Life at BAF

It occurs to me that since our move here to Metropolis, I haven’t really written about the day to day life on Bagram.

 

In many ways, Bagram is a lot like my hometown of Glenwood Springs, Colorado was when I was growing up.  There is one main street running north and south through town and everything of interest, the Dairy Queen, Burger King, and Wal-Mart (ok it’s really a PX) is located on this thoroughfare and the entire place is surrounded by mountains.  I would guess that the population is even comparable to Glenwood Springs circa 1970s.  So, in a lot of ways, if you squint a little, this place looks just like home.  Except for the land mines, I don’t remember any of those on the shortcut to school.  Other than that though..well, and the rivers.  Glenwood Springs has the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers running through it and all we have is a stinky little patch of swamp land along the north edge of town.  I can’t even squint that much.  We’ve also got some burned out Russian tanks, APCs, and Migs lying around and I don’t remember playing on any of those when I was a kid, although the neighbors at the bottom of the hill had an old ’39 Plymouth so if you use your imagination, well no maybe not.  I guess it’s really not that similar after all.

 

Bagram is divided up into little sub-divisions though, and they all have really catchy names like “Camp Lacy”, “Blackjack” and “Infantry Village”  Since the Marines were the first to occupy our little piece of paradise, we have the pleasure or residing in “Camp Teufel Hunden” which is German for “Devil Dog Town ” or  “Satan’s Little Helper Village”, but then that might be the Simpsons, I’m not sure.

 

Our accommodations here are 15’ by 40’ plywood shacks known as a B – Huts which have been numbered in sequence.  The commander lives in 16, so naturally, the Bucksnort Saloon’s replacement is “Stalag 17”  Craig and I picked up a new cell...er..room mate, Jeff Knight.  Jeff has been here working as the Support Operation Officer, Bagram, or SPO Bagram, or SPO BAF, or BAF MAN. Now that Craig, the original SPO, has shown up on BAF as well, we now have a title conundrum.  We’ve been working through some ideas like “SPO Major” and “SPO Minor” and after watching “The Usual Suspects” last night I think one of them may end up being “Kaiser SPOsae”

 

Stalag 17 has been recently renovated to create a little more room and one of the remnants of this semi-professional contacting work is a piece of two by four that sticks out from the wall right about forehead level to SPO Major.  This little bit of unfinished deconstruction has been dubbed the “Widowmaker” because of Craig’s repeated attempts hammer it through the back wall with his forehead.  We could just cut it down, but the entertainment value in Stalag 17 would diminish drastically, so we just put hash marks on the Widowmaker every time Craig whacks it. 

 

So life goes on and the days tick by and the longer we are here it feels that much more like home and we miss home that much more.