The sun is harsh and hot in Afghanistan’s Musahy Valley and it’s barely nine in the morning. Up here at about 7,000 feet, the thinner atmosphere doesn’t scatter the solar energy like it does at sea level; the natural coolness of this higher altitude is counterbalanced by rays more direct and searing. Underneath my Kevlar vest and ill-fitting helmet I have already sweated through my shirt which sticks to me now, front and back.

The Musahy looks and feels a lot like some of the mountain valleys in Colorado where I grew up. Back home, places like South Park feature a wide and lush valley floor walled in by incredibly rugged peaks. So it is here in Afghanistan, except that Colorado’s mountains shoulder a fine garment of greenery right up to timberline– spruce, fir and pine. These Afghan ranges seem devoid of anything but rock.

I’m tramping a dirt road with a small unit of Italian Alpine troops sent here under NATO auspices as part of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force. The Italians’ Forward Operating Base is relatively new to this valley. They arrived in December, a handful of men to keep an eye on 62 villages scattered across 125 square miles. Estimated population: about 60,000. Among that population: an unknown number of Taliban or at least Taliban sympathizers. That’s part of the reason we are out this day on foot patrol. You might say we’re looking for trouble… and hoping we don’t find any.

We pass a school where some 500 boys are enrolled just in grades 8-through-12. The place is bursting at the seams; there’s no room for that many children in the meager classrooms now standing. Colonel Michele (pronounced mi-KAY-lay) Risi, commander of this Italian force, tells me that to handle the overcrowding the school is constantly running a kind of double-shift; half the boys are in classes while the other half are outdoors enjoying what you can only call ‘recess.’

I see a teacher dressed all in white carrying a switch of willow half an inch thick and close to five feet long. He’s shouting. Whatever is going on among the kids outside the school, he doesn’t like it. He chases the boys, wildly swinging the switch and yelling commands. They seem to have seen this drill before and manage to stay just beyond his reach. I’m glad I don’t see him connect—the weapon he’s using would raise a serious welt, maybe even break the skin. “The teachers,” Col. Risi tells me, “are judged not by how well they teach, but by how well they handle the switch.”

Keep Reading …

The morning sky in Kabul is never exactly a normal color.  It’s a hazy, wan, milky mess, more gray than blue, nature’s true palette obscured by the smoke of a million morning cook fires and the exhaust of this broken-down city’s assemblage of rattletrap rolling stock.  And then there’s the dust.

We’re on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital awaiting a chopper that will carry us into Taliban country; the coffee I’m downing might be the best I’ve ever had.  Leave it to the Italians to concoct a delicious espresso even in a war zone.

The sudden, guttural thumping of helicopter blades overhead says it’s time to go to work.  We depart the comfort of the base mess hall, strap on our body armor and head for the airfield.

I’m with two other guys who will make this assignment possible: U-S Army Lt. Col. Web Wright is my guardian angel and answer-man; Akbar Shinbari, my indefatigable cameraman, fixer and source of local knowledge.   Col. Wright is one of those walking contradictions our armed forces seem so good at producing; intelligent, soft spoken, polite-and really scary-looking when he dons his battle gear, slips on a pair of Oakleys and straps a holstered automatic to his chest.   With hands clasped in his lap as if meditating, jaw squared and eyes obscured, he just oozes an air of serene danger.

Wright clamps on his helmet and Kevlar vest and looks like a man not to be messed with.  I bundle myself in my NATO-issue Kevlar and headgear and look like a dork.   Akbar’s video confirms this.  But Akbar-perhaps the most genial photographer I’ve ever worked with-is much too kind to say so.  I’ve heard that the Afghan culture is very welcoming of strangers, and right now there’s nobody stranger in Kabul than me.

We leave the mess hall and notice a forest fire has broken out in this high desert.  As our Land Cruiser rolls toward the airfield, a towering cloud of smoke is boiling skyward, a brown pillar now supporting the milky sky.  But there is no fire and the tower is not smoke.  It’s dust kicked up in the rotor wash of the giant Chinook waiting impatiently for us to climb aboard.

