Shust

 I am beginning to be regarded as a bad fellow traveler because my flights tend to have problems.  We took a C-130 from Kabul to Sharana, in the NW part of Paktika.  We were an hour late, supposedly due to a backlog of planes to take off.  It is not as exciting as it sounds to fly in the cargo hold of a C-130.  It's like any commercial passenger plane, if you stripped all the stuff covering the wiring, frames, gear shaft boxes, landing gear compartments, etc., then took out all the seats so you can squeeze in more boxes.  Also, there are no windows and the in-flight movie was boring.  Then we took a Chinook to Bermel, a village in southern Paktika, and then Blackhawks for the even smaller village for the shura.  Our return flight in the C-130 was delayed over an hour because of winds too high to allow takeoff, and by the time we got back to Kabul, it took over an hour from the airport because of traffic jams.  But before that, there was another reason for the delay which was a new one for me.  On the way back to Sharana to catch the C-130, one of the Blackhawks was delayed nearly an hour by a special kind of weather.  On the horizon you could see what looked like very dark rain clouds, with a blurry mist stretching to the ground and filling about a third of the sky.  It looked like a light rain forming in the distance.  But it wasn't.  It was "shust."  In much the same way that "smog" is smoke + fog, or "slush" is sleet + ... I don't know, "mush," maybe ... "shust" is a combination of two words.  The second is "dust."  The first is not Shinola.