Give them a couple of more months, and they will have the Bowling alley in, and then they can start worrying about the "Al Q" coming through the wire. Ahh, Vietnam!
Kandahar Airfield growing into long-term camp
By Steve Liewer, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Thursday, September 19, 2002
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.? |
