NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (8 page)

I was never worried about it. My position stipulated U.S citizenship and secret clearance as requirements. KBR had to hire a U.S. citizen for my position. Even so, I watched as the contract workforce slowly became Eastern European. The preference for hiring employees from the Balkans was based upon wage and salary considerations. It was entirely profit driven. The average American worker was hired for 80,000 to 100,000 U.S. dollars per year. KBR could hire an employee from the Balkans for one third of that salary. The company was guaranteed 250,000 to 400,000 U.S. dollars per position by contract. KBR could pocket a significantly larger amount by hiring Eastern Europeans instead of Americans.

Eventually, KBR started hiring Indians. Most of them were from the south and east coast of India, such as Kerala. They paid these guys even less. The average Indian made around 20,000 U.S. dollars per year. KBR also saved money with the Indians by sardining them into B-Huts by the dozens. They gave these guys a green army cot and a few feet of space. These were unsanitary conditions. The Indians didn’t complain—20,000 U.S. dollars per year for these guys is “Slum Dog Millionaire” money. A few years in Afghanistan and the Indians built a house and retired. There was usually enough money to pay a bride dowry, if they weren’t already married.

This was all going on while American jobs were disappearing and continued right through the 2008 financial meltdown and beyond. When I left Afghanistan the last time, the big contract companies were hiring Kenyans for a whopping monthly wage of 500 U.S. dollars. In the meantime, they’re pocketing a couple hundred thousand dollars per position and Americans are out of work back home.

$35 Haircut Special

Late Summer 2004

Prostitution wasn’t rampant on the bases in Afghanistan. However, it was present. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) ran a beauty salon at the Post Exchange complex on BAF. All of the girls who worked there were from Bishkek in the Kyrgyz Republic or K2 in Uzbekistan. Some of them were beautiful. Some … well, not so much. At the AAFES beauty salon, one could get a haircut, a manicure, pedicure, or a massage. Women went in there and came out waxed and dyed. For sixty days in early 2004, one could also procure the services of a gal for more base pleasures, like blow jobs. All one need do was walk in and ask for the $35 Special. I suppose you had to know who to ask to get that service. Of course, it was illegal.

At about the same time, the Army found out about a pretty, young airwoman servicing the troops for fifty bucks a pop. Simultaneously, she was engaged in an adulterous affair. Her married beau became incensed when he found out that the object of his extra-marital obsessions was prostituting herself. An extreme (and unwise) public argument ensued between the two, which exposed the affair to the chain of command. The resulting investigation revealed extracurricular activities of the young woman when her chain of command searched her room. In Afghanistan, the authorities do not need a search warrant. There’s no due process. One surrenders all rights upon entering a base. The military can pretty much do as they please. A right which they exercise excessively at times. While searching her room, the authorities found a package with over fifteen thousand dollars in fifty, twenty, and ten dollar bills. They also found several boxes of condoms. This gal had only been there for ninety days.

It took a while for the Army to finish its investigation on the young woman and her consort. A friend of mine was part of the investigation team. “Dave, she confessed everything. The girl actually advertised through her customers. Word of mouth. She would leave a sock outside her door. If the sock was on the door, she was busy with someone. No sock and you knocked, walked in, and handed her fifty bucks. She was doing everyone. Marines, soldiers, enlisted, officers, contractors. If you could come up with fifty bucks, it was on. They said that there were lines outside her door all the time. How in the hell did that go on for three months with no one noticing?”

“Well, brother, think about it. General Order #1 prohibits sexual intercourse in Afghanistan. Yet, the PX is always stocked with condoms. Someone was happy about condom sales. There’s no way that her chain of command was completely in the dark about all of this.”

“I agree. But whether they knew or not, the chain of command deserves to be relieved. I’m sure it’ll be swept under the rug, though.”

“I don’t doubt it. Can’t ruin an officer’s career over some enlisted scum now can we?” I laughed.

