[Peace] afghanistan

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Kandahar Airfield growing into long-term camp

By Steve Liewer, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Thursday, September 19, 2002



Kevin Buckley / Special to S&S 
Spc. Anthony Nguyen, left, and Sgt. Raymond Donquerne, of the Louisiana 
National Guard’s 769th Engineer Battalion, saw a plank as part of one of 
Kandahar Airfield’s numerous construction projects this summer in Afghanistan.


Karen Burnick / Special to S&S 
Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry 
Regiment hoist the walls of the air-conditioned chow hall tent, a new 
addition to Kandahar Airfield, last month.


Kevin Buckley / Special to S&S 
Soldiers from the 307th and 769th Engineer battalions patch the taxiway at 
Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan last month.


Kevin Buckley / Special to S&S 
Two soldiers from the 769th Engineer Battalion frame a temporary office 
structure at Kandahar Airfield.


Karen Burnick / Special to S&S 
Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry 
Regiment hoist the walls of the chow hall tent.
 

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — When Lt. Col. Garth Anderson and his team of 
Missouri engineers showed up early last spring, Kandahar Airfield looked like 
it had been through a war.

Which it had. Several, in fact.

Only the main terminal and a few other buildings survived last fall’s U.S. 
aerial bombardment. The field lacked electricity, water, sewer and roads. 
Thousands of mines ringed the perimeter fences. Bomb craters pockmarked the 
runway. Dust stood ankle deep over most of the base.

Burned-out rockets, mortars, airplanes and helicopters dotted the grounds.

“The place was pretty much a mess,” said Anderson, 41, commander of the 
Facility Engineer Team 18, a Kansas City-based Army Reserve unit.

His seven engineers found tents scattered here, motor pools scattered there, 
offices in bombed-out buildings. They set out to redesign the base, imposing 
order upon it: housing and soldier uses in one area, offices in another, 
motor pools and aircraft repair in a third.

The main terminal is the focal point of the base, which covers three square 
miles. Built in the early 1960s by a U.S. aid organization as an 
international airport 15 miles from the city of Kandahar, it is an intriguing 
collection of waves and arches underneath layers of dust and decay. The 
Soviets hunkered down there against the mujahedeen in the 1980s, as evidenced 
by the litter of broken airplanes and helicopters on the base’s outskirts.

The Taliban, too, used the airport and made one of its last stands in a 
concrete building near the laundry tents. A U.S. laser-guided bomb shattered 
the place, and it is said dozens of Taliban met their end there.

It is no surprise, then, that the engineers had their work cut out for them 
when they arrived. Afghanistan is the probably the most remote and desolate 
place the U.S. Army ever has tried to build a base.

“You’re trying to build a city on the moon,” Anderson said. “There are no 
resources to tap into. There’s very little skilled labor, no building 
supplies. You can’t go down to Home Depot and pick up what you need.”

First, the engineers filled a critical need by building a detention center 
for the scores of Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners pouring into Kandahar for 
questioning before they were either released or sent to Guantanamo Naval 
Base, Cuba.

Then, they directed the clearing of hundreds of mines from a dusty field at 
the southwest end of the base. The area would become Tent City, home to most 
of the several thousand American soldiers living here. Beyond the tents would 
be a junk pile, a burn pile and a sewage lagoon.

Soldiers had been living, working and eating in tents without heat or 
air-conditioning, open to the wind and dust. They had graduated from open-air 
outhouses to plastic portable toilets like the ones common at construction 
sites. A shower meant standing in line for an hour to stand under a spigot in 
a tent for a few minutes.

Then in early May, the engineers began a major upgrade. They ordered five 
Force Providers — modular home and office units sometimes called “a city in 
a box.” Each comes with billeting tents, Morale Welfare and Recreation and 
administrative office tents, showers and latrines, dining and laundry 
facilities for up to 550 soldiers.

They are pre-equipped with electrical outlets and generators, lights, 
furniture — even brooms and maps.

As the Force Provider components arrived via Kuwait and Pakistan, the 
engineers staged them in an area of the camp dubbed Higginsville, after Capt. 
Dan Higgins, the camp’s principal planner.

In the meantime, soldiers from the 92nd Engineer Battalion from Fort Stewart, 
Ga., started laying out a plumbing and electrical grid. In late May, they 
started building plywood floors to keep the tents out of the deep desert 
dust. Not long after, construction began at a furious pace on the new, 
climate-controlled village.

“The first tent went up June 12, and the last dining facility went up July 
25,” Higgins said proudly.

That meant that nearly all of the 82nd Airborne Division troops, who replaced 
the 101st Airborne Division soldiers in July and August, moved directly into 
cool tents and offices despite Kandahar’s 120-degree heat. By early August, 
they had air-conditioned latrines and showers with hot running water.

For the past month, soldiers from the Louisiana National Guard’s 769th 
Engineer Battalion have been hammering sheets of plywood to two-by-fours, 
erecting unadorned command structures so some units can move out of their 
crowded offices in the terminal and the hangar, or out of tents.

“They’ve pretty much done it like the Amish did,” Anderson said.

And there’s more to come in the weeks ahead.

Anderson said the Army and Air Forces Exchange Service tent will be doubled 
in size early next month as part of a new “MWR Mall” between the terminal 
and the main hangar. It will include a coffee shop, a gift shop and extra 
cashiers. That should eliminate the half-hour lines to get into the AAFES 
tent.

The meager MWR tent also will expand to two tents. One will be used for quiet 
purposes like reading, movies and Internet cafe; the other will include 
pingpong tables, a game room and game tables.

Outside, a basketball court is slated for construction.

In the same area, a “soldier services center” will include tents for 
personnel, finance, legal affairs and re-enlistment.

“That’ll be just like a strip mall: everything in one place,” Anderson said.

At the same time, the engineers have slowly been improving the roads. Only 
the main road, which runs parallel to the runway more than a mile from the 
front gate to the huge, bomb-damaged hangar, is paved. But workers have 
trucked in load after load of heavy gravel to upgrade about 10 miles of dirt 
roads inside the compound.

The next big step is hiring Brown & Root Services, the defense contractor 
that built and still carries out most support services at the U.S. bases in 
Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It can’t provide the full range of 
services it does in the Balkans because of restrictions on the hiring of 
local nationals in Kandahar, which was the birthplace of the Taliban regime.

Still, Brown & Root will take care of sanitary services, such as garbage and 
sewage disposal, using U.S. citizens beginning later this year, Anderson said.

“They’ll replace some of the support personnel and let them get back to 
their jobs,” Anderson said. “You don’t need highly trained paratroopers” to 
clean latrines.

By the time Anderson and his team finish their nine-month rotation this 
winter, the major construction projects will be winding down. Kandahar 
Airfield lacks the size and solidity of Eagle Base in Bosnia or Camp 
Bondsteel in Kosovo, but the facilities already are at least as good as a 
decent stateside campground. Soldiers can live in reasonable comfort until 
the Bush administration decides whether it wants a more permanent presence in 
Afghanistan.

“We’ve been here long enough to see it go from a combat outpost to a 
garrison,” Anderson said. “We’ll keep building until somebody tells us to 
stop.”