Tuesday, July 20, 2004 Afghan Journal John Cramer and Sam Dean report from Company C in online exclusives The Roanoke Times

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Watching a blast at 10,000 feet

Posted 08/13/04

GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan — We left the trucks in the village and started into the mountains on foot.

We followed an Afghan guide, a black-bearded young man in sandals. He said it would take about 20 minutes to reach the weapons caches hidden in the rocks above.

Behind him were some soldiers with the Afghan National Army and Company C, 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division, of the Virginia Army National Guard.

For the past quarter century, soldiers, guerrillas, warlords and bandits have hidden weapons across this war-ravished country — in mountain caves, in village homes, in desert holes in the ground.

Staff Sgt. Brian Sullivan (top) passes a rocket to his ordinance demolition assistant, Sgt. Rio, as the pair prepare to destroy a weapons cache found in a cave high in the mountains above Ghazni. PHOTO BY SAM DEAN

There are big and small caches of guns, bullets, rockets and bombs.

Some are old and rusted, hidden during 1980s when the mujahedeen fought the Soviets.

Other stockpiles, though, are more recent and still effective.

Every week, U.S., coalition and Afghan government forces gather tips that uncover more of the caches.

That’s what we were doing this recent day.

We followed the trail led into mountains, through steep boulder fields and sandy ravines and sheep and goat manure and scattered old shell casings and tiny green oases that grew up around rare spring waters that gurgled out of the desert.

The valley floor was about 7,500 feet in elevation. The Afghan soldiers, who are accustomed to the thin air, moved easily like mountain goats. They soon outpaced the American soldiers, who huffed and puffed under their heavy packs and armored vests.

The voices of children echoed up on the wind. The soldiers’ boots crunched on the rocky sand. The mountain face was split and bouldered and weathered into thousands of formations. They were like summer clouds you stare at long enough and pick out faces and shapes and whatever your imagination comes up with. In the rocks, I saw a monkey’s face and a diamond and six coffins standing upright.

Sam Dean, my photojournalist colleague with The Roanoke Times, and I decided to move ahead with the Afghans so we could have a better view of the Americans’ approach.

I’ve learned Afghans have a different sense of time and distance than Americans — a 20-minute walk can mean a lot more.

So, in about 45 minutes we reached the first cache, which was some boxes of anti-aircraft rounds tucked into a rocky crevice.

We waited for the Americans to catch up, then headed higher to the second cache, which was another collection of anti-aircraft rounds in another crevice.

Then we boulder-hopped higher for a while to the big cache at nearly 10,000 feet.

I saw three Afghan soldiers climb up and into a narrow opening in the rocks. None of the U.S. soldiers had arrived yet, so I climbed up to the first ledge.

And suddenly an Afghan soldier popped his head out of the crevice and handed me a rocket, which looked like a 2-foot-long bullet.

I didn’t want it.

I don’t know much about rockets except they’re supposed to explode, so I quickly passed it down to another Afghan soldier.

Sgt. Ron Hawes leads 2nd Platoon soldiers up a trail that leads to a weapons cache. PHOTO BY SAM DEAN

But I wanted to see the stockpile before the U.S. explosives specialists blew it up, so I shimmied up further into the crevice.

It opened into a space too small for a man to stand up in, but big enough to hold nearly 30 rockets and a large amount of anti-aircraft rounds. They were covered in dust and most likely stashed during the 1980s.

I was already a little nervous sitting on top of so much high explosive.

And the Afghan soldiers were handling the ammunition like they were feeling cantaloupes in a supermarket, which is to say not gently.

That made me more nervous.

Then an Afghan soldier decided to open one of the steel boxes of rounds. He took a rock and started banging his combat knife into the lid like he was opening a can of tuna.

They didn’t speak English, so I pantomimed an explosion and put my fingers in my ears and grimaced.

They just laughed and pounded even harder with the rock. I laughed, too, and quickly climbed out.

After a while, the U.S. soldiers arrived, assessed the situation and decided to blow up the cache. It wasn’t large enough to warrant carrying it all the way down the mountain.

So, a U.S. ordnance specialist packed some C-4 plastic explosives onto the cache and sent the soldiers down the mountain.

He shouted: "Fire in the hole!"

Then he asked if I wanted to pull the igniter pins to start the fuse. He said: "Just pull firmly."

But my firm pull apparently was more of a yank.

"Oops," he said.

Which is not something you want to hear an explosives specialist say after he’s just packed a load of C-4 into a cave you’re standing next to.

