NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan Read Free Page A

bolted to the floor. One passenger was holding a chicken during a flight.
    Uzbekistan is a former Soviet satellite state. Like its airports and customs officials, it was dark, dank, and dreary. The people looked downtrodden. The economy was dead and jobs were scarce. The hotel in Tashkent where KBR lodged us had lawyers and doctors working as receptionists, bartenders, and bellboys. The bars were full of prostitutes. The first time I stayed in Tashkent, the going rate for a lady of the night was fifty bucks. The rednecks from Texas and Louisiana had run that price up to 300 U.S. dollars within a few months. The price pretty much stuck there until KBR moved its operations to Dubai in 2005.
    After a night or two in Tashkent, KBR moved us to K2, which, at the time, was the way station for soldiers and civilians flying into and out of Afghanistan. I was part of a massive influx of new hires for the Afghan mission. Flights were limited. After a week sitting in K2, I boarded a C130 aircraft bound for Bagram Airfield. The flight was smooth running for about seventy-five minutes when suddenly we took a vertigo- inducing dive. The aircraft engines reversed into a deafening burst of combustion. Seconds later, we hit tarmac. I wasn’t certain what was happening at first. The dive was so steep that I thought we’d been fired on. We were in a war zone after all. One second we’re on a steady trajectory. The next we’re being pushed and pulled by the force of the aircraft’s change of direction. I felt a momentary surge of panic as the G-forces turned my stomach up into my mouth.
    No rockets had been fired at us. This was tactical night landing—standard operating procedure—in Bagram, Afghanistan. All aircraft flying into Bagram Airfield landed in this manner. A quick altitude decline hugging the slopes of the Hindu Kush Mountains, immediate deceleration, and straight onto the ground. A big bump, a short bounce, and then we smoothed out on a runway and came to a lurching halt. A couple of poor bastards who hadn’t strapped on their safety belts were jerked out of their web seating and onto the floor.
    No sooner had the aircraft come to a full stop than a ramp came down, and our tiny pitch black world inside the aircraft was flooded with light. We had arrived. We’d flown over a cascading canvas of mountains to get into Bagram in eastern Afghanistan. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Bagram Airfield is situated in a valley surrounded by the soaring ramparts of the majestic mountain range of the Hindu Kush that straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan. The mountains encircled Bagram like fortress walls. They were the reason for our sudden, terror-inducing decline in altitude. Pilots had no choice but to drop steeply in order to land at Bagram. Of course, the opposite is true on the way out. Aircraft must reach for immediate elevation when leaving Bagram or crash into the craggy, snow covered peaks.
    We landed in the dead of night. When the cargo door at the rear of the aircraft opened, I inexplicably started singing an old Army tune in my head, “C130 rollin’ down the strip! Airborne Daddy gonna take a little trip!” Lights flooded the cargo and passenger department. A few airfield officials and a KBR representative appeared in the light. “Mission Top Secret, Destination Unknown. We don’t even know if we’re ever comin’ home!” We were told to unstrap and grab our gear. “Exit from the rear of the aircraft,” a cargo specialist yelled to us. We followed directions but mostly we followed the veterans. The old guys who were returning from R&R. I watched them and mimicked. We followed the KBR representative off of the tarmac and into a passenger holding area. Our identification cards were collected and compared to the passenger manifest. “ Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door! Jump right out on the count of four.” They called off our names ensuring that everyone who was supposed to be on the flight was actually on the