Trash and Treasure

12/04/2011

Every month, I have had the pleasure of donning my flack jacket and company-issued weapons in the presence of career soldiers. We gather in front of our TOC, with water bottles and snacks, and head out to the easternmost mountains surrounding Kabul for firing practice.

The truck ride takes anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes, depending on a number of factors: traffic, our particular security guard driver, groups of children darting in between cars, dust storms, potholes and checkpoints, which seem to appear and disappear at random.

The spot we use for our range is well-guarded by Afghan National Police (ANP), so we always stop to trade tea and various goodies to bolster our relationship. Every so oftemn we invite the police to use our rounds. The last time we practiced, a member of the ANP joined us. We learned at the time that he was close to the Taliban. He was about 15 years old and handled his AK-47 with confidence.

This time around, I consciously noticed what had already become a subtle pattern. The arrival of our convoy generally signaled to any number of nearby children the opportunity for brass leftovers.

The Afghan boys waited patiently on their heels as we set up our targets - small circles for sight adjustments, larger ones for pistols, and combinations of cartoon terrorists, sometimes with hostages. I had printed out a few scantily-clad bikini models and told our medic, a hulking, intellectual Special Forces solider from Washington state: "you can't hesitate just because they are super hot." He laughed and promised he wouldn't.

Meanwhile, the kids watching us seemed to understand our mood and smiled while we loaded our guns, yelled "hot!" and proceeded to take down our paper enemies. Maybe it was the anticipation, from seeing so many empty shells spill onto the ground beneath us, that made those boys happy. For me, this was one of a few, well-respected lessons in gun use and safety. For our group of military and civilian contractors, this was half a day away from the compound keeping necessary skills sharp in the event of a bad situation.

But for those boys, this was at least a day's wages depending on the number and quality of shells we dispensed.

Our Indian and Nepalese security team got in a few shots as well, as we foreign nationals packed up our equipment and hydrated. One of the locals nodded at me to try firing his AK at a boulder about 150 meters away up the hillside, right in front of our targets. I hit it a couple times, which got another nod, and another loaded magazine.

But after I had finished in embarrassingly inaccurate fashion, he turned to those patient boys and whistled them over. Turns out he had used me as an excuse to empty another magazine of shells for those boys, a truly subtle but respectable gesture for his countrymen.

As I watched the kids scramble around on their knees, careless of the dirt and rocks, I realized what that extra magazine meant to them. It wasn't hard after that to take a few extra minutes scouting shells under our vehicles to add to the pile. Not one of the boys looked up or said thank you, but it didn't matter.

As we rode back to our compound, I thought a bit more about that old saying: "one man's trash is another man's treasure." It felt good to leave a little treasure for those Afghan kids.