"No problem," he said. "That’s why we have a 12-minute fuse."

He climbed back into the cave, put the C-4 back onto the rockets, climbed out and we walked down the mountain.

Nearly a half mile down, we took cover behind some boulders for the countdown: "10, 9, 8, 7…"

Nothing happened — the fuses burn slower at high altitudes.

Then the ground trembled. The air split. A tiny gray bird squawked and flew past us. A few rocks the size of golf balls came zinging down around us.

"Incoming," one soldier joked.

Then we all walked down the mountain.

Raid, gunfire provide a lesson on risk taking in a war zone

Posted 08/09/04

GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan — The day started like many others here but ended with us nearly getting shot.

Sam Dean and I boarded trucks with a group of Virginia Army National Guardsmen and Afghan National Army soldiers gathered at Camp Ghazni last week.

They planned to raid the home of a suspected insurgent in a remote village.

We headed out on Highway One, one of the few blacktopped roads in Afghanistan, and then into the countryside again, where the roads are nothing more than rocky, rutted, washboard paths through a desert that billows endlessly in the wind.

After meeting with Afghan military, police and village officials in the district, the soldiers headed for their destination — a large dirt-walled compound where the insurgent lives.

The U.S. military’s task here is to support Afghanistan’s democratic elections, reconstruction and security forces so the country can stand on its own one day.

To that end, the Afghan soldiers would lead the raid and the Company C guardsmen would stay back, provide perimeter security and chase down any militants who were flushed from the compound.

Sam and I are covering the Company C soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division. Our job is to chronicle the experiences of the Bedford boys and other Southwest Virginia soldiers in this front line on the war on terrorism, to put a local human face on an important international story.

But for this particular raid, we decided to stay with the Afghan soldiers and their several U.S. Army advisors, who were from National Guard units in Oklahoma, California and other states.

We wanted to better understand the relationship between the American and Afghan soldiers, to see up close how that relationship works on an actual mission.

After all, that’s the whole point of America’s involvement here — not just how they do their jobs, their thoughts, feelings and actions, but how they fit into this niche of the larger picture.

We planned to rush through the front door with the Afghan soldiers and their U.S. advisors, report and photograph what happened, then rejoin the Company C soldiers to chronicle their part in the raid.

The U.S. and Afghan soldiers planned to drive up quickly and quietly to the compound, but the big troop trucks got jammed in the narrow dirt-walled road several hundreds yards away.

After a moment of confusion, the American and Afghan soldiers jumped from the trucks and raced through the desert on foot, through farm fields and over irrigation ditches.

Sam and I joined them. It wasn’t very fast or pretty, trying to run wearing a heavy body armor vest. Sam also carried his cameras. I carried just a notebook and pen, but Sam, who’s younger and fitter, soon caught up with me.

When everyone reached the compound, the Virginia guardsmen took up their positions outside, while the Afghan soldiers circled the home.

Then they stormed through the big gate, pointing their automatic assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades.

Sam and I ran with them as they raced across the courtyard, past a chestnut pony and other frightened farm animals and into the dirt-walled house.

The house basically was a long hallway with many small doors leading into about 20 rooms.

For several minutes, the Afghan soldiers and U.S. advisers searched the rooms, which contained frightened women and children, grain, cow dung used for cooking fires and other things.

The suspected insurgent, a middle-age man with a scar on his face, was handcuffed and blindfolded and led outside to kneel in the courtyard. So were two young men. The only weapon found was an old rusted rifle. The women and children cried and cowered nearby.

About 15 minutes into the raid, one of the doors in the hallway opened and a burst of gunfire came out — BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

I was standing in the hallway next to the door. Three bullets stitched the ground, missing my leg and feet by a few inches. I dived to the ground and lay there, the gunpowder smoke hanging in the air, my ears ringing. Two Afghan soldiers nearby turned and ran away.

I thought a guerrilla had emerged from his hiding place to fire a few shots. Everyone else thought the same.

I’ve been shot at in other war zones and I knew enough to stay down until it was clear what was happening. I was watching the door for it to open again. I wasn’t sure what I’d have done if it had. I noticed the three inch-deep holes the bullets had dug into the concrete-like dirt floor.

Sam had just walked out the front door when he heard the gunfire. He turned and yelled my name, thinking I’d been shot.

He ran back in the hallway. I was just getting up. Several Afghan soldiers who had not run away stood with their rifles ready.

A U.S. adviser — Staff Sgt. Rafael Rodriguez of the California Army National Guard — was just coming out of the room where the shots came from.

