LITTLE ROCK — The war in Afghanistan has raged over the past eight years, fought primarily by U.S. Special Forces and foreign allies as Iraq's violence held America's attention.
The battles for control of Afghanistan's beautiful and desolate mountain passes and precious few roadways never waned over the years, however.
Compared with Iraq, relatively few U.S. troops have touched Afghanistan's rocky soil. Now, the numbers are growing by the day with the ongoing surge of 21,000 ground troops almost complete. The surge brings the number of U.S. troops to about 65,000, more than half of the 100,000-strong NATO force there.
With NATO stepping up the number of international troops as well, the intensity of battle has followed suit.
Last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the situation in Afghanistan is "deteriorating."
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And where ground troops go, the U.S. Air Force in many cases is already in the skies above.
The Air Force, which until this year had been operating as much from bases in countries surrounding Afghanistan as from its borders, has consistently dropped more bombs and fired more bullets from the skies over the nation than in Iraq.
In March, Little Rock Air Force Base C-130s moved from a base on the fringes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan farther inward to Kandahar to lead the movement of troops and supplies to forward operating bases as part of the surge.
Hundreds of other Air Force Arkansans can be found throughout Afghanistan flying and fixing planes, hunting for roadside bombs, patching up the wounded and loading bombs onto the fighter jets that provide close air support of ground troops.
They're doing jobs few people can relate to in a rugged land and wartime environment that must be experienced to be understood.
"It's kind of an abstract concept when you first show up," said 1st Lt. Scott Hendrix, a pilot deployed to Bagram Airfield with the Little Rock base's 50th Airlift Squadron. "It's nothing you can plan for, nothing you can even imagine. You don't fully understand the concept until you're here."
These are some of their stories, told matter-of-factly from Afghanistan over scratchy phone lines, interrupted by the occasional roar of fighter jets flexing their afterburners as they take off.
'AS LONG AS WE'RE NEEDED'
Hendrix has been flying C-130H cargo planes out of Bagram for about two months. He may have a month to go. He may have longer.
C-130 crews and mechanics from Little Rock Air Force Base have been in high demand in and around Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars began. Cargo planes hauled the first troops and equipment in and will fly the last out.
That means some long tours of duty and repeat deployments. C-130 Hercules cargo planes, known as Hercs, are the busiest planes in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for the majority of all sorties. That is especially true in Afghanistan, where terrain and field conditions prevent most aircraft from landing at forward operating bases.
"Certainly, every 90 seconds that means there is an Air Mobility Command airplane rolling down a runway somewhere." Gen. Arthur Lichte, commander of Air Mobility Command, which oversees all cargo and air-refueling operations, said last month.
"We're here as long as we're needed," Hendrix, of Dallas, said. "It's the world we live in these days."
And in Afghanistan, it is a Herc driver's dream.
Hendrix deployed with Little Rock Air Force Base's 50th Airlift Squadron, of the 19th Airlift Wing.
"The fields here are really challenging. It's a lot of good flying," he said. "There's one that's a dried-up clay surface with pretty jagged rocks and you have a lot of instances where it cuts up your tires. But it's definitely a field that commands respect in bringing it in and being gentle with it."
It is exactly the kind of flying he'd hoped for when he chose the Herc.
"You don't really get the opportunity to 100 percent train on what we do over here," he said. "It's an awesome mission, where you really see the fruits of your labor."
The lessons that come out of an experience like this are not limited to flying skills. The Herc is a five-member crew mission where long days are the norm.
"Don't pass judgment on anything, don't act too quickly," he said. "Learning to work with people, with different personalities is a big lesson learned here. People are entirely different after being up [on a mission] for 13-14 hours. You learn patience."
HONORING THE FALLEN
Senior Airman Nate Batts flies with Hendrix as the loadmaster, in charge of cargo and passengers. A native of Kalamazoo, Mich., Batts is also a member of the 50th Airlift Squadron.
"Most of it is passengers, Army guys and obviously a lot of civilians, too, military contractors," he said. "We move a lot of pallets, some fuel bladders, ammo and once in a while you get a case of blood coming out here."
Batts said the cargo is similar to what he saw as a loadmaster in Iraq on his last tour.
"The difference is living conditions," he said. "The quarters aren't as nice, and there aren't as many options."
Batts, Hendrix and their crew carried their first fallen comrade recently, a Polish soldier. While it was the first "Human Remains" mission for them, it is a common mission for the Herc in Iraq and Afghanistan.
About 300 NATO troops have been killed in Afghanistan this year, making this the deadliest year since the beginning of the war in 2001. And at 45 deaths, August is so far the deadliest month for U.S. troops as well.
