Gentlemen Bastards: On the Ground in Afghanistan with America's Elite Special Forces by Maurer Kevin

Author:Maurer, Kevin [Maurer, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101611371
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

BUILDING BOHLE

A few days before the team permanently moved out to Wilson, I moved there with the team’s support guys.

Ben, Mike the Cop, Littlejohn—the team’s cook—and Day, who worked on the team’s communications gear, moved with me. At this point, I’d essentially become a support guy too. I no longer got strange looks when I helped. Now it was expected, which was why the team sent me out early. The idea was for us to help Rick and Mike, the team’s senior engineer, frame the rest of the containers and build the operations center.

After putting our gear in the transient tents, which sat down the road from the camp, we returned to find Mike the Cop moving his gear into his room. He’d selected a prefab green Afghan police checkpoint. It was essentially a container with paneled walls and a window and door cut out of one side. Built as a makeshift office, it had been acquired for the camp. And since Mike the Cop was a policeman at home, it was a no-brainer that he’d be the one who should live in it.

After the team left to go back to Kandahar, I sat outside in front of Mike’s and Rick’s rooms and they told me about the first days at the camp. Called Camp Bohle, it sat on the outer edge of Camp Wilson.

Special Forces soldiers name all their camps and buildings after soldiers who have been killed. The team had planned to name their new firebase Camp Mills, after another 7th Special Forces Group soldier, but they found out that the name was already slated for another camp.

“So, who is going to go out and get shot?” Matt joked.

They selected Camp Bohle next, naming their base after Sergeant First Class Bradley Scott Bohle. A medical sergeant assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, he was on his second deployment to Afghanistan when his truck was hit by an IED in Helmand Province in 2009. He died from the injuries.

When Rick and Mike first saw the site for Camp Bohle, it was a vast wasteland. A small Afghan compound, its walls crumbling from neglect, sat in the middle of the site. Nearby, squatters lived in a tent. They drove the water and fuel trucks that kept Camp Wilson going.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mike remembered saying, a look of disgust and contempt on his face. “Fuck, man, this is going to take forever.”

For a few weeks before this, RC South—the regional command in charge of Coalition forces in southern Afghanistan—had been getting reports that the camp was ready. But after Rick and Mike finally had a look at the site, it was obvious that Camp Bohle was far from ready.

The work hadn’t even begun.

After seeing the site, Rick and Mike knew they had to come out and get the camp going or when the team eventually got sent to the district they’d have nowhere to live. A few days later, Rick and Mike flew back out to Wilson and started building the camp.

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