"It’s all right, it’s all right," he said — an Afghan soldier had accidentally fired his rifle.

"Was it an American?" the Afghan army translator asked.

"F---, no," Rodriguez snapped. "What do you think?"

He and the Afghan commander chastised the soldier and shouted for all the Afghans to put their rifles on safe, the switch that prevents the weapon from firing.

Several minutes later, I was still standing in the hallway when two more shots exploded just outside. I ran out and saw an Afghan soldier laughing about having accidentally fired his own rifle.

Sam had been crouching a few feet away, taking a photo. There were two bullet holes in the ground just behind him.

Rodriguez and the Afghan commander who had yelled at the first soldier now were furious. They grabbed the second soldier’s rifle and nearly slugged him.

"One time’s an accident. Two times is f---ing stupid!" Rodriguez shouted. "Put it on safe. Everybody. Now."

A few minutes later, Rodriguez carried a crying infant, who had been left in one of the rooms, outside to his mother. She took the baby without a word and cowered in the courtyard with the rest of the women and children.

After a few minutes, Sam and I decided we had seen enough. We joined the Company C soldiers outside.

Later, Sam and I talked about our decision to go into the compound with the Afghan soldiers.

We felt then it was the right decision if we were to understand the larger picture, that of the Afghan people becoming independent with America’s help.

If we had stayed outside, we wouldn’t have learned what we did — namely, that the Afghans have a long way to go.

Getting nearly shot, whether it’s intentional or accidental, makes your heart beat a little faster for a moment.

I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years and have reported on several conflicts, and I’ve learned there are smart risks and foolish risks.

I felt this was a risk worth taking and I’d made the same choice again.

Sam, a photojournalist who is on his first assignment in a war zone, feels a little differently.

He’s undecided about whether we went into the compound to truly better understand the bigger picture or whether it was our — mainly my — desire to be part of the action.

He did, too, but he feels our rationale for charging through the front door could be pretty easily shot down.

In the end, he thinks we did so mainly to satisfy our journalistic curiosity rather than to produce a better story and photographs on Charlie Company.

I disagree.

Which we’ve done before on this assignment and no doubt will do again.

But we both feel we’ve worked well together and will continue to produce stories and photographs that connect The Roanoke Times readers with the citizen soldiers of Southwest Virginia.

A simple gift won't salve these wounds

GHAZNI CITY, Afghanistan — I made an orphan cry.

The other day, we visited an orphanage here, a place where 150 boys have found a home in a land where war, drought, disease and famine have killed millions in the past quarter-century.

The children who survive — both their parents’ deaths and a mortality rate that kills one in four infants under age 5 — go on.

There are no child labor laws, no welfare system, no safety nets as Americans understand them.

So the orphans go on, hungry, barely educated, sickly, dirty, dressed in rags, sleeping jammed together like stray dogs on a cold night.

The men who run the orphanage take care of the boys as best they can. And the boys don’t seem unhappy.

I’ve traveled in many Third World countries, including countries at war, and these Afghan boys seemed like many other orphans in many other poor countries.

They know they’re hungry and cold and sick, but their plight is all they’ve known and they don’t really know any better.

They play and laugh and tease and rough-house like other boys.

They’re curious about strangers, especially strangers who don’t seem hungry and cold and sick like them.

I’m a journalist. And the story this day was some U.S. Marines and Virginia Army National Guard soldiers who took pens, candy and other little things to give to the boys.

It was a very nice gesture, but pitiful, too.

The Marines handed out the trinkets a few at a time. And when the children became more desperate, the Marines finally tossed the stuff on the ground.

The boys fought like hyenas fighting over scraps of meat. The bigger boys here always bully the little ones, taking the best stuff for themselves. No adult stopped them, not the Afghans or the Americans, although the guardsmen handed out their goodies in a more orderly fashion.

Still, it was painful to watch.

Later, the orphanage’s directors showed us around the place. After a while, after we’d talked about facts, figures and other things, I needed to know about the boys themselves.

This wasn’t just a story about American troops visiting orphans. It was really about the boys.

To tell the story, you have to know about the boys themselves. They aren’t some amorphous street urchins. They’re human beings. They’re real children.

Who are they?

How did they come to live in the orphanage?

What are their thoughts and feelings and hopes?

And it sounds like a stupid question to ask a child, but what did they think of America’s effort to help them — not the penny candy they’d received that day, but the multibillion-dollar reconstruction program that may one day give them a decent life.

