I drove into town the next morning to pick up supplies for the horses and my dog, Tor Spay (which means “black dog” in Pashtu), who was due to arrive within the next 24 hours.  But first I hit Starbucks, aka “Fivebucks,” so that I could check my email.  I paused at the entrance because every single person in the place was staring into a smart phone, which really creeps me out.  Seems to me every zombie movie worth a damn portrays them with glazed over eyes, oblivious to everything around them.  When life starts imitating zombie flicks, it should give us all pause.  Anyway, I cracked on, got my $5 cup of coffee, and set up at a little table in the corner with my back to the wall so I could keep an eye on the smart phone zombies just in case they got bored with their devices and turned their hungry attention to me.

I had an email in my inbox from Yahya Afridi, saying my dog should be delivered that day, Inshallah.  Tor Spay was my best friend and sometimes only companion when I was working out in East Butt Fuck Afghanistan.  That dog had my back like none other.  I knew I had to find a way to bring him home with me after he almost chewed the nuts off a local Afghan that made the mistake of throwing a rock at me just outside the FOB.

So, in high spirits, I spent the morning shopping and the afternoon mucking out the horse stalls.  A freakishly large snow storm was apparently heading our way and by late afternoon as I headed back to town to pick up some odds and ends, big, thick, wet flakes had started piling up in my yard.  I was elated to see a large dog crate sitting on my back porch when I returned.  But my elation quickly turned to concern, as I didn’t hear Tor Spay’s distinctive welcoming bark as I approached the crate.  Peering in, I could see that there was indeed a black dog inside, but the hulking beast left snoring on my front porch certainly wasn’t my Tor Spay.

I figured there had been some mistake.  They must have gotten the dog crates mixed up at the airport or something.  But there was no paperwork attached to the crate, no stamps or markings of any kind, which I thought strange.  The dog inside stirred, woke up, and gave a bit of a whine, so I opened the door, and out stepped the biggest Kuchi fighting dog I have ever seen.  In Afghanistan, the dogs that accompany the nomadic Kuchi people are legendary for their size and strength, making them much sought after as fighting dogs.  I could tell this one had been a fighting dog because his ears had been cut off, tail bobbed, and he had scars all over his muzzle and head.  The Afghans cut the ears and tails off fighting dogs so that the other dogs can’t use those appendages as leverage during a fight.  He must have seen a lot of time in the rings, as he was the oldest, ugliest, most beat up dog I’ve ever seen.  Have you ever seen a dog without ears?  It ain’t a pretty site.  Despite their fierce reputations, Kuchi dogs can be sweet and docile and this one seemed quite friendly, as I scratched him where his ears used to be.  I gave him some water and noted that he was missing a few incisors and his upper left canine.  Both his lower canine teeth seemed to be made out of cheap, dull steel.

At this point though, I was confused and starting to get pissed off.  As I watched the Kuchi dog devour several bowls of food and lap up about a gallon of water, his arrival was seeming less and less like a mistake the longer I thought about it.  There couldn’t be a lot of people in the state of Washington importing washed up Afghan fighting dogs.  I started to have the sneaking suspicion that Yahya had fucked the whole thing up and sent me the wrong dog.

After finishing his food and water, the Kuchi dog trotted past me into the house and proceeded to take a huge crap on the Afghan rug I had just unpacked.  He walked nonchalantly past me back to the porch, sat down, and started howling.

I could not believe it; I looked at the mess on my rug, out the window at the howling Kuchi dog, back at the carpet and did what any sane man would do, I popped open a beer.  Then I cleaned up the rug and got my burner out to give Yahya his “what the fuck?” phone call.

I cut straight to the chase, skipping the usual Afghan formalities of asking, “How’s your family? “How’s your health, yadda yadda.”

“Yahya, what the hell have you done with my Tor Spay?”

Given the time difference, I must have woken him up, as he sounded groggy and confused at first.  But I didn’t care, I needed to get this straightened out.

“Oh, Dalton, yes, hello my friend.  You got the dog today, yes?”

“I got a dog not my dog.  Where the fuck is Tor Spay, Yahya?”

“Dalton, Dalton my friend, I…I couldn’t send you Tor Spay.”

“Yahya,” I spluttered, “what do you mean?  You told me everything was good to go with the dog last week!  What is this fucking dog you sent me?”

He sounded hurt by my harsh tone.

“Dalton, please don’t worry, my friend, you got a very good dog.  I couldn’t send you Tor Spay so you got Tor Spay’s plar; a very famous champion.”

Yahya went on to explain that he had sent Tor Spay’s plar (father) to see if he could actually make it through customs, because my dog was a “special dog” and he didn’t want to risk sending him without first knowing if he could get a dog into America without it getting confiscated.  This was complete bullshit, as Yahya and I had discussed in detail the process for getting a dog sent from Pakistan to the U.S., and I had paid him $5,000.00 to cover all the costs of immunizations, quarantining, etc.  So, I asked him when my dog would arrive and was told it would cost another $5,000.00 for that to happen.  I told Yahya he was either going to send me Tor Spay, or I’d be on a plane to Pakistan next week to rescue my dog and knee cap him.  Threatening to kill him would be culturally tone deaf, as hill Pashtun are not afraid of dying, but they are terrified of being crippled.  He laughed and said there was no way I could get a visa.  I countered with a threat to put him on the JPEL and he laughed again saying the CIA could no longer fly drones into Pakistan, and besides how would I put him on any list when I didn’t even work for the government?

He thought I was joking about knee capping him.  I wasn’t.  Because I love that dog more than anything, otherwise I would not have spent $5,000.00 to have him shipped over.  Yayha assured me that he was still my good and best friend and that he could send Tor Spay back, if I gave him the freight money, but it would still be a difficult task because Tor Spay was now in the Miranshaw dog ludus.

I asked if a ludus was what I thought it was and yes, of course it was.  All Yahya’s uncles had seen Spartacus and with gladiators on the brain, they decided to turn their dog fighting operations into a professional dog ludus.  Yahya said that now they even brand the dogs that completed training with their own special logo.  He was about to receive another string of foul language and meaningless threats for branding my dog when my cell died.

The snow really started coming down at that point and the Kuchi dog was still howling away.  As I stepped onto the deck in an attempt to get him to shut up and come inside, the Kuchi dog stopped howling long enough for me to hear howling somewhere off in the distance.  It sounded like wolves calling back and I, having spent countless hours watching Nat Geo  (it was that or fucking cricket) on TV in Afghanistan, was well aware of how dangerous large packs of carnivores can be.  You spend a year watching lions and tigers and bears tearing the ass out of cape buffalo or baby elephants and then tell me you wouldn’t be a little freaked out by the sound of a pack of wolves.  Then the power died before I could charge my phone and I thought to myself, how could this day get worse?

I walked down to the barn to check on my two feral horses.  Earlier they had indicated they would tolerate me as long as I didn’t try to brush them down.  Now they seemed super skittish, clearly they wanted to get out of the barn and they kept looking at me like I was stupid for hanging around.  I made sure all the other exterior stall doors were lashed tight against the storm.  As I stepped out of the barn, I saw the Kuchi dog jet past me.  Horrified, I watched him clear the fence like a show horse, shooting out into the rapidly darkening pasture without breaking stride.  Why in God’s name did I ever let him out of the crate?  I don’t have a lot of close neighbors, but I shuddered to think of what that Kuchi dog could do to livestock, other dogs, or God forbid, a child.

But before I had much time to contemplate the potential lawsuits I might be facing, I heard frantic yelping and the Kuchi dog once again cleared the fence, heading straight back towards me.  Following close on his heels was a big fucking wolf.  With both animals bearing down on me, I had barely enough time to react.  I reached into my back pocket for my spare tire and threw it at the wolf as hard as I could when he was maybe 5 feet away.  It exploded off his forehead in a spray of crappy lite beer, and with a yelp he did a hasty 180 and galloped off to the southeast, disappearing into the snowstorm.  But I heard howling in the distance and figured I’d better get inside quick before the whole pack showed up.

Kuchi dog and I headed inside; I locked the door, looked outside at the driving snow and caught my breath.  Despite having just gone head to head with an alpha predator, I smiled.  I had been home the better part of a week stumbling about in a self-induced funk trying to figure out what to do next with my life.  Now I knew what I had to do, at least in the short term: it looked like me and Kuchi dog just might have to to do battle with a wolf pack, who may have been drawn to my farm by my two smelly feral horses.  The pack probably wouldn’t be too happy that I had nailed one of their members in the head with a beer can.

Kuchi dog was clearly raring for a fight, pawing and scratching at the sliding glass door.  The power had come back on, so I went down to my basement to take inventory of our weapons in case the wolves came back.  My old lady had cleaned me out in the divorce, so my arsenal consisted only of a rusty garden rake, my old Marine Corps E-tool, and a heavy-duty staple gun, which I shunted aside, as it would be worthless on animals with a thick coat. I grabbed the E-tool and headed back upstairs.  I checked my cell phone, discovering that it was now partially charged, but I had no bars.  The storm was probably screwing with my reception, which was never great to begin with out at my place.  Then the power went out again.

And that’s when the pack showed up.  I heard one of them slam into the back patio doors before being answered with vicious snarling and barking from Kuchi dog, who was now going nuts trying to get out of the house.  Kuchi dog smelled a fight and even at his advanced age, the instinct to fight back hadn’t left him.  The snow was coming down hard, the sun had set, and the power was out, so it was pitch black inside the house and out.  I managed to find my wind-up flashlight and gave it a couple of cranks before casting its beam out through the patio doors.  I could barely make out what appeared to be a half dozen black shapes pacing back and forth in front of my porch.

