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.

Rainbow Slide -- Afghan Fog -- Women in Arms

Kelley is about a month away from returning home for a two-week mid-tour break. The vacation schedule includes trips to Scotland and London, dinner at a Gordon Ramsay's and a show.

The photograph from FOB Gardez shows one of the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles in which she and the troops with whom she works travel while on their missions.

Here's a shot of the captain saddling up for another trip beyond the wire. Communication from the front is getting thin. The once- or twice-a-week phone calls have trickled away to once a month or so as the mission tempo in Gardez has quickened. Taliban attacks elsewhere have stepped up with the coming of spring and the peace jirga this month in Kabul. Just what the jirga accomplished, I don't know. The Taliban did not attend. Instead, it fired rockets at the gathering and made itself a nuisance altogether.

In its wake, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly cast doubt on prospects that the US and its NATO allies can prevail. Reports are that he is making overtures to the Taliban and its backers inside Pakistan on his own. Karzai has become unreliable in terms of his ability to inspire confidence in his allies, to put it lightly. That he's willing to play nice with the Taliban is confusing, in that he's been its avowed opponent and not least that Talib are responsible for assassinating his father, before Hamid the Popalzai trial leader. But I digress. See Ahmed Rashid's excellent book, "Descent Into Chaos," for more background on the political relationships in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For more on the challenges inherent in being female in the military, check out this part of a series on women in arms by the New York Times. It addresses some of the day-to-day twists women face in rough outposts in a male-dominated society.

The Captain writes that she traveled beyond the wire to Chamkani for a regional peace jirga recently. In attendance was the Paktya provincial deputy governor, a guy named Abdal Rahman Mangal, who gave the keynote address.

She writes:

"(Mangal) is essentially the de-facto governor of Paktya province, as the actual governor (a Karzai appointee) is corrupt and chronically absent from the province. Mangal is a great guy who's actually FROM Paktya (unlike Hamdard, the real governor) and he really cares about the people there. We pretty much just deal exclusively with Mangal."

Here's Mangal giving interviews at the jirga.

Nearby, an Afghan National Army soldier stands guard.






It's sometimes difficult to square what she reports as progress in one area of Afghanistan while reports continue to pour in of an ineffective surge in Marja, a delayed offensive in Kandahar, endemic corruption, drug trafficking and ineffective leadership. (This account by C.J. Chivers, however, suggests a more nuanced interpretation of events in Marja.) I suspect the truth is a shade greener than most reports in the Times and elsewhere portray them, though not so bright to suggest that success is assured.

Here's my favorite shot, taken on the way to the jirga June 10.

"The doors were completely off, and I was sitting right on the edge. Pretty cool looking immediately to my right and seeing a thousand foot drop and the earth whizzing by. My hair got so jacked, it felt like dreadlocks by the time I got back to the FOB."

 Here's an overhead shot of the compound where the captain resides. She recently moved out of a mud barracks into a new trailer, something more in keeping with the dignity of her rank, I suppose, although she considers trailer trash a step up.

Here's Kelley aboard a Russian-made chopper operated by an NGO working in Afghanistan. She was taking photographs of a road-building project in her district.

No Country for Bad Filmmakers

The Drover returns from a self-imposed hiatus to mark the passing of Dennis Hopper, auteur filmmaker, photographer and cultural icon, not to mention, for a time, self-destructive personality. Charlie Rose repeated portions of three previous interviews with Hopper as part of a retrospective on the man. Among the things he had to say were one, that he considered his career a failure and, two, that he erred in moving to Taos, N.M., after his second and disastrous directorial effort, "The Last Movie."

On the first count, his lost decade of alcohol and drug abuse certainly contributed, although the idea this his was a failed career is a personal meditation, as a start. Moving to Taos put him outside the mainstream when his physical presence was required to advocate for his own work.