Children like this aren’t like most American children. When you ask them what they want, they say — sincerely — things like peace, food, books, no shooting.

No, no, you say — toys, what toys do you want?

And they look at each other hesitantly — enough time for you to feel appropriately stupid — and they’ll say, well, maybe a soccer ball, but what we really want is peace, food, books, no shooting.

I needed to find out about the boys themselves. I’ve worked with children before — poor and sick and homeless children — and it’s often difficult for them to talk about their lives.

But this is what makes a story strong, what makes readers stop and think and, in rare cases, get involved. Which is the whole point of the story.

So, I looked at the boys around us, including one who was about 14. He looked maybe 10 years old, undersized like all of them.

He was friendly and eager and curious, and I asked the orphanage director to have him tell us about himself, his family, his life.

I started with his parents. How had he come to live in the orphanage? What had happened to his parents?

It’s hard to talk to anyone, especially children, about intensely sad and personal things. And the difficulty is magnified when you don’t speak the language and the questions have to be relayed by a translator.

As soon as he heard the question, the little boy cried. He turned away, put his face into the folds of the director’s filthy coat. He cried quietly.

After a while, it came out that he didn’t remember his parents, that he’d come to the orphanage when he was 2 or 3 years old.

The director said his parents were dead, or most probably dead, killed in the violence or famine or disease or other fatal convulsions of modern Afghanistan.

The adults in the room went outside to talk about other things. I felt badly, not about asking what had happened to his parents. That’s simple journalism and I’d ask the same question again today. But I still felt badly for the boy.

I motioned for him to stay behind. I wanted to do something to make him feel better. I had some pens and notepaper, which the children here covet like American children covet candy and cartoons.

But that didn’t seem enough.

So I took the military goggles off my Kevlar helmet and sized them down to fit a little boy’s head and put them on him and he smiled very gently and held them as if they were gold.

We shook hands — his were soft and tiny and dirty — and when he went outside, the other boys, the ones who had been happy with fistfuls of pens and candy, looked at him as if he were Superman.

And he smiled again, that unbelievably satisfied little-boy look when he gets something he considers unbelievably good.

Later, I learned a U.S. soldier had taken the goggles back, thinking the boy had stolen or found them. The goggles are needed to keep out the choking dust when the soldiers ride the endlessly dusty roads here.

The boy found me, grabbed my sleeve and pointed out the soldier. I explained the goggles were a gift and I gave them back to the boy.

When the trucks left the orphanage, he was still standing there in the dust, no longer smiling, but concentrating on holding the goggles tightly in his fists against the other boys.

A night patrol moment: ‘Pass it on — look out for dogs’

GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan — The moon shone brightly, casting their shadows on the desert floor like scarecrows in a mid-day sun.

The patrol was on the outskirts of the village.

"Do your guys have bayonets?" Marine Cpl. Ryan Flitcroft whispered.

Sgt. Robert Sloan, leading a squad of Company C soldiers of the Virginia Army National Guard, looked at him.

"Bayonets? No, but they have K-bars," the Staunton resident said, referring to the long combat knives.

"Well, there are a lot of dogs in this village, so use them if you have to," Flitcroft said. "Hell, just f---ing shoot them if you have to."

"Shoot them?"

"Yeah, believe me, you don’t want to get bitten over here."

The word passed down the line: Stab or shoot any aggressive dog — and there are many in Afghanistan, domestic and wild, big and small, in cities and mountain villages, none vaccinated.

"Pass it on — look out for dogs," the next soldier whispered.

"Use your K-bar," said the next.

"Just shoot them," said another.

"Jesus, I’m not shooting any dog," said the next.

The Marines and soldiers left the road and followed a 2-foot-wide path through the minefield, stepping as carefully as steelworkers on a girder in a skyscraper.

The ground rose and fell gently, and they walked where the man in front walked and nowhere else.

Then they were at the edge of a farm field. There were deep furrows and muddy holes. There were green leafy crops. There were steep embankments and narrow berms between the irrigated rows.

The Marines had information the field was not mined, so they bushwhacked across the field, stepping in between and over and through the crops, their boots crushing and releasing a smell that reminded some of cedar.

They crossed another farm field, and then another and another, the men spread out as they approached the village.

The footing was tricky in the dark. Their boots sunk in the black water. They leapt across ditches and furrows.

Several soldiers stumbled, their depth perception momentarily thrown off when they switched off their night-vision goggles.

They walked through the village, which was empty — no enemies, no friends, no dogs.

