When The Ground Shakes

If you've read my prior post, it makes it sound pretty dull here. It is like that most of the time, but not always. Since my arrival here on 22 October, we have had 2 earthquakes. Now I'm from Pennsylvania, so this is not something that I'm used to. The first one occurred after I had been here for only 2 or 3 days. It was in the middle of the night. As my wife can tell you, I'm a pretty deep sleeper (I only wake up for phone calls and the pager). On this occassion, however, one of the guys started yelling and I woke up. The entire building was shaking, and a few things fell off my shelves. It lasted for about 30 seconds and was quite intense. A few days later, we had another one around 21:00. I was still awake, and it was much shorter and less intense. Certainly a strange feeling if you've never experienced it.

The other thing that makes the ground shake is enemy fire. When I first arrived here, I was told that this FOB rarely gets attacked (only once between June and October). Well, I hope I didn't bring bad luck with me. Nine days ago, we were hit with 2 rockets. It was at night, and we were expecting storms so the balloon ("eye-in-the-sky") was down. It scared the crap out of me; the explosions were loud and I thought they were pretty close. We all put on our "battle rattle" (vest and helmet), grabbed our weapons, and went to the shelter. Fortunately, they landed in a remote part of the FOB and nobody was hurt.

Earlier today, the same thing happened again. This time, LTC Smith, CPT Creel, and I were walking to lunch. All of the sudden, we heard a loud explosion and saw a huge pile of dust in the air. It was out near the perimeter of the base (where I run). At first, we thought it might have been a controlled detonation. Shortly thereafter, however, people started running and we knew it was another attack. We went back to the FST and didn't have any reports of casualties, so we once again put on the "battle rattle" and went to the shelters. We spent about 2 hours waiting for the "all clear", and now here I am writing this post.

Interestingly, the sky is clear today and the balloon is up. The Taliban seem to be getting a bit more brave. I guess the lesson in all of this is that, even when the "eye-in-the-sky" is up, we should never let our guard down. I'm just thankful that 1) nobody was injured and 2) I wasn't running when it happened.