Free NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan by David Kaelin

many girls were involved or what they were charging but it was all going well until that one guy brought back his bag of STDs and passed them on to one of the girls. It spread like wildfire from that point.
    Apparently, none of these guys or gals had discovered the benefits of condoms. The guys who came in for STDs were all disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). But I’m sure that there were more involved. The girls were all sent back home. The beauty salon hired new girls and business went back to normal.
    After that incident, the Army made the beauty salon girls move off base. AAFES moved them to a safe house downtown in Kabul. No massage girls or barbers lived on any of the Kabul area bases after that.

Camp Cupcake—The Easy Life
    March–December 2005
    In the spring, KBR moved me up to Camp Eggers to be team chief. I took over the Property Book Office from Sergeant First Class Wright, who was a septuagenarian that had been retired for over a decade when OEF kicked off. Believing that they were short of manpower, the Army began randomly recalling retirees. SFC Wright was given a choice: deploy to Afghanistan or lose your retirement benefits. Within the month, he was on a plane. When he arrived in Afghanistan, he was assigned to the Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan (CFC-A), which was the overall command of the U.S.-led coalition and was also responsible for training the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. Unfortunately, CFC-A was not expecting Wright. They didn’t have a position for him. He spent a year deployed in Afghanistan doing busy work. The Army interrupted this grandfather’s life, so that he could sit around doing nothing for twelve months in Afghanistan. SFC Wright was far from the only one to be jerked around like this to “fight” the Global War on Terror. I would estimate that 10 to 20 percent of the folks in Afghanistan were likewise sitting on their thumbs and counting the days until end of deployment. They got shiny medals out of it, plus some useful VA benefits, so I guess it wasn’t a total waste of their time.
    Camp Eggers was a different animal than other camps in Afghanistan. It had always been the headquarters for the effort in Afghanistan and is dead center of what’s now called the Kabul Base Cluster. It was here that the generals, who ran the show, worked. Eggers was less than half a mile from the U.S. Embassy. Karzai’s presidential palace was a stone’s throw away. ISAF headquarters was a couple hundred feet from the main gate. There’s more brass per square meter at Eggers than anywhere outside of the Pentagon, which made it a dog-and-pony show magnet.
    Eggers actually looked like a neighborhood back in the States that the military had beefed up with gun emplacements, guard towers, and Hesco barriers. The only road in Eggers was a tree-lined street called Gator Alley. The camp was full of small villas. Some high-ranking person decided that instead of numbering the villas, he’d name them. There was Rose House that got its name from a guy killed by the Taliban. Alamo House was named by a Texas unit that had been stationed at Eggers when it first opened, while Goat House had a bit of an odd story. When the Army first moved into the area that would become Eggers, they had to clear many of the houses of rubble and debris. In one building, a goat carcass was found in the debris. Whoever was in charge of building designations had a sense of humor and decided that Goat House would be a great name. That building became the home of the commanding general of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan. The most powerful man in Afghanistan was put in Goat House. He lived on the top floor. The bottom floor was one of the Eggers dining facilities.
    Eggers was rarely attacked. I can’t remember a direct attack the whole time that I was there. The only incident that I can recall occurred about a week or so after I arrived. The security forces (SECFOR) discovered a bomb