As they left, a farmer with a flashlight came out of his house. He had heard the soldiers passing.

"Wodarizah!" Sgt. Pat Gleason, who was the last soldier in line, ordered. "Stop."

Sgt. John Stewart, one of the Bedford boys of Company C, leveled his rifle at the man.

They soon determined he wasn’t a threat and left him standing there with his arms still thrust in the air.

"We told him he could put his arms down, but I think we scared the crap out of him," Gleason said.

The soldiers and Marines crossed back through the cropland.

They passed a cemetery, where rock mounds with tattered flags mark the final resting places of the dead.

The graves of the children were tiny, just a few dozen rocks needed to cover the bodies.

They passed a brick-making site, just a muddy hole in the ground and row after row of hard mud rectangles flecked with straw laid out to dry.

As they walked, faces flushed in the warm night, Virginia’s citizen soldiers heard a rare sound coming from the pitifully small creek nearby, which was still enough to nourish a row of scraggly trees in a nearly treeless land — the sound of leaves rattling in the breeze. Sloan, Stewart and the rest of the Bedford boys walked silently out of the minefield and several miles more back to the base.

Another patrol over, another day done, time to sleep.

A place where a ballpoint pen is treasured

"One pen! One pen!" cry the children amassing along the dusty road as we drive through the streets of Ghazni.

Their hands stretch toward our lumbering vehicles, hoping for a pen or a pencil — things most Americans lose two or three times a week.

A day later on our first early morning patrol, a village elder proudly shows us his community’s two-room school, still empty since the school hour had not yet arrived.

Small and mud-walled, there are separate rooms for girls and boys, and in each a well-used chalkboard with the previous day’s lesson still neatly written across it. But there isn’t a scrap of paper to be seen. Not a pen or pencil anywhere.

Marine Cpl. Jeremy Pitman greets a child on the streets of Ghazni. Most of the soldiers from Charlie Company are still getting used to the locals and are not as comfortable with the Afghan crowds as the Marines are, who have been in Afghanistan for months. PHOTO BY SAM DEAN

Afghanistan has known one thing consistently for generations: War.

Evidence is everywhere, from the red and white painted mine-marking rocks, to the rusting hulks of Soviet tanks.

But perhaps the most lingering impact of the various conflicts is found in the lives of the children here.

Under the Taliban’s cruel supervision, girls were not allowed to attend school. Now that they are, education for both sexes still suffers from a lack of adequate resources.

Various aid agencies attempt to deal with the problem, but it is rampant.

The Marines being replaced by Charlie Company recount trips to orphanages in the area.

"We bring what little toys we have. Everyone sticks a handful of pens and notepads in their pocket when we go down there. They don’t have a lot of school supplies," said Marine Staff Sgt. Daral Harrison.

Now Southwest Virginia has an opportunity to bring a little joy to this corner of the world.

Charlie Company — men from our hometowns — is here with the ability to put a pen into the next small hand they see.

If you would like to join in their efforts, please mail any packages of pens and small notepads to:

Sgt. Ben Kramer
C Co. 3-116 Infantry
APO-AE 09354-9998

'You don’t have the luxury of time'

GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- There was a sudden wail: "RRRRR!"

The soldiers of Company C had just finished breakfast Saturday.

Some were going on shift, some coming off.

Some were sleeping or shaving or sitting in the latrine.

That’s when the emergency siren — heralding a possible mortar, rocket or artillery attack — wailed for the first time since the Virginia Army National Guardsmen arrived last week at Camp Tiger.

The siren split the air: "RRRRRR!"

Sgt. Robert Carter, right, and other members of Charlie Company practice taking shelter from mortars in one of the bunkers inside of Tiger compound, Saturday morning. PHOTO BY SAM DEAN

From across the little base, the soldiers ran to the bunkers, which are thick U-shaped concrete culverts turned upside down and heavily sandbagged.

Some were in full battle gear with rifles, armored vests and helmets.

Others wore gym shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops.

They squatted under the low concrete bunkers like hermits under a bridge.

Some were tense. Some were given advance notice it was a drill. Some joked about their buddies dying and having "dibs" on their girlfriends, portable DVD players and other good things they would leave behind.

Sgt. Matt Laney and Spc. John Fuhrman speculated about whether the bunkers could take a direct hit. They agreed a rocket would probably be bad news, but that a small mortar wouldn’t make a dent.

"Once you step off the plane [in Afghanistan], this is the sound you listen for," said Sgt. Doug Moore. "If it’s the real thing, you don’t have the luxury of time."

