Last Mission

We should have taken our first clue from our first day, rather our first night, of our last mission in Afghanistan. Our first day went pretty well. Our task for the first day was to drive south about 140km to the FOB where we would be working out of for the next week and a half. I'd heard horror stories about the drive before, but our drive went fairly well. We found the hard-packed dirt and made it most of the way down in ten hours. Believe it or not, this is pretty good time for Afghanistan.

And then, about 10 clicks out, we hit some snags. The sun went down. Our lead vehicle had trouble finding the hard-packed dirt. Our trailers hauling heavy equipment started getting stuck. At one point the vehicle commander for the vehicle I was riding in told me we had been averaging 26 minutes per mile for the past five miles. And then we made it to the FOB--we could see the lights just over the hill. What we couldn't do was find the ECP, or entry control point, that would let us inside friendly lines. So we searched for it, and finally the last vehicle in our convoy radioed that he had found it.

Unfortunately, at that point, our three trailers hauling our TRAMs and the small bulldozer we had brought with us were a ways past the ECP, down the hill and by the Helmand River, which we would be crossing every day for the next week. We started turning vehicles around, and our first vehicle made it inside the FOB around 1900. Then the fun started. The road close to the river got pretty narrow, so one of the trailers ended up in a small tributary when it tried to turn around. One of the trailers succumbed to the elements and died entirely. Fortunately, we had brought the heavy-duty recovery truck with us, so we sent it out to drag the vehicles out of the river and back up the hill. By the time our last vehicle rolled in the ECP, it was a minute past midnight.

Annoying, but no big deal. We wouldn't need the trailers until we headed back to Leatherneck, so our mechanic had a while to fix the trucks. We started the next day by taking a look at the BOM (Bill of Materials), or the lumber and HESCO that we would be using for our mission. It wasn't in the greatest of shape. It had been delivered from Khandahar, to the east, by a civilian contractor, and they hadn't used common sense in its delivery.

The materials had been loaded up in Khandahar in dump trucks, so when they arrived at the FOB, they had simply lifted the beds of the trucks and dumped the materials on the deck. The lumber and HESCO had been mangled. The nails ended up in a head on the deck and had to be sorted out. Some of the items had been substitutes for what was requested. For example, my Sergeant liked to use orange spray paint to mark the lines of the patrol bases we built. Orange paint had been delivered in cans instead--completely useless to us. Razor wire was substituted for concertina wire.

Our mission was to build a PB (patrol base) for the Afghan Border Police, to give them their own base to work out of instead of them working out of the adjacent Marine Corps outpost they were currently using. We would build a HESCO perimeter, guard towers, a "hygiene" (head) area, and the original order called for a wire perimeter. We inventoried our materials on hand; they would be enough for what we needed. The razor wire wasn't an adequate substitute for the concertina wire we had requested, but the engineering officer stationed at the FOB said he had some c-wire we could borrow. We headed out to the existing patrol base to take a look at the site.

(We slept at the FOB and commuted to the PB every morning. We ended up fording the Helmand River every morning and evening, and there were a couple of canals we crossed along the way, but it worked out pretty well. There was a real chow hall at the FOB, and showers, and an office to work from. There was supposed to be a tent to sleep in, but because the Battalion was being replaced, there was an extra Battalion currently at the base, and all of the transient billeting was occupied. Still, it was better than staying at the PB.)

So we arrived at the PB after lunch. The site survey had been done by someone else. We had been assured that there was enough dirt on site to fill the HESCO, but we had failed to properly assess the amount of work required to level the site. We got on site only to find out the small bulldozer we had brought would be completely inadequate to complete the job in a reasonable time frame. We were in luck, though. When we got back to the FOB that night, I talked to the SeaBees stationed at the FOB, and they said we could borrow their bulldozer the next day. Score.

So we headed out the next day with an extra bulldozer and managed to get the site leveled. It wasn't perfect, but part of the order called for putting down gravel inside the PB--we would level the deck when we spread the gravel. We started heading back to the FOB. The Sergeant that had been my VC (vehicle commander) was in a different vehicle, so I was in the VC seat (front passenger seat). One of the culverts crossing one of the canals was fairly narrow, and the driver of my vehicle hit it wrong as we went over it. Too far to the right, and then slowed down when the rear right side of the vehicle sank. I told her to crank the wheel and hit the gas, but it did no good. The vehicle started to tip over to the right.

I yelled back at my gunner to get inside the vehicle--the gunner's turret is the most dangerous place to be in a vehicle, especially in a roll-over. Fortunately, he had already crouched down inside the vehicle and braced himself. We rolled slowly. Once it felt like we were more or less stable, I told the radio operator to radio back to the vehicle behind us and make sure we were stable. I didn't want anybody getting hurt as they climbed out. It was too late. My platoon sergeant, the VC for the vehicle behind us, was already on top of the vehicle, now the driver's side, trying to get the door open. It took two of them to open the door, but then he was yelling down into the vehicle to make sure everybody was okay. I assured him we were okay, and other Marines helped the four of us climb out of the vehicle.

We hadn't brought our heavy-duty recovery truck with us that day, so we called back to the FOB and waited until it came. It took the operator a couple of tries to pull our vehicle out of the ditch it had slid into, but finally it was out. We examined the culvert. It had been built by filling HESCO placed on top of concrete. When our vehicle drove too close to the edge, the HESCO had burst, starting the roll-over. The firm ground left was smaller than it had been, but it was still just barely wide enough for our heavy trucks. The truck itself was in fairly good shape. The stairs were bent, a couple panels were bent, and dirt had been packed into the crevices on the right side of the truck, but it still ran, and the armor hadn't been damaged.

We drove back to the FOB. I hopped out near the entrance so I could head to the office the SeaBees worked out of and thank them for the use of their bulldozer. As soon as I did so, I found myself staring into the barrel of my rifle. A buckle on my sling had worked itself loose and fallen off, so my rifle was now connected to my sling at only one point, instead of the typical two. I took the sling off and carried my rifle by hand--a broken sling was just icing on the cake.

What I didn't know at the time was that we hadn't even put the cake in the oven yet. (To be continued...)