I was on my own, with no reliable form of communication, no power, and possibly trapped at the farm; if the storm went on for long enough, it would be days before somebody with a chain saw could cut me out of the driveway.  To top it all off, I was now being stalked by a hungry pack of wolves.  With the odds stacked against me, what I needed was what the military calls a force enabler to even the playing field.  Traditional force enablers come in the form of sniper teams or D7 bulldozers, but I needed to get creative.  Kuchi dog was still going ape shit at the door as I popped another beer and sat down at the kitchen counter to think.  And then it hit me, I had force enablers, in the form of about 30 2mg Xanax tablets, at least two ounces of state-issued primo weed, and a whole bunch of ground beef that I had picked up at the grocery store that day.

Few things can energize a man more than coming up with a cunning scheme.  I got out the meat, went down to the basement for a dozen of those large plastic feed pails the old lady never got around to recycling, and recovered the Xanax and dope.  I rolled up all 30 pills inside balls of hamburger, cut down the pails with my trusty Emerson CQ7 folder, put my high-speed speed E-tool in the corner and climbed into my brand new sleeping bag to wait the storm out.  If the wolves were still there in the morning, I had a plan.

I immediately feel into a deep and dreamless sleep.  The Kuchi dog woke me up before dawn.  The snow had stopped and it was quiet as a grave outside.  But then I heard it, the long, eerie wolf call I’d been dreading.  The pack was still outside somewhere, but at least they were no longer on my front porch.

The dog and I swung into action.  I cautiously opened the door and let Kuchi dog go scout the yard for me before carrying the feed buckets, and bait down to the barn.  We both went back for the Bud lite and my E tool.  I set the feed buckets in pairs around the three sides of the barn that were fenced in.  One bucket had the laced meatballs and the other was full of bud lite with reefer from the state dope clinic thrown in for good measure.  After tying up the Kuchi dog, I checked the area with binos from up in the hayloft.  I couldn’t see any wolves, so I trudged up to the house to get my new gas grill, hauled that inside the barn, fired it up and started cooking a giant rib eye steak for Kuchi dog and I.  If those damn wolves were still around, the smell would hopefully bring them right into my chemical ambush.

The dog made short work of his steak and was lying out of the floor of the hayloft, gumming the steak bone with what was left of his teeth, when I heard the wolves.  I spotted them trotting towards us from down wind.  As they drew closer, the Kuchi dog started barking savagely and straining at his tether.  I counted four wolves and they were all big, healthy-looking specimens.  I remembered once reading a Russian detective novel Wolves Eat Dogs and glanced over at the Kuchi dog just in time to see him disappear down the hayloft steps, trailing a frayed rope behind him.  I grabbed my E-tool and followed.

The horses were now making a ruckus as the wolves closed in and went right for the bait.  The alpha male hogged the food and beer closest to the southern side and the other three spread out and started in on the others around the barn.  I figured Kuchi dog and I would just sit there and wait till the wolves either buggered off after their feed or passed out from the tainted meat.  But I’d forgotten that you can’t keep a good fighting dog down, and Kuchi dog had other plans for those wolves.  He jumped over one of the empty stall doors, hit the outer door latch with his right paw, and having broken free of the barn, went after the lead wolf like a rocket.

The Kuchi dog, in his haste to get at the wolf had failed to give my chemical ambush a chance to work and the big wolf seemed to have all his senses when Kuchi dog attacked.  But there was no turning back now and the battle was on, my good Kuchi dog versus the evil wolf.  Despite being slightly smaller than the wolf, it looked like the old Kuchi dog was kicking the wolf’s ass but what do I know about dogfights? All I could see was a lot of flying fur and flashes of teeth.  Although Kuchi dog was holding his own, I knew the rest of the pack would soon join the fight, so I prepared to do what I could to help him out.  I locked the E tool into the 90-degree configuration and raised the shovel over my head.  I charged the wolf and threw all my 225 lbs into a downward swing that I was sure would decapitate that damn wolf.   In the split second before the shovel hit the wolf, I heard that little fucking devil voice in my head say, “hey, isn’t that shovel broken?” But it was too late.  The broken locking mechanism had failed in mid- swing; the flat of the shovel hit the wolf right on top of his thick wool-covered skull.  It bounced off the wolf and hit me square between the eyes.  I went out like a light.

I didn’t sleep well on my third night home.  I gave up trying around 0500, made coffee and sat outside to watch the sunrise.  Just after 0800 the county sheriffs prowler climbed up the long gravel driveway and parked behind my rental.   The sheriff got out, about 6’3”, around my age, a little on the husky side, thinning blond hair, big friendly smile.  I liked him immediately.

“I’m from the government and here to help …you got another cup of coffee up there”?

“Sure, come on up “ I stuck my hand out and introduced myself.

“Ron Jackson, county sheriff, damn glad to meet you. Seen any zombies?

“Nope”

“How about psycho combat vets you seen any of them”?

“Not yet Sheriff, grab a seat and I’ll get us some coffee”.

We sat down on the back porch taking in the spectacular view of Mount Rainer.

“So Dalton, are you aware that physicians are obligated to contact local law enforcement if they think their patients are a threat to themselves or those around them?”

“Nope, but I’ll take your word for it Sheriff”.

“Yesterday I get an email followed by a phone call from the doctor you saw and he tells me that a guy, who has been Afghanistan for 8 years, and been blown up over 15 times, came to see him for sleeping pills.”

“I haven’t been blown up over 15 times Sheriff, I’ve never been blown up”.

“I can see that Dalton, I’m trying to tell a story here”  He gave me a sidelong glance like I was irritating him, I smiled, it was like talking to an old friend.

“So I asked the doctor if he thought you were dangerous, and he sez ‘how can he not be? Over 15 IED’s, eight years of Afghanistan, it is, in my professional opinion, impossible for him not to be severely damaged’.  I asked if he detected anything that would give him the impression you were a ticking time bomb near the end of his fuse, and he said you seemed normal. But then added that you can’t be normal, but seem normal, and that’s abnormal, so he used the most aggressive state treatment protocol on you and contacted me as required.”

“Is that really the law Sheriff”?

“Not really Dalton, the doctor wanted to put you into the system as a potential severe PTSD or TBI candidate.  If you committed a crime then his notes could be factored into the prosecution, at least that is the intent of a ‘policy’ recently approved by the state.  But a random doctors diagnosis has no standing in court and I have no obligation to pay any attention to him.  What he doesn’t understand, and what I’ve been explaining to the state attorneys office for years now, is the consequences of a report like that coming up in a background check for a job interview of a returned vet who has no real issues is a huge law suite.   We’ve had zero problems with the few returning vets we have around here but you’re now the third report I’ve received from the same doctor.  If I paid attention to the dumb ass we would have records on computer files and computers files migrate, right?”

“I guess”

“Take my word for it Dalton, if you email a file it has migrated”.

“Am I in some sort of database now”?

“Oh hell no, I’d  never put a report like that on our computers, I shred  them.  Sheriff is an elected office in this county and I’m not about to expose the taxpayers to litigation we could never win.  They’d vote me out of office and I’d have to get a real job; who wants to do that at our age?  The doctor can kiss my ass, I’m the Sheriff around here and have an obligation to protect the public purse, and mine too for that matter cause I’m loaded.”

“No kidding, how did you get loaded”?

“The wife, raises horses and now heads the family ranch, the property has been in her family for generations. Most wives of law enforcement officers are concerned their husbands will get hurt on the job, mine is afraid I’ll get sued.”

“Don’t you receive some sort of immunity when acting in your official capacity as sheriff?”

“Are you a lawyer Dalton? You’re kinda screwing up my  story here. Tell me your story now because I forgot where I was”

I laughed out loud; and headed back to the kitchen for more coffee.  The Sheriff called after to me.

“Your horses look like shit.”

“I think they’re feral, they won’t let me near them”.

“They won’t what?  Won’t let you near them?  Where the hell you grow up New York City?”

“On military bases in the south mostly”.

“And they didn’t teach you how to take care of horses”.

“Why would they”?

“I don’t know, I always thought the army had horses.”

“I was in the Marines, so was my Dad.”

I walked back outside with two fresh cups of coffee; “Know what I was thinking about when you pulled up”?

“Tell me”

“The smell; it was reminding me of Afghanistan.”

“What smell”?

“The smell of cut hay and mown grass”

The sheriff just looked at me expectantly so I plunged in.

“I was working out of Jalalabad years ago as a regional supervisor for a Brit security company, and to be honest,  had very little to do.  I asked The Skipper if I could go on some calls with him.  The Skipper was a retired navy senior chief, an EOD tech by training, and the regional EOD mentor. He was able to go anywhere in the Eastern provinces because all the locals knew him and his team.  He had started his program back before the military started working off big box FOB’s and well before the Taliban started coming back.  I can hear him now talking to somebody at the Taj bar;  ‘all the local people know I move the boom, no questions asked, 24/7 so they let me go anywhere I’m called.  I know I have girlfriends on two continents and I’m a 50 year old fat man who needs for an unending supply of cash money so this job is a match made in heaven, the Taliban are going to provide me employment for life.’

“One morning we were poking along because The Skipper drove slow, really slow, I learned later that he went to church daily and was even more superstitious then a normal EOD guy, the slow driving was part of his ritual to keep bad luck at bay.”

“It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, blue skies, when suddenly his lead truck stops, we pull up next to it and open the doors to this overpowering smell of cut grass and shredded leaves.  The Afghans are out looking up and down the road, The Skipper looks over and says “IED”.

“What do you mean IED? It smells like somebody is mowing grass or hay.”

“Exactly, and somewhere near here are a bunch of trees with all their leaves blown off, close the door let’s drive down the road some and scope this out”.

