goats on OP

So the good people who hold in their possession the power of whether or not we shower have took it upon themselves to grace us with 4 shower units, and a new generator. We get em offloaded and the damn things don't have pipes or shower heads. Its gonna be a slow process getting this patrol base up to snotch, and its not because we've been working slow. It turns out that Dorner is the new fencing guru in the eyes of the platoon warrant, and Rediger is the carpenter of the group. Thing is, we get an idea, and it takes upwards of a week to get approved or the stores to do it. It looks like we have a fridge now, so we may be getting back to our one fresh meal a day.

Ole Hawk and Blencowe had a little read of the blog today, ok admittedly theres a few exagerations and maybe I'll have to tone it down on them for awhile. At any rate, life goes on as usual around here. The section put up about 80m of fencin this morning. A small task that took us a couple of hours. Thats been Dorners forte for the last few days. He's been assigned daily 5-6 infanteers to build fencing all over the patrol base, mainly in the rear of the compound. The rest of us have been working with what we've got, trying to make this place a little more comfortable. The boys put together a stretcher slide yesterday from the top of the compound to ground level. This in case, we take a casualty up top, we can slide him down on a strecther below. Riley gave it a shot, and the thing worked pretty well.

Last night Bergeron and I went on a night patrol. The night patrols are completely different than the day. The surroundings look completely different and its hard to gauge where a good place to put your feet down. The primary threat is still IED's in the area, and I admit its a little nerve racking going out at night. The terrain in areas is fairly difficult to pass on foot, and we find ourselves going up and over numerous grape rows all the time. These grape rows are huge. The ones we came across last night are about 8 ft deep and are 2m apart. This leaves about 1-2 ft to walk on and down the row. There is no rhyme or reason to how these little Afghan villages are built up. It's like Akmir says to Abdul, heres some dirt, lets build here. The walls go up and another route has to be made to get around. I'm not sure how their property lines work, but they make no sense to me.

So we, being Hawk and I are on OP shift this afetrnoon. Its like a little posse of Afghani boys sit around and watch us all day. Hawk made a good observations and said its probably the Talibans version of OP, watching us all day. Eventually they started throwing rocks at us, and we'd catch them and throw them back. Well, the rocks they were throwing were a good size and this one boy in particular had a hell of an arm. We'd chuck them back at them, they'd try to catch them and shake their hands in agony after the rocks hit them. After a bit a car rolls up, probably a taxi with a packed load, and I mean packed. The roof of the car had 5 kids on it, and then the people in the car started piling out. 6 men, and 3 goats piled out, along with the 5 kids on top. 3 goats, priceless.......anyway,,, thats it for now...... out