Emma Graham
In their few spare hours, soldiers play poker and UNO with almost frightening competitiveness.
by Emma Graham-Harrison
Video feed from the surveillance balloon that watches silently over US marines at Forward Operating Base Delhi shows the ghost of a swimming pool lying just outside the first perimetre of razor wire and vast blast barriers — a disconcerting reminder of another dream of Afghanistan.
The pool was part of an agricultural college built by a more optimistic generation of Americans in the 1960s. Now there is not even running water in the crumbling buildings that have been converted into military headquarters by men who could be grandsons of the original teachers (there were no women on base when I visited).
The only feature that might be familiar, incongruous today in the middle of a desert military base, is a full-service laundry. Marines hand in combat trousers smeared with mud or worse from patrols through canals that double as open sewers, or gym clothes soaked with sweat from their endless weights sessions. They are returned within hours fragrant and neatly folded.
The laundry is a hangover from when the base housed perhaps five times as many men, as a battalion headquarters at the height of Obama’s surge. No one seems to know why the main outpost for Helmand’s Garmsir district was named after the Indian capital, with which it shares hot summers and overcrowding (even after the thinning out of numbers), but little else.
To a visiting civilian, even one used to Kabul’s modest comforts, it is a spartan place, where life revolves in an entirely utilitarian way around the multiple bristling antenna of intelligence equipment, convoys of MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles), the arrival and departure of helicopters and the security operations of the Afghan police and army.
The smell of burning plastic drifts over the base when the wind blows in from the “burn pit”, where all rubbish ends up, and which smoulders permanently. Desert dust is everywhere, thrown up by helicopter blades and heavy convoys, that works its way into clothes and sticks to face and hair.
Food comes from far away in giant, precooked packs; the chefs admit they do little more than heat it up and the menu doesn’t change much. Lunch is often just a stodgy ration pack; they last for years unopened.
And the only time most of the men on base can close a door and be on their own is inside the base’s portable toilets – which the desert heat turns into foul-smelling plastic saunas by day. “There is no privacy or freedom,” says one marine. Instead, there is the camaraderie, cliched but true, of men forced together for months at a time, facing stress and danger. “Misery loves company,” he adds with a grin. But like many others, he seems almost uncomfortable about life on Delhi, which is tough for a civilian but unexpectedly soft for a fighting force that prides itself on its aggressiveness and has spent much of the past four years on Helmand’s deadly frontlines.
“If we could trade, we would be in a hole getting shot at,” says first sergeant JP Saul. “Every marine worth his salt would much rather be in a mud hole for a fight.”
Belying the intimidating array of military equipment, there is an uneasy sense of calm on the base. The Taliban rockets and gunfire that hit in the evenings half a decade ago, when Prince Harry was stationed there, dried up after US surge forces beat the Taliban back across Helmand. In their few spare hours soldiers play poker and UNO with almost frightening competitiveness, or occasionally savour a cigar brought from home, one of the few indulgences available on a dry base.
They can also go online or call their families from the wooden shack where a contractor provides “MWR” – morale, welfare and recreation services. On the door is a copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the heading This Is Why We Are The United States Of America. Inside, beside the phone and computers, is the disconcerting sight of men with real assault rifles slung beside them, shooting away at enemies in video games.
The threat has shifted, not vanished, however. Marines have been pulled back from the battlefield to advise the Afghan police and army as they take a larger role fighting insurgents, a tactic that has reduced marine casualties from Taliban guns and bombs. But they now have to watch the people they came to help, as a rising number of Afghan forces turn their guns on Nato allies, driven by Taliban sympathies or bitter personal grudges. In August a teenager working for the district police chief gunned down three marines as they exercised in a shared gym at FOB Delhi, days before they were due to return home.
Working as mentors for the corrupt and often badly organised Afghan security forces can be frustrating for men groomed as aggressive fighters (one sticker in FOB Delhi says “Marines Fear Only God. No Others”), particularly newer recruits who missed the most brutal years of fighting in Afghanistan. “They trained for years, they signed up for war, they went off to war and they are leaving with the same rounds they got here with,” says Captain Devin Blowse, the company commander responsible for Garmsir district. The Guardian
In their few spare hours, soldiers play poker and UNO with almost frightening competitiveness.
by Emma Graham-Harrison
Video feed from the surveillance balloon that watches silently over US marines at Forward Operating Base Delhi shows the ghost of a swimming pool lying just outside the first perimetre of razor wire and vast blast barriers — a disconcerting reminder of another dream of Afghanistan.
