Mark's words...

Mark went on a mission with another guy to recover some vehicles, below is what he said about it...


...we are back. we woke up on Thursday at like 6 in the morning, Schienbein and I worked on trucks most of the day, then we rolled out back to leatherneck at like 7 PM. It took like almost 3 hours to get out of the kandahar base, because we had a new unit with us. They did not PMCS their trucks (look them over and make sure they are good to go.) so as soon as we started rolling they called out over the radio that 2 of their tires were flat on their trailer. They were driving HETTS, huge trucks and their trailer has 48 tires on it! so it took them like a hour and a half to fix it. then as soon as we were rolling again another one of them hit a concrete barrier and blew another tire!!! the convoy commander told them to just roll with it(they had another 47 tires =))

So we finally got rolling(I was pulling the same truck that I brought up) one of the bridges we had to go over the taliban tried to blow up a week or two ago, so the army built another temp bridge thing over the hole in it. It could only hold so much weight so the HETTS had to go through the river below and the rest of us went over the bridge. One of the HETTS got stuck in the river so that took awhile to get them out.

After that we went through Kandahar city, they enacted a curfew on the city because of recent attacks so no civilians were outside at all. There were Afghan police everywhere in the city, at every intersection and in their little outposts all over the city, and we were the only vehicles on the roads. It was kinda creepy, but we had the roads all to our self, which made it easy and quick to get around. Oh on a side note, on the way up to Kandahar on the other side of the road we say a little boy get hit by a Afghani truck =( we stopped about a block up and our interpreter jumped out at a police check point and told them about it. We were not allowed to call for a medivac(helicopter) for him since we did not cause the accident. but the police took him to a hospital like a bat out of hell.

Well after many rips it(kind of like a red bull energy drink we get for free over here) and packets of beef jerky we got back to leatherneck at like 5 in the morning on friday after 10 hours of sitting in the truck. It was kinda peaceful out there being the only people on the road all night, and the country did not look like such a dump in the dark. lucky for us nothing else broke down on the way back and I am writing this to you after getting back to the hooch and crashing for like 6 hours of sleep....