First Person from Friday Attack on FOB Gardez

A bombed-out hulk of a vehicle that carried ammo to the fortified gate of FOB Gardez at the onset of an attack by a band of insurgents Friday.

Here's an expanded account of the attack:

It was a pretty harrowing day, I have to admit. I couldn't sleep for hours last night. My mind just wouldn't shut down. I was sitting in the chow hall when the attack started...  Turned out it wasn't a vbied after all, but a car full of ammunition and various explosive items they were planning to use once they had breached the base. Someone hit that car with a mortar (don't know if it was us or them), and it exploded, and started burning.  Some of the explosions we kept hearing that were scaring us so badly were items in that fire that kept cooking off. I got out of the chow hall -- our chow hall is just a big tent -- and couldn't find a bunker and was just desperately trying to find some sort of shelter. At one point, I ended up in a dogpile of DFAC workers, wedged between a giant forklift and a wall of hesco barriers. One of our PA SECFOR guys saw me and yelled out at me to follow him. I jumped up and we ran together to the next bit of shelter. Another PA guy caught up with us, and they both sort of adopted me and we all leapfrogged from shelter to shelter, running full-blast across open areas that were a little terrifying to be in, given the circumstances.

 The sounds of explosions were seemingly all around us, and small arms fire was everywhere. At one point as we were running toward our PRT qalat, I looked over my shoulder and saw the huge white plume from where the car had blown up, but I didn't know what it was at the time. I hid again among some hesco barriers with ... several civilians, including Ian, the Scot who works for an NGO here -- a Reservist with the Black Watch. I saw him today and suddenly remembered I'd hidden with him briefly yesterday, but had forgotten it almost as soon as I'd run from that shelter. We finally made it back to the PRT area, and I ran into the bunker ...  One of the guys in the bunker with me was at the Afghan shops when it happened. He was pretty pissed off, because he was talking with one of the shop owners when the guy got a phone call and suddenly started shutting everything down and told our guy he had to go to his other shop in town. He obviously got tipped off and didn't tell us that we were about to get attacked. Pretty sure that guy will be interrogated hard when he returns.

Attack at FOB Gardez

The captain writes that she went unscathed through an hour-long attack around 12:30 p.m. Friday at FOB Gardez. 

I got up late this morning (Friday), and went to the chow hall and the fob got attacked.  I ran from small arms fire, mortars and a vbied (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, aka car bomb) that went off.  Spent half an hour in a bunker, listening to weapons firing and explosions, F-15's and helos flying low, hoping no one had breached the base and were walking around looking for more targets. No American casualties, but Afghan guards badly injured and four enemy dead.  Had to go to the scene and take photos.  Pretty ugly.  All happened around 1230 and lasted about an hour.

That was the quick bulletin from the scene. News accounts of the action can be found here and here. Read the Task Force press release here.

A huge sigh of relief and a word of thanks from the Drover for the wife's safekeeping.

New Double Tap, Issue No. 4

Yes, hard to believe, but here it is, finally, the latest edition of the PRT Paktya newsletter, Double Tap, issue No. 4. Check it out!

A Firefight in a Faraway Place

Culloden - The winners' side

Today's topic is battlefields. Add to the list a place called Jaji, a remote rock pile in eastern Afghanistan where two men of the Vermont National Guard died during a firefight Sunday.

The men, Spec. (actually sergeant, posthumously) Southworth and Sgt. Deluzio, belonged to the Vermont National Guard, elements of which are co-located at FOB Gardez along with the Provincial Reconstruction Team to which Kelley belongs. Their missions are entirely separate, however.

The PRT is out to win hearts and minds, to put it simply. The Guard, which is designated a "maneuver"  unit, is a combat unit. It hunts bad guys and sometimes kills them. The Captain writes that the fallen men were flown back to Gardez en route to Bagram and beyond and that a formation was held to honor their sacrifice. A tough day on the FOB, no doubt.

We're Your Huckleberries: Kilmer and McChrystal

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, is in a world of hurt this morning thanks to this article in Rolling Stone. The general is expected to appear before the president today in Washington, D.C., to answer for remarks attributed to him and his entourage that many deem insubordinate.

Of all the small consolations he can take, the least one is that he's not alone. Over in New Mexico this afternoon, actor Val Kilmer will appear in front of the San Miguel County Commissioners, explaining, among other things, his controversial remarks seven years ago in Rolling Stone and again five years ago in Esquire.

Kilmer, you may recall, played Doc Holliday in "Tombstone," Gay Perry in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" and Chris Shiherlis in "Heat," among many other noteworthy roles over a long career. He's also a reputed ass. Nonetheless, he charmed my former boss's wife with a kiss to the cheek back in 2003 when he had dinner with the boss and Gov. Bill Richardson in order clarify those remarks about homicidal New Mexican drunken drivers.

For the record, Kilmer says he was misquoted. Not so McChrystal, who was quoted as referring to the article as “a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”

The piece by freelancer Michael Hastings for RS is remarkable for a couple of reasons, one because of the unguarded access he was given, which in the aftermath cost McChrystal's press aide his job. Apparently he set no ground rules prior to the series of interviews that yielded this piece. Two, Hastings is clearly no proponent of the war in Afghanistan and makes no pretense from the opening paragraph right up to the closing how he feels. Our allies are fictional; the Afghans themselves either apathetic or hostile, never friendly; the effort itself doomed to failure.

