Thursday, August 6th - Sunday, August 9th
Don’t talk about roughin’ it until you’ve spent a few days with Captain Bob Harris and his squad of Field Artillery soldiers at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Tora in the mountains above the Surobi Valley.
Mind you—FOB Tora is a French base. Yes, French. But before you get any ideas about red wine or fine cheese, you should know that this outpost of the famed French Foreign Legion is no Parisian arrondissement. Instead, it’s a flat spot on top of a rocky mountain, commanding a 360-degree view of the surrounding sandy moonscape. The American corner of the base consists of two “Alaskan Tents,” a storage container, some HUMVEEs, and a flagpole. But for Captain Harris and his soldiers, it’s home.
The handful of troops based here hail mostly from coastal Georgia—primarily the armories in Springfield and Savannah—though there was an Atlanta-area soldier in the group during my short visit. The soldiers comprise a PMT—a Police Mentoring team—tasked with helping the Surobi Valley Precinct of the Afghan National Police force (ANP). Says Captain Harris, “We don’t teach them how to be police officers—we teach them how to run an operations center: how to account for their people and their weapons, how to plan patrol schedules—and then when there are operations that include the coalition forces, how to plan and prepare for those." Recently, when the Georgia soldiers found themselves embroiled in a fierce firefight with Taliban insurgents in the area, their ANP cohorts held up their end of the battle, proving themselves to be ferocious fighters. Adds Harris, “Do they know how to fight? Yes. Are they as efficient as coalition forces? Not yet, but they’re getting there.”
On my second day at FOB Tora, we piled into the squad’s HUMVEESs and went further out into the wilderness, bedding down for the night at the ANP substation in the Uzbin Valley, a place known for Taliban activity. The soldiers parked their HUMVEEs in a square, and spread out cots in the middle. As a full moon rose over a distant hilltop, we fell asleep beneath a curtain of stars and the silhouettes of turret guns atop the vehicles. Not less than half an hour after I closed my eyes, we heard a loud thud, and the sky turned a dark orange. “Mortar!” yelled one soldier. “What are you waiting for? Get under the HUMVEEs!” yelled another. A few of us were already sprawled out in the sand before we realized the mortar fire was outbound rather than inbound—an illumination round fired by friendly forces nearby. The barrage continued for a couple of hours—lending a very “Apocalypse Now” feeling to the entire evening.
Around 04:30 the next morning, we rolled out with the ANP—the latter riding in the beds of their signature dark green Ford Ranger pickups, AK-47s in their hands and long, checked scarves wrapped around their heads, with just a slit left for their eyes, to keep out the dust. We joined up with a large French convoy—roughly 100 vehicles with more than three times that many Legionnaires inside—and proceeded to a nearby mountaintop. With US and French military helicopters buzzing overhead and the noise of a fighter jet high above, the French vehicles formed a sprawling perimeter around the hilltop, with the ANP and our small squad on the inside. Captain Harris and a French Battalion commander—in charge of the entire French force—walked down the hill to the nearby village and brought the local men back up the hill for a short Shura, or meeting, to discuss coalition efforts to secure the village and bring in medical help and education for the children. It was an odd scene—the village men arranged in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground, with the colonel’s heavily-armed body guard forming a looser, outward-facing ring on the outside. As the colonel spoke in bursts of French, a “terp” (interpreter) conveyed his words in the local Dari, while Captain Harris’ terp repeated the conversation in whispered English.
I accompanied the soldiers back to Camp Phoenix this morning—a run they make on a semi-regular basis to obtain supplies and perform maintenance on their vehicles. It took us more than three hours to complete the roughly fifty-mile trip through the deep gorges and switchback turns of the Kabul-Jalabad Highway, one of just a handful of paved highways in the entire nation. Several of the soldiers dismounted to help direct traffic and clear a massive jam. The source of the trouble turned out to be not a wreck or a broken-down vehicle, but instead large numbers of impatient Afghan drivers who attempted to pass slow-moving vehicles and turn a two-lane road into four or five lanes. It makes you wonder if we need to create TMT’s (Traffic Mentoring Teams) as well.
I’ll spend the next couple of days here at Camp Phoenix before heading out Tuesday morning to Camp Blackhorse, another base nearby where there are members of Bravo Company, 2/121st Infantry Battalion from Newnan, Georgia, as well as other 48th Brigade soldiers.