It's hard to imagine moving to Taos as anything but positive (Hopper was buried in nearby Rancho de Taos, nonetheless). With that in mind, let's take a look at some favorite films made in or about New Mexico.


Easy Rider -- Of course. Hopper wrote, directed and acted in this 1969 classic along with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. One of the first films of the 60's to actually reflect the temper and culture of the times. Parts were filmed near Taos.

The Milagro Beanfield War -- Filmed in nearby Truchas, Espanola and Santa Fe, Robert Redford captured the earthy and contentious nature of New Mexicans.


White Sands -- A confusing plot and uneven performances mark this '92 murder mystery, but it's worth a look for the awesome scenery and stellar cast. Crew say Mickey Rourke was a pain to work with, a trait he acknowledges from the period. Willem Dafoe, on the other hand, was a prince. Scenes capture familiar landmarks in Santa Fe, Taos and, naturally, White Sands.

The Missing -- Shot in Valles Caldera, a national preserve in an ancient volcanic caldera, and at movie ranches around Santa Fe. Features a small, but disturbing role by that ubiquitous movie New Mexican, First amendment poster child and threat to the peace and security of San Miguel County, Val Kilmer.


The Tao of Steve -- Does for ordinary Santa Feans, those with three jobs, two of them in restaurants, what "Beanfield" did for Truchas.

Every Which Way But Loose --A sentimental favorite, despite its inconsistent logic. It features a brief tour of Taos plaza by the hapless Pacoima Black Widows.

Plenty of films have been filmed in or showcase the Land of Enchantment, the City Different and Taos. Crazy Heart, No Country for Old Men, Wild Hogs and plenty more. For ex-pat New Mexicans the  cinematic well need never run dry.

Weekend in Sarajevo

My friend John put me up for the weekend at his place in Sarajevo, where he's working for the time being. I owe him one for such an eye-opening experience.

The city itself is a little worn around the edges. The buildings still bear the scars of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War and the 44-month siege by Serbian forces, one of the longest in modern military history. The pockmarks of bullet holes and big rosettes gouged out of concrete by tank rounds are pretty common on the buildings in the center of town and along the main boulevard to the airport. Even now, the former president of the Serbian Republic is on trial in The Hauge for war crimes resulting from that conflict.

Red brick and white marble are everywhere in Sarajevo: red brick terra cotta-style building blocks for rebuilding and patching up, and white marble for the many Islamic grave markers in the ubiquitous cemeteries in the city. The brick serves just as well to make a wall on a new addition as it does to patch up a hole left from gunfire. The white marble comes in small obelisks. Every other city block, it seems, has a graveyard and most of the tombstones date from the war. About 10,000 people were killed there, just over a tenth of them children.

In the central part of the newer part of the city is a memorial to all the children killed in the war, along with rotating metal cylinders that bear all their names.

What you don't find in Sarajevo is a McDonald's. Or a Burger King or a Starbucks or a Gap, for that matter. The future is uncertain, which mitigates against a lot of investment there. The Republika Sprska, the Serbian portion of Bosnia-Herzegovina, is threatening to withdraw from the country, which could lead to more violence. Plus corruption is rampant. The cost of doing business there inevitably includes kickbacks and greased palms.

Put all that aside and Sarajevo seemed like a pretty vibrant city. People filled the streets. The shops are full of consumer goods, though mostly clothing and not much, from what I could see, in the way of electronics other than cell phones, for example. While the city may seem tattered, its people are for the most part youthful. Like other European cities, especially the old city centers, Sarajevo loves its outdoor cafes. The old district near Ghazi Husrev-Gye's Mosque is lined with coffee shops where customers fill shopfront benches or sit on stools and sip espresso.

In another part of town, old men gather in a central park to play chess on a checkerboard pattern of tiles. It draws a pretty good crowd and the onlookers and players alike shout at one another, apparently commenting on the moves or offering advice.