On the first count, RS has always been the edgy journal of politics and culture and the tone set in Hastings' account is in keeping with the tradition set by Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi. I get that. Kudos to Hastings for counting coup. RS stands by its man, and McChrystal despite his mea culpa has yet to deny any of the statements attributed to him or his staff.

On the second count, Hastings has a noteworthy record of reporting from Iraq, so he's an experienced hand and entitled to his opinion. On the other hand, the Drover questions whether he's reported enough from Afghanistan to draw the wide conclusion he puts forward in his piece. Despite having spent months on this piece, it boils down to a day and a night in Paris and a trip to a Afghanistan, where he attended one meeting between McChrystal and the troops. It seems pretty thin ice on which to make that kind of stand, even though it serves up insight into the nature of fighting under the rules of engagement designed to minimize civilian casualties.

The Drover has a stake in the argument, of course, and does not out-of-hand dismiss contrary opinions about the war. It's a mess over there, that's a fact, and and by what terms we define victory is clouded in murk. Nonetheless, from a critical reader's point of view, Hastings delivers little more than the unguarded snark any employee engages in about their superiors. In this case that may be enough to relieve a commanding general, but so be it. Otherwise, Hastings has done little in his article to advance his own naked sentiment that the war is a waste of time, effort, blood and treasure.

The Drover turned, of course, to the one authority with which he's most familiar in this context and asked her opinion. The Captain writes:

"Haven't gotten to the part about no Afghans who like us, but that truly is not the case.  Maybe the guy didn't get out of Kabul much. Out here in the hinterlands, unless they're straight-up Taliban or their associates, they tend to like us. In Gardez City, they really like us a lot. I'm sure Helmand and Kandahar provinces are a completely different story, but that's the heart of TB territory."

And that's all I'll say about that.

This Just In: Double Tap Newsletter No. 3

It's here, the third and latest edition of The Double Tap, the newsletter of PRT Paktya straight from FOB Gardez. This month features pics of family and friends receiving combat infantryman and combat action badges as well as awards for on-the-job performance. Plus, "how I spent my mid-tour break." Don't miss it.

Previous editions of The Double Tap are available here and here. Also, take a look at Avalanche, the newsletter of Task Force Avalanche, the PRT Paktya sister unit at FOB Gardez.

New, Improved: Paktya Newsletters Right Here

The Apple lent his considerable expertise in the realm of desktop publishing to recommend an app, Issuu, that allows Turtle Drove to post Double Tap, the best-selling newsletter of PRT Paktya, directly on this site. No more tortured links.

Check out the two previous editions of Double Tap: No. 1 and No. 2; along with one edition of Avalanche, the newsletter of a sister unit to PRT-P, Task Force Avalanche, 3-172 Infantry (Mountain).

For easy viewing, once you open the link look for the "full screen" icon in the top left corner of the screen. Next to it is a page icon, click it. Scroll down to "paper view." Try it. It also works in full-screen mode.

A third edition of Double Tap, incidentally, is promised in a short time. Stay tuned. Many thanks to the Apple.

The Blistering Commentary You've Come to Expect

Nothing is so bad that a hyperventilating news media won't make it worse. Oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of hundreds of thousands of barrels a day? Not terrible enough. Coat it with some  partisan political hackery and second-guessing punditry. War in Afghanistan not keeping up with the timetable? Engage in some paper-thin debate and attach nonsensical symbolism to David Petraeus fainting at his seat before a congressional committee. It's bad enough without imagining how much worse it can be, or taking cheap shots when thoughtful analysis might find a way forward.


It's been worse, a lot worse. The steeple pictured to the left is St. Mary's Church in Ashwell, Hertforshire, maybe a half hour's drive from here. Ashwell is a picturesque ville tucked into rolling hills and surrounded by industrial-sized rapeseed fields from one horizon to another. Not far from Ashwell, out in the fields, is the site of Caldecote, a village that no longer exists. Take a walk out there and all you'll find is a patch of plowed dirt the wife of a local farmer pointed out as the place archaeologists probed some years back with shovel and trowel. Caldecote disappeared in the 1300s during the Black Plague epidemic that killed about a third of the English population.

Things were pretty bad in 1350, about two years into the event, when someone, presumably someone with enough education to read and write Latin, reached up and scrawled a message on the plaster inside the church steeple at St. Mary's.

"Pestile Cia.

superset plebs pessima testis in qeven valid"

"There was a plague," it translates, in part. "A wretched populace survives to witness."

So, we have a benchmark, of sorts, to work from.

Alas, bug, we hardly knew ye

"Bug Hunt! The Maniacal Obsession with Housecats, Disguised as Weblog Comic Relief" signs off for the season with this post, the Drover having doggedly cataloged nearly all the felines in a one-block radius. Behold Gray Cat, who lives in Bug Alley and who was really the inspiration for "Bug Hunt." That's my wallet on the pavement, provided for scale.