Center for a New American Security

On FOB Marez, there is actually a spa trailer, which I always thought was hilarious.

Count on the jarheads to have a lock on Afghanistan’s only resort and spa!

On a more serious subject, I took a look at the COP Keating video tour at The Captain’s Journal today and, as a Vietnam vet, I was appalled! I knew it was going to be bad when the opening shot showed a couple of building roofs with a single, not very well-set, layer of sandbags on them. Those were the only sandbags I saw during the entire 10-minute tour. I did, however, see the gym, the chow hall (with KBR contract employees, of course), the well-built latrine, the barracks rooms for the individual soldiers and the entertainment center. What I didn’t see was more than two soldiers wearing ACUs (the rest were in tee shirts and shorts or civies) or any soldiers carrying any kind of a weapon. As a matter of fact, this entire post seemed conspicuously lacking in weapons. It also appeared to be lacking soldiers involved in soldiering. It also appeared to have a perimeter that would be large enough to require an entire company to defend adequately. I saw no area denial weapons such as claymores or foo-gas (Foo-gas was a mixture of gasoline or diesel fuel and detergent in either a 55-gallon drum of an artillery shell container buried at least half-way in the ground, angled toward the enemy, with a small charge beneath it. When our friends from the opposition came calling, the foo-gas helped us give them a warm welcome. I don’t know whether the Modern Volunteer Army still uses this field expedient weapon.). I also saw no bunkers of any kind. When I heard that the soldiers there had “lost everything,” I had a difficult time understanding what “everything” could possibly be. In Vietnam, anyone who occupied a firebase (the equivalent of a COP today) lived in a bunker — a hole in the ground into which all of the rainwater could drain covered by PSP and multiple layers of sandbags. These bunkers were located near the night defensive positions which the soldiers would occupy at night — every night. During the day, there was work. Sandbagging went on every day. I never saw a firebase where sandbags weren’t being filled and added to the total, where more wire wasn’t being strung, where weapons weren’t being obsessively cleaned, where claymores and foo-gas barrels weren’t emplaced, The mess hall was a C-ration box the exercise area was where sandbags were filled and carried to the location of the day, and if a firebase was attacked losing everything meant losing a paperback book that you had already read seven times or a dog-eared Playboy that had probably been making the rounds for three or four months. It was apparent that “everything,” in the context of a COP has gained an entirely new, and in my judgment inappropriate, meaning.

Unless things had changed substantially since that video was made, COP Keating was nothing more than an nighttime assault waiting to happen. I don’t like to be critical, but what’s surprising to me is that the death toll wasn’t higher.

If we’re going to get serious about placing our soldiers in outposts like this, we had better get serious about holding them to a higher standard than was on display in that video.