Settling in at BAF

Waking up my first time in Afghanistan was, admittedly, a bit anti-climactic. I woke up and didn’t feel anything apart from fatigue! One night was clearly not enough time to get my sleep back to normal and thus far its been about 4 days and I’m still all over the place sleep wise. I’m now trying to adjust my sleep schedule to allow me to fly nights, which I will do starting Friday.

So far our days have been full of in-processing nonsense. We had to get flightline badges, set up our finance accounts, pick up our weapons and ammo, get briefed by the Squadron Commander and Superintendent, the Group Commander, the Wing Commander, the flight doc, and then a bunch of other units and people onbase. We spent most of that time in and around our squadron area of the flightline.

The 4^th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron (4^th ERS) is the MC-12 squadron at Bagram and our nickname is the Crows. We have our own operations area on the flightline where we have our Ops desk, a medical tent, a facility where we store all our classified stuff, an Aircrew Flight Equipment (AFE) tent, a mail tent, and a morale tent. It seems like a pretty cool area where people just hang out when they’re not flying. There’s a burn pit, some cornhole games, bop it, and a balcony area overlooking the flight line with tables and chairs called the Crow’s Nest.

We did have one particularly exciting thing happen in our first few days, and that was our first IDF (indirect fire) attack. The enemy surrounding Bagram doesn’t have any particularly good artillery so what they do is just shoot off mortars in the general direction of base in the hopes that they will hit something. This is referred to as indirect fire (IDF) and with the size of the base and the inaccuracy of these weapons, they rarely hit anything at all. However, when the IDF sirens go off we are required to take cover and wait for the all clear. These attacks happen every so often (less frequently in the winter period) and while I was a bit nervous about them before I got here, I learned through the first one that its really not a big deal at all!

Here are some photos of the base and the area where we live and work.

My hallway- its dark because someone is on crew rest all hours of the day so we have 24/7 quite policy

My room before I made it mine. The front half is mine. Once my photos arrive you'll be an "after" shot with my Disney Planes sheets and photos put up and whatnot. I'm regreting not bring at least one football scarf! Its just not my room without them...

My dorm building

Mountains surround Bagram on all sides-- we are in a geographic bowl

Bagram USO, named in honor of Pat Tillman

4ERS Squadron Area

Ops and AFE tents

Some Hercs on the flightline. Visibility is often that bad because of lots of blowing dust.