The Filet of the Neighborhood

I have been living in overflow housing on Kandahar Airfield for almost a week now. For the most part, time spent in the tent is time spent sleeping. If I come back here and there are more than 30 minutes to spare, those minutes are spent napping. My bunk is about as comfortable as I can make it. I have a small sleeping bag tucked into a liner, and a makeshift pillow made out of a blanket and a laundry bag. I moved the mattress that was on the top bunk to give myself a luggage rack, and to make use of the steel mesh for hanging my ID and my flashlight, and to dry my towel. It’s really not too bad once you come to terms with the fine layer of Afghan dust tracked in by my 65 roommates and the seriously foul foot stench that seems to hover by the front door… Or by that one guy’s rack by the front door… He’s getting some anti-fungal foot powder from the rest of us for Christmas.

Just outside the tent is a row of shower trailers, each one with (luxury) hot water and (decadence) flushing toilets. Timing is important with the showers. Until today, I have done all of my showering before bed, but feeling a little lazy last night, I decided to wait until I woke up and grab one in the morning. Apparently 0630 is the same time that every foreign worker in the place takes a shower before going to work. While there were shower stalls available, there were only three minutes of hot water left. Of course I found this out by taking three minutes of a comfortable shower.

Something should be said here about the work force. All of the physical functions of the base—collecting trash, cleaning bathrooms, cooking and serving food, managing the shops on the boardwalk—are performed by an army of LBGs, or Little Brown Guys. These LBGs hale from all over the world, from Bangladesh to The Philippines and they do every bad job here and basically keep it running. There’s no telling how AAFES recruits them. There must be really good money involved, because it probably takes more than dental coverage to convince someone to drive a garbage truck in Afghanistan.

By far the most important feature of the neighborhood has to be the Sh*t Pit. Looking at an aerial photograph, the Pit (represented by a steaming volcano, below) appears at first glance to be a park, or a reservoir, or maybe even a very large helipad. But no, that massive circle with the crosshairs in it represents the collected leavings of all 15,000 residents of Kandahar Airfield. And if you look just to the east of the Pit, you will see my home. Every day the pump trucks roll across the base, collecting the sludge of countless Port-a-Lets, and empty it into its final resting place, right next door to me. The proximity is bad enough psychologically, but the wind in the evening puts the icing on the cake by wafting the stench over and around us, permeating the tent with an abominable smell as it seeps in through every crack and crevice.


View Home Sweet Home in a larger map

Every day as I walk home from work, into the wind, that air blowing through my clothes and my hair, my face forms a permanent scowl of disgust. Last night, in the cruelest blow yet dealt by the Pit, I noticed a horrible taste in my mouth while I was waiting in line for dinner. Imagine the worst sensation of morning breath you have ever known, that subtle stickiness on the roof of the mouth that tells you it’s time for Crest and Listerine. That is what it felt like. I took some time for thoughtful reflection on what I had eaten and the last time I had brushed my teeth, and I realized the awful truth: it was the sh*t. The waste of thousands had congealed onto the back of my throat to provide me with literal sh*t breath. It’s been 24 hours, and some marathon brushing, and I still taste it.