Shot of Whiskey - Sex Stories

Shot of Whiskey

Shot of Whiskey Ch 1: Arrival Debrief

The day I arrived on the massive Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan I had very low expectations and was still somehow deeply disappointed, at least that was my impression on the landing strip. I had transited through the same orientation given to all civilians at the massive training facility at Bagram and was somewhat prepared for life on the remote outpost in the southeastern edge of Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, but the real thing had smells and dust and ants and other things that tried desperately to crawl into your boots while you just stood there under a relentlessly hot sun. There was no slide for the feeling of despair sinking into your DNA, at least not in my training sessions.

We arrived worried about police capacity, police training, the legal system and how we might, possibly, if we were lucky, build a foundation for a modern society to emerge. We did not start out thinking about sharing toilets with people who refused to learn how to use them, so that each shit had to be prefaced by a wiping down of muddy footprints on the toilet seat, as most locals preferred to squat over the toilet than sit on it. They thought sitting was dirty. And let's not discuss the distaste for toilet paper among some of the local workers with whom we sometimes shared bathroom and shower facilities on our little corner of the massive military base.

Perhaps worse than the living challenges, I was cynical about the work ...

... from the start. I needed money and this was a lot of money. As a former police trainer focused on weapons, munitions, safety and explosives, I was the ideal fit for the $350,000 a year contract they were offering. This was life-changing money, and if I completed my two years, I could walk away set for life, for my kids' lives, with multiple rental properties under my name and a wad of cash to spare. I did not have high hopes, however, for our mission. It seemed a one in a million shot that a tribal culture would turn away from their clans and their traditions and embrace a life organized by outside institutions like courts, legislatures, or provincial governments -- never mind a national government few recognized as legitimate.

People often talked about the religiosity of Afghans as a major hurdle. I never saw that as a hurdle. There was no real organized religious structure to what most people did day to day. There were family leaders, clan leaders, tribal leaders, that was the structure. Faith was an element that shaped the culture, to be sure, but authority, order, that was fundamentally a family and clan decision. Even religious interpretations were heavily influenced by what clan an imam might belong to, that was the framework. There was no single, coherent, enunciated view of religion that shaped traditions, it was really the other way around. Yet here we were, in Afghanistan, asking people to yield their trust and their roles within their tribes, the anchors of their ...