“The road doglegged to the right crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair sized stream, now mostly dry, under a paved asphalt road.  The road was covered in a several inch carpet or leaves but there was no sign of a blast.  We get out of the trucks looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, a patrol from the Afghan army (ANA) pulls up with a bunch of villagers in the back of their pick ups.   They tell us there is a bomb in the culvert.  The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up and an elder points downstream and said ‘the man who put the bomb in the culvert, we don’t know him’.”

“The Skipper gets out one those fish eye mirrors you used for searching under vehicles and a large piece of angle iron with 90 degree bend at the end and  a surefire flashlight taped to it and gives it to his senior EOD tech.  The culvert is about four feet below the road and the stream bed five feet below that.  The EOD tech lays on his belly holds the mirror in front of the culvert while one of the other EOD men took charge of the light.   They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and I look and see it too; pressure cooker on vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap taped into the lid and wire running out of the pipe heading downstream.”

“The Skipper calls back to the FOB and describes what he found. The army tells him to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to come recover the IED.  The Skipper acknowledges but we both knew waiting for the army was a non starter.  They would take at least 8 hours to roll out and there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long.  There was a new Brigade rotation at the FOB and new command groups thought they actually had a say in what was happening outside the wire.

“We tape four bricks of C4 together, The Skipper wraps them in det cord, primes it, attaches about six feet of shot tube and hands it off to his head EOD tech.  The EOD team and some of the ANP troops tape the charge to a piece of cardboard and then tape the cardboard to a five gallon water jug they had some local kids take down the creek and top off.”

“The Afghans tie 550 cord to the water jug handle and lower it to the front of the culvert pipe, one of the local EOD techs is in the culvert making sure the charge is lined up correctly, He gives a thumbs up and scrambles up the bank, the head EOD guy looks a The Skipper who nods and puts on a set of high end hearing protectors.  I fish a old dirty pair of foam ear plugs out of my pocket, we’re sitting on deck chairs the Skipper carries around with him for just such an occasion.  The EOD guy looks over one more time to make sure the shot is lined up, takes a step back and shoots the charge.

The C4 goes off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow burning explosive so it doesn’t evaporate the water, it pushes it down the pipe at around 26,550 feet per second, the kinetic energy takes out the IED and the water renders the explosive components instantly safe.  A giant gush of water erupts out of the downstream end, arcs over the creek bed for about 200 feet and slamming into the trees like a wave. The water explodes up into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors that hung suspended in the air for a good 45 seconds.”

“There were hundreds of people from local villages and the stalled traffic watching us and they erupted in cheering and laughing and shouting.  Kids were dancing around in excitement; local men coming up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team.  The Skipper looks over with a big wide smile and says to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit Dalton”?

The Sheriff was laughing out loud, he looked at me; ‘No shit?  You were never in a firefight or got blown up or any of that?”

“Never, our job was to avoid drama, the way we were set up inside the local communities made doing that a no brainer.  I saw all kinds of IED’s go off but mostly because The Skipper let me tag along with him. The Taj guesthouse, where I was lived in Jbad, had a bar and pool; my two best buddies, who worked in the reconstruction biz, were living there too.  On Thursday nights there would be 40 or 50 internationals hanging at the bar, famous journalists, American and French SF teams, German NGO chicks, dozens of American NGO workers, grad students from Boston…  We had a full house staff, a great cook and my company had the guard contract and we were the best in the country. I loved being in Afghanistan and now I smell cut hay and think back to all cool shit we did and realize I’ll never be so alive or free again.”

“Now the Sheriff was roaring with laughter; ‘never be so alive and free again? Jesus Dalton you’re suffering from male menopause, you can go down to the Cougar Clinic and get some testostirone shots, fix you right up.  Never so alive again….that sounds gay dude.”

“Maybe I didn’t put that quite right.”

“I’m kidding Dalton I think I know what you mean….You could just drive around anywhere you pleased in Afghanistan”?

“We could drive most anywhere we wanted for years, but the South got bad in 07; the East started to go pear shaped in 09; we adapted as the security situation tanked by wearing local clothes, never speaking English outside the compound, driving in old beat up cars, but our freedom of movement steadily contracted and at some point each of us realized we weren’t really good, we were really lucky.  I got called back to Kabul at the end of 2010; the Ghost Team expanded for one final round of direct implementation so my two best buddies headed south to support that. The Skipper pulled out in 2010 too and by the end of 2011 all the outside the wire crews had called it a war and gone home.”

“I stopped giving my expat PSD teams ammo because we were reduced to operating inside a 2-mile box of downtown Kabul where armed internationals were unwelcomed and not needed.  We no longer controlled our destiny in Kabul or anywhere else in the country and you had to accept that fact if you were going to stay in the game.  I would have explained all this to the doctor yesterday but he was being such an asshole I didn’t feel like it”.

The Sheriff was looking over at me smiling like I was a long lost friend.  I was smiling too,  talking to him had been refreshing. He stood to leave.

“I’ll bring the wife by this weekend to look at your horses and I drink Bud light, so don’t be a social retard and not have any around when we show up. I can’t wait to tell her one of our neighbors spent years in Afghanistan cleaning storm culverts with C4 charges…who the hell would believe that”?  He paused on the steps and looked back.

“What did the doctor give you”?

“Xanax and a dope chit”.

“Xanax? Did you take any”?

“No, I hate being told what to do there is not a chance in hell I’ll take that crap now, I don’t care how tired I am.”

“Don’t try it – that shit is addicting, I can’t believe that asshole gave it to you, should be a law against that. How did you spend 20 years in the Corps if you don’t like being told what to do”?

“I was an officer”

“Probably a dick too, but you seem to have turned out OK.  Dalton, I’m going to enjoy having you around.”

It was a great start to my new life as a normal American.  It was hard to believe that in 72 hours I would be fighting rendition.

Cartman’s phone rings and I hear a feminine voice of an international reporter who I don’t know that well.

“Boss, she wants to know if Obama is coming to talk to Karzai.”

“Tell her it is a gross breach of etiquette for her to talk to an Afghan male who is not a member of her immediate family”.

“She said your blog sucks and to shut up because she’s not asking you”.

The question sure put what I was seeing in context.  The local cops don’t come out at night and cut roads unless something big is up.

It turns out the Commander in Chief was on the ground for a secret visit that obviously wasn’t too secret and one has to wonder if we might want to think of rebranding the Secret Service because they can’t keep a damn thing secret anymore.

The president was on the ground in Bagram Air Base pumping up the troops but (according to NPR) not spiking the ball again on the one-year anniversary of his“gutsy call” to send a crew of hardened sailors into Pakistan to whack OBL.  Recently the “gutsy call” of last year had been in the news…something about Mitt wouldn’t have made it and I guess there is a professional video of the VP making an ass out of himself describing how the “difficult” decision was made.  Mitt batted the sleazy allegations leveled at him out of the park and then the real story behind the decision to whack OBL came out and it looks to me like our POTUS came as close to voting “present” as is possible with a presidential finding.

Next thing you know we have a not so secret, secret visit where the Prez pumps up the troops and then last night sneaks into Kabul to ink a really, really, great deal with President Karzai.  But none of this had anything to do with the anniversary of killing OBL because the president said so himself .

The Taliban decided that, they too were not going to observe the one year anniversary of OBL’s demise by conducting another well planned, poorly executed, attack inside the Kabul “Ring of Steel” (my guys call it the Ring of Steal).  The tactics were standard; a VBIED at the gate, followed by a ground assault by gunmen disguised in burkas.  The target a bit ambitious, it’s called Green Village and is a privately owned FOB designed to provide ISAF level security.  The results were predictable, the attackers rapidly isolated, this time rapidly dispatched, their intended targets unscathed, a bunch of innocent civilians, mostly children, killed or injured.

Most international guesthouses in Afghanistan meet the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS) but Green Village far exceeds MOSS because its intended clientele is the US Government, not stingy tight wad NGO’s.  Opened in 2008 the place has never stopped growing, always at 100% occupancy it has great food, a decent gym, racquetball courts, a bar, pool, and all sorts of kiosks selling local goods and other stuff.  I don’t care for the place myself because its pre-fabricated, high-end feel combines everything that is wrong about our efforts and confines it in a small, artificially nice place.  We have called it menopause manor for years because of the unending stream of reporting, generated by the residents, saying the Taliban is targeting them.

This morning the Taliban were not able to talk their way past the gate guards so they blew their VBIED on the road at exactly the time when one would expect 200 to 300 school children to be walking by.

This is a picture from 2005 of kids waiting for their school bus on the corner of Jalalabad Road and the Green Village road. There are hundreds more children walking to schools along that road every morning now. At least one of those killed and many of the wounded today were school children.

The VBIED was followed up by three-man assault force who approached their objective wearing burkas, and started battling with the Serbs and Nepalese guards from the Green Village guard force.  At some point I guess they took the burkas off;  that would be weird for Taliban dudes to attack in burkas I would think. The optics would be all wrong.

Anyway, one of the three attackers blew himself up, another was gunned down and the third made it into the laundry building which is still well outside the blast walls of the main camp.   The Kabul PD Critical Response Unit took the last one out soon after arriving on the scene.  This was a typical Taliban attack – good planning, excellent operational security, poor execution coupled to a complete disregard for collateral damage.

The planning was pretty impressive because Green Village is the only privately run FOB in the country that houses ISAF contractors and troops.   It would be, by far, the easiest ISAF FOB in the country to attack; if you could sneak a battalion of infantry into Kabul.   One VBIED and three suicide bombers is not really an attack; it’s a statement.  Like the last attack in Kabul it was successful only because it happened.  The tactical failure of the assault force is, as always, irrelevant.

Here are, in my humble opinion, are the take-aways’ from this latest attack.