"It's pretty humbling," Hendrix said. "It's pretty eye-opening. It demands a lot of respect and puts things into perspective. It's something you don't forget."
The Polish flag, with its simple design of a horizontal white stripe over a red stripe, covered the casket. Two of the fallen soldier's friends, fellow Polish soldiers, accompanied it.
"It doesn't really put a face with it," Batts said. "But that made it a little more like you're making a difference for those guys."
When a U.S. serviceman dies in war, the casket is moved to the plane during a ceremony, with people gathering in formation to salute it as it is hand-carried onto the plane.
In most cases, the airfield halts operations for those few minutes, delaying takeoffs and landings to ensure quiet reverence as they send the fallen home.
Not all allied nations have the same protocol.
"We as a crew decided we'd do our own ceremony for them," Batts said. "Rather than just backing the truck up to the plane and offloading the casket like regular cargo, we had the guys line up on the sides of the ramp and salute as we walked him up the ramp and into the plane."
After a brief pause, he said, "Yeah, I think it did make a difference. I hope it did."
WELCOME TO AFGHANISTAN
Little Rock Air Force Base C-130Js - the newest Herc model - got the call for Kandahar this year.
The base's 41st Airlift Squadron had been deployed last year to a base in Qatar, where its planes had been flying Afghanistan and Iraq missions. The move to Kandahar was an indication of the increased demand for airlift in Afghanistan.
Maintenance officer Capt. Dave Reilly was part of a team of flight crews and maintenance personnel who arrived in Kandahar in February to set up the 772nd Airlift Squadron - the 41st's new and continued-deployment home.
A dusty NATO outpost in the volatile southern region of Afghanistan, Kandahar was described by many of those as "The Wild West."
"There was a lot of scrambling for land," Reilly said. "The conditions weren't ideal at first."
They found a patch of dirt on the edge of the flight line and erected tents to live and work out of. In the months since, what started as a small squadron with combined operations and maintenance responsibility has since doubled in size.
"We were lucky in the way J models don't break very often," Reilly said of those early days. "It allowed us to work on some other projects."
By the time he left in June, Kandahar's dirt roads were getting paved and permanent housing and bathrooms began to appear.
The flying mission began to take its toll, however.
The sandstorms and heat that wreak havoc on planes in Iraq are not a bother in Afghanistan. Rocks made up for that.
More than a few fields have fist-size rocks littering the dirt runway.
"The runways at forward operating bases weren't as good as what we were flying out of," Reilly said. "We're landing on these dirt strips, tearing up landing gears, tearing up the gear doors, a lot of hydraulic lines. We learned very quickly from the Brits, who had their J-models there and also the Marines, a lot of these [external antennas on the front and bottom of the plane], we'd have to pad them up real well, better than we do here.But even with the extra padding sometimes, we'd use the cloth fire hose and lay it along the front edge of the antennas."
Early on, there was no easy way to empty the C-130's on-board toilet. Instead of dumping the raw waste on the side of the ramp, the British C-130 unit created their own "Bog Trolley," a hose and a cart that would allow a plane's toilets to be safely emptied and the waste hauled away.
Those tricks are still being shared among the various crews at Kandahar.
"We all kind of shared things, facilities, equipment," he said. "So the other nations showed us some good tricks on how to protect our aircraft. But after they came back here [to Little Rock Air Force Base], they have ... a lot of costly maintenance."
Thinking back, Reilly said, "It was good fun. I wouldn't want to go back again."
AIRDROP: BEANS AND BULLETS
"You're never doing the same thing two days in a row, really," said Capt. David Milodragovich over the phone from Kandahar, where he's deployed with the 41st Airlift Squadron.
Milodragovich, of Great Falls, Mont., flies the newest Herc, the C-130J.
Compared with Reilly, Milodragovich is a relative newcomer to Kandahar's 772nd, with a couple of months under his belt in Kandahar.
And a lot has happened over the past six months.
From March 15 to Aug. 27, the Hercs of the 772nd have flown more than 3,200 hours, hauling 25,314 passengers and 75 tons of cargo, according to 1st Lt. Noelle Caldwell of the 451st Air Expeditionary Wing at Kandahar.
The J-model can fly faster, higher, farther and carry more cargo than older Herc models, giving them a slight advantage in Afghanistan's high-altitude terrain.
To get supplies to troops in mountainous regions where landing is not an option, the Hercs are doing more airdrops than in years past.
"We do airdrops on a pretty regular basis out here right now," he said.
The squadron has completed 37 airdrops since it began on March 15. Most of those, 30, have been since June 15 - during Milodragovich's deployment.
