Update 2

Part 2 of the wildly popular Updates From An Afghan Hospital begins now. I have had two cups of very strong coffee, chock full of a carcinogenic sweetener. I am raring to write.

Things have been slowly improving here. That's one of those statements that makes me want to knock on wood, but it has been. I think that part of the problem was that there was a Relief In Place (RIP) happening. RIPs are when a group of service members leave and their replacements come in behind them. They happen periodically, as one group's tour is up. The enemy, Al Quaeda, Taliban, whatever, know when this happens and know that the incoming personnel are less comprehensively competent, due to lack of experience, and the out-going personnel are eager to be gone and therefore more cavalier. And they ramp up their efforts in order to exploit this weakness. In the case of this last RIP, it worked a treat for them. It sucked for everyone here, though. It's hard to know how graphic to get in an e-mail like this. I want to tell the truth, but I don't want to break anyone's heart or gross anyone out. So, that's a full-on spoiler alert, the next sentence is for those of strong constitution. I will change the font color, and you will have to highlight it to see what I have to say next. Please don't, if you don't want to see something sad. My friend Cahill, who will get several mentions in this e-mail, came into the tent the other day and said. "I saw my first mutilated fetus today. The woman was blown apart and the fetus was just in pieces." I choked up and just... it's hard to know what to say, you know? But that's the sort of thing we see here. Obviously, that was a local Afghan woman. And she did not survive.

Wow, that's difficult to do. I have never experimented with that sort of trickery in HTML before and it is really kind of hard to not mess up.

Anyways, this e-mail is only a week after the last and there hasn't been that much that happened, so you'll probably get more musings and fewer stories, though I do have some pretty good stories, too.

The first one I would like to call, How Owen Got Lost in Something Like No-Man's Land, While Driving a Bus.

The vehicles here have the steering wheel on the British, right-hand-side, but you drive on the American, right-hand side. I remember Tom saying once, when I was younger, that this sounded like a sensible way to drive, since it would mean that you could better hug the berm. Well, Tom, you were talking out of your hat. I have now tried this eccentric method of driving and it is not at all what you made it out to be. As I described previously, the ditches here are basically sledding hills made from a crumbling flour. Hugging this berm is something like Russian Roulette. Camp Bastion is located to the East of Camp Leatherneck. Camp Leatherneck is the big base, the US Marine base, that is where the good food is, the Marine PX, where you can buy things that an American might want, and the Post Office. I was told that it is also where the fuel pumps are, but I am getting ahead of myself. When we arrived here I was put in charge of the 3 vehicles that belong to the Americans. We have 2 SUVs, Toyota HILUX. One is very nice and the other is pretty ratty. On the other hand, even the ratty one is the lap of luxury compared to the 24 passenger bus we have. This thing seems like it was built by a Soviet car company. I think that it is a refurbished AvtoVAZ. We're lucky it runs at all. It has not suspension, no steering, no brakes. It is basically a poorly built rocket. It is used whenever there is a training that takes place outside of the hospital, for food runs and general transport purposes. I think that the reasoning is, "We're in a war-zone, if this bus kills everyone, their families are already prepared." Seriously, it is an unsafe vehicle.

On Monday morning there was a note for me: "Pitrone, put gas in the bus. The pumps are on Leatherneck." So, after my shift I took the keys, started the bus, which I forgot to mention is a manual transmission, so you shift with your left hand, and went to go to Leatherneck. Well, there is construction happening. There is always construction happening. (It is like Cleveland road conditions, in this sense.) There is always something closed off. In this case it was the straight-forward route to Leatherneck. So, I started my drive, saw that the only way I knew was blocked, and then as I re-routed, I picked up a couple of British soldiers. Now, this might seem foolish. In fact, it was probably VERY foolish. They were obviously standing where the road was closed, trying to figure out how to get to Leatherneck, so I figured we'd pool our confusion and lack of information. We started driving around the base, in the direction opposite to that which would normally take us to Camp L.