Not far away is the central market, where a mortar attack in 1994 killed 68 people and finally drew NATO into the fight. Across the street are a small group of men and women with produce for sale on the sidewalk. This is one of my favorite shots.


Every once in a while you'll find someone smoking a hookah. Like these four guys. First on the left doesn't look like he wants his picture taken, but like everyone else I photographed, I asked first.

Bug Hunt! Goes Balkan

No trip abroad would be complete without an expedition to track down the wily feline. This edition of "Bug Hunt! Photographic Chronicles of the Common House Cat" took to the streets of Sarajevo. The hunt here was superb. This is a cat town.

This handsome specimen popped out of grated opening in the wall around Ghazi Husrev-Bey's Mosque. He's about the healthiest looking animal in the whole town. The usual riff-raff there are pretty scrawny looking and kinda dirty.



These two characters squared off for a showdown on the wall beneath John's apartment. They commenced howling just after the morning call to prayer that issues over the loudspeakers from the mosques in town, a memorable experience at 7 a.m. when you hear it the first time. Not so much if you've been living there several months.


That's all for now.

Word from Our Sponsor - Britain Votes - Oxburgh Hall - The Westie

May arrived on a sunny Saturday, which seemed somehow appropriate. With it came the second edition of the PRT Paktya newsletter, Double Tap, which features some photographs of team members and an account of a convoy ambush in April. The link takes you to the old Turtle Drove site, where a link to the newsletter is posted. No friendly casualties were suffered in the April fight and the hostiles were driven off. A more recent encounter ended with four dead insurgents and again no friendly casualties. Keep those team members in your prayers.

The Strange Case of Mr. Brown

The Labour Party appears to be on its way to losing its grip on Parliament and the prime minister's residence in this country, a hold it's held for 13 years. Unless, as the polls seem to predict, the election results in a hung Parliament, with no one party able to elect its leader PM. The Labourites were on the ropes already when Gordon Brown, incumbent PM and party leader, forgot to turn off his mike as he drove away from a campaign meet-and-greet last week. Hence the now fabled Bigotgate. Yes, the Brits have stolen the -gate suffix and affixed it to anything remotely scandalous politically. BBC Newsnight summoned crack animators to recreate the incident here.

The Conservatives (the Tories, that is) have fielded Rory Stewart, author of The Places in Between and The Prince of the Marshes to run for a seat in Parliament representing a district in barren Yorkshire. His book on Afghanistan, Places, about his walk from one end of the country to other, is an inspiring book not only for the feat itself but also for his pedestrian take on Afghanistan. It's worth a look. Kelley and I met Stewart at a talk he gave in Anchorage, where he signed our copies of his books. Interesting guy. He was particularly critical of the Allied approach to "managing" the war and reconstruction in Afghanistan, where he created an NGO to help craftspeople in Kabul.

All the fuss comes to an end this week when Britain votes. Coincidentally, Michael Caine is making the talk show rounds and interview circuit on behalf of his new movie, Harry Brown, about a codger who goes all Dirty Harry on Elephant and Castle. Caine, who I ran into once on a street in Santa Fe, says he's voting Tory out of principle. Not political principle, but the principle that he only expects two terms out of the elected leadership and no more, as far as he's concerned.

Religion in the Gutter

The weekend road trip took me to Oxburgh Hall, a National Trust property about 25 miles from here. The place was built in the 15th century and belonged to a Catholic family that managed to hang onto it, and their lives, during the period in which Henry VIII dismantled the religion in England and outlawed its practice. The Bedingfields were big dogs in London, one was apparently the equivalent of lord mayor and another was responsible for holding Princess Elizabeth prisoner for a spell. So they walked a fine line, loyal to the throne on one hand but barely tolerated Catholics on the other.