The President’s schedule was compromised to the mainstream media.  The planning for his visit was excellent; in around 2000 out by 0400; that scheduled allowed the downtown to be cleared and the President to meet with Karzai with minimal disruption to local residents.  But I knew he was coming before he arrived because the MSM phone call put what I was witnessing downtown into context.  It appears I wasn’t the only one in on the secret.

This dispatch came in from Taliban central on twitter today:

“Al Farouq” spring offensive will be launched on May 3 all over Afghanistan.”  The Taliban said the code name came from Islam’s second caliph, Omar al Farouq known for his military advances in Asia and the Arab world during the seventh century.

The announcement comes hours after Taliban insurgents armed with guns, suicide vests and a bomb-laden car attacked a heavily fortified compound used by Westerners in Kabul, killing seven people and wounding more than a dozen.

The militants claimed the attack in defiance of US President Barack Obama’s call that the war was ending during a visit to Afghanistan on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death on Wednesday.”

Did the Taliban launched one of their pre-planned attacks a day early because they discovered that Obama was in Kabul?  The attack happened two hours after the POTUS left and that means two hours after all the elite police units in the capitol went off duty after being up all night because he was here. That’s a pretty impressive reaction time by the Taliban and it demonstrates the danger of allowing administration operatives to leak details of Presidential trips to preferred members of the MSM.

The reaction to todays attack by the people inside Green Village was also impressive when compared to the attack on ISAF HQ last fall.  None of the residents, many of whom are EUPOL police officers or ISAF troops and therefore have weapons, ran out to the walls to start shooting wildly in the general direction of attack.  They let the guard force do its work which, I understand, is a drilled SOP at Green Village. This reinforces the point that there is nothing, not one damn thing, big government can do more efficiently and effectively than the private market and that includes repelling ineffective insurgent attacks on FOB’s hosting government troops.

The Afghans are hosed; the agreement Obama came into Kabul to sign last night is long on promises but short on specifics.  The level of funding for ANSF he is promising has to be approved every year by congress and what are the chances that they decide to cut it at some point in the future?

I am just not seeing how all this is going to end well

I went to the local family practice center for a few Ambien after being awake for the past three days.  I’ve been in Afghanistan for over eight years and had just left for good.  I had enough of that damn place and longed to be back in the states.  I wanted to be able to travel as I pleased, to no longer deal with police and army checkpoints, to no longer fear strangers would do me harm, to no longer carry badges and my passport just to go to the corner store.  I wanted the freedom that allowed me to carry a pistol, just because I wanted to, and best yet, I didn’t need to justify myself to anyone while exercising my constitutionally guaranteed rights.  I rented a car at the airport, arrived at my empty farm to find the house trashed and two feral horses in the south forty.  This wasn’t the way I had planned things when I took off almost a decade earlier to be a high-speed security operative.  I needed a few good nights sleep so I could figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I explained to the doctor I had been away for many years and the old lady had moved out months before after stripping the farm of all furniture and the bank account of all money.  I hadn’t slept in the three days it took me to get home and needed a little help to get back on schedule.  I had stopped in Denver to tell my son face to face I wasn’t sure how I’d pay his college tuition next year and that went well but I still needed to string a few good nights of sleep together so I could figure out what to do next.

The doctor seemed like a decent guy, my age, fit, hyper focused, a good listener and all that.

“Dalton we have a protocol we have to follow for combat vets like you and Ambien isn’t on the protocol”

“I understand doc but I’m not a combat vet, I’m just a contractor and I’ve been working Kabul for years.  Kabul isn’t combat, the biggest danger for internationals in Kabul is alcoholism”.

The doc explained that my status as military or non-military was irrelevant.  The state mandated screening for everyone returning from Afghanistan to determine the extent of combat exposure and as it was in the public interest to determine this it was, therefore, mandatory.  Pulling up a form up on his computer tablet he started asking me questions. They started out as a normal medical background screening before focusing on combat.

” Have you been exposed to indirect fire, for example mortar, artillery or rocket attack”.

“Yes”

“Which kind of indirect fire, rocket, mortars or artillery”?

“Rockets and mortars”

Reading again from the tablet; “how many times were you exposed to indirect fire, 1 – 5, 5-10, 10 -15, or 15+”.

“15+ but that was a long time ago doc, I’ve been skating in Kabul for the past three years, all the IDF we took was back in 04 and 05, maybe a little in 06 but none since then”.

“Have you been exposed to an improvised explosive device”?

“Yes”

“Was this device hidden inside vehicle, person, animal, or a static?

“Yes”

“Yes what”?

“I have, over the years, encountered IED’s that were attached to vehicles, persons, animals, and buried in the ground”.

“How many of them blew up”?

“All of them – that’s how I knew they were IED’s”.

“Were you injured in these explosions?”

“No – I wasn’t hit by the IED’s.  We were paid to avoid IED’s and were very good at it. I was only caught in one IED explosion and it was a low order detonation”

“Have you had an MRI or CAT scan”?

“I had an MRI about a year ago.”

“What did it show?”

“That my left shoulder was dislocated and my rotator cuff was torn.”

“I mean for your head injuries, have you had a CAT scan or MRI for that”?

“For what, I don’t have any head injuries”.

“Yes Dalton you no doubt do”.

“How do you know that”?

“Because you say you don’t and that is the most consistent indicator that you do”.

I just looked at the doctor in stunned silence.

“Your records indicate you were treated for a gun shot wound is that correct ”?

“Yes”

“Do you want to tell me about it”?

“No.”

“Why”?

“Because its embarrassing.”

“Fouling yourself or quitting the fight or whatever you did that embarrassed you is without question a perfectly normal reaction to extremely abnormal stimuli Dalton.”

He looked up from his tablet and just stared at me, waiting.  I give him the NOF (neutral operational face) and stared back.  That lasted an uncomfortable 30 seconds until I folded.

“I don’t like to talk about it because I shot myself in the leg while holstering a 1911 pistol without engaging the slide safety many years back and it’s an extremely embarrassing topic for me.”

He stares at me again – I counter with the NOF.

“Dalton you work in the security business and carry a gun in Afghanistan as part of your daily duties, am I right”?

I knew where he was going and replied that his description wasn’t technically true.

He asked me to explain:

“I’m the country manager for a security firm but in the last three years we’ve been restricted to Kabul and only the central parts of the city because our clients move inside a very small geographical box for insurance reasons.  About three years ago, after yet another negligent discharge by one of my men outside the Ministry of Finance I stopped giving them ammunition”.

“You what”?

“I stopped giving them ammunition; at every destination we take our clients there are no less than 35 ANP officers milling about with AK’s and if you were to discharge a weapon around them they’d shoot you; good guy, bad guy, unknown guy it doesn’t matter they will shoot anyone who discharges a weapon around them.  Only after the shooting has died down will they try to find out what it was all about.  So I tell my guys if they ever detect a ‘Taliban assassin’ with their international man-of-action spidey senses the best thing they could do is point an empty pistol at him, shout loudly and then hit the deck to avoid getting caught up in the ensuing ANP death blossom”.

Now I had the doctor’s attention; he was ignoring the tablet clearly engrossed in my story, being jet lagged (and not thinking clearly) I started to open up.

“That is very counterintuitive Dalton, I’m not sure if you’re joking with me”.

“I’m not joking and besides the ANP and the secret police (NDS) have been cracking down on armed expat security companies for years.  They confiscate armored vehicles, radios and weapons all the time even when all the paperwork is in order. The other companies spend a fortune getting their weapons back.  We don’t spend a penny on confiscated weapons or buying back ammunition.  After I explained the new ammo policy to the owner, he had his Afghan partner sell all our working weapons.  He then purchased a bunch of broken weapons for chump change so now when our weapons get confiscated we let the NDS keep them”.

“That sounds crazy to me.”

“No its not, thinking you can shoot somebody in Kabul and live to tell about it is crazy.  New guys bitch about it all the time, ‘why can’t I have ammo mate, what if the Taliban have got me in their sights mate’ What if I step out the vehicle and there is a suicide bomber mate’?   I tell them the truth.  And the truth is it will be better for the clients and the rest of us if they just get shot.  If one of them opens up with a weapon and actually hit somebody the local crowd is going to rip them and our client from limb to limb unless the ANP shoot them first.  So on the off-chance you happen upon an assassin and you can’t drive away or run away then you get shot and that’s what you deserve for getting out of the vehicle when there are assassins lurking about”.

“They normally continue to be whankers about this so I ask them to give me one example of a situation where they could recognize a ‘Taliban assassin’, decide he’s a threat, present a weapon, and then shoot the prick in less time then it takes to sit their fat ass back down in the armored vehicle and close the door?  The standard response is something about getting out of the truck with a client onto a busy sidewalk and then detecting a threat when you are halfway between the ministry (or whatever) gate and the vehicle.  Oh really?  And which of our authorized stops involves disembarking onto a crowded sidewalk?  The answer is none.  We drive the clients inside the gates of whatever destination we are taking them to and when they get out there are, on average, a dozen armed Afghans around them.”

“Being the guy in charge I lead by example and have a block of wood in my pistol holster I carved it and painted it black to look like a pistol.  You can carve wood and carving up stuff is a good way to spend the countless hours we have to kill sitting in the tucks waiting for our clients to finish work.”

“The bottom line, doctor, is not issuing ammo to the Lads and running around with a piece of painted wood in my holster is probably the most rational thing anyone has done in Kabul over the last ten years.  I deserve praise for being so damn smart but I’ll settle for a few nights worth of Ambien.”

The doctor was staring at me again and wasn’t sure what he was thinking which was creepy.

“Well, I’m sure you are well compensated right ”?

