, which just made me more convinced that I was flying to my doom. We landed in Kabul after dark, much later than planned and no time to be on the streets.

Luckily, Jassim had arranged for a driver to meet us at the airport—which is a good thing considering all of the shady characters that hang around the Kabul airport at night—and within minutes we were cruising through the city on the way to our hotel.

At first glance, Kabul looks like Malawi on steroids. Shanties, people sleeping on the street, stuff is on fire, the whole nine. But every few blocks there’s a new, neon lit building that looks like something out of Vegas. Oh, and everybody has guns.

As we were driving to the hotel, Jassim pointed to a little shop on the street and said, “That is the best bread in the world, you have to try it. I have been to Paris, London, everywhere. That shop has the best bread in the world.”

We pulled up the hotel and my mind was officially blown. It’s called the Safi Landmark and it stands huge and glittering amidst a pile of squalor, surrounded by armed guards with AK’s. The inside has a shopping mall that looks like something out of Monte Carlo—without the booze or gambling. One shop sells a Sony Vaio about the size of a Blackberry that I’ve not seen anywhere, including Dubai or New York.

A few hours after arriving at the Safi Landmark Jassim knocked on my door, handed me a loaf of flatbread about the length of my arm and said, “Room service!” The guy actually walked five blocks in the dead of night to get me a piece of bread. I can’t overstate what a risky proposition that is and I’m still shocked that he did it for me.

We then had dinner together in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant and tea overlooking the city. We said goodnight shortly after, I shook his hand and thanked him for everything. “It is nothing,” he said. “You are a nice guy and I think somebody is looking out for you.” He never asked me for a thing and I guess just wanted me to be O.K. in my travels. On more than a few occasions—whether in Africa, Tennessee, wherever—I’ve had to rely on strangers to guide me. I’m continually surprised by how willing people are to go out of their way and do kind things. I’m still pretty jaded about people, but guys like Jassim make me feel a whole lot better about the entire human endeavor.

PS: I have TONS of pics but can’t upload them now. Hopefully later…

After a 24-hour delay due to airplane mechanical issues, I’ve finally arrived in Dubai. Nearly everybody on the plane from D.C. was some kind of profiteer/contractor headed to Afghanistan to make some money. The man next to me was former U.S. military working as a hired gun from KBR out of Kabul. He didn’t talk much.

When I got to the airport in Dubai I was detained in customs for a couple of hours because of my ballistic gear, or as they called it, “life vest.”

The folks there were extremely friendly, even offering me coffee, tea or water. They kept my gear, giving me a receipt and saying I could pick it up from the security office when I leave the country. Not sure why the stuff would be verboten in the U.A.E. but whaddyagonnado?

I’m settled in a decent hotel near the water, popular with British travelers. The place has a proper pub with cricket on the telly and a midget Pakistani guy in a fez working the door.

Dubai itself is a glittering, sprawling expanse of highways and neon. I went for a walk to get some dinner and got kinda’ lost in a maze of alleys, kebab shops and the kind of vast electronic stores you’d find around Times Square. The city feels pretty safe, even when I was lost at 11 P.M. and speak no Arabic.

I have a busy day tomorrow. I’ve got to secure a visa for Afghanistan, try to find a sat-phone, and make sure that someone is there to meet me at the airport in Kabul. I’m going to attempt to hit the beach if I have time, but that will have to wait ‘till my work is done.

I’ll also post some pictures of Dubai, at the risk of this blog turning into boring ol’ vacation diary.