Candyland

Welcome to Candyland! is the traditional greeting for FNG's at KAF. Most effective when accompanied with an evil grin and body language suggesting the greeter's opinion of the FNG's chances of sticking it out in this place.

Kandahar Air Field is a concrete runway, surrounded by plywood shacks, shipping containers, tents, and a few real buildings. The world's sole remaining superpower projects power from places like Charleston and McChord and Moody and Schofield Barracks into Central Asia through here. Loudly. At all hours of the day and night. The C-17's hit their reverse thrusters right outside my tent. This is the logistical support base for Operation Enduring Freedom in southern Afghanistan.

This used to be the Kandahar International Airport and will be again, someday. The terminal building is being slowly renovated. It has been uninhabitable since November of 2001. We kind of messed it up when we took it.

Afghanistan struggling with more than bad weather, and it may get worse

Afghanistan's seven-year drought ended with the harshest winter in 15 years. It has been so long since water flowed in and around Kandahar that a regional training compound was constructed in part on a wadi. The flood photographs are awesome, but the world at large is unaware of what happened because the news was dwarfed by tsunami stories.

Mud. Everywhere. Khaki colored soup. Knee deep at the latines up from from the laundrymat. Hail hitting the puddles like machine gun bullets. Bitterly cold winds that numb the fingers and fog the brain, turning a simple task like unlocking a padlock and opening a CONEX a tortuous exercise in endurance. The weather has sucked since Christmas.