The blades are as wide as desktops and thumping over our heads.  Unconsciously, I duck down.  Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of M*A*S*H; this craft is so big those rotors wouldn’t touch me if I did my best basketball leap.  Its jet engines are screaming and hurling powerful streams of exhaust directly at us as we approach from the rear.   The blades pound; the combination of exhaust blast and rotor wash from above has the kerosene-tainted air convulsing wildly in waves that push and swirl.  I walk unsteadily, like a drunk, until I’ve climbed past the machine gunner in position on the boarding ramp and find myself safely inside this flying bus.

We’re off the ground within seconds.  I’ve noticed that virtually no piece of military hardware stays put for long in Afghanistan.  Such targets are too easy to hit if they’re standing still.

We head south from Kabul, flying low, maybe three-hundred feet off the ground.  We climb only to clear  the spiked teeth of a mountain range, and even then, the big ship hugs close to the forbidding landscape, all escarpments of rock from base to peak.  No trees, no grass-just jagged, angry stone.

The chopper drops down the other side and into the Musahy Valley, an unbelievably flat, wide expanse.  We fly across it very fast, and yet despite all the ground we cover, I see exactly one paved road.  The scenes dashing by below look almost Biblical.  Goats scatter as the thunderous machine roars overhead.  Flat-roofed houses with walls of mud and straw punctuate fields in which children are working.  An occasional cow bucks and flees in terror.

For a time the valley is verdant and green; then we fly over a long stretch that shows dry and gray as the moon.  The one advantage of such a bleak landscape, or so it would seem to me, is that it offers no hiding place to insurgents.  There are no houses, no trees, no boulders below us.  The three men stationed at this ship’s very large machine guns-one on each side behind the pilots and the one mentioned earlier on the Chinook’s tail boarding ramp-have a moment to relax their minds, if not their weapons.

We land.  Quickly we’re out of the chopper and it takes off on another mission.  As its thunder fades down valley and we head toward the small NATO outpost the Italians have established here, Col. Wright speaks but five telling words:  “Welcome to the eighth century.”

I look around and it’s easy to see what he means.  Absent the Italians’ base, its vehicles, sandbags and razor wire, there isn’t anything in sight that appears to have been made by machine.  A large herd of sheep is grazing unfenced in a pasture, tended by what looks to be a teen.  Children are running in our general direction, apparently believing the chopper must have disgorged something interesting.

We set out on a foot patrol with a small contingent of Italian Alpine troops who’ve made the valley their home.  Akbar and I are warned to keep to the middle of this walking convoy of less than a dozen men.  Gunners in the front will act as scouts, along with an explosives-sniffing dog that bears some resemblance to a German Shepherd.   More heavily-armed soldiers will trail behind us.  A small aerial drone–wingspan maybe three feet–is launched to fly ahead and beam back pictures that are monitored in a situation room at the base.  If there’s trouble, we’re told to get down, stay flat and look for cover if any can be found.  In this peaceful valley of gurgling creeks and bleating sheep, surrounded by peaks under a cloudless sky, it doesn’t seem like violence should intervene.  But in this part of Afghanistan, I will learn, trouble is never far away.

To be continued…

It’s a bit disconcerting dropping in here for a visit. And I do mean ‘dropping’. The gigantic Air Force C-17 that dropped us here offers no windows, so it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. But I could tell we were at a substantial altitude—I’m guessing 20,000 feet or so—when the pilot dropped the gear.

Suddenly the roar of an already-loud aircraft notched up another dozen decibels as the outside air screamed past the landing gear now hanging out in the airstream. A pilot will ‘fly dirty’ (meaning the airframe isn’t smooth and clean) if he wants to get down in a hurry. The exposed gear creates a huge amount of drag that helps the jet fall out of the sky.

I could feel the giant craft tip nose down for our steep approach to the runway. The C-17 is a huge target, and with a 4-star general onboard, the Air Force was taking no chances. There would be no low flybys of the jagged peaks surrounding Kabul, just in case some lucky-shot insurgent might be waiting with a shoulder-launched missile.

Once on the ground it was a mad scramble to get off the plane, but executed with military precision. I can honestly say that the worst part of this entire trip—repeated over and over again—is donning the mandated body armor for any trips outside secure NATO installations. The “bulletproof” vest is heavy and of course, doesn’t allow air movement, so almost as soon as I’ve put this thing on in the 90-plus degree heat, I’m drenched with sweat. That’s not so bad; I can deal. What’s absolutely awful is the heavy protective “one size fits none” helmet. The thing weighs about five pounds with virtually no padding, only a taut spiderweb of nylon webbing that grinds into my scalp. More journalists should be required to wear this stuff when dispatching stories about battlefield conditions; I have new respect for our troops, fighting in conditions like these wearing much heavier gear than the cumbersome load now burdening me. I’m told mine is the “old style” helmet; the new ones are more comfortable. Yeah. Right.

