Last night was pretty shitty…I was told that I was flying out that night to go to Bagram to get my ID fixed…the flight was at 2100hrs… so, I packed everything up –told to pack for 7- 10 days—headed out to the Helicopter pad around 2030 and stood around getting cold …I knew it was gonna be a cold ass flight so I piled on every piece of cold weather gear I could find—I had to loosen up all the straps on my IBA(Individual Body Armor) just to get it on …the commander saw me and started laughing and called me the Michelin Man…I might have looked funny but, I was gonna be as warm as possible…so, the choppers showed up –one BlackHawk and one Chinook…after the unloaded whatever off both birds we were guided to the BlackHawk…I like that chopper better…I popped in my headphones blasting Metallica, Pantera, TOOL, Slipknot, Deftones, and other rocking music and we hopped on the birds—me and the “crazy” guy—he is really fine and cool and nothing is wrong with him, but everyone is just overly paranoid and trying to cover their own asses…he is actually a pretty good friend of mine and we talked about all the shit going on with his marriage and he is a little pissed off, but no more than is expected for what happened—I don’t want to spread his beeswax, so I won’t talk about all that…anyhoo…worst case scenario is that I have to escort him all the way to his home station in Oklahoma…so, the flight to Bagram is about 40 minutes by chopper, I was ready for that and had all the clothing I needed to be warm for the flight—the doc just got back and said it was 14 degrees at Bagram and even colder flying over the mountains at 8000 feet…so we took off and headed out…I can’t describe everywhere we went, because I have no idea where the hell we flew to, but we basically took a tour of the entire Eastern section of Afghanistan—we landed a few times, we even hit Jalalabad to refuel and hit a few more stops…this 45 minute trip ended up being over three hours…and it was freakin cold—by my calculations it was about one degree colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra…not sure what that converts to on the Fahrenheit scale but it sucked bad…and we just happened to be sitting in the front seats just behind the gunners, who obviously have to have the doors open to hang out and man their guns…so it was super cold wind blowing right on us the whole time…it would have been an awesome trip if wasn’t so damn cold…the moon was full so we could see everything…at one point we circled around while the Chinook landed and picked up/dropped off…we closed in and circled this spike of rock sticking up about 2000 feet above anything around it…I thought maybe the gunners spotted a bad guy or something, but they were watching and telling the pilot where everything was…we actually landed on this point…the entire surface area of this thing was about the size of the belly of the BlackHawk…I looked out the door, over the edge and it was a straight drop of 2000 feet… I mean it was unreal…we landed for about 30 seconds and blasted off in a sideways, upward motion and as I looked out at the spike we were sitting atop, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing …this thing was a skinny, pile of rock, like a 2000 foot tall stalagmite…the view was incredible…I wish I had a camera that would have taken good night pictures …anyhoo… it was awesome but I was completely frozen…well, really just my hands and feet were frozen…and they were probably about 4 minutes from frostbite…it was that painful tingling frozen—but as long as I could feel them, I knew I was still OK…it’s when they go numb, you have to start worrying…finally at around 0100 we landed at Bagram…it hurt my feet to move and stand and walk …we unloaded all 3485 bags that homeboy had—because he still isn’t sure where he is going, but he knows he won’t be back to the FOB so he had to pack everything he owns…I talked to one of the gunners and asked where the hell we went and why…he said they just arrived in country and they were getting their familiarization flight around the area—so, it was literally a complete tour of the section of Afghanistan between Kabul and Pakistan …we caught the bus and headed to where we are staying…we got in the B-Hut—a wooden shack with partitions to section off 8 little rooms just big enough for a bed…my fingers and toes were still burning cold…we bedded down and tried to get some sleep…I think it was about 4 degrees above a witch’s tit in a brass bra inside the B-Hut…I left all my cold weather long johns and shirts on changed my cold socks—I pulled out the Alpaca RedMaple socks for this one…it was dark in the hut and all I had on was a small weak flashlight…when I took my socks off I looked down at my feet and my toes were glowing white and the rest of my feet were seemingly normal skin tone…I immediately thought that frost nip had set in and I was on my way to losing a toe or two…I kinda freaked out a little…so I grabbed the little light and put it down closer to my foot and realized that the white part was my regular skin tone and the darker part was my tattoos…yes, I laughed at myself, and you can laugh too…so, I still have all my toes and fingers and I didn’t suffer any cold-weather injury…so, wrapped up in my super warm multiple-layer “sleep system”—that’s what the Army calls it’s sleeping bags now that they are all these separate pieces…it’s the same thing that saved me from freezing at Ft. Bragg…so, I popped in some headphones with mellow tunes and passed out—also, I was wearing my cold-weather stocking cap and my face protector…the only thing exposed to the cold was the tip of my nose—and even that woke me up a couple times…I got some decent sleep but still woke up every couple hours due to the cold…today I got up around 0900 and started the day with a freezing cold walk to the shower, 4 minutes of nice warm water, then a freezing cold walk back to the hut…we headed out to find the guys that my buddy was supposed to hook up with and get my ID card done…went searching and couldn’t find the 1st Sgt. for my guy to talk to, so we went to the ID card place …that took me a whole 8 minutes to complete—ID card is now good to go…we walked around doing nothing for a bit and then hit the chow hall for lunch…we headed back over to the Air Force side and found the Chief instead of the 1st Sgt and he talked with the “crazy” guy and didn’t understand why they sent him off the FOB…the Chief was really cool and understanding and said he would take care of everything…so, now, the guy is staying here at Bagram for the rest of his tour and going to be working with the Air Force…we met up with the 1st Sgt. and we all talked for a while about the situation and how the whole Army experience is just totally different than anything we have ever done and how they plan on taking better care of us than their predecessors and all kinds of other things…they both seem like pretty good guys…they gave the guy a place to live and we moved everything to get him settled, then we headed to the BX to waste some time …he went back to chill and I hooked up with another guy here from the FOB and we got some chow and BSed for a while and decided to both come over here for the internet and the warmth…I am done and do not need to escort the guy any more and I am just waiting for the next “ring flight” to head back to my FOB—should be in the next couple days or so…now, it’s just chillin in Bagram doing nothing…I decided that I will just come to the USO building to use the internet and watch movies all night and sleep in the hut in the daytime when it’s a little warmer than too cold to sleep…of course, now that I am here at the USO there are 59478385 people here using the internet at the same time and it is as slow as it can possibly get …I have been trying to log in to my mail for about an hour now and still no luck…good thing I don’t have anything better to do—except type this letter out for you guys…well, the internet it kinda working .. it’s slow, but I will try to send this out … love you and miss you all …talk to you soon
OOL
B