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- ---
title: "Visiting Kandahar"
author: Greg
layout: post
permalink: /2011/01/visiting-kandahar/
published_at: 2011-01-17 17:30:00 AFT
comments: True
licence: Creative Commons
categories:
  - Army
tags:
  - Afghanistan
- ---

The rain turned the runway at TK into mud which delayed my departure date but on the 12th of January a little Hercules aircraft took me for a 30 minute ride to Kandahar Air Field (KAF). KAF is a little city with traffic jams, TGI Fridays, KFC, coffee shops, speed cameras, ghettos, and a population of about 30,000. I'll be here for just over a week so I'm trying to make the most of this rest bite. While here, I'm working night shift which means watching movies and calling the TK commcen to shoot the shit. It's a little boring but no one bothers me and it gives me time to explore during the day. Night shift can be a little isolating but I'm trying to mingle. We had the fortnightly Saturday afternoon BBQ a couple of days ago. The BBQ was interrupted by a rocket attack, the sirens yelled and I just copied everyone else and lay on the ground. After 2 minutes we moved to bunkers, those with more experience took some lobster tail from the hot plate with them.

Before I left TK I had an interesting job relaying information from a camera to the troops on the ground. My job was to tell the guys on the ground what people around them were doing. It was early morning so basically my job was to broadcast the bowel movements of the locals, like a futuristic peeping tom. I tried to mix it up by using different euphemisms but it was still oddly uncomfortable to be spying on someone taking a dump. For the hours that I was on poo reporting duty, I thought I was looking at a black and white screen until someone wearing red entered view. It was weird, like the film techniques in Schindler's list. Everything just looked so brown and lifeless.
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