They were devout, nonetheless, but in those days to welcome a priest onto your estate to celebrate Mass was to court death. So the house has a priest hole, a handy hidden compartment into which the celebrant could duck should the authorities come a knockin'. The hiding place is in a brick tower just off a second-floor bed chamber where Henry VII once stayed the night. In fact, it's in the garderobe, another name for the latrine. To reach the hiding place, about the size of a walk-in closet, the fugitive needed to crawl into the hole over which one sat to do his or her business, wriggle over the shaft that opened into the waste-water treatment facility below, aka the moat, and into the hiding place. The tour guide added that naturally, white vestments weren't so white after the trip. Photos inside the property were forbidden. The photo up top is an outside shot.

West End

Finally, allow me to close with the last of the tour of Ely locals, the word Brits use to describe their favorite watering hole within walking distance.

The West End is, predictably, on Ely's west side. It's a free house, I think, and my favorite draft here is usually a Guiness. It has an outdoor area, or beer garden, and judging by the aircraft photographs hanging indoors is popular with the flying community from RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath. The Westie is a warren of rooms from which the same bar is accessible on three different fronts. The ceilings are low, so watch your head. It's a neat, well kept place with a friendly atmosphere. "And not a cheap clip joint for picking up tarts."

Til next time.

Pay the Cow, Man -- Substitute Education -- Insurgent Behavior

Scattered around the roadsides in the country hereabouts are signs posted on fences or stuck on front-yard posts or hung on unattended, homemade stalls advertising locally grown veg and, especially, free-range eggs. We get nearly all of our eggs this way and we buy most of our veg from a service that delivers a box of fresh, organic stuff every other Friday. The quality of both is a cut above what we find in the local groceries and at the commissary, and the price is right, too. Sometimes I have to research the odd-looking, dirt-encrusted tuber in order to discover what to make of it, but it usually pays off. Who knew celeriac made such a tasty mash? I chop it up with an equal amount of potatoes, then mash them up with some garlic and butter.

Egg stands are ubiquitous. A carton of six can be had for 1 pound, 20 pence. The cow sells its eggs for 1 pound (about $1.55). Payment is on the honor system. In this case, you deposit your money in the cow, which is really a bank. The Brits don't refrigerate their eggs, even in grocery stores. They just sit out there in the open until the stock is gone. We haven't encountered a bad egg, yet, though, knock on wood.

Ash Week, Epilogue

The Drover needed nearly a full week to decompress from his stint as substitute history teacher during the ordeal that became known as Ash Week. For those of you just joining us, ash from the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name spewed into the sky and floated at high altitudes into European air space around about Thursday of Spring Break (two weeks ago today). For six days, airports were closed across the continent, including those in the UK, stranding thousands of travelers from Bangkok to Birmingham. Among those were hundreds of students and teachers from the Defense Department schools for military dependents.

Battalions of substitutes stepped in to fill the breach until the stranded could return, which in some cases took an entire week. The biggest challenge for the Drover was fashioning a lesson plan from the directions left by the absent teacher. The chapter under discussion covered the 1950s post-war domestic economy and social and cultural changes in the US, things like the GI Bill, Levittown and Elvis Presley.

The next biggest challenge was adopting some kind of tactic to keep control in the classroom. This sounds like a no-brainer until you find yourself facing 25 students, among them a handful of the least motivated and least academically capable in the school. It takes only one to really screw things up. With so many teachers and administration absent (including the principal) that week, it didn't pay to fob your problems off on someone else, like sending the offender to the front office. Often times, nobody was manning the front office to fall back on. So you sucked it up, and did your best.

The lesson plans came together with some overnight research and the presentations in class were generally successful. The discipline problem was kept in check until the final hour of the final class on the final day of the week, when things promptly came loose like a stand of cannonballs kicked loose on a rolling deck.

On one hand, the look in a student's face who is hanging on your every word like it's money is a pretty inspiring sight. I have a fraction of understanding now what motivates teachers. The same face that's experiencing frustration and disgust at the antics of a classmate who's interfering with the experience is the flip side of that coin. It becomes a personal mission for the Drover to shield one from the other. Unfortunately, it's often a losing battle. Ardor for teaching, I think, sometimes runs up on the rocks. The underlying mission in classrooms is behavior modification. It doesn't pay to run a high school history class like a graduate seminar. They're just not there yet.

