Deployment Blog: Afghanistan - The Unblogged (1)

By the time you read these posts, I am home safe and sound. This post is a collection of the things I would not tell anyone about, except a very select few, so no one would worry.

The Sunday after Easter was a busy day in the headquarters here at Bagram, as the insurgents launched a coordinated series of attacks against some of our remote sites. I was at one of those sites not 2 weeks prior. The guy I know there had a 107mm rocket land in his quarters. It did not detonate, which is the case most of the time, and he was not in it at the time thank goodness. We and our remote sites do periodically receive what is called Indirect Fire (IDF) at night. Usually happens between 0000 and 0200 in the morning. They fire 107mm rockets from the villages that surround us and hope they hit something. 9 times out of 10 they hit an open field or an empty building as this place is so big.

Just this past Sunday we had a pretty close call ourselves though. At around 0030 in the morning, there were at least 3 rockets that landed on Bagram. My buddies that live across the street said one exploded pretty close to them, between their B-Hut (Barracks Hut where they live), and the laundry facility. Here on the other side of the street, we had a rocket land 2 buildings down from mine. The round landed in them middle of the building, when through the roof, the 2nd floor bunk bed (no on was sleeping there thank God), through the 2nd floor, and berried itself more than 6 feet in the ground without exploding. The gal that lives in the room it went through didn't even wake up and it was not reported until morning. I never hear it when they go off if I am already asleep. One of my co-workers lived on the other side of the wall from where it hit. She says her head was about 2 meters from the impact ad it knocked a picture off the wall. Again thankfully it did not go off. The blast radius is about 12 meters. These munitions are so old most are no good, or they forget to arm them before the fire them.

Here are some pictures of that incident showing what it did. The reality of the situation is, in the United States you could be killed by a drunk driver. Here there are no drunk drivers and we are a cross-section of the populations. In essence, these are our drunk drivers as we are a sampling of the population and bad things happen. We just have different "bad things". Just like back home, there is a lot we can do to prevent stuff, but we cannot worry about things like this. When these things hit, there is not really much you can do other than hope it is not close to you.

Proximity of impact to me.

Ceiling of impact area.

The floor all dug up to try and retrieve the unexploded shell. They where not able to dig deep enough so they just poured concrete over it to seal it.