At Home on the Range

I won't go into the details, but the week after getting back from the last trip was a bit stressful. I was getting increasingly irritable and short-tempered, readily snarling at people for things that would've usually earned them a good-humored ribbing from me. Clearly, it was time for me to find some sort of therapy.

Fortunately, treatment for such an affliction in Afghanistan is readily available in the form of ammunition. Better still, my good friend (and driver) Greg is very adept at finding ammunition for us to take to the firing range and he jumps at every opportunity to go out and shoot things. After the week I'd had I couldn't appreciate him more.

Here's the lot of us from the Regional Outreach office on the range:


The bulk of the office got together along with a couple of Marines who are new in theater and went to the range. We got there with our personal rifles and pistols, many thousand rounds of ammunition, and a variety of junk that would show adequately satisfying battle damage when it was hit. Ostensibly we were there to make sure that our weapons were still properly calibrated so I started out with carefully aimed shooting:


It took me ten rounds to feel confident that my sights were aiming where the bullets were landing. At 30meters I was able to put six of those rounds through a target about the size of a quarter. I wasn't shooting great, but I wasn't doing too bad either. After my ten carefully aimed rounds to zero my sights, the rest of the day was spent just shooting for fun.

I only put about 600 rounds through my M16:


That was okay though, because then I got to melt through a full ammo box on the C9, the Canadian version of our 5.56mm, belt-fed machine gun (called a Squad Automatic Weapon or SAW for short):

I was all over the place with this thing. I fired it prone and kneeling and standing and from the hip. I'd be amazed if two out of five rounds landed anywhere near where I was aiming. Still, I'm pretty confident that if there was someone on the other end of the range headed my way with ill intent, at least a handful of the 220 rounds I fired in the first four minutes probably would've hit him.

After the SAW, I used up a quick 180 or so rounds with my 9mm pistol. I'm a fan of the pistol too. I need to get me one of those.

Someone also left a piece of laminated "bullet-resistant" glass out on the range, so we decided to test it out. Here's Greg dumping a few rounds into it (the glass is the light-colored area at the base of the glass powder cloud):

He was very proud of himself:


When we were done, the glass had not fared well:

In defense of the properties of this piece of "bulletproof" glass, we did manage to put well over 500 rounds into it and less than six managed to penetrate all the way through.

Anyway, as is his way Major Brinkman had to pose for pictures everywhere we went. So here's a shot of him looking tough in front of a mountain while wearing his ninja turtle costume:


Major Brinkman also decided he needed a shot of himself in front of a bunch of old bombed-out buildings and shattered Soviet Tanks. He kept talking about how the perfect caption for these pics would be "the Brink of Destruction." Okay...


Since the basic concept wasn't silly enough already, I decided to take one of these pics a step further and turn him into Andrew Brinkman, Infantryman of the Apocalypse:


Goofy as all of that was, I couldn't resist the urge to get a similar shot of myself:


It was a good day and did manage to lift my spirits a bit. Of course, anything beats sitting around in the office and waiting for something unpleasant to do.

Stay tuned, more shenanigans already scheduled...

Part VIII: Random Afghanistan Photos

So the other day I got invited out to go to the shooting range with a bunch of Canadian Army guys. The closest ranges we can go shoot at are actually located at the Afghan National Army Training Center on the other side of town. There's an American compound within the Afghan Army compound where the US advisors live and work. The Euro-random food served at the ISAF HQ is a bit unpleasant, so we drove over as early in the morning as we could stand and had breakfast.

After a tasty breakfast at the American chow hall (including the first properly cooked bacon I've seen since I landed in this godforsaken place*) I turned a corner and saw this shipping container with a very odd looking label on its side:



I paused for a few moments while trying to decide what could possibly be contained in this container. When I gave up on it I continued to walk past it and realized it was the funniest thing I'd seen in weeks:


After a brief chuckle I hopped back into the truck and we drove up to the shooting range. When we got up to the ranges I snapped a few pictures of the scenery:


I also got this winning shot of me somewhere during the day:



It was nice to get a chance to do some shooting. I'm not sure why, but there's something therapeutic about blowing holes in things from a few hundred feet away. One of the Canadians brought along a 12-guage shotgun and some slugs, so once we'd used up a couple of boxes worth of 5.56mm ammunition we got to set the ammo boxes down range and blast a few holes in them with the shotgun. Here's a winning shot of Master Corporal Gregg Scruton (assigned as driver/admin dude for my office) with the hapless ammo box victim:


On the serious side, I got to do a bunch of move-and-shoot marksmanship training with the Canucks. It turned out as I'd've predicted. I still suck with the rifle, which is to say I'm acceptably lethal, but not the world's best sniper. On the other hand I did pretty well with the pistol and the shotgun. The shotgun especially. It was a pump action shotgun, so I got to practice the one-handed pump method might remember from Terminator 2.** A good time was had by all, but it was time to leave all the same.

On the way back we passed a huge area littered with the burnt-out leftovers of hundreds of Cold War era Soviet armored vehicles. These are all that remains of the Russian invasion that the Mujahedin fighters managed to defeat in the 1980s. It makes for a sobering reminder of what the locals are capable of:



On the way back to the HQ compound, I took a bunch more pictures around the city of Kabul. Here's one of the countless random people who seem to spend much of their day camped out in the center median of some of the busiest thoroughfares:



Here's one of the so-called "jingle trucks" that are commonplace on the highways here:


More commonplace though, are the horsecarts:


I'm not sure why, but the local version of commerce still fascinates me. Here's another bunch of roadside fruitstands:


This is what passes for a strip mall in most of Kabul:

And here's a downtown stockyard where you can buy yourself some really sad-looking barnyard animals:

I'm not sure when I took this picture, but this dude can almost always be found begging on this road out:


Something else I'd mentioned in a previous entry is the contrast between the generally drab, dusty environment and the surprisingly immaculate local women:

Here's another shot that makes the contrast even more noticeable:


While the burkhas (shown above) are still in style all over town, with the fall of the Taliban regime, more and more women are adopting a more Western style of dress:


Here's a random shot of Massoud Circle:

A little while ago there was a car bomb that was detonated in this intersection. It killed four locals (if you count the guy driving the car bomb) but otherwise did only minor damage to some other cars nearby. I'm still not sure what the intended target was.

Leave it to militant insurgent forces to take all the fun out of a nice drive across town.

*I realize fully that I should not expect to find decent bacon in a Muslim country any more than I should expect to find a decent hamburger in a Hindu country. The problem is: every single morning at the chow hall there is bacon. Sausage too. For some reason though, the exact formula for converting it from dead pig to some sort of palatable form continues to elude the cooking staff at my base.

**Toward the end, when she'd been wounded and couldn't use her right arm for much, this was the same one-handed method Sarah Connor used when she started blasting away that the T-1000. If you don't remember it, go rent the movie today. It's still just as good as it ever was.