Kandahar

Starting another embed involves moving sometimes accross the country on mujltiple flights taking days, Saturday’s move to our next embed was a simple matter of being picked from our hooch/bunkhouse/room driving five minutes across the airfield base and turning into another camp, within a base.

Now not all room are created equal and our room was basically a 10 x 8 feet (not meters or yards) plywood box, in a building that must of been built around Sept 12th 2001. These were without doubt the oldest buildings I had come across at Kandahar. within the block there are 6 identical plywood boxes, no windows but a plywood square over a hole cut in the wall.

Sparsely decorated is a way to describe the bunk bed and nailed up table in the corner. For Greg and I it was easier if either one of us wanted to get anything out of a box or bag for the other to step out of the suite. After Greg had lost the pick which hand the bullet is in as to who gets the bottom bunk in Khost a couple of weeks ago. He immediately grabbed the bottom bunk, the only thing he forgot was that the only heater in the room was directly above the top bunk, effectively he had chosen the coldest spot in the whole Gitmo cell with a cold breeze coming in through gaps in the plywood.

By 4:30 am, he could stand it no more and asked to change bunks a i was lying there with barely my sleeping bag on. Given that any movement on the top bunk made enough noise to wake the dead, we swopped over. I barely noticed the cold and slept for a few more hours.

Come 7 am I wanted to get a run in before the day started and we were to move to another province with the embed. Closing the door to the Gitmo cell i put the latch across as i did not want to let the door swing open and cold air in the cell.
50 minutes later getting back from my run the door is till closed, I open it to find Greg there cross legged holding up a water bottle that is green in color. I had by mistake locked him in the cell and the call of nature in the morning had found him a prisoner.

So another night was over and if anything a funny start to another day in the war zone.