Other sex incidents popped up across Afghanistan throughout my time there. The Army deals with these things as they’re discovered but can’t seem to stomp out prostitution. For instance, when I was at another base a couple of years later in Kabul I had started getting weekly massages at the beauty salon there. I always got the same girl because the others were too brutal with their trade. In mid-August, I showed up and my girl wasn’t there. So I asked Roxanne, the manager, where she was. Roxanne said to me that she had to send her home. When I asked why, she wouldn’t say.

Later that day, I found out what happened. About two weeks earlier, there was a Chlamydia epidemic. A soldier returning from his mid-tour had caught Chlamydia back in the States. He went to the medical station to get it fixed. A few days later, a couple of guys came in with the same problem. Later, still more soldiers showed up at the aid station with STDs. Then the girls started showing up. All of them had Chlamydia. I think they may have had gonorrhea as well.

The Army investigated the mini-outbreak and discovered that the girls who worked at the beauty salon were prostituting. I don’t know how many girls were involved or what they were charging but it was all going well until that one guy brought back his bag of STDs and passed them on to one of the girls. It spread like wildfire from that point.

Apparently, none of these guys or gals had discovered the benefits of condoms. The guys who came in for STDs were all disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). But I’m sure that there were more involved. The girls were all sent back home. The beauty salon hired new girls and business went back to normal.

After that incident, the Army made the beauty salon girls move off base. AAFES moved them to a safe house downtown in Kabul. No massage girls or barbers lived on any of the Kabul area bases after that.

Camp Cupcake—The Easy Life

March–December 2005

In the spring, KBR moved me up to Camp Eggers to be team chief. I took over the Property Book Office from Sergeant First Class Wright, who was a septuagenarian that had been retired for over a decade when OEF kicked off. Believing that they were short of manpower, the Army began randomly recalling retirees. SFC Wright was given a choice: deploy to Afghanistan or lose your retirement benefits. Within the month, he was on a plane. When he arrived in Afghanistan, he was assigned to the Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan (CFC-A), which was the overall command of the U.S.-led coalition and was also responsible for training the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. Unfortunately, CFC-A was not expecting Wright. They didn’t have a position for him. He spent a year deployed in Afghanistan doing busy work. The Army interrupted this grandfather’s life, so that he could sit around doing nothing for twelve months in Afghanistan. SFC Wright was far from the only one to be jerked around like this to “fight” the Global War on Terror. I would estimate that 10 to 20 percent of the folks in Afghanistan were likewise sitting on their thumbs and counting the days until end of deployment. They got shiny medals out of it, plus some useful VA benefits, so I guess it wasn’t a total waste of their time.

Camp Eggers was a different animal than other camps in Afghanistan. It had always been the headquarters for the effort in Afghanistan and is dead center of what’s now called the Kabul Base Cluster. It was here that the generals, who ran the show, worked. Eggers was less than half a mile from the U.S. Embassy. Karzai’s presidential palace was a stone’s throw away. ISAF headquarters was a couple hundred feet from the main gate. There’s more brass per square meter at Eggers than anywhere outside of the Pentagon, which made it a dog-and-pony show magnet.

Eggers actually looked like a neighborhood back in the States that the military had beefed up with gun emplacements, guard towers, and Hesco barriers. The only road in Eggers was a tree-lined street called Gator Alley. The camp was full of small villas. Some high-ranking person decided that instead of numbering the villas, he’d name them. There was Rose House that got its name from a guy killed by the Taliban. Alamo House was named by a Texas unit that had been stationed at Eggers when it first opened, while Goat House had a bit of an odd story. When the Army first moved into the area that would become Eggers, they had to clear many of the houses of rubble and debris. In one building, a goat carcass was found in the debris. Whoever was in charge of building designations had a sense of humor and decided that Goat House would be a great name. That building became the home of the commanding general of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan. The most powerful man in Afghanistan was put in Goat House. He lived on the top floor. The bottom floor was one of the Eggers dining facilities.

Eggers was rarely attacked. I can’t remember a direct attack the whole time that I was there. The only incident that I can recall occurred about a week or so after I arrived. The security forces (SECFOR) discovered a bomb attached to one of the trucks that was delivering fuel to the camp. It was quickly disposed of by the Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal crew. An exploding fuel truck would have left a mark.