Several minutes later, the all-clear signal was given.

"There are always people who take their time and get dressed and there are people who grab their weapons and run," said Marine 1st Sgt. Anthony Carter. "The ones who think it’s just another fire drill are the ones who’ll die in their racks."

Company C soldiers and the Marines — from the riflemen and mortar men to the corpsmen and cooks — responded well in the drill, said Carter and 1st Sgt. David Bugg of Company C.

"Their reaction was great," Bugg said. "It’s all part of our learning curve" as the guardsmen take over the base from the Marines early next month.

Camp Tiger’s emergency drills are done randomly, so it’s second nature to the troops if an attack occurs, Carter said.

Islamic extremists fire a few mortars or rockets — either homemade or leftovers from the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation — that are picked up on radar about once a week at night at Camp Tiger and nearby Camp Ghazni, said Carter.

Their equipment and aim is so bad, the rounds rarely come within several miles of their targets.

The attackers — whether Taliban guerrillas, Taliban sympathizers or other opponents of the U.S.-led coalition — flee before U.S. troops can respond, Carter said.

The insurgents prefer hit and run, harassment and other guerrilla means over direct attacks to make their presence known, he said.

The Marines try to find where the rounds were fired from, where they landed and whether nearby villagers knew anything about it, he said.

U.S. troops are better trained and equipped, but the insurgents know the terrain and disappear in minutes, Carter said.

"They’re trying to disrupt the normalcy of things," he said. "It’s just to let us know, ‘Hey, we’re still here. You haven't gotten all of us.’

"If they can intimidate people or cause fear or delays in the election, then they’ve succeeded in some way."

Living in a giant bellows

The "120 days of wind" are upon us now, a summertime period in parts of Afghanistan when the wind sweeps the land as if the earth is spinning too fast.

In the camp of Company C, the wind blows like a wild beast trying to get inside the tent.

Warm in the day and cool at night, the wind comes down from the mountains in continual spasms — violently, gently, violently — coating everything with a silky dust lifted from the parched valleys.

Day and night, the tent’s 20-foot ceiling surges up and plunges down like a giant bellows.

Day and night, the wind sucks the tent’s wall flaps outward, then slams them back loudly, one after the other in endless domino fashion.

It’s a big tent, nearly 40 yards long and 15 yards wide, made of heavy white vinyl that hangs loosely from tall aluminum poles.

There are many of these temporary troops tents, all resembling a white circus tent, some with white tops, others stripped with blue, red, yellow or green.

The floors are plywood or gravel the sizes of golf balls, marbles and baseballs, which makes walking a little tricky.

The tents are vaguely air-conditioned — two large units are stationed at both ends — but the cool air is defeated by the high-desert sunshine and the body warmth of more than 100 soldiers sprawled on cots.

The men ignore the wind. It’s a part of their life for now, living under a tent that moves like the sail of a mighty boat at sea, buffeted by a wind that can’t make up its mind which way to blow, so it blows every which way at once.

Going to Kabul

Monday morning.

There isn’t a breath drawn in this country that’s free of dust.

While much of Charlie Company prepares to move out, we’re dusting off after another night of being brutalized by a sandstorm.

It’s Kabul day for us, too. A press conference gives us an excuse to see the capital of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, as it turned out, our only view came from the inside of a fast-moving sport utility vehicle.

We meet the military police for an escort and a serious lieutenant says we’ll be taking the extra bumpy Old Kabul Road into the city, since there was a rocket-propelled grenade attack on New Kabul Road recently.

An Afghan woman and her daughter try to cross the road near Kabul, Afghanistan. PHOTO BY SAM DEAN

Strap on the body armor, cinch the helmet down, and we’re off.

Thirty miles of country roll by as fast as our SUV and heavily armed Humvee escorts can safely manage. Painted rocks line both sides of the road — red on the far side, white on near side.

Mines.

"Don’t go 6 inches off the road for any reason," our driver was warned.

Children play outside the walls of mud compounds near the road. Common in the rural areas, as they must have been for a thousand years, the mud huts finally give way to larger concrete buildings and an impoverished city teeming with pedestrians who seem to have little thought for their lives. On bicycles, motorcycles and the occasional tired donkey, Afghans press in on our convoy.

The military police in their turrets keep a watchful eye on the swarm.

As we expect, the streets are full of men and boys. But there are more than a few women — like this woman and her daughter (pictured above) looking for a break in the traffic that’s as thick as the dust coating the SUV's window.