Not a Routine Day in Gardez
 
A convoy out of FOB Gardez was targeted yesterday by mortar and small arms fire. No casualties -- killed or wounded -- were suffered. The convoy returned fire and the insurgents were driven off. The wife was not involved in the operation; such events are not routine, she assures me.

This represented a minor incident in a war zone. No one beyond those involved took note of it. No press account was filed. The big story is elsewhere, in Kandahar or Marja or Kabul. Unless, of course, you know somebody who was there, or who might have been, but for the accident of scheduling. In that case, you say thanks, or feel relieved.

Ash Monday: Makin' Hay While the Sun Shines

The setting sun, photographed Saturday from a front window here at home, attempted to burn its way through the gunk that volcano in Iceland continues to spew into the atmosphere. All aircraft here are grounded, even the fighters, tankers and cargo craft in and out of RAF Lakenheath and Mildenhall. Which, if you work on Lakenheath, especially, is a blessing. You get used to the flights of four roaring overhead, but never really.

Among the thousands stranded by the ash cloud in airports in Europe and at home in the U.S. are hundreds of teachers employed by the U.S. Defense Department to teach in its schools for dependents across Europe. They were caught by the flight ban away from their homes on Spring Break. And hooray for that. A battalion of subs was summoned to fill the breach this morning and looks like they'll be making hay for the remainder of the week, if not longer.

I pitched in for a math teacher during the day's first period. She's in Slovenia and heading home by train. She's due back Thursday. The remainder of the day I spent as a teacher of U.S. History. I don't know where that teacher went, but she can't return before Saturday. That's a full week of work for yours truly. Some of the kids were on a church trip to Poland on an aid project. They endured a 27-hour bus trip to get home in time for school first thing this morning. Some were too tired after the ordeal to make it to class. The principal is out, too, until Friday.

My one concern is that the volcano will continue boiling into May and disrupt my plans to fly to Sarajevo. More on that in another post.

Three Bugs Full

The weekend bug hunting was rewarding. This insolent specimen lives just down the street. I caught him just outside Bug Alley.

This layabout was just yards away. As you can see, the street is teeming with these animals.

Look carefully at this frame and test your powers of bugspottery. This was a scene from a country lane along a string of farms known as Padney, just south of Ely. Yeah, he's in there. Look closer.

Finally, this lunker was grazing outside Witnesham in Suffolk County about an hour east of here.


That's right, it's not a cat at all. It's a llama. So sue me.





All Quiet on the Eastern Front

Attacks in Kandahar and Kabul rocked the news recently, and I confess that hearing TV talking heads announce, "Breaking news from Afghanistan" twice in one week caused a momentary pause in the usual cardiac rhythm. But Gardez was quiet and the wife reported no sorties beyond the wire, as it were. So no news to report from that quarter.

See & Be Seen: Market Day in Gardez

Kelley delivered a trove of photographs from her day off the FOB Monday and into Gardez proper to visit the local market. The PRT has not been to the market in quite a while, she writes. Part of the mission involved in going there is to see and be seen by the locals. Her party was armed, of course, and she recounts seeing some folks she assumes were "bad guys," but the trip went without incident.

That's here along with her boss, Lt. Col. Douglass in the back and another member of the team on her right. This photo was taken by Dan Shakal, a freelance photographer embedded with PRT Paktya.

Kelley took photos of her own, including this one of a group of kids on the street. Notice the lad on the right wearing mascara again. She writes that the practice, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is meant to deter insects, something she learned since photographing a bunch of tribal kids in an earlier trip to the country.

