The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories are Heroic by Joseph Kassabian

Author:Joseph Kassabian [Kassabian, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TCK Publishing
Published: 2018-08-09T04:30:00+00:00

TWENTY

THE SUICIDAL PERSON’S GUIDE TO BOMB DISPOSAL

Kandahar is littered with explosives. Thanks to its history of constant war, occupation by foreign nations, and good old fashioned civil conflict, there is never a shortage of military grade munitions for the person who wants to find some.

The Soviet army planted hundreds of millions of landmines and dropped millions of pounds of bombs in a futile attempt to defeat the Mujahideen in the 1980s. The vast majority of those landmines were never triggered, and due to fantastic Soviet engineering, a lot of those bombs simply buried themselves into the dirt rather than explode. But for a fighter too lazy to grab a shovel and go unearth some military grade explosives, it was plenty easy to make some of their own.

Afghanistan doesn’t have much of a legal economy to speak of. What it does have is a thriving poppy farming industry that has made them the number-one producer of opium poppies in the world. That meant it was normal to see tons of fertilizer bags piled around everywhere we went. It was incredibly easy for a Taliban operative to mix some of this fertilizer with some kerosene to create an ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosive, or ANFO, in the comfort of their own home.

It took a particular kind of fertilizer to make ANFO. Knowing this, the Afghan president Hamid Karzai made it illegal to own. He waved his hands and figured that would solve the problem. Unfortunately, no one ever figured out a way to replace the millions of tons of old fertilizer that was lying around. And farmers needed to farm. So they just ignored the presidential order and no one ever enforced it.

The Taliban would take whatever choice explosive they were using, pack it into a box, bag, or sometimes into a vest they would wear, and place it somewhere to attempt to blow up allied soldiers. Every once in a while, their bomb would fail, and we would recover it. Back in the day, we would just shoot at the unexploded IEDs on the corner of the road and try to make them explode.

Someone above me in the chain of command realized we could use those bombs to try to find the bomb makers. So the new rule became to call EOD. If they thought they could safely transport the IED, they took it with them to a forensic lab and went all CSI on it.

They’d pull fingerprints, building schematics, and note what region the parts came from. Using all that information, they would dispatch soldiers to go looking for the masterminds behind the bombs. These orders were killing more U.S. soldiers than anything else.

Which brings me to a mission we were sent out on one incredibly hot day in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Kandahar City. All the bombs recovered by EOD are processed by forensic units. They were then brought to one central location at the local Afghan Police Provincial Headquarters. It was staffed by both Afghans and Americans.

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