My posting has been slow lately, perhaps a reflection that not much is going on here. Combat has been slightly less frequent and there have been no casualties (well, some of our guys surprised some "bad" guys planting an IED and the encounter was a bit one sided, if you know what I mean). Slow is good, from my perspective.
Part of the slowness is that I'm still waiting for my Staff Sergeant to return from the south. He has been stuck for two weeks now, safe and sound, but stuck. It's really hard to move around in this country. Mostly the delays are due to weather in the mountains. The Chinooks need to fly through a number of passes to get anywhere, and if there are high winds or thunderstorms they don't fly. People get stuck places for weeks, and all you can do is sit around and wait for the next scheduled flight. Luckily, he will have visited our two furthest outposts and we will be unlikely to return.
As soon as he gets back I'm going to make the rounds to the outposts that are in the north section of our area. I'll let him stay here for a while and enjoy "civilization" and I'll go to a few other outposts. I'll consider hitching a ride in a convoy as long as I can get a seat in a $500,000 v-bottomed RG31. They are pretty much safer than the flat-bottomed Humvee M-1114.
US Forces are getting a lot of the RG31's (somewhere between 500k and 1 million per unit, courtesy of the US taxpayer credit card, thank you very much) because the Humvees just don't cut it anymore here in the world's biggest ammo dump. I read on the internet that the Humvee is close to ground, wide, and flat-bottomed, which means that the vehicle will absorb a relatively high percentage of a blast from beneath, transferring that force to the occupants and making the vehicle more likely to be breached. The RG31 is a high-riding vehicle that is v-bottomed like a boat, which deflects the blast out and up, rather than just absorbing it. Poor Afghan Army guys drive around in older Toyota HiLux trucks, which are really cool looking but definitely not IED resistant.
That said, I'll be happy to wait around for at least a little while to catch a flight.
Part of the slowness is that I'm still waiting for my Staff Sergeant to return from the south. He has been stuck for two weeks now, safe and sound, but stuck. It's really hard to move around in this country. Mostly the delays are due to weather in the mountains. The Chinooks need to fly through a number of passes to get anywhere, and if there are high winds or thunderstorms they don't fly. People get stuck places for weeks, and all you can do is sit around and wait for the next scheduled flight. Luckily, he will have visited our two furthest outposts and we will be unlikely to return.
As soon as he gets back I'm going to make the rounds to the outposts that are in the north section of our area. I'll let him stay here for a while and enjoy "civilization" and I'll go to a few other outposts. I'll consider hitching a ride in a convoy as long as I can get a seat in a $500,000 v-bottomed RG31. They are pretty much safer than the flat-bottomed Humvee M-1114.
US Forces are getting a lot of the RG31's (somewhere between 500k and 1 million per unit, courtesy of the US taxpayer credit card, thank you very much) because the Humvees just don't cut it anymore here in the world's biggest ammo dump. I read on the internet that the Humvee is close to ground, wide, and flat-bottomed, which means that the vehicle will absorb a relatively high percentage of a blast from beneath, transferring that force to the occupants and making the vehicle more likely to be breached. The RG31 is a high-riding vehicle that is v-bottomed like a boat, which deflects the blast out and up, rather than just absorbing it. Poor Afghan Army guys drive around in older Toyota HiLux trucks, which are really cool looking but definitely not IED resistant.
That said, I'll be happy to wait around for at least a little while to catch a flight.