Oh man I hate this too – the old ‘contractors make so much money’ meme that had surfaced in the state run media back in 03.  It was once true once but not any more:

“I don’t make that much money,  I make less than 75% of the thousands US Government workers packed onto FOBs around the country working hard to accomplish I’m not sure what, but it doesn’t seem like much to the casual Afghan based observer.  By the time I pay my federal taxes in one lump 20k+ sum (and this is after staying outside the country for 11 out of 12 months to catch the only tax break available to contractors) I clear around $115,000 a year.  That’s more than I could make around here but given all the shit I have to put up with it’s not that much more.”

“Why do you stay for such modest compensation”.

I was going to say I’d rather shoot myself in the head then work a normal job in a normal office with a normal daily commute but caught myself and, having no good reason for spending all the time I do overseas, said nothing.  I continued to stare at him, he at me.  He broke this time and looked down at his tablet, flipped a page, then another and another and then looked up and asked, “Do you own any firearms”?

I gave him the NOF so he quickly added “it’s a mandatory question Dalton, state rules” as he showed me the tablet like I could read the damn thing without my glasses.  It was then I remembered my son had written some notes to me in the notebook I carry around because my memory is getting less than reliable.  I closed my eyes and concentrated on remembering what he had written.  It was something along the lines of ‘don’t tell anyone anything about what you do Dad, they’ll think your crazy or dangerous or both’.

I opened my eyes and replied “I drive around Kabul with a chunk of wood painted black to look like a pistol, why the hell would I need a firearm in America”?

The doctor admitted that was a good point then gave me the news.  “Dalton I’m afraid you have severe PTSD.  I accordance with the state protocol I’m placing you on Xanax until your next appointment.”

“My next appointment with who”?

“A psychiatrist”.

“What psychiatrist”?

“The one the state appoints in cases like yours”.

“How many cases like mine do you have”?

“None really but look here Dalton, you’ve have PTSD and by state decree you get Xanax and a dope chit”.

“A dope chit; what’s a dope chit”?

“Marijuana is not only legal for people in your condition its encouraged and I, for one, would be much happier knowing you are taking Xanax and smoking dope daily while a resident of our great state.  Normally a dope chit costs 300 dollars but in this state combat vets get them for free.”

I should have been paying closer attention to what my son was trying to tell me; kids get so big, so smart, so fast and I’m still thinking of him as a child.  Typical reaction from a divorced Dad and I recognized that now.  He was right on the money; the doctor clearly thought I was crazy.  Being the (admittedly self designated) sanest man in Kabul I recognized I was digging myself a hole so I held my tongue. I needed to find out what the hell Xanax is before I started to stockpile it and state sanctioned bud in my basement.  I haven’t spent the better part of a decade in Afghanistan for nothing; pills and bud are the American equivalent of having a few pounds of dry opium stashed away to see the one through hard times, a common practice back in the Stan.

Coming home is turning into a perilous journey, there could be hard times ahead and I’m rusty at IFF (old military term meaning identify friend or foe).  I would need to be more discreet around strangers.  I had money, guns, and state approved drugs; I was missing one thing that was now vital to my continued personal freedom in the America of Hope and Change.  I was going to need a good lawyer.

Early on in the Afghan adventure living outside the wire was the norm even for the military.  Westerners could drive anywhere knowing their arrival in remote districts would be welcomed if not eagerly anticipated by local villagers.  In Jalalabad City there were two different compounds for SF teams, another compound full of psyops or civil affairs or some other outfit like that, the ANP mentors lived out in the town as did the local EOD mentor.  The other expats living in Jbad at the time (including the Rotary Club folks) regularly socialized with them at the Taj tiki bar and at the weekly dinner parties hosted by NGO’s or the UN. That changed when the American military issued a  massive life support contract called LOGCAP that ended up driving life support costs to a million dollars per soldier per year.  The units who had been embedded in Jbad city (and lots of other places around the country) were forced to move into the Big Box FOB’s for force protection and financial reasons.  Those units were gathering tons of useful information; they would have picked up a lot from their pattern of life alone; most of them were  in the information gathering business anyway and I know they were successful.  But performance wasn’t the issue, getting all hands behind the wire was and that was a mistake.

The Bot and I were talking about the old days and how damn cool everything was when I mentioned Mortenson and he looks over and said “mate, you know what it took to build the TK runway?  Five Machineguns.  His story is interesting mostly because there is no way any international could do what he did today in Afghanistan.  There is no faster way to end up in jail (or paying a hefty bribe to avoid it) then to drive around illegally armed.  In many of the areas where we once roamed free the Taliban now control the turf.  The local folks are no longer happy to see foreigners in their midsts, the Afghan security forces are, in some places, openly hostile and will extort those who don’t know the language or aren’t smart enough to hire a good fixer.

The Afghan people are stressed to the max and who can blame them?  The latest attack in Kabul scared them – not the attack itself, it was mostly viewed as a nuisance, what scared them was how people in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome etc… would react.  Afghanistan cannot function without billions in donor support.  That support will not come through unless the World Bank and the IMF are able to remain in country and, at some point in the very near future, gain confidence that the central government can manage Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund.  If the security situation deterorates to the point where the World Bank can’t stay or the central government proves incapable of managing the ARTF the internationals will go, the money will stop, the international support under the Afghani will drop, and overnight you will see Zimbabwe type inflation.

The local folks understand this and know that in less then two years they could lose everything. Again. And that is some seriously depressing shit which is why The Bot and I were boring ourselves with stories from days gone by.  Here is a quick trip down memory lane to illustrate how things have changed in Afghanistan.

The Bot jumped in an SUV and, by himself mind you, drove about 150 kilometers to the outskirts of Kabul where he purchased 5 Machineguns and as many rounds as he could find from a village elder. We didn't know each other back then but at the same time he was heading up to Kabul my mobile security team and I were heading from Kabul to Kandahar to deploy K9 teams. By late 2007 this was no longer possible - insurgent attacks were too frequent. We had to stop outside the hamlet of Shah Joy to get a flat fixed and we're not to happy to be static in this area which was controlled by the Taliban even back then. A few days after I took this picture The Bot was ambushed near here but able to hole up and keep his attackers at bay until an American patrol came by.

These two kids had a compressor and a stack of tires next to the road - that's the local way of advertising tire repair. They were as fast and serious as a NASCAR pit crew.

They didn't have the tools of a NASCAR pit crew just the sense of urgency and that probably was due to the fact that we were well inside Indian country and needed to get going before the local insurgents decided to get us going.

The Bot made it to Kabul and back without incident and scored five PKM's along with enough ammo to run them awhile. Back in the day we had not figured out the low profile approach to outside the wire work. We would learn through bitter experience to never ride around looking like this again. Any international caught with 5 belt fed machineguns today would be in the Poli Charki prison for a long long time. It is so against the law now, but back in 06 it wasn't too big a deal.

Having scored the guns the next step was to plan out the defense with the local ANP chief and his tribal auxiliaries

And there it is - pile up some dirt to elevate the guns who then provide overwatch and the rest of the men get busy trying to chip through the rock. When the machinegunners dueled, it was at a very slow sustained rate because even back then ammo was outrageously expensive.

Under a million dollars to complete - one international supervisor to handle all the problems that come up on projects like this and in record time you have an improved (sealed mind you mate) dirt runway that handled C-130's and the old Sov transports found all over Central Asia with no problems. When LOGCAP rolled into TK they fenced this all in, tore up the runway, paved it and put lights in and spent a fortune improving the base, but did that lavish infrastructure translate into improved mission performance? I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

I remember back in 06 and 07 when the human terrain started to shift a little.  What I didn’t know then was the tide of unease flowing through the population was (in part) triggered by the arrival of the British army in Helmand.  Apparently the SAS and their American counterparts had conducted a comprehensive study of the Helmand in 2005 and had come up with a really good deployment plan.  They recommended to the army that it fortify the two largest towns, engage in reconstruction in those towns,  leave the current governor in place even though he was a Narco Khan, and most importantly, stay out of the rest of the province. Her Majesties government instead insisted that Karzai remove the governor, focused on poppy eradication and, based on intel that there were only 420 Taliban in the province, decided  they could ruck up to densely populated areas and kill them while ignoring all the other pricks milling around as if they were gliding through the fucking matrix.  (hat tip to Charles Booker for the matrix quote).

I knew the British Army had stumbled badly in the Helmand but I didn’t know how or why nor did I appreciate the adverse impact the Helmand fighting had on the other provinces.  I found the gory details of the Helmand fiasco in the new book Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge.  The hyperlink is to a not too friendly review of the book in The Telegraph.  The only point the reviewer can find to quibble over is the authors contention that most of the British forces sent to Helmand never left the safety of their Big Box FOBs.   The review is a little emotional and I suspect the reporter lost friends in this conflict but that kind of reaction clouds rational discorse about sensitive topics.  To wit:

One senior officer in General Richards HQ had done the sums.  He told the general that ‘on a good day and with a following wind after a good deal of planning, once the HQ and communications staff have been taken into account, and if the guard roster was doubled’ (meaning the assigned manpower cut in half) ‘we can find 168 combat troops to conduct operations from the entire brigade’.

How do you justify that ? Prior to the establishment of big box FOB’s there were detachments of troops spread out around the countryside and for every 20 men assigned to a safe house you had 20 men ready for combat.  Then come the FOB’s and with them the rotating battle staffs and before you know it the reality on the ground is so bad that the military creates its own alternative reality based on I am still not sure what.  Big Box FOBs are a problem created from the unlimited funding of discretionary spending by both the Pentagon and congress to make our soldiers safer and more comfortable.  Who could be against that?  But does this lavish support translate into improved tactical performance or significantly contribute to mission accomplishment?  Most importantly is it better for our troops on a big box FOB or deployed on shoe string budgets like they were in the early days?  What came first the Big Box FOB or Taliban human wave attacks? In my memory they seemed to have arrived back to back.

