On patrol with the Afghan army
Our Afghanistan correspondent Jon Boone survived dozens of embedded missions unscathed. Then, one morning, his luck finally ran out . . . Just as I thought things couldn’t get much worse, they did. The decrepit Humvee, a hand-me-down from the US Army, juddered to a halt and smoke billowed from the air vents below the bulletproof windscreen. I was now stranded in a broken- down Afghan National Army (ANA) vehicle in the middle of a deadly stretch of highway where only two days earlier there had been a small firefight between the Taliban and the security forces. More to the point, I also had a broken leg. My right fibula had snapped at the ankle at around 8am that morning after I fell into a flooded irrigation canal near the town of Kandalay in the district of Zhari, the neighbourhood of Mullah Omar (in the days when the one-eyed cleric was gathering his forces for what would ultimately lead to the Taliban conquest of almost the entire country). I really needed to be in hospital. Instead I was crammed into the front seat of a baking-hot armoured vehicle watching a bunch of Afghan soldiers running back and forth to a nearby puddle, scooping up water into their helmets to cool the engine. Despite the quantum leap the ANA has made in recent years, they are still not the people to help you when you are in serious difficulties. And it had arguably been more than a little unwise to hitch a lift with the ANA to get back to the relative civilisation of Kandahar City, from where I hoped to get a flight to Dubai or Kabul. Or anywhere with a decent hospital prepared to treat a wounded civilian. A few days previously, sitting in the comfort of the ANA’s 205th “Hero” Corps headquarters on the outskirts of
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On patrol with the Afghan army
Our Afghanistan correspondent Jon Boone survived dozens of embedded missions unscathed. Then, one morning, his luck finally ran out . . . Just as I thought things couldn’t get much worse, they did. The decrepit Humvee, a hand-me-down from the US Army, juddered to a halt and smoke billowed from the air vents below the bulletproof windscreen. I was now stranded in a broken- down Afghan National Army (ANA) vehicle in the middle of a deadly stretch of highway where only two days earlier there had been a small firefight between the Taliban and the security forces. More to the point, I also had a broken leg. My right fibula had snapped at the ankle at around 8am that morning after I fell into a flooded irrigation canal near the town of Kandalay in the district of Zhari, the neighbourhood of Mullah Omar (in the days when the one-eyed cleric was gathering his forces for what would ultimately lead to the Taliban conquest of almost the entire country). I really needed to be in hospital. Instead I was crammed into the front seat of a baking-hot armoured vehicle watching a bunch of Afghan soldiers running back and forth to a nearby puddle, scooping up water into their helmets to cool the engine. Despite the quantum leap the ANA has made in recent years, they are still not the people to help you when you are in serious difficulties. And it had arguably been more than a little unwise to hitch a lift with the ANA to get back to the relative civilisation of Kandahar City, from where I hoped to get a flight to Dubai or Kabul. Or anywhere with a decent hospital prepared to treat a wounded civilian. A few days previously, sitting in the comfort of the ANA’s 205th “Hero” Corps headquarters on the outskirts of
Posted by
on July 25, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.