Posted on 09/28/2010 2:34:36 AM PDT by Palter
My eyes broke through the dried crust between my lashes. I was freezing, curled in the fetal position on my cot with an Army-issue sleeping bag wrapped around my body. I didn’t know where I was. I had never woken up here before. I tried to gain a sense of my surroundings using only my peripheral vision.
The room was dark and damp. I looked at the indigo light on my digital watch. 0608. Where was I? …
“Gah!” I shuddered like a little girl as a fat drop of arctic water fell on my face from the leaking roof. It was enough to purge me from any further attempt at sleep, and an ample reminder that, “Oh yeah…I live with the Afghan National Army now.”
The Afghan Army’s Combat Operating Post (COP) is about the size of a football field. Large puddles of stagnant water cover the dirt terrain of Kandahar Province. On each corner of the complex there are guard towers riddled with shrapnel and spotted with machine-gun fire from previous fighting seasons. On the north and west flanks of the compound are empty dirt fields encompassed within separate barriers. It was October 2009, and these fields were where our unit would soon make our home.
I’ve never built a room before, much less been responsible for building a whole outpost. The only thing I’ve really ever built in my life was a few bookshelves for my Eagle Scout project back in high school … and even then, I didn’t do most of the work.
The good news was that I had a first sergeant with some seven-odd deployments under his belt and a strong vision for the COP.
(Excerpt) Read more at atwar.blogs.nytimes.com ...
This one in particular, stands out:
If it were other than the NYT, I would. But I won’t.
I won’t soil my browser with it. Thanks for posting the excerpt.
This peckerwood is an Lt.?
Damkn...just damn.
Waterboarding our troops is now okay??????
A lieutenant waking up at 0608 at a combat outpost is also not very inspiring. This fellow should perhaps find a new line of work.
LLS
From the sound of it, the 1stSgt. may have given the word to let this REMF sleep...anything to keep him out of the way.
A lieutenant waking up at 0608 at a combat outpost is also not very inspiring. This fellow should perhaps find a new line of work.
Not only that but he thinks he's in the Arctic. I guess they don't have to learn to read maps anymore...
LOL!
Really, though, any person in the military who is somehow tied into the NYT in any way, experiences, info, anything, has an issue.
The NYT is not a friend or even impartial observer of military matters. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING will be used to a purpose not of the military, no matter how innocuous.
Think of them as Rolling Stone with a wider distribution.
Read the article on Khafka that is linked on this page. Far more interesting. The writer (his name is Elif Batuman) is pretty good.
I completely agree with you. The slimes is just plain evil.
LLS
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