Here is an interesting article written by the recent American commander back in TK answering my question of how well lavish base support facilities contribute to his ability to accomplish his assigned mission.

When I took command of a NATO task force in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan in July 2010, one of my first patrols in the province included a stop at the construction site for an unfinished U.S.-funded police headquarters. Inside, we found loose 82mm mortar rounds and cell phone components: clearly the tools of an IED-maker.

Finishing this well-intentioned project that had become a shelter for terrorists became one of my top priorities. The project had stalled due to a cumbersome bureaucracy, poor contracting procedures, high leadership turn-over, and a lack of proper supervision,

When I relinquished command and left Afghanistan about a year later, the project was back on track but still incomplete, despite three years of frustrating effort.

I know he doesn’t say a word about facilities in the article but you can’t tell me that if he was living out in the villle in his own compound with his own motley  crew and a bunch of Afghan auxiliaries that it would have taken him three damn years to almost build a crappy little ANP post. Besides our ability to perform isn’t the issue; there are many successful reconstruction models to emulate in Afghanistan.  The La Jolla Rotary Club would probably be more than happy to explain the reconstruction game to anyone who wants to hear it. What we should be focusing on is the balance between base support for deployed troops and their ability to accomplish the mission. It seems to me the troops were much happier and more effective when allowed to live off the economy and operate independently.  It also cost billions less to deploy them in that manner while reducing the ISAF footprint by at least half if not more.  That would save a considerable amount of blood and treasure, but who cares?  The past is the past and now we face the brave new future.  The awkward close of our Afghan adventure is upon us and nobody is in the position to make an educated guess on how this is all going to end. That sad fact is why being here now is like stepping into a pressure cooker.

The location and approximate range fan for yesterday's attack on the diplomatic quarter. Deeper in this range fan (but well within machinegun range) are the US Embassy and ISAF HQ.

At dawn the villains were still active in the 3rd and 4th floors (counting top down) from this building. ANSF was hitting them with RPG's and rockets about every 35 seconds, followed up with automatic weapons fire

ANSF had pinned the attackers in that building from the start and by the time I was able to climb up Bibi Mahroo hill to get a look at the site, the fighting was all outgoing.  The attackers may have still been firing AK’s at that point, but I could only confirm that they were taking all the incoming rockets and heavy machinegun fire while returning little of anything.  When a brick wall is all that separates you from the effects of RPG’s and rockets, the pounding your body takes from the overpressure is brutal.  I doubt that the villains were in any condition to offer effective resistance by the time the CRU went in to finish them off.  At 0630 local time, the scene was declared secure and ANSF announced that the insurgents involved in other attacks in the city had also been terminated.

These attacks, like those before them, accomplished very little tactically.  But they don’t have to accomplish much of anything.  Just mounting the attack is a victory for insurgents with the only audience that counts: the people of Afghanistan.  It may seem weird, but tactical victories are meaningless now for all sides of this conflict.

Watching the action from Bibi Mahroo Hill

So we now have another problem.  Not the attacks – they accomplished nothing, as they usually do, except to demonstrate the insurgents’ ability to stockpile weapons and ammunition inside the most secure parts of Kabul.  That takes time, money, and access.  They had to pay for that access and whoever they did pay – that’s the problem.  But it’s not an ISAF problem; this problem belongs with the Afghans.   The latest casualty figured via Reuters;

Afghan security forces have killed 32 gunmen and arrested one more in operations to stop co-ordinated attacks by Taliban fighters that hit the capital, Kabul, and three other provinces, the defence ministry said on Monday.  Eight members of the security forces have been killed and 44 others, including five civilians, wounded, Mohammad Zahir, Kabul CID chief, said on Monday.

Given the amount of ordnance the insurgents fired off that is amazing.  This isn’t the last time Kabul is going to be targeted; we’ll be in the hot seat again soon.  For now the local people are going about their business hoping that the next time insurgents decide to make a statement their luck continues to hold.

The problem with announcing your plans long before commencing an offensive is that the enemy gets a vote too.  And the enemy has decided to pre-empt ISAF with an offensive of their own.  As usual, the attacks are rather spectacular and, for a change, well coordinated.  Tactically, they will fail.  The attackers will inflict whatever minimal damage they can with small arms, explosives, and RPG’s and then die in place.  Afghan security forces have locked down Kabul, and no doubt the other sites too, and can now afford to take their time clearing out the villains.

The fighting is two blocks over (to the right) as you look down the street in this picture. The traffic is pretty light but has not stopped as people try to get around the police barricades that have isolated the attackers. There is a group of school girls clustered at the corner at the end of the street peering down the road towards the fighting, probably trying to decide what to do - the ANP escorted them down the road a bit after this photo was taken. A steel tornado is ravaging the downtown just a few hundred meters away while these local people are trying to find their way home. People can adopt to just about anything.

Wind tornados strike with little warning; steel tornados strike with no warning.  We were exiting a local bank when the shooting started.  It was close to us, but you get that around here sometimes.  A few rounds fired from one weapon is not a reason for alarm.  As we headed back towards the safe house we were surrounded by frantic armed men, some in uniforms, some not, some carrying M4’s, others sporting AK’s.  They were the security detail for a senior Afghan official and trying to clear the usual traffic jam in order to get their charge off the street and into a secured location.  To the perceptive man on the street, frantic high-end Afghan security guards are as sure a sign of heavy winds inbound as a tornado siren in the Midwest.  Our driver looked at me and said, “trouble.”  I looked back at him and said, “no shit.”  We both smiled because there was nothing else we could do until the traffic jam cleared up.

When I wrote the last post, I asked the question, “to what end?” when discussing the soon to be launched ISAF offensive.  I don’t care how many “leaders” are killed in night raids, nor how many insurgents are rolled up in this pending offensive.  Does anyone honestly think it will make a difference?   I don’t.  The Taliban seem to be able to penetrate the Kabul “Ring of Steel” at will and, I bet, based on the amount of shooting I’m hearing, they stockpiled ammo and weapons inside the downtown area just like they did for their last attack inside Kabul.  Can ISAF stop it?  No, it has nothing to do with ISAF; it’s an Afghan problem and only they can fix whatever it is that is dysfunctional enough to allow HIG and Taliban militants to launch operations at will.  I’m getting the feeling that these “spectacular” attacks in Kabul are the new normal.  It’s going to be a long summer.

Great photo from todays attack by Reuters

The Afghanistan Live Blog from Al Jazeera has the best coverage and is updated frequently.  You can find it here.

A senior U.S. government official in Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the new troops will have three primary missions. First, they will work to expand the so-called “security bubble” surrounding the Afghan capital, which has been battered by a spate of insurgent attacks in recent months. Second, they will try to better connect Kabul with the key southern city of Kandahar, a hotbed of resistance that NATO forces largely reclaimed last year.

The third mission will be the most important, the most complicated, and potentially the most dangerous. The troops, the senior government official said, will move toward the Afghan-Pakistani border as part of a broad push to reduce the numbers of antigovernment fighters, weaponry, and bomb-making material flowing in from Pakistan, where militants operate freely from large safe havens.

Extend the “security bubble” from Kabul to Ghazni, clear route one from Kabul to Kandahar and then turn east and clear all the Taliban from the border provinces of Paktya and  Khost with 5000 extra paratroopers?  That’s not going to happen.  That plan is not only DOA; its crazy.

Late in the Soviet Afghan War the Soviets tried the same kind of Op for probably the same reasons only they had 28,000 men trying to clear a tiny piece of road running from Gardez to Khost. The Soviet Offensive was called Operation Magistral and if you’re a gamer and have played The Battle For Hill 3234 you were playing a game based on a battle from Operation Magistral.  It took two months for Soviets and their Afghan partners to get to Khost and the offensive was conducted in November through January – the non fighting season when the weather is cold, the snow deep and most of the Muj fighters still sitting out the winter in Pakistan.

The Southeast Region - the next offensive is supposed to clear all of this with the forces on hand plus an extra 5,000 troop mini surge.

The Gardez to Khost highway - this tiny part of the Southeast Region took the Soviets 2 months to clear using 28,000 troops

Number comparisons between Soviet forces back in 1987 and American forces now are irrelevant. The Soviets had to dig out the thick belt of heavy weapons the Muj used to fortify the Satukandav Pass (30 km east of Gardez) using infantry fire and maneuver.    Americans have drone pilots back in Nevada who could sort that out.  Any Taliban fortifications uncovered by our side would get plastered by rockets and 2000lb JDAMS.  That’s why the villains now use IED’s and, when they do fight, they do so in areas of heavy civilian populations so they can drop their weapons blend back into the normal pattern of life when hard pressed.  The area between Highway 1 and the Pakistan border is huge and has heavily populated flat lands with lots of mountains in between.  It is not the Helmand Province where the Marines were able (with twice the manpower) to dominate the lower Helmand basin in large part because terrain, vegetation, and population density favored their direct fire weapon systems.  That still took years and I don’t want to get into what that effort cost in casualties because it is too damn depressing.

The reason I bring up Operation Magistral is not to point our the Soviets had 28,000 men and still got their asses kicked – they didn’t.   The Paratroopers from the 82nd who are scheduled to conduct this offensive (if it happens as outlined in the article) won’t get their asses kicked either.  But they’re going to take some casualties and they are going to inflict much more than they take and my question is to what end?

