Fever Dream
Kandahar Airfield and the Empire.
It was July of 2011, and I was dismounting wearily from my vehicle in Kandahar Airfield (KAF). We had just driven back to the base from Patrol Base Sperwan Ghar, Panjwai; my home for the past four months. Dust caked sweat-soaked Kevlar. The drive had been marked with a couple near-accidents and my nerves were rattled.
I didn’t know at the time, but I had just arrived back in the strangest place I have ever been. The most profound expression of the American Empire I could imagine.
I was angry, but that was nothing new; I’d been angry for months. A long seething resentment at the world and the war that culminated with my departure from Sperwan Ghar, Panjwai district.1
The Canadian units in the district had been replaced by an American company, reducing to a third the total troops on the ground. My Electronic Warfare (EW) detachment at Sper wasn’t replaced at all, and the Americans doing the job nearby were wildly incompetent. I felt like us going home was going to get some of those Americans killed.2 I’d been working with them for months and they were comrades-in-arms, fighting an enemy we all agreed was worth fighting. They were mostly Alaskans, young, recently trained and wide eyed. Their uniforms were new, and their operations marked with the clumsiness of inexperience.
The entire plan had been broken from day one. Counter-insurgency relies on there being enough security forces to defeat the insurgency, a pre-condition that had never been met. Our withdrawal was dooming Panjwai to further increasing bloodshed. I felt like I was carrying around an enormous wealth of information that, on the order of a higher-up in Ottawa, just became completely irrelevant.
I wanted to go home. To live my life, to marry my fiancée, and to see my dog, yet I also wanted to stay. My brain wanted to find a compromise between these two mutually exclusive notions. The time I spent at Sper had been the highlight of my career, and having been unplugged from the war, I was furious.
The drive back to KAF didn’t help. Some geniuses in Ottawa had decided to remove our driver’s right periscope to give us a thermal camera with no depth perception, and no training on how to use it. An unseen bend in the road, and our lopsided Bison slewed into a ditch and almost rolled. As I was standing outside the rear hatch on rear-security, I didn’t like my chances with 20 tons of armour rolling on top of me. It happened again sometime later.3
I felt weird clearing and unloading my rifle. I was returning with the same bullets I’d been sent with; my rifle having spent most of my deployment stowed in the truck. The Taliban got to shoot at me, but I never got to shoot back. In retrospect, this is a good thing, but at the time it was one more burning resentment.
I was wildly unprepared for a gunfight anyways; our pre-deployment training was far from thorough. My body armour was held together with para-cord. I was given ten magazines worth of ammunition for five magazines, so the other 150 rounds of rifle ammo I had stuffed into a Ziplock bag in my tactical vest next to my grenades. I’d never been given the chance to test-fire my carbine and honestly didn’t know what would happen if I pulled the trigger. For all I knew, I could have been protecting our crew with a broken piece.
For the next three weeks, I and the rest of my colleagues in EW would mill around KAF like some embittered tourists waiting for our flight out. We spent our days talking about the experiences, going on leave to Cyprus, and debating what the actual purpose of the mission had actually been. After ten years of war, the objective beyond “defeat the Taliban,” whatever that meant, remained as murky as ever.
The population of KAF exceeded 20,000 when I was there. A massive sprawling base that housed troops, supplies, and aircraft. It was another world wholly removed from the patrol base I’d spent most of my time in up to this point. I’d been living in an improvised plywood shack on top of a hill, and KAF felt like a metropolis.
A loud metropolis. Sper had been remarkably quiet, and at night, the entire Milky Way was visible in the dark. KAF was an endless parade of diesel trucks, buses and the roar of jets on full afterburner taking off. It never slept, the lights never dimmed, and it never stopped stinking.
If the wind was blowing, the fetid stink of the sewage pond would assault your nostrils. The shitwinds were a ubiquitous feature of KAF; an experience that everyone there remembered. Compounding that, there were the badly tuned trucks and buses that belched thick plumes of black diesel smoke, and the convoys of armoured vehicles that kicked up dust and smoke.
The streets of KAF were a winding dusty maze of concrete walls. The walls, mostly stacked highway dividers, were in place to reduce damage and fragmentation from the rocket attacks that by the summer, were a near daily occurrence. Many of the walls had graffiti style art, and actual graffiti. Concrete bunkers dotted the roads. It was the height of summer, and the 30–40-degree heat and the hot, dusty wind ensured that when we weren’t indoors, we skittered between cool shady spots and air conditioning.
Our chain of command who had directed us from KAF now shepherded us around the city like a school field trip. We packed our trucks up, accounted for our gear and then we waited. Three weeks to do two days of work while the war carried on around us.
We toured the many mess halls of KAF, there were at least 10 of them. Some, like the Chinese one, would cater to a particular type of food, where others, like the British mess, were tailored to the troops most seen there. They were all run by the same US contractor.