I was pretty sure that I kind of knew the right way, but I was very much guessing. When I saw a couple trucks take a right, I followed them. The British guys said they thought that I wasn't going the right way. I told them that if we passed a machine gun nest to holler, as it would mean we were now outside "The Wire" and probably going to die. They agreed to mention it.

I followed the trucks up the road, took the next right, as it was a one-way, and then found myself in what looked an awful lot like open desert. There were tracks, but the trucks had easily out-distanced us. I started bouncing the bus over dunes. I was biting my lip pretty hard, not really sure where we were, if what we were doing was legal, or if we were in a mine-field. I probably can't describe this situation adequately, on the one hand, I was pretty sure were still on base. We hadn't crossed any Entry Control Points, that I noticed. But we were definitely on a built up part of the base. So who knows where we were? We were in between two huge concrete walls, but only in the sense that there were walls visible on the horizon. Seriously, it felt like driving across the DMZ, if the DMZ were somehow transported to Afghanistan. (And that would be a real shock for everyone.)

I kept thinking that the bus would break down and I would have to call for a tow in the middle of nowhere. I told the British guys, who were kind of freaking out, that if we got stopped by the MPs that they should say I had kidnapped them. No sense in all of us going to the brig, right? The British guys were really freaking out, and while I was trying to pretend I wasn't, I was freaking out too.

We finally saw a line of traffic, across what would have been a bridge if it had any kind of structure, really more of a couple of concrete pads over ditch. I bit my lip, tossed up a prayer and gunned it across the makeshift platform. We survived and I joined the line of traffic, safely on Leatherneck. It wasn't until 45 minutes of driving, dropping of Brits and swearing that I finally found out that the gas station was on Bastion. I went back and waited in line for another hour. I didn't get to bed till afternoon.

Anyone who has ever driven with me before will appreciate this story. It is all Owen-driving condensed into one anecdote. Dangerous, stupid, foolhardy and oddly lucky. Why they put me in charge of the vehicles is a mystery.

So that was pretty good. Other than that it has been a pretty quiet week. The number of casualties has dropped radically. The RIP is over, people are settling into routines and everyone is getting to know their jobs well enough that there are fewer explosions. Plus it is getting cold, and since the Afghans are seasonal fighters, we have a break. We had our first big rain storm the other day, which is not as nice as you'd think. That dust just turns to mud. It gets pretty rotten. And that's what we have to look forward for the whole winter.

Here's a story, my buddy Cahill told this one the other day, and it is a good scary story. He was in Iraq, a couple of years ago. He worked at a base, with the Marines, he was a line corpsman, Role 1. They had taken this school that was far enough from the base that it became an outpost. They would send teams there, one team every 12 hours, to keep watch. The school was small, one room with a foyer. The machine gun nest was on the roof and three of the guys would go up there, the stairs were off the front of the building, while two guys would stay in the foyer. Behind the foyer was a school room, full of those desk/chair combos. There was also a back door. In order to ensure that no one could get into the place from the rear, they randomly tossed/stacked the desk/chairs against the back door. That way anyone trying to come in would cause a massive chair-slide, they'd hear it and run in firing. So Cahill and one of his buddies is in the foyer, the other guys are on the roof, and all of a sudden there is a gust of wind from the back room. Cahill and his buddy start to freak out, because that means the back door must be open. So they run back, weapons at the ready, and the back door is closed, but the chairs are set up perfectly, for a class. Rows of chairs, no explanation. The chairs were stacked in such a way that moving one would cause a slide, but there was no sound. They called up to the roof and got the Staff Sergeant, who said, "Why did you take the chair stack apart?" They said, "We didn't." There was no explanation. Cahill said that he was really, really freaked out and that while they were only in that area for another couple weeks, he made sure he never went back to that school.

Anyways, lots of days running together here. Strangely, when I say days, I mean nights.