Brother _B_ and I were chatting on skype earlier trying to figure out why (if this story is even true) ISAF would launch an “offensive” in a heavily such a heavily populated area .  _B_ figures its to demonstrate the “capabilities of the Afghan Army we have been mentoring while creating space to withdraw”.  I agree – that is the classic reason to do this kind of operation but it showcases the Pentegon’s steadfast refusal to deal with reality.  The whole American COIN concept is predicated on having a legitimate host nation partner and the ability to build host nation security forces.  We do not have a legitimate host nation government to partner with and have failed to build capacity in the Afghan Security Forces (ANSF) above the battalion level while doing a decent job below the battalion level.  Those of us who have been paying attention know that the USG knew this as early as 2004 yet what have they done to adjust course?  We know how it is going to end – we’re going to lose soldiers while killing scores of Talib fighters and dozens of innocent civilians.  The second we pull out, the turf will go right back into the hands of the local Taliban and/or the local Warlord.  That  is exactly what happened when the Soviets pulled out of the same area after inflicting a good thumping on the Muj back in 87.  This planned offensive may well be the craziest idea floated by the military since Operation Eagle Claw.

Crazy seems to be a theme because guess what those crazy Afghans have done now?  They are threatening Hillary Clintons legacy!  This is from the linked article;

Clinton embraced the cause long before the first U.S. troops landed in the country, and as secretary of State she has brought Afghan women worldwide attention, political power and unbending promises of American support.

“We will not abandon you,” she pledged.

First, yes you will abandon them , you already have in most of the country.  Second, what the hell does Hillary Clinton’s “commitment to women” have to do with the foreign policy of the United States of America?  I’m all for helping Afghan woman and have done my share of projects in support of the effort but I was working for an NGO and NGO’s are the only appropriate vehicle for that kind of change because they work with the Afghan people and are not dictating to them from on high.  Is anybody else in the Obama administration talking like this or are they talking about how great ANSF is in preparation for leaving?   Why is the office of the Secretary of State now a platform where liberal ruling classes elites can indulge in pet projects supporting a personal legacy?  Billions of our dollars and the lives of thousands of our fellow citizens hang in the balance and now the issue is Hillary Clinton’s legacy? The State Department had a lot to do with starting and shaping this conflict (if you break it you own it) while also single handedly creating the current dysfunctional central government by foisting their favored candidate and the SNTV voting system on the Afghan people.  Nobody seems to remember that and all the problems they created are being swept under the rug instead of being mined for lessons on how to not make the same mistakes in the future.  Hillary Clintons legacy….I’ve got her legacy right here;

I do not care for people who create tales of martial exploits in order to win high office because it reinforces the sad fact that they think the rest of us are stupid

Now that I got off my chest let me throw in some more pictures and get back on track.

The US Embassy entrance in 2005 looking towards Massoud Circle

Public school in Nangarhar Province 2005

The US Embassy entrance in 2012 looking from Massoud Circle back towards the gate

Public School in Nangarhar Province 2012

Shortly after the first set of  pictures above were taken ISAF decided that we were going to do COIN now and emphasize protecting the people.  Every year since then the Taliban and other insurgent groups have grown stronger while not much has changed for the average Afghan. Yet ISAF and the American embassy have never stopped putting up more walls, more wire, and adding more movement restrictions which isolate diplomatic and aid staff even more than before (if such a thing is possible).   Security for me but not for thee is what I had to say about this back in 2010, and not much has changed since.  Admitting this seems to be problematic even for the practical people of Australia.  From the linked article:

Australian officials have rejected a report commissioned by the government agency AusAID that is critical of the security assessment in Afghanistan, insisting it be rewritten to match upbeat claims of dramatic progress.

What can you say about that nonsense?  What I’d like to say to any Australian government repersentitives reading this post is that The Bot and I can do a 3 year Provincial security assessment, in any province mind you, for 2.5 million (Australian dollars please – they’re worth more than American dollars) and we’ll have teams on the ground in every district bringing in the ground truth within 96 hours of signing the contract.  But we don’t do re-writes; that may seem a disadvantage, based on the article above, but look at this way: save a million here and million there and before you know it you have a budget surplus and are then politically strong enough to take the truth straight.  And that’s how you should want your security assessments….right?

I don’t think there will be an offensive by ISAF in eastern Afghanistan – the conventional military has done all they can do and they know it.   It is time for the infantry battalions to go home and leave it to the trainers, SF teams and other enablers ANSF needs to accomplish whatever their chain of command tells them needs to be done.

Kabul is currently a tense place as it has been many times in the past (the 2006 riots that erupted after American soldiers caused a multi-fatality motor vehicle accident and then started shooting people who were coming to the rescue of the original victims springs instantly to mind) but this time things are different.  The endgame is near, internationals are no longer welcomed in most parts of the country and barely tolerated in the rest.  Armored SUV’s, still the only way most internationals will travel in Kabul, are routinely stopped and the legally licensed weapons of the international security consultants confiscated.  On a technical note every weapon owned and licensed to PSC firms are now illegal because the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF)  was supposed to take over the security duties from international PSC’s last month and that’s not remotely close to happening.

The local people here are terrified about what will happen when ISAF and the international community pull out while at the same time absolutely disgusted with ISAF, the UN, the big reconstruction firms and the Afghan politicians who are looting the country.  Who can blame them?  I’m disgusted with the American politicians who are looting my country too.  Over here the mob is enflamed by Koran burnings and rouge shootings.  In America the mob is inflamed by a media manufactured “racially motivated” shootings.  The New York Times prints articles about corrupt officials in Kabul and ponder aloud why they remain at liberty.  I’d like to know why Jon Corzine is still at liberty, he stole 1.6 billion dollars from his investors making the millions his Afghan counterparts are pocketing pale in comparison.  But we know why these men are free – politically powerful members of corrupt political machines never face the consequences of their actions.  That seems to be a trend around the world these days, or so I thought until I read this piece of conventional brilliance from our Secretary of Defense informing me I don’t know Jack about trends.  The topic Mr. Panetta was addressing, while demonstrating his mastery at defining common english words, was the non-trend of Green on Blue fratricide.

The problem of Green on Blue fratricide is a big deal, has been going on a long time, and it’s not confined to Green on Blue as there have been reports of  Green on Green incidents over the years too.   We don’t know how big the trend  is because our military isn’t telling us how many Americans (another report on this un-trend can be fond here) have been gunned down by Afghan security forces.  Why is this happening?  I don’t know because I’ve got no perspective and very little inside information.  If you go back to this post and watch the 60 minute segment about Special Forces trainers or go back to this post and watch the you tube video of the mayhem caused by  Canadian soldiers as they spend an hour in the bazaar looking for a spark plug (I’m not kidding about that either) you’ll get an understanding on how we are viewed from the Afghan perspective.  I’ll write more on that topic soon as it is not one I’d normally gloss over but at the moment there is more pressing news at hand.   I’m going to cover a few points that I think unique and then share the best April Fools joke I have ever seen.  If it is not a joke  (and it has to be) then I’m spotlighting the event that is going to make getting out of here alive very difficult for us outside the wire types.

The Koran Burning Apologies

It was not the apologies that were so bad it was how they were made and what was said.  Some regular Joe’s in Bagram made a mistake and placed Korans into an incinerator.  Local Afghans saw this and, with the help of the soldiers, rescued the material.  That’s the story – there is nothing else need be said and here’s why.  If any Afghan leader or any other leader took that story and started to accuse of us if not respecting Islam we have an 11- year track record in Afghanistan of not only respecting cultural mores and traditions but of bending over backward to show that respect.    Any accusation or remark by a senior Afghan official that we disrespect Islam or the Koran should have been met with an explosion of righteous indignation.  And I mean eyes bugged out, frothing at the mouth explosion of spitting right back at them the years and years of evidence that such a charge is out of line.  If there is nobody at the ISAF HQ capable of doing that maybe we should consider forgiving the considerable tax debt of NBC news commentator Al Sharpton and send him over here to deal with the press.

Messaging

Social media is not a game for big bureaucratic PC centric battle staffs because even illiterate tribesmen can make them look stupid

The Mask of Command; Modern Marine Corps version

Pasted above are two recent examples of ISAF messaging; the first is self explanatory, the second unexplainable.  Let me take the second first, and, to make it fair, let me stipulate the following.  I’ll ignore the color of the Shalwar Kamise (the senior guy should be in all white) and ignore the man dancing (the senior guy doesn’t dance – he has subordinates that he can make do that) and focus on the venue.  Locked deep inside the most secure base in Southern Afghanistan, behind multiple secure entry points with armed, very serious, Marines standing post, is a prefabbed trailer with pictures of the Prez and the Queen and no doubt President Karzai and along with some local textile hanging on the walls and probably a bunch of Afghan rugs the Marines paid 18 times too much for and its called the Afghan Cultural Center.   The Commanding General wanted to thank the Governor of Helmand for all the great team work that has made his year-long tour so successful and he does this inside a gigantic Marine base where he established some bullshit “cultural center”?  You know what that makes him look like in the local context?  Weak.  If he wanted to put on local clothes and spend the night man dancing to thank the governor for such a great year on the ground he should have had the balls (and G2) to go to the Governors compound.  At least he would have been in a real Afghan room listneing to real Afghan music while eating real Afghan food and most importantly, demonstrating some confidence in all the improved security that was the cause of this silly celebration in the first place.

The Big Picture

Is there a reason for us to stay in Afghanistan?  No there’s not, but I’ve been saying that for years.  Should the military be packing up and going home?  They are – it is going to take until 2014 and probably well beyond just to retrograde all the equipment and personnel from theater and I doubt there is much they can do to speed the process up.  Should we stop doing night raids?  Yes – I’ve been saying that for years too, and I don’t care how many phone conversations of panicked Taliban ISAF intercepts or how many senior guys they kill because it doesn’t matter.  Every month the Taliban spread, every month the number of successful IED strikes goes up, every month more Afghan government officials are assassinated.  If these are indicators that the night raid tactics are working what are the indicators that they’re not?  I think the reason we do night raids is because we have a huge, expensive, special operations apparatus that specializes in night raids.  When you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail right?