The center of KAF for us was the Boardwalk, a square shopping and recreation area in the center of ‘town.’ At Green Bean, you could get a MOAC, or ‘Mother Of All Coffees,’ a 1 liter coffee with shots of espresso in it to liven it up a little. Down the pathway one could find a shawarma shop, a few discount souvenir shops, a pizza place, and of course, the KFC. In the center of the Boardwalk, Canadians would gather to play ball hockey, which caused more injuries than the Taliban.
Of course there was Tim Horton’s, and yes, I went to it a couple times, but life is too short for bad coffee and Horton’s is some bad coffee. It wasn’t worse than it was at home, in fact, it was uncannily similar (it looked and even smelled like a Tims inside), but I never identified my national pride to a Brazilian owned coffee cartel. Besides, the lines were too long.
There was an “Afghan” market, in which approved vendors were allowed to sell souvenirs. Everything from rugs with Kalashnikovs and the Twin Towers burning on them, pirated copies of video games like Dawn of War, and beautifully sculpted marble and blue lapis chess sets. For many who called KAF their home, these vendors were the only Afghans they would ever see or meet.
There was a massage parlor, with a sign that read “no we won’t, and yes we will call the MPs (Military Police) if you ask,” taped to the door. Rumors that this was once a front for a brothel circulated constantly, but the sign begged to differ.
Sex-work rumors were always the talk of the town. Rumors abounded4 about the Dutch and Romanian Armies sending hookers to KAF. The lavatories were full of phone numbers allegedly soliciting services. Everyone had heard something but had not actually seen it for themselves.
Hypersexuality was the order of the day. With the ratio of men to women being in the order of 20:1, KAF was home to 19,000+ angry, horny, feral, leering, men. We all did it shamelessly; an entire table of soldiers, even in mixed company, would go silent and watch when a pretty woman walked by. When I forgot my camera in a truck, I found that my boss had taken some pictures of pretty women he saw while driving.
The women who served in KAF just had to tolerate the predatory atmosphere as best they could. Before the Battlegroup had even left Canada, a sex tape of one of the female members had been making the rounds.
At night, few women went out, and never alone. The neighborhood known as South Park was off limits to all Canadians because of the danger of being robbed and/or raped by gangs of American soldiers. The danger was not exclusive to Americans, or South Park, however. We were all armed, but many women kept their weapons loaded in KAF, a no-no according to the chain of command, but understandable given the atmosphere.
It remained unexamined by us, that we were ostensibly fighting a war for the cause of Afghan feminism (among other myriad objectives), yet the women on our team were subjected to this.
Crime was constant. During my deployment, the US Marines robbed their own payroll office. Anything you value should be locked up, lest it go missing. An armed society, as it turns out, does not mean a polite society.
There were MPs of course, and they were as useless there as at home. They’d give out speeding tickets, and a Latvian MP tried to tell me I had the wrong type of holster for my pistol. Surly and embittered, I told him where I worked and said it’s issued kit, and to go talk to my bosses, before turning on my heels to the sound of him spluttering in broken English about his authority. There was even a rumor that the Van Doos5 held a Canadian MP at gunpoint until he dropped a negligent discharge investigation.
A defiant, devil-may-care attitude pervaded all the outside-the-wire soldiers marooned in KAF. For my part, I was too burnt out, too tired, and too angry to care about much. Even rocket attacks.
“This is the J-DOC. Rocket attack. Rocket attack,” would come a female voice with a British accent from the loudspeakers. If you were lucky, the rocket(s) in question would arrive after the warning.
The first time I experienced a rocket attack, I was a wide-eyed new soldier who had been in the country for less than two months. The siren started wailing, and I asked my friend A, a veteran on his second tour, if we should take cover.
“If you want to,” he shrugged, continuing his cigarette. We stayed standing.
By July, I was numb. Sitting in my bunk in KAF a week after arriving, I was watching a movie on my laptop when I heard the ripping woosh of a rocket scream over the building I was in and explode down the road. I paused my movie for a second, listened, then resumed nonplussed, muttering something about the fucking Taliban.
The danger wasn’t an illusion; when I was on leave a rocket had hit the roof of a mess hall in South Park, eviscerated some poor bastard standing under it, and wounded 20 others. But after the threats posed from snipers, mortars, IEDs, near-rollovers, and the daily jokes about killing ourselves, dying from a very inaccurate Chinese rocket seemed too galling and random to worry about. Besides, the war was over, right?
Morale had taken a beating in those weeks. The Lieutenant-Colonel who commanded us, along with his Sergeant Major, had been sacked for taking the outside-the-wire troop’s allotted two monthly alcoholic drinks and having Caligula esq debauched parties while we lived in forward bases. We had heard the rumors to this effect for the entire tour, but it was only after everything was over and it didn’t matter anymore, that the powers that be addressed them.
