Hella Nation - Evan Wright [10]
Despite efforts to offer the comforts of home, life at the camp is mighty unpleasant. The food is awful—a combination of premanufactured T-rations and MREs (meals ready to eat). Temperatures inside the tents hit 130 degrees in the day, the porta-johns are foul and beastly hot, dust sifts into clothes and sleeping bags, and showers are available for only limited use. Add to that constant bouts of dysentery and the ever-present threat of rocket attacks—none successful so far—and you can understand why the soldiers have bitterly nicknamed the post “Ass-Crack-istan.”
Among the stringencies the soldiers complain about most is General Order Number 1, which bans possession or consumption of alcoholic beverages by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. “There’s a way around everything,” says one enlisted soldier. “Some of the guys like to huff,” he says, referring to the tried-and-true brain-frying high of sniffing inhalants. “I was against it at first, but we got a good high from Glade.”
Sexual relations are banned on the base, but stories of forbidden conduct abound. In April, an Apache attack-helicopter crew, monitoring the camp through night-vision equipment, picked up a couple having sex in a vehicle. And several women have been flown home after it was discovered they were pregnant. Assignations are not unknown at a place dubbed “Terrorist Terrace”—a blown-up bunker at the south end of the airfield. “I hooked up with an enlisted girl at the MWR tent,” says a young officer. “We borrowed a Humvee and drove out to Terrorist Terrace. We’d never met before. We talked for a few minutes, and I said, ‘Listen, do you want to fuck?’ And she said, ‘Um, OK.’ When I came back and laid down in my tent with her gunk all over my dick, I knew I had done a bad thing. Then I thought, I can’t believe it. I just got laid in Afghanistan.”
THE FIFTH PLATOON go by a roguish call sign. Over the radio they are the Hell Hounds of the Tank Killer Company Wolf Pack, or Wolf Pack Five for short. But gathering in their tent in the final hour before their patrol, they look more like a small-town baseball team than combat soldiers. The youngest is nineteen, and most of the rest are in their early twenties. The oldest, Platoon Sergeant Patrick Keough, is a thirty-six-year-old father of two. Despite the mad tattoos many display on their backs and arms, the bunch still give the impression of hometown innocence—one that is reinforced by frequent proclamations of how much they all care about one another. “All of us are brothers,” says Private First Class Andrew Wiser, a twenty-year-old from Conneaut, Ohio. “I’d die for any of these guys.” Their intense feeling for one another results in an almost naive faith. “Nothing bad is going to happen to any of us in Afghanistan,” Wiser says. “We’ll do anything it takes to look out for each other.”
Wolf Pack Five showed up in Kandahar last March, ready for battle. “I expected to start shooting as soon as we stepped off the plane,” says platoon section leader Sergeant Paul Quast, a beefy thirty-four-year-old with a shaved head and hard, deep-set blue eyes. Some of the soldiers, like PFC William Ballard, have been disappointed by the lack of action. A slender, soft-spoken, squinty nineteen-year-old, Ballard says, “I thought there’d be more war in Afghanistan, more like Vietnam.” When he came to