April Fools

But night raids aren’t my problem today…this is and I took a screen shot just in case the story disappears from the web  as fast as the stories about Obama sending one of his kids, with a dozen of her friends, and two dozen Secret Service agents to Mexico (on our dime) did.

If this isn't a joke us internationals in Afghanistan are in big trouble

Breaking News: Ban on full-face veils instituted in Afghanistan may be the only hint of good news I’ve seen from Afghanistan this month.  Somebody here has developed a serious sense of humor combined with an understanding of irony and fooled the western media with a story that cannot possibly be true.  If, and I can’t see how, but if, the central government tried to force Afghan women out of the Burka the appropriate Immediate Action drill for all foreigners  (and especially the women folk) would be to head to the Kabul airport and fly out  with the clothes on your back.  Any attempt to go to ground in a safe house or delay your departure a day or two would be suicidal.  That’s how disruptive the topic of women and their place in society is in Afghanistan.

To those westerners paying attention the treatment of Afghan women is so uniformly dismal (by western standards) that it is unbelievable.  You want to see the ANP respond to a police call with true alacrity?   Phone in a report of an unescorted teenage girl talking to a male who is not her relative.  I’ve seen that kind of call play out  in the past and it’s not pretty.  In fact here’s a story from yesterday about just how strongly locals feel on the issue:  Boy and Girl killed in Afghanistan acid attack ‘over friendship’.  But to Afghans the treatment of women in this country, and boys who befriend them outside the conventions of social mores, is the way it is supposed to be because it’s the way it has always been.  That will change when the Afghan people want it to change and there is very little any one person or country can do to speed that process up.

To westerners it may seem like the story above is a perfectly reasonable start to a process very important to them, but irrelevant to the interests of the United States Government.  At least it should be irrelevant but it’s not, because our Secretary of State continues to champion this particular cause.  I’d rather she focus on corruption and Green on Blue fratricide but those issues deal with OPM (other peoples money) and OPC (other peoples children) and obviously don’t interest her much.  That strange, poll-driven, PC centric policy formulation may explain why, one day before she is scheduled to visit, the UAE closed down a State Department funded advocacy group National Democratic Institute (NDI).  That is not an indicator of radicalization in Dubai – it is indicative of how little clout the boy and girls in Foggy Bottom have in this part of the world.  After all the time and money we have spent in this region one has to wonder why?

My last night in Afghanistan was spent at the Kandahar Airfield. When I landed after a short hop from Lashkar Gah there was a brief violent rain storm. That storm caused a break in the massive KAF Poo Pond and what you see here is a 3 foot stream of human waste water surging through the CADG engineering camp where I was staying. We got off light - camps upstream lost their vehicles and living connexs to the Great Poo Pond Flood of 2011

But I don’t want to talk about shit, I want to talk about the alarming deterioration I see in this country and our nitwit President.  That is proving hard to do, because every time I think I’ve crafted an astute observation or two I read a post by Victor Davis Hanson or Richard Fernandez who say what I was going to say, only they say it ten time better than I ever could.   My agent keeps telling me I’m just 12 months of hard work away from a Hollywood blockbuster but I don’t believe a word he says except when he tells me I need to keep the blog going.  Keeping the blog going is proving hard because I’m not in Afghanistan and the Afghans are screwed now anyway.  I can sum up our ten years in Afghanistan in 3 pictures and then I’m moving on to the President’s new genius plan for the military and (this is going to freak you out) I agree with him.  Not his reasoning mind you, he was, is, and will always be an absolute moron, but what he is doing by gutting the ground forces was inevitable.  But hey, every once in a while even a blind squirrel will find a nut.

First, ten years of NATO in Afghanistan in three pictures:

Ten years ago, Afghans were thrilled to see us and thought that finally they could live in peace and develop their country

Five years ago they watched us flounder - we stayed on FOBs and shoveled cash by the billions into the hands of a corrupt central government that we insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, was a legitimate government - one that had to be supported at all costs. We raided their homes at night and shot up civilians who got too close to our convoys, we paid for roads that did not exist and, because of the "force protection" mentality, most Afghans thought our soldiers were cowards because they never came to the bazaar off duty and unarmored to buy stuff like the Russians did. In fact, every bite of food our soldiers consumed was flown into country at great expense, so in a land famous for its melons and grapes our troops ate crappy melon and tasteless grapes flown in by contractors from God knows where.

Now, they want to shoot us in the face. Except for the klepocratic elite who want us to give them billions more and then shoot us in the face.

There it is; Afghanistan is toast, and what the last 10 years has taught us is we cannot afford to deploy American ground forces.  Two billion dollars a week (that’s billion with a B) has bought what?  Every year we stay to “bring security to the people,” the security situation for the people gets worse and worse, deteriorating by orders of magnitude.  Now the boy genius has announced a “new strategy”.  A strategy that is identical to the “strategy” that resulted in a hollow ground force getting its ass kicked by North Korea in 1950; a mere five years after we had ascended to the most dominant military the world had ever known.

The only effective weapon we have ever deployed to Afghanistan is cash money, but, in typical Washington fashion, that money has disappeared and nobody seems to know how that happened or where it went.  The Afghan government is operating under the assumption we are going to continue throwing cash at them forever and thus will have troops in the country indefinitely.  The idiot Taliban think we’ll stay forever to harvest all the rare minerals buried in the desert, as if we could possibly mine 2 billion a week worth of rare minerals to cover our burn rate.  The Iraqis now know that, no matter what we have said in the past, we are more than willing to declare victory and organize a big parade to celebrate the last truck out of the country.

Was Iraq worth the blood and treasure spent by the United States?  If it was, I’m not seeing it.  Will the end state in Afghanistan be worth the blood and treasure we have spent and continue to spend?  Not a chance in hell.  The only lesson to be learned from the past ten years of constant war is that we cannot afford to go to war.  At least not in the way we do it now which is, sort of, what I’ve been pointing out in this blog for years.  Admittedly, it takes me a ton of words to make my point but you get that from bloggers.  Well, at least from this blogger.

The fact that Obama has slashed ground forces and fallen under the spell of high tech ninjas from the United States Air Force is, believe it or not, good news.  This is going to force the Army to do a little creative thinking about why the hell they even exist. It is also going to force the Marine Corps into a fight for survival because when the Big Army starts to do “Creative Thinking” the only option they come up with is to do away with the Marine Corps.

Obama is right about the obsolescence of the Two-War Strategy.  Not for the reasons he’s been braying about (to be honest, I can’t listen to him and don’t really know or care what he’s saying).  He’s right because we have never had the lift ability to move ground forces into two distinctly different theaters of operation.  We had the troops to do it stationed in places like Okinawa where they can’t train, irritate the local citizens, and accomplish little more than getting in trouble for doing what troops always do.  They were essentially stranded there because the amphibious lift to move them anywhere (in numbers that matter) had to come from the continental United States.

But the Pentagon never dealt with this issue honestly, just as they are not dealing with their impending evisceration honestly.  Witness this bit of complete nonsense: Pentagon Says Two-War Strategy Not likely To Be Scrapped. Talk about living in denial.

The good news is that the main stream media, the two party system, the current PC sycophants in the Pentagon – all of them are going to swept into the dust bin of history.  They cannot sustain their current mode of operation, they cannot change because change is all they have talked about for decades while simultaneously maintaining the same force structure, the same spend thrift habits and the same corporate mind set regardless of multiple Quadrennial Defense Review recommendations.  The Navy, Air Force and Army always get their 30 something percent of the budget while the Marine Corps gets the rest.  The Marine Corps air wings are paid for by Navy Air which is a type command.  The Fleet Marine Force is also a type command under the control of the Chief of Naval Operations (in theory) so the pittance the Marines operate on is not as small as its seems.  But now change is being forced down from on high and all the PC ass kissing the Pentagon has done since Tail Hook is doing them no more good than is did for BP after the gulf oil spill.   Change is coming and no matter how vigorous the rear guard action by the dysfunctional institutions of government or the private sector they are still doomed.  Richard Fernandez explains the inevitable here:

Developments like this, when juxtaposed against the tally of failing institutions suggest that the future may be one in which the balance of power will shift from the spenders using deficit financing, and the rent-takers (the Middle East) and the blackmailers (North Korea) to one where the producers are relatively more influential. The next few decades, provided the world doesn’t blow itself up getting there, may belong to those who make and design new things rather than those who appropriate them and hand things around.

It is already making the shift and the crisis is how it is doing it.

The growth industries of the future might be in trade, industry, science and engineering. By contrast, the day of the ambulance chaser, financial Master of the Universe, SEIU organizer and journalistic hack may be coming to a close. What the current crisis is doing is burning out the latter to clear the way for the former. It is a process of creative destruction that has almost no input from the Republican Party.

While all this continues to drags on, I suspect I’ve reached the end of my useful shelf life as a blogger.  How many more times can I say the same things? But not to worry, Dalton Thomas, a man who could have been me in another life, has one in the hopper and it is the craziest, funniest story I have read in years.  I’ve asked him to break it up into a few posts while toning it down some.  He’s going to cut it up into several posts but has refused to tone it down.   The topic is “The PTSD,” as he calls it, and, his life, being basically a train wreck, is great fodder for creative writing.  I can promise you that you’ll laugh your ass off or be appalled or possibly both.  Dalton is a funny, funny guy but he has issues to work through and, as is typical of Marines from his generation, he’s taking them head on.  It will entertaining. I promise.

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