A Battlefield Tourist

Nothing About Afghanistan Is Easy

Jan 10 at 1:01pm by David Tate

Just when I thought everything was sailing smoother than expected, the unexpected whacks me in the head.  It is kind of my fault for buying my plane tickets before hearing from the Marines, but sometimes that’s how I work… and this time, it cost me.

Dave,  I could offer you something earlier in the month, say Feb. xx-xx. Would this work for you?  Do you already have your ISAF badge? If not, be advised that you will have to stop through Kabul to pick it up at HQ ISAF. Please let me know if this is the case and I will send you specific instructions.  You’ve mentioned wanting to see a lot of things (MEDCAP, CERP, patrols); could you narrow down what kind of story you’d be looking to get out of your embed? That will help me focus our planning for it more. Thanks!

Detour to Kabul

Basically what that means is that I now face several new issues that will greatly slow me down as well as chew up a bunch of my financial reserves.

First, I had to change my tickets.  After penalty and price adjustment, that cost an additional $65 (btw – Dubai is just $800 r/t!!  Incredible vacation spot… so I hear!).   Why Dubai?  Because there aren’t many flights out of Kuwait to Kabul, whereas Dubai has daily 6am flights. The flight to Kabul and back is another $750.

Second, I have to make my way to ISAF headquarters in Kabul so they can fingerprint me and give me a retinal scan.  You can only do this Monday, Wednesday or Friday between 10 and 11am, so timing is everything.  Obviously, this all means I will likely have to spend a few days in Kabul waiting for a flight to Kandahar, which means more money.  At least I will be able to add Kabul to my HD archive, so there is a silver lining.

Finally, I have to get a visa.  It really isn’t a big deal, just another thing I have to do on top of the million things already needing to be done.  Basically you just have to send your application, passport and passport photo to the Afghan Embassy in Washington (plus $100), and they send it back to you within a day or two.

So in a nutshell, this detour through Kabul is going to end up costing about $1,000 as well as about a week of time that I could have been using for embeds.  It also means that by the time I get to embed with the Marines, I’m going to be exhausted.  Oh well, nothing about Afghanistan is easy.