We piled in the back of a convoy of British military vehicles, sitting sideways on bench seats, knees interlocked with whoever’s sitting on the opposite bench. We’re given a briefing about the drive ahead, how to react if we should come under fire. Somehow it seems a bit less ominous delivered in a crisp British accent. I notice mine is the last vehicle of the convoy. Great. When insurgents do attack—not that I’m expecting such a thing—they like to go for the either the head or tail of the procession. How comforting.

We tear off, weaving through the dusty streets of Kabul. Even on straight stretches of road, our driver constantly makes “S” turns using all available lanes—if these so-called roads actually had lanes. Not because traffic is a problem–which it is. The constant change of course is a protective maneuver designed to make us harder to hit in case our convoy should come under attack.

The vehicle commander in the right seat is talking into a radio headset, keeping up a constant chatter with the rest of the convoy. Eyes peeled on nearby traffic, looking for anything out of the ordinary, hoping to spot any potential car bombers that should happen upon us. It’s all very professional and executed with cool caution; but a smooth ride, it is not. Accelerate sharply, hit the brakes, clutch, gas, swerve, bounce—the helmet feels like it’s shaving my scalp at the follicles as we lurch along these potholed paths.

The Brits’ delivery mission is successful, and after what seems like a very long fifteen minutes we are pulling up to the ominous concrete barricades and blast walls marking the entrance to the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) compound in Kabul. Once inside, I-D’s are checked, more gates are lifted, the armed soldiers traveling with us climb out to clear their weapons of live ammunition.

We drive past a mustard-yellow building, a fairly grandiose structure for this impoverished and war-ravaged country. I’m told it now serves as the headquarters of the ISAF forces. In a delicious (and deliberate) bit of irony, it was the headquarters of the Taliban when that repressive regime ran this nation a scant few years ago.

We’re given another briefing and dispatched to our rooms. We’re safe.

Welcome to Kabul.

You want to see a bit of delightful chaos?

Descend on an impoverished country that holds an exceedingly young population. Bring almost 60 nice, new bicycles. Set up a dignified ceremony involving representatives of the Afghan Cycling Federation and the “Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled.” Then try to turn over the bikes to those who are intended to receive them — a group of kids from a Kabul orphanage, and members of the Afghan National Cycling Team.

Pandemonium.

As I mentioned in my earlier dispatch, it’s one of the events that brought me to Kabul. Bicycling Magazine teamed up with Specialized (the bike company) and NATO to deliver these bikes to Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force did the heavy lifting—literally. Two tons worth’ of bikes and assorted repair equipment. Now that they’re assembled and ready to roll, the great handover is underway.

I remember getting a new bike for Christmas as a kid. It’s a great feeling, but in a nation as rich as ours, such a thing can hardly be described as out-of-the ordinary. In the destitute place that is Kabul, handing out new bikes, no strings attached, is almost beyond comprehension– like walking up to a guy in a parking lot in our country and tossing him the keys to a Rolls-Royce.

It begins slowly enough as though no one can believe this good fortune. Suddenly it’s a free-for-all; little fingers clamping on handlebars and desperately trying not to let go. The kids are from one of the many orphanages in this country; their deceased parents, in most cases, victims of the Taliban’s vengeful rule. It’s hard to know how old the children are. Because of the harsh living conditions and poor nutrition, a 14-year-old here might appear to be ten.

I see a boy straddling one of these two-wheeled wonders and ask what he’ll do with it. “Go to school,” he declares with a grin. There simply aren’t enough schools anywhere in Afghanistan, so most kids have to walk miles to attend. A bike will make it possible for him to actually go to classes now. He’ll ride this gift from America into his future.

Keep Reading …

Rebuilding a nation. It sounds like such a grand, impossible feat. But as the Chinese proverb goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” The rebuilding of Afghanistan is underway. This is a story about one of those little steps.