Here are a group of young Afghan guys who have apparently never seen a blue-eyed, blond woman, namely the Air Force airman from Wisconsin, who accompanied the group to the market that day. American women in uniform are apparently still a novelty to the local population. Third guy from the left apparently doesn't get out much.

This photo was taken by Dan Shakal, as well. Notice the close adherence to hygienic practice by this local butcher.

Here's a merchant who deals in arms and accouterments. No doubt the three-day waiting period is not observed in this country.


Kelley took that photograph, and this one, of a blacksmith.

Here's a shot down a side street taken by Kelley, as well.







Here's a final photo.

Wearing Out Shoe Leather Along Hadrian's Wall

It was the first sunny spring weekend in all of England and therefore a good time to take a long walk. Apparently there's no better place to stretch your legs than the path along Hadrian's Wall about 4 1/2 hours north of here. Scores of people were out doing just that, and filling the campgrounds and pubs along the way.

The spot pictured above, judging by what you can find in documentary videos, books available at the visitor's center and hanging on the walls of local pubs, is the most photographed stretch of the entire wall. This is my attempt, with a little help from Photoshop Elements to correct for what was a very hazy Sunday.

Seventy-three miles long and as high as 15 feet in its day, the wall is still pretty impressive. Today, it's at most six feet high and about eight wide in some places. It snakes across lonesome country populated by various livestock species and still gives a lesson on defensive use of the terrain. Some stretches are reduced to nothing more than rock piles demarcating one pasture from another. Dressed stones are visible the countryside over in homes, churches, fences, whatever. Once the Romans decamped, the locals formed up salvage parties. But even 2,000 intervening years weren't enough to totally dismantle the thing.

The wall took less than 10 years to build, which staggers the imagination. Forget the wall itself, which traverses some pretty rough terrain -- across the top of steep crags and along ridge tops, dipping and climbing in and out of gaps in isolated country. At every mile were stone gateways 13-feet high inside stone towers, called milecastles, to permit access. Between each milecastle were two small watch towers, or turrets. On the north front of the wall is a ditch, at one time 12-feet deep, and behind the wall another ditch with an accompanying earth rampart, called the Vallum. A military road, route B6318 today, runs about a mile south of the wall and parallel to it. Don't forget the 16 Roman army camps, like Vindolanda and Housesteads, that served as garrisons for the auxiliary troops that manned the thing. When you consider all that, it's a pretty impressive engineering feat.

These are volunteers excavating Vindolanda, about a 1 1/2 miles south of the wall itself.

A path runs along the wall for most of its length. The stretch I visited in Northumberland County, between Housesteads and Cawfields, is one of the best preserved bits of the wall. It runs through pasture land, and encounters with sheep or dairy cows are common. It's lambing season and so pairs of lambs trotting along behind mom or asleep in the fields are a frequent sight. Many of the farmers in the area operate campground sites for RVs (called caravans hereabouts) and/or tent campers. The park where I stayed, Hadrian's Wall Campground, had electric hookups and other amenities, plus a cabin with a heated, wood-planked interior with showers and such. The place advertised a full English breakfast but when I arrived I discovered the practice was discontinued. Disappointing, that.

Hikers and walkers jostled along the trail, some in jeans and running shoes, some in tour groups duded up in leather hiking boots and pant-legs tucked into their socks. It's possible to actually backpack the length of the wall, staying at private campgrounds along the way; nonetheless, I counted only two or three pairs of those folks. Some parts of the wall cross Northumberland National Park. The Brit notion of a national park differs from the US version in that their parks encompass lots of private property, as well as public land, and it may be under cultivation or in pasture. The public has some access rights by agreement, but public access to private property here is a thing unlike the States. Public footpaths crisscross the entire nation and are pretty well posted, as well.

The landscape is sick with sweeping, postcard vistas. Any moron with a camera can make a masterpiece. The one handicap is the weather. Sunday the long view was hazy. Monday the air cleared but that was a travel day. The view above at left, taken Sunday, is a place called Crag Lough, looking westward. On the crag itself at the left side of the photo I found a trio of local guys scaling the cliff, about 300-feet high. They were training for an ascent of Mount Blanc in Switzerland. That's Stephan on belay and Andy climbing.

