This kind of dukey, along with the riots over some scorched books and our Afghan “partners” shooting at us tells me that it is time for us to go.

So I get an e-mail from Captain Jack, and I know that some of you are going to immediately feel his pain.

So here we are all fat and happy in Kabul when we get a QRF call to go secure a down balloon.  You can google REDACTED and see what I’m talking about.  Anyway, this thing goes down and we have to go secure it so Lockheed Martin can recover it.  Well, it’s Afghanistan and, as you are painfully aware, the dang balloon doesn’t go down in a wide open field; oh no!  It goes down on top of some calats (there’s a word you haven’t heard in a while).  Well, it’s Kabul, Afghanistan so they have (sort of have) electricity.  So my QRF arrives and they have to pull this huge balloon off of this house.  No one got hurt.  They had to cut the balloon up with their non-issued pocket knives.  Does that sound like the night we had to take apart the UAV with our Gerbers?  Anyway, my soldiers did a great job on a mission they have never trained for.  They secured the sensitive equipment and helped Lockheed get their stuff back.

I will tell the UAV Gerber story later, and since no good deed goes unpunished, he dropped the other shoe.

Today I got a visit from, you guessed it, the DA Safety Office.  He was concerned that my soldiers did not have the proper training to cut the balloon safely.  Ohh…. he happened to mention that my soldiers destroyed the balloon, which costs about $1.2 million… but “that’s not the reason I’m here” he said.  My ass.  I can’t count the missions that you and I conducted that we weren’t trained for which involved shooting!  We never heard a peep out of the Safety Office.

I knew when I walked past the EEO office at Camp Phoenix right next to the inflatable Santa at the Post Office what the priorities were.   And if there is a DA Safety Office, we are 2 PX’s and a bowling alley away from Afghanistan becoming a slightly more scrumptious self licking ice cream cone than Germany.

Maybe next time his soldiers conduct a mission, he should tell the TOC that they can’t leave the wire and go out there and conduct the mission for them until they get the 16 hour block of instruction on the proper care and maintenance of a Mark 1 Mod 0 SSBFM (Super Secret Balloon Flying Machine) along with a complete risk assessment and briefing from the safety office regarding the proper use of tools.

Is there actually a class on how to “cut a super secret balloon?” Who conducts it?

One night, Captain Jack and I were about to leave on a another mission to kill Taliban in our sector and at the exact moment we were leaving the wire at 2:30 am, the TOC calls and says that they just lost a UAV; crashed along the route we were going to take and contained a bunch of OPSEC stuff that had to be recovered.  So Captain Jack and I, our ANA soldiers, and a platoon of steely eyed killers from 2-87 Infantry moved out to secure this UAV.

Get there, bring up the thermals to go with our NODs and see bunch of potential bad dudes in the area around the UAV.  Guns up, move out, ready to terminate with extreme prejudice etc.  We provide cover and a perimeter around the area and the 2-87 soldiers move in and secure the UAV.  Turns out, UAV is whole and intact, weighs couple hundred pounds, and too big to fit in, on, or around a Hummer.  So Captain Jack and the ANA move in to help figure this out.  Decision?  Can’t leave it, can’t destroy it in place, so….  The Joes pull out their Gerbers and Leathermans and start unscrewing the wings, body, other pieces etc. and throwing it in the trunk to take it back to the FOB.

Got a nice thank you from the Air Force and they put it back together.  Guess what, not one visit from the Safety Office.  Must have been too busy putting up OSHA posters and making sure everyone was wearing their pro-mask and their cod-piece on their IBA.

But if this is how the theater is, and future theaters are going to be, then I think it is time to evaluate our mission and future missions and in this case, I say we back off and nuke the site from orbit.

That is the only way to be sure…

Courtesy of Blackfive.

Note:  Wikipedia defines Kabuki Dance as follows: In common English usage, a kabuki dance, also kabuki play, is an activity or drama carried out in real life in a predictable or stylized fashion, reminiscent of the Kabuki style of Japanese stage play.  It refers to an event that is designed to create the appearance of conflict or of an uncertain outcome, when in fact the actors have worked together to determine the outcome beforehand.

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