Soldier in Afghanistan: The Girl with the Pretty Eyes

When I was in Afghanistan, I spent the majority of my days on a small base. As a cannon crewmember, we mostly lived our life within the thick, blast resistant walls of the Forward Operating Base (FOB) that we were assigned to, FOB Naray. However, on some occasions, we were to go outside those walls, on missions that called for us to be a little more mobile. We were the northernmost guns on the northernmost FOB in Afghanistan at that time, and sometimes, the infantry had missions planned, with targets that would be well past our range while we were still on the FOB. So, we would pack up our gear, our guns, our ammo, our lives, and move out for a week, a few days, a few weeks, depending on what the mission called for. We would head north, in a convoy, travelling slowly over roads that were barely passable in a small 4x4 pickup truck. Yet we drove armored humvees and 2 1/2 ton trucks, loaded with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and our howitzers towed behind them through the rocky, mountain roads with 100 foot drop-offs. If the road had chose to crumble under us like it had done for so many other unlucky people, we would surely have plunged to our deaths. And we took each mission seriously, for the threat of enemy attack was constantly around us.

We took our missions seriously, and while we were "outside the wire" we took care of our own security, establishing a perimeter of concertina razor wire, and manning machine guns mounted in the turrets of two humvees. As we sat in a farmer's field on the side of a main road that we had occupied on several of our previous trips outside the FOB, our howitzers ready to pummel the targets that the infantry in the mountains ahead of us would establish, we constantly had to watch our own backs. We had a humvee parked, manned with a soldier on a M240-B machine gun scanning the road in both directions, in case enemy fighters tried to overtake our position. The threat of snipers, car bombers and suicide bombers was real, and we were vigilant.