It didn't escape me that while I was playing tourist along an antique military frontier, quaffing boutique ales in roadside pubs to restore my vigor, Kelley was manning a real life military frontier for a different kind of empire, in terrain equally forbidding but much less welcoming. The more things change...

Bug Hunt! Episode 4: Tables Turned!

"Bug Hunt! The Tireless Quest to Digitally Capture Neighborhood Felines in Action," went on the road to Lough Farm, on the shores of Crag Lough. Hoofing across a particularly swampy section of the trail along Hadrian's Wall, the Drover was paying mind to where he placed his boots and failed to check the surrounding area for predators. This lapse was to prove his undoing, for nearby lurked a bug.

The animal moved swiftly, and in a flash was on me. Bringing up my camera arm to ward off the attack, I must have pressed the button by instinct and in so doing caught this image of the beast as it closed. Farm cats, the most terrible bugs of all.

Painted Afghan Babies: It's a Country Thing

The sun rose in clear skies for the third day in a row here, which so far in 2010 is some kind of record. The photo is actually the moon at about 5:15 a.m. from the bedroom window. The camera exposure makes the sky seem brighter than it appears to the naked eye.

The Drover prepares today for a weekend excursion to the north of England, Hadrian's Wall, specifically. The goal is to pitch a tent in a campground about a half mile from the wall and photograph the landscape for a couple of days, then meander home. Hopefully there will be photographs to post here come Monday or Tuesday. Stay tuned.

Toddlers in Mascara
 
As previously mentioned, Kelley is working in an area of Afghanistan inhabited by the Kuchi tribe, whose members are ethnically Pashtun. Unlike most other Pashtun, however, the Kuchi are nomads who until recently, at least, lived in the here and now, with little knowledge of events in the wider world, as this 2002 article from the Christian Science Monitor suggests. They are much more familiar now with Americans, judging from this 2008 blog post from a US military physician, who apparently worked on a PRT just as Kelley is, and who recounts his attendance at a Kuchi assembly.

Kelley at her last outing noticed that the Kuchi like to paint their children with cosmetics. She writes:

"I was pretty weirded out by how many children I saw with heavy makeup on at the village medical outreach the other day.

 "This one brood came in, led by a boy no older than 9 or so. He and his younger sister -- maybe 7 or so -- were the oldest of this group of six kids, and they had no parents with them. The older girl held the baby in the photo here. Four of them had the heavy makeup. I asked a translator about it later, and he said it's sort of a hillbilly thing. The 'country people and Kuchis' are the ones who tend to do that.

"This little girl's hair was dyed that crazy red, and she had the makeup on, too."

Here's redhead's baby brother.












That's Good Bug

This edition of "Bug Hunt! The Obsessive Quest to Photographic Every Stinking Feline on the Block" goes international! Gaze upon this orange tabby living in the compound at FOB Gardez.

Kelley relates that the animal has been dubbed "Morris." He is curious, demanding and has but one friend, Abdullah, the man who feeds him. Morris otherwise is not a friendly cat.

Closer to home, "Bug Hunt!" scored a couple of choice shots of an animal who lives down the street. She was captured as the Drover passed on a bike ride. The animal boldly trotted into the street and into a neighbor's shrubbery to do its dirty business. Unfortunately, its compromising position left the feline prey to the "Bug Hunt!" camera.

Behold.







In Other News...

Back in February Kelley passed through Manas, a base in Kyrgyzstan. The US lease on that facility is now in question, due to a revolution there that has ousted the unpopular president. The Washington Post reports it here. This another of those situations where we appear to appease the kind of people -- anti-democratic strongmen -- we're at odds with elsewhere.

'Til next time, keep the outhouse door secure.