Police Escort

Today was... interesting.

The day began with me waiting for about an hour in some random alley in Kabul for our escort. We only expected to be there a few minutes, but our escort was late (as often happens in Afghanistan). I'm pretty sure we were making all the afghan nervous sitting there in two uparmored SUVs. They kept looking at us suspiciously. I was the only military person in the group.



Finally our police escort shows up. They guys were awesome. They had a truck in the front, and one in the rear.



Going out there was uneventful because the traffic was light. I'm near the back of the convoy. The last police vehicle was behind me. With the police escort we blew through all of the checkpoints without any problems.



Then I spent the next five hours in a desert of shipping containers. There was an Army SFC running the show. He was pretty squared-away. He reminded me of my drill instructors at Ft. Jackson. The afghans... not so much. It seems to take forever to get something done with afghans involved. The basic problem is that no one seems to know exactly what to do. So everyone huddles and starts doing stuff and undoing stuff and arguing until they come to an agreement on what was supposed to happen. It's a funny process to watch, usually, but dealing with weapons I didn't find it so funny.

Finally the SFC showed the afghan Major how to do all the paperwork and we got out of there in the early afternoon. By then traffic had gotten bad. The police escort was barreling through it though. They had their sirens and lights on. They had a bullhorn and they were yelling at people to get out of the way. They were cutting off other uparmored SUV carrying American forces. I waved at them as we passed. They were probably trying to figure out what was so important about my convoy. The funny thing is, nothing was, I think the police just liked the opportunity to run this kind of mission. At one point they got tired of the traffic on our side of the road and they cut over to the other side. So for a half-mile or so I'm driving against traffic. I wish I could have taken a picture of that but it was very tense driving. You have to maintain very tight formation to keep other vehicles from getting in the convoy. But the SUVs are extremely heavy because of the armor so they are hard to stop. You can't relax for a moment because a few milliseconds lapse will cause you ram into the car ahead. Anyway, it was fun but I was glad when we got back to Eggers.

Then in the evening it was back to fighting the battle of emails and paperwork, with a telcon thrown in.