A Quiet Unease

There is a growing unease among the soldiers here on the FOB. It is quiet and unspoken, yet palpable as we recognize what the change in the season will bring to our little corner of Afghanistan.

The winter has been very cold and the snow at our elevation deep, at times the weather dropping over two feet of snow on us.  The snow is welcome because it falls across the mountains and the fields that surround the villages here in Wardak Province, covering the landscape in a surreal sheet of white peace that is rarely broken by explosions or gunfire.

The deeper the snow, the more difficult it is for insurgents to travel and gather their weapons as they wait out the cold and ice.  When the snow is deep, an insurgent's tracks from a weapons cache or an IED placed on the road is easy to identify.  It is during this time of year that the roads are the safest.

I shuddered this morning when I realized that nearly all of the snow on the southern side of the mountains near us has melted away.  The receding winter reveals evidence of the barren waste that occupies most of the countryside; a brown, featureless surface that yields not life, but death.  When the ground is free of snow, it is much easier to launch a rocket and even easier to hide afterwards.

In Massachusetts, where there wasn't much of a winter, the buds will soon be bursting.  The pink dogwood flowers, passion-fruit color croci, the deep green of the grass awakening from their own winter hibernation are a welcome sign of spring back home.  There are areas of Afghanistan where the Spring brings beauty, but ours is not one of those areas.

My countdown is in single digits, just a little more snow for another week or so would do me just fine.