Well, bad weather in the mountain passes meant I stayed a day and a half longer in Khost than I had anticipated. There was a pretty bad suicide bombing there on Friday, killing ten or so people at last count, so I had to go down Saturday morning to see how our people were doing. The weather was fine on the way down; it's about an hour by helicopter. But the snows came in - not at the base in Khost where I was, but in the mountains that surround it like a bowl - and all flights were canceled for the rest of the day. All today, they kept telling us, maybe in an hour or so, maybe by noon, maybe by 2, but on the hill just to the east of Khost, there was 40 cm of snow and everything was completely socked in. There was fog in Bagram and Kabul and they couldn't get a flight out. So I wandered around the base in Khost, where the skies were mostly blue. Khost is where, a couple of years ago, a suicide bomber killed quite a number of CIA agents. It's right on the border with Pakistan, and the insurgency there is linked to the Haqqani network, which has been particularly prolific with the suicide attacks. So anyway, I stumbled across this next to the Med Unit. I'm not sure which sign is the official sign of the place, and which one has been put up by the troops, but anyway, here it is for the West Virginians. At the end, they couldn't bring in a fixed wing because the runway was too soft, but they did manage to bring in an Mi-8 helicopter, one of the sturdy Russian ones that fly well in the Afghan mountains.
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