The pool was part of an agricultural college built by a more optimistic generation of Americans in the 1960s. Now there is not even running water in the crumbling buildings that have been converted into military headquarters by men who could be grandsons of the original teachers (there were no women on base when I visited).
The only feature that might be familiar, incongruous today in the middle of a desert military base, is a full-service laundry. Marines hand in combat trousers smeared with mud or worse from patrols through canals that double as open sewers, or gym clothes soaked with sweat from their endless weights sessions. They are returned within hours fragrant and neatly folded.
The laundry is a hangover from when the base housed perhaps five times as many men, as a battalion headquarters at the height of Obama’s surge. No one seems to know why the main outpost for Helmand’s Garmsir district was named after the Indian capital, with which it shares hot summers and overcrowding (even after the thinning out of numbers), but little else.
To a visiting civilian, even one used to Kabul’s modest comforts, it is a spartan place, where life revolves in an entirely utilitarian way around the multiple bristling antenna of intelligence equipment, convoys of MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles), the arrival and departure of helicopters and the security operations of the Afghan police and army.
The smell of burning plastic drifts over the base when the wind blows in from the “burn pit”, where all rubbish ends up, and which smoulders permanently. Desert dust is everywhere, thrown up by helicopter blades and heavy convoys, that works its way into clothes and sticks to face and hair.
Food comes from far away in giant, precooked packs; the chefs admit they do little more than heat it up and the menu doesn’t change much. Lunch is often just a stodgy ration pack; they last for years unopened.
And the only time most of the men on base can close a door and be on their own is inside the base’s portable toilets – which the desert heat turns into foul-smelling plastic saunas by day. “There is no privacy or freedom,” says one marine. Instead, there is the camaraderie, cliched but true, of men forced together for months at a time, facing stress and danger. “Misery loves company,” he adds with a grin. But like many others, he seems almost uncomfortable about life on Delhi, which is tough for a civilian but unexpectedly soft for a fighting force that prides itself on its aggressiveness and has spent much of the past four years on Helmand’s deadly frontlines.
“If we could trade, we would be in a hole getting shot at,” says first sergeant JP Saul. “Every marine worth his salt would much rather be in a mud hole for a fight.”
Belying the intimidating array of military equipment, there is an uneasy sense of calm on the base. The Taliban rockets and gunfire that hit in the evenings half a decade ago, when Prince Harry was stationed there, dried up after US surge forces beat the Taliban back across Helmand. In their few spare hours soldiers play poker and UNO with almost frightening competitiveness, or occasionally savour a cigar brought from home, one of the few indulgences available on a dry base.
They can also go online or call their families from the wooden shack where a contractor provides “MWR” – morale, welfare and recreation services. On the door is a copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the heading This Is Why We Are The United States Of America. Inside, beside the phone and computers, is the disconcerting sight of men with real assault rifles slung beside them, shooting away at enemies in video games.
The threat has shifted, not vanished, however. Marines have been pulled back from the battlefield to advise the Afghan police and army as they take a larger role fighting insurgents, a tactic that has reduced marine casualties from Taliban guns and bombs. But they now have to watch the people they came to help, as a rising number of Afghan forces turn their guns on Nato allies, driven by Taliban sympathies or bitter personal grudges. In August a teenager working for the district police chief gunned down three marines as they exercised in a shared gym at FOB Delhi, days before they were due to return home.
Working as mentors for the corrupt and often badly organised Afghan security forces can be frustrating for men groomed as aggressive fighters (one sticker in FOB Delhi says “Marines Fear Only God. No Others”), particularly newer recruits who missed the most brutal years of fighting in Afghanistan. “They trained for years, they signed up for war, they went off to war and they are leaving with the same rounds they got here with,” says Captain Devin Blowse, the company commander responsible for Garmsir district. The Guardian