Herc crews have dropped Howitzer field artillery guns with five parachutes strapped to them to troops hundreds of feet below. Ammunition, food, water - if a parachute can make it float, it can be airdropped anywhere.
"It's the most efficient way to get them the supplies they need," he said. "I get a sense of accomplishment out of it, it helps them get by and do their day-to-day business and survive."
It's the kind of flying that's impossible to practice in Arkansas. Milodragovich said some locations are such deep canyons that they must fly into them, far below the jagged peaks to airdrop supplies. For really difficult locations, crews use Global Positioning System-guided parachute systems called JPADS (Joint Precision Airdrop System).
When wounded servicemen need to be evacuated, however, landing is the only option. It's not the kind of mission Milodragovich likes to do; he'd prefer there wasn't a need. As of Thursday, the 772nd had airlifted 114 critically wounded troops to safety.
"Sometimes when you're coming in to some of the [dirt landing fields], you're coming in high and you have to descend fast. And you pass that terrain and it looks a lot closer to the field than it did on a piece of paper or computer screen," he said. "When you see it in real life it seems like it's right up on the field."
ALMOST HOME
Maj. Christopher May is headed home any day now.
A Marianna native and son of St. Francis County Sheriff Thomas May, Maj. May's time in Afghanistan as a judge advocate - Air Force lawyer - is up. His wife and three daughters wait for him at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where he is stationed.
Back home, May will face a different kind of battleground, a more personal one. His father was diagnosed with cancer while he was deployed.
"One thing you don't want to happen is you don't want to be over here when you get bad news. Because there is very little you can do about it," he said. "As a son, you want to be there with your dad and support him. ... At the end of the day, when you have a family member battling cancer, that's kind of tough."
A deployment gives a different kind of family, one of tightlyknit friendships spun out of shared experiences.
"We had a rocket attack that hit pretty close a few weeks ago. There are a lot of young folks outside the wire getting shot at all the time," he said. "Sometimes I think we're safe. That rocket attack, that was certainly a time that got everyone's attention. We lost a couple folks and that shook us a bit."
As an officer in the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG), May's job is part lawyer, part adviser and completely unique.
"I get a lot of questions that don't have anything to do with the law. I see a lot of things other people don't see," he said.
Generals and commanders seek out JAG opinions on everything from policies to rules of engagement such as when to use deadly force.
May's opinion has been sought on a new nonlethal weapon security forces are using to protect the base, and, he had a court-martial a couple of weeks earlier that convicted an airman for leaving his post.
"Security is a pretty big deal," he said. "He was sentenced to 75 days. That sends a strong message out here. One person leaving their post is a pretty big deal."
There are the countless cases of divorces, credit issues and other personal problems he helps airmen deal with as their lawyer.
"Some of these kids were in middle school when Sept. 11 happened. They're doing an incredibly hard job for very little money and no glory," he said, with pride.
"... And at the end of the day, some of them leave here in boxes."
COUNTING BOMBS
Airman 1st Class Caleb Hickerson of Pine Bluff joined the Air Force after finding himself living paycheck to paycheck in Arkansas, unable to make ends meet.
That wasn't very long ago.
Now, over a scratchy phone line from Bagram, just north of Kabul, Hickerson said, "I've never looked back."
As he came to the phone - a satellite phone with a several-second delay as it bounced from the war to outer space and over to Arkansas - Capt. Dave Faggard asked Hickerson as he handed the phone, "Want me to take your gun?"
Everyone carries a firearm in Afghanistan, a reality that is relatively new to most airmen.
Based at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, Hickerson is a munitions systems specialist.
"We're responsible for keeping track of all the munitions expended," he said.
Part mechanic and part accountant, Hickerson accounts for every bomb and bullet fired from American aircraft out of Bagram.
And he helps to ensure there are enough bombs and bullets on hand when needed.
"You work 12-hour shifts," he said with some amazement that anyone would find the daily grind of war interesting.
"I get up, eat breakfast, go to work, go to the gym and do laundry. And I call home on days I can. Over here there's pretty much one thing going on: Planes taking off, planes landing. That's it."
Hickerson's part of the war may not be obvious, but it's there.
"I may not be out rolling with the Army or Marines, and obviously I'm not a pilot," he said. "But there's more to it than that. If you didn't have bombs, what are you going to drop?"
Hickerson echoed other airmen, noting that the perspective of war makes for an appreciation of what waits back home.
"It makes you realize you have it much better than you think you do,' he said. "When people say, 'Life sucks,' well, no. It doesn't."
Front Section, Pages 1, 10 on 08/30/2009