KABUL, Afghanistan – Here come the helicopters again. Blackhawks, flying out of the Kabul night, the gunner hanging out the side, scanning the city from behind the sights of an M-240B automatic rifle. The blades thunder their rhythm throughout the compound, too loud to talk over. They land quickly, spill out their passengers and a few bags, and leave. This isn’t the place to linger.
The last Blackhawk landed so close it blew open the windows and scattered papers across our office floor. I’m on the ground, at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a relatively safe NATO compound in central Kabul, along with more than 2,000 people from 48 coalition countries.
Tonight, the Macedonians are playing a serious game of soccer at a small court surrounded by a chain-link fence. On my walk around the small compound, I see Afghans, Britons, Dutch, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, Romanians, Turks, and a few whose country I can’t recognize; troops from the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force; and civilians. Almost all are armed. My friend said that this place was like the Epcot Center, with guns.
I pass a white-haired lady wearing a conservative blue dress who could be described only as grandmotherly, if it weren’t for the 9-millimeter Beretta strapped to her hip. Every Sunday, I sing and play acoustic guitar at the base chapel. I’m learning from my musical betters. My tendency is to rush a song. If I don’t position the strap just right, my 9-millimeter handgun bangs against my guitar as I play. The rest of the congregation, except for the chaplain and a few civilians, is also armed.
Our “Battle Rhythm,” meaning the meeting schedule and work shift, is long. We work seven days a week, and 12 hours a day, or more, with two glorious exceptions: On Friday and Saturday mornings, we get to come in at noon. I average about 84 hours a week; others average more. Days blur, so it hardly matters whether today is Tuesday or Saturday. People said you would get used to working seven days a week. I haven’t. The pace does violence to the ancient rhythm of work and rest: Six days shalt thou labor, the Lord told Moses.
We live by regulation and decree. Three-minute showers. Don’t pass anything to an Afghan with your left hand, the hand used for bathroom functions. Don’t take both chef’s salad and hot entree in the chow hall (huh?). When you hear “Incoming!” on the loudspeakers, hit the floor and cover your head. General Order No. 1 prohibits the possession of alcohol or pornography, bans proselytizing and bans feeding the indigent cats for fear of rabies — although we want the cats around to catch rats, which attract poisonous snakes. That last rule, at least, is routinely ignored. Another rule: no sex, and no men in the women’s barracks (and vice versa). At least this rule is no hardship for me to follow, since Deb and I celebrate our 33rd anniversary this month.
Yet for all our rules, we are living large on this NATO compound. Troops stationed in the more rugged forward operating bases scattered around the country call this base Camp Cupcake because we have beds, warm meals, hot showers, female barbers and patches of green grass.
The nearness of death bubbles to the surface regularly. We see it in dozens of daily reports from open media and our own secret sources: “Five dead in Farah bombing,” “35 Afghan University professors abducted in Ghazni,” “Mortar blast kills two children.” We see the nearness of death at night, when the alarm sounds “Shelter in place!” and an explosion rocks the compound. At my going-away party in the headquarters building at Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts, I read a letter from a 6-year-old at our church, who penned, in a child’s oversize handwriting: “I hope you have fun in Afghanistan. I hope you don’t. …” Having run out of room, he used the back of the card to finish his innocent thought: “die.”
During my first two hours in Afghanistan, while at another base waiting for a flight, we took rocket fire. Around midnight, we’d just arrived at the dirt-caked, broken-plywood “distinguished visitor transient barracks” after a trip that began five days earlier. A giant voice barked over the base loudspeaker system, “Incoming, incoming, incoming!” Then a loud boom. It sounded close. When the first rocket hit, I was talking to a lean and leathery Army sergeant major who could’ve been the model for the Marlboro man.
“Is this a drill?” I asked.
“No sir, I believe this is the real thing,” he drawled. After the first blast, I ducked low, and the sergeant major even crouched down. We’re supposed to drop to the floor immediately because explosions tend to mushroom upward. I hate to admit that I resisted lying on the floor because it was filthy. Then a second explosion sounded, as loud and near as the first.
After the booms stopped, I grabbed my heavy body armor and headed for the bunker, as required.
“You coming, sargn’t major?”
He shook his head and went outside to smoke. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”
Inside the musty concrete bunker, I chatted with a groggy, scared 18-year-old from Cleveland. After 10 minutes, “All clear” sounded across the base, and we went to grab some chow.
In my compound, there’s a thin veneer of safety, and it’s easy to stare at the snow-capped foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains and forget about the war. Now and then, we get a reminder. On May 25, I was working in my second-floor office around 3:15 p.m. when we heard an explosion. Sometimes a truck backfires or someone throws down weights in the gym, and we’ll look at each other and wonder. But this sounded close and unmistakable. I wish it didn’t sound like a movie explosion, but it did. Whoom! My window rattled, then things went silent. People sitting on the third-story porch where I eat said they saw a large white plume. We found out in scattered chunks of information from classified sources, and later open sources, that a suicide motorcyclist had rammed into a bus carrying Afghan National Army troops less than a mile from our compound. It struck me as unnerving that a motorcycle can pack that much explosive material. Two people died, and nine were wounded in the blast.
But when the dust settles from the insurgents’ rockets, at the end of the long day, what I see is an international gathering of people braving roadside bombs and dangerous checkpoints to help build a fledgling democracy. I see three basic questions driving their actions, blending the noble and mundane: Will this project help Afghanistan? Will it make me look good? When can I go home? I also see snow and soot blow across the summit of the Hindu Kush range, and I restack the papers in my office after the helicopter departs. In rare moments, I almost wish you were here to see it, too.
A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, James Gleason Bishop is serving in Afghanistan as a public affairs officer at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force. He’s also completing a memoir on hiking along the Appalachian Trail. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of NATO, the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or the United States government.