Kandahar Air Base

Kandahar is the largest city in the south, and the south is where the main fight is right now.  I was scheduled to stay at the airfield for a few hours and then hop a helicopter to the city to visit the Canadian-US PRT.  If weather had allowed it, I was even going to zip out to see a district team just set up in Zari, described as "a beautiful, gorgeous site - pity about all the people trying to kill you."  But the dust storms rolled in by early morning.  It wasn't so much sand and dust flying around, though there was a bit of that; it was more like an all-pervasive winter fog that enveloped everything.  It was already dicey when we landed, and within an hour they had grounded all flights, so I got stuck at the airfield, which is a big honking sea of dust with a lot of aircraft of all types, a lot of tents and b-huts and containerized housing units and latrines.  The bad weather did lower the temperature, since instead of the usual 100+, it was upper 70s.  But it also meant I had an extra evening at the air base, so I wandered around.  The whole place has a disturbing smell - not egregious like a cesspool, though there was a hint of that, more like someone who hasn't bathed in weeks and has body odor issues to begin with, then tries to cover it up with really bad cologne.  (I was fortunate to get an actual room to myself to spend the night; most of the others were in a barracks referred to as "the one next to the poop pool.")  The sand was suspended in the air; it felt like walking through a room that has just been fumigated, and you can feel all the tiny particles clinging to your skin and forming a tangible layer of dirt caking your body.

Anyway, I wandered down to the boardwalk, which is an actual rectangular boardwalk with a TGIFriday's, KFC, "Yankee Kabob" shop, rugs and jewelry shops, a pizza house, a sign for "Your Harley Davidson Dealer in Afghanistan," a dozen Canadian soldiers playing street hockey on an enclosed rink, and one American soldier forlornly trying to shoot hoops with a mostly-deflated basketball that wouldn't even dribble.

The next morning you still couldn't see the sky or the mountains ringing the airfield, but you could sort of see the sun, and it did indeed appear better than the day before when, I was told, visibility was under 500 feet and that's why they canceled all the air ops.  Helos still couldn't fly, but fixed wing were starting to, and I saw several fighter jets taking off.  Also saw the Predator drones taking off and circling to gain altitude.  They are much larger than I had expected, with very long wings like a glider.