A bicycle might not seem a likely instrument of international aid. Fifty seven bikes, maybe a bit closer. That’s how many bikes were loaded on board the gigantic C-17 jet that brought us here. Two tons of bicycles, donated by the cycle company Specialized in a giveaway — It would seem a simple thing to send a few bikes overseas. It isn’t.

Coordinating their arrival was a logistical feat; thank goodness for the military efficiencies of NATO and the US Air Force. Once the bikes were safe in Kabul at the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) base here, another masssive task loomed: getting those bikes assembled.

The crew of four from Bicycling did most of the work, with help from various military personnel who stopped by to help. I pumped a few tires and installed a few pedals and seat posts; I’m good with a wrench, but the Bicycling folks are the artists. Hours and hours and hours of assembly later, the bikes were ready to roll.

It took a lot of planning just to figure out who should receive this gift.

Kabul is still in some respects a city of survival of the fittest. Power rules. Award these bikes to some deserving private citizens and, it was feared, they’d instantly become the target of thieves. Various plans were considered and scrapped. Finally it was decided to award the bikes to two national entities; the fifty new Specialized bikes went to a government ministry that runs orphanages throughout Afghanistan. Another seven bikes of various types were assembled for Afghanistan’s national cycling team–the riders who hope one day to compete in the Olympics.

Here’s a telling indicator of just how severe life remains in this country:

The Afghan team was asked whether they might like to have a few mountain bikes to ride; road riders often mix up their training regimen with some off-road work. The simple answer was no, thank you. We don’t ride the trails in this country. Too dangerous. They’re often pocked with land mines.

More on the award of the bikes–and my Afghanistan adventure– coming up….

We are six miles above Prague, more or less, about an hour into our flight to Kabul, Afghanistan.

Seven hours to go. This cavernous US Air Force C-17 Globemaster roars along at 33,000 feet—and I do mean roars. We’ve all been issued foam earplugs for the flight and I’ve topped mine with a pair of those noise-cancelling headphones. (Great packer and trip-planner than I am, I neglected to bring an Ipod to pump any music through them — but I do have some nifty headphones keeping my eardrums happy.)

Liftoff from Brussels, Belgium came around 7:30 this morning. Brussels, of course, is heaquarters of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I’m onboard a NATO flight and find myself in very esteemed company. Four-star General John Craddock—the Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe–is onboard. Gen. Craddock is responsible for roughly 50,000 NATO troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and of those, about 21,000 are U-S forces. He’s headed back to Afghanistan to check on his people and the progress they’re making in stabilizing a country wracked by years of war and hardship.

Also onboard are 18 members of the Council on Foreign Relations. They’ll shadow General Craddock as he crisscrosses Afghanistan to see for themselves this nation at the nexus of so many foreign policy debates raging around the world today. There’ll be briefings from NATO personnel and U.N. and Afghan officials.

And me? I’m onboard to report those stories, yes, but also something a little more concrete and perhaps even more meaningful for a dozens of deserving people—especially children– in Afghanistan. More on that in a moment.

Earplugs in, headphones on, nothing to watch out the window because essentially there are no passenger windows in this flying freighter. Not much talking because we have to shout to be heard; we’ve been warned we’ll be hoarse by the end of the flight if we keep that up. So I sit, and think, and type.

I think of what it must feel like to be in Gen. Craddock’s shoes, to know that 50,000 men and women are depending on the decisions he makes each day. I’m a guy who often finds it overwhelming to maintain a handle on our four children. Once I (temporarily) left behind our 8-year-old daughter at a park after her brother’s baseball game because I can be a scatterbrained doofus (who also forgets his iPod). To be charged with the care of 50,000 others? I’m in awe of the responsibilities of this general and the men and women like him who lead our forces throughout the world.

That gets me thinking about our oldest son, now almost finished with his “plebe” year at West Point. I’ve blogged about his experience before and I owe you some retro-blogging about how his year has progressed. Assuming he makes it through graduation, he could be leading troops somewhere in the world a scant three years from now. A couple of blinks ago I was battling with him to turn off the video game, clean up his room and finish his homework; a few more blinks in the future and he might have some young private’s life depending on his leadership. Pride, patriotism, excitement, fear — a father’s emotions are wrestling one another for dominance at 33,000 feet.

Keep Reading …