Aside from the occasional improvised explosive device laid about in the general vicinity, Camp Eggers was relatively unscathed by the war in Afghanistan. At the time, traffic jams were common right outside the two main Eggers points of entry. But I always wondered about both gates. They were excellent points for suicide bomb attacks, especially a well-placed, vehicle-borne improvised device of some sort. Even so, it was years before attacks were attempted directly on Camp Eggers. By that time, the street leading to Eggers were blocked to all traffic except Coalition or Afghan officialdom.

Karzai’s palace compound was practically on top of Camp Eggers and was relatively easily accessed. I drove by it a time or two on my way to Camp Phoenix. There was a small security checkpoint through which one passed to access the palace, but the guards were lax (sometimes sleeping!) and barely acknowledged us as we passed. It would have been nothing for a disciplined and well-planned attack force to have taken those guards out and to have proceeded on to attack the palace.

In those days, though, no one seemed all that worried about an attack. We were Camp Cupcake ensconced in the middle of a war that we barely acknowledged in our quest to produce mountains of PowerPoint slides and to kill our days at the Green Bean slurping down extra large mochas, lattes, and strawberry smoothies, and then working it all off in the gym that night.

Despite the leisure my KBR promotion afforded me, sometime in August 2005, I started talking to Mantech Inc. about a position on the Property Book Operations Sustainment and Support (PBOSS) contract. The Army had created a new accounting system for the Iraq and Afghan theaters of operation. The command in Afghanistan was authorized by the Department of the Army to retain war materiel for theater operations. Any equipment that was designated “theater provided equipment” (TPE) would be left in Afghanistan as units rotated home. All equipment purchased with funds budgeted by Congress for OEF would be retained in theater. Mantech won that contract and offered me a position as a master supply technician. My time with KBR had come to an end.

* * *

In September, I flew into Alexandria, Virginia on a bright, sunny fall Sunday morning and showed up at Mantech headquarters with hair down to my shoulders and a three-inch beard, which I had grown while working at KBR. I probably looked like a drugged-out hippy to the executives at Mantech. There were a few other new hires with me that morning. Jim Carrel, the incoming program manager who was a retired Marine Corps sergeant major, was new to Army logistics. He proved to be fairly clueless but he was a nice guy. Dorian, who had also jumped ship from KBR, was there as well. I felt much better when I met Mark. A retired Special Forces master sergeant, he had hair almost as long as mine and a beard that was a little longer.

We spent two days in-processing at Alexandria. Then they sent us to CRC (CONUS Replacement Center) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Benning was the Army base where infantry were trained. It probably hadn’t changed much since World War II. The CRC cadre stuck us in old Vietnam-era barracks out in the middle of nowhere. The CRC was a fenced-in compound with twenty barracks, a small Post Exchange annex, a dining facility, and a Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facility. There were also a few smaller classrooms, a chapel for the religiously inclined, and the cadre offices. The place reminded me of Stalag 13. We were required to attend 0500hrs and 1700hrs formations each day.

“Formations are mandatory. If you miss more than two formations, you will be dismissed. Soldiers will be sent back to their units for action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Contractors! You will be dismissed. If your company likes you, they might send you back. If not, it’s the unemployment line.” I hated formations when I was in the Army and I hated them at CRC. We also had a series of mandatory classes such as country familiarization, first aid, unexploded ordnance, and mine identification. The CRC cadre marched us up to a training area for these classes, which lasted from 0600hrs to 1600hrs over the course of two days. The instructors were mostly cool, old, retired, senior non-coms. The classes were useful especially for those who had never been in the military or first time deployers to OEF and OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom).

You’d be surprised the amount of stupid shit that people will do in Afghanistan. “Hey look! An unexploded mortar round. Let’s play catch with it!” I’ve seen people do it. I always ran the other way. We also had mandatory computer training on sexual harassment, rape prevention, fraud, waste and abuse, and a whole array of other useless information.