Our Troop Warrant Officer, trying to maintain what was left of our morale, got us a booking at TGI Friday’s for my friend C’s birthday. Having been cooling our heels for weeks, we were happy to have a diversion. The outside of the building, like most, was nondescript with just the sign out front showing the way. Inside, was a TGI Friday’s in almost every detail but the alcohol.
The wait staff were mostly Phillipinos. Most of the civilian staff in KAF were either from the Philippines, or Nepal. Like most people voluntarily in combat zones, they were there to work, to get a good pay cheque to bring home at the end of their tour. Few spoke more than a couple words of English. They seated us at our tables like any group at a restaurant, and we sat, flipping through the menus.
I hadn’t even been to a TGI Friday’s, and I doubt any of the staff there had either. The meal was fine; I honestly don’t remember it much. What I do remember is the birthday boy.
At the appointed time, out came the staff of the restaurant with birthday cake with candles. They compelled my introverted friend to stand on the chair and dance with a faux-wine bottle of grape juice in his hand while they sang ‘Boom Boom Chicka Boom,’ TGI Friday’s copyright safe birthday song.
C stood there, awkwardly doing a dance with his “wine,” on the chair, 9mm pistol strapped to his leg and his “Nowhere 2 Hide,” Grim Reaper patch on his arm. It was one of the most profoundly strange moments of my life. An insane fever dream. Outside the wire of KAF was Afghanistan and the War, but here, inside, was a sort of American theme park that had been built amid a war the Empire was deciding to lose.
It was impossible to reconcile this moment with memories of just two weeks earlier. Driving through the countryside of Panjwai, you could see and feel the eyes of every Afghan civilian lock onto you, the occupier. Their eyes followed us as we left forever. It was a feeling that had made me shiver inside my armour.
Years and many events later, it can be hard to say where my recollections end and my hindsight begins, but I know that even at the time I knew that we were going to lose the war. Canada was ending its mission, we were in at the death, and I felt like we were on the last flight out of Saigon.
It’s not that I expected the war to end right away; there was much more dying to do before then, but the writing was on the wall in ways I was truly starting to grasp. Existing there in the desert, surrounding by the simulated trappings of the American Empire at its most grotesque, I knew we were going to lose because we’d never tried to win.
We built an insane simulated world to occupy the poorest country in the world. We had the ability to kill with satellite guided ordnance flown by drones operated in Las Vegas, yet we lacked the stomach, the moral fiber, to even live there, let alone fight for Afghanistan. This base, this world, had nothing to do with Afghanistan. It might as well have been on the moon.
My time there was spent at the end of Obama’s troop surge. It was the Empire’s last shot to defeat the Taliban and then devolve the mission to the Afghan puppet government. Already allies like Canada were jumping ship, soon it would just be the Americans left, and they were reducing their commitments. The Taliban was as strong and patient as ever. The USA had, and still has, the power to create an American town for 20,000 soldiers in a landlocked corner of central Asia, yet they couldn’t find the patience to fight the war.
Nothing about KAF was unique. In Afghanistan alone, KAF was one of several big bases, the others being Bastion in Helman province, and Bagram in Pawan province. Some of the structures may remain, but the travelling circus that is the American military is gone. The same companies, networks and administration that created a tiny, simulated America in the desert now supplies the Ukrainians, Israelis, and supports the untold number of mini-Americas in the form of bases in faraway lands. They’ll get bored of those conflicts too soon enough; it’s already well underway for Ukraine.
Seeing the simultaneous display of imperial power, and imperial ambivalence has coloured my perceptions of the Empire to this day. Few things the US of A has done since then have come as a shock to me, because I saw outside the wire of Empire.
‘Au revoir, Zangabad,’ Canadian army hands over Afghan village to U.S.
A news story from neighboring Zangabad, discussing the withdrawal. We left a couple days after.
Some were wounded before we were even out of country, but it’s impossible to say if that would have occurred if we were still in position.
This is something C continues to apologize over to the this day, and to this day I tell him it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t trained on the new camera, and a driver has to be able to see where he’s going. This fact may come as a shock to staff officers.
The wartime rumor mill is a fascinating creature worthy of its own story. It’s impossible to understate the extent of unreality that permeates every interaction when regular sources of information are inaccessible. Soldiers in a conflict will believe anything. Sean Kingston and Brian Adams both “died” on our tour. The only celebrity death on my tour I recall that proved accurate was Osama Bin Laden.
Royal 22e Régiment, the French speaking infantry unit that the Roto 3-10 battlegroup was based around.
What an excellent essay! And what a total, up one side and down the other cock-up. How could any thinking person give a positive spin on this debacle, or any invasion of another country come to that? And, yes, if you have to invade, at least make it look as if you mean it. This occupation was squalid.