Renton's Rant - Afghanistan 2008

My mindset in Afghanistan had become somewhat jaded. I felt at times that things were spiralling out of control. Looking back at these letters, I realized that i was beginning to struggle. There were times that I loved my job. I was seeing a country that had been the crossroads of history for Millenia. I had scratched an itch. It was a lonely time. 

Dear All,

Cigarettes, Land Cruisers, Dust and boredom, which is how to summarize Mazar E Sharif and this task that I am working on. On terms of job satisfaction, I rate this as one of the low points of my career. So, it is good money, but the feeling that you get when you know you have worked hard to achieve it is not there. I have for the last 66 days been nothing more than a point of contact. Merely getting up long before the sun rises to walk to the main gate, speak to the German or Croatian soldiers and sign in my Afghan deminers. Then it is eight hours of watching the sun rise high into the sky and the thermometer climb into the soaring 40s. The deminers spend their day clearing a vast open space that will become a runway free from of all metal signals and the occasional piece of ordnance. It is mind-numbing and soul destroying. This is the corporate face of Enduring Freedom.

For career progression it certainly has been an eye opener. Profit margins, expenditure and deadlines are the mantra; the profit is the end goal. This is not me; this is not what I want to become.

 I have worn out one pair of desert boots, dropped several pounds and have escaped the routine of the pub back home. Yet this is not living, this is simply existing and counting down the days to leaving. I have not craved the companionship of people as much as I do now. However, I am unable to have conversations like this with the people I know here. The handful of Germans and Croatians are good company, but there is that language barrier. Where it is easier to smile and laugh, use gesticulation when words fail. Homesickness is not how I would describe this feeling, but helplessness. We all make choices and I know that I have made the wrong one.

I know that this will be the last time that I am here in Afghanistan with my present employer. I know that this will be the last time that I want to return here and face this again. I have return tickets booked after my leave for another three months. But, hell, no way.

Home has been a twenty-foot shipping container and more recently wooden shacks that have been made into a barrack block. I have shared this room with a Frenchman, Germans, and now an Uzbek. All pleasant people, but the lack of privacy is grating.

Groundhog Day, that is the only way to describe it, and as said earlier, no amount of money is going to tempt me to do it again. Renton in Trainspotting came up with the diatribe of the mid 90s, ending with the words of wisdom “choose life”. How true. 

I need more to see me through than books and pirated DVDs, more than chatting to Afghans about rain in the UK, more than the heat, endless dust and absence of water. I want to control where my life is heading and not feel regret in the choices that I make.

I want to be able to speak to my family, face to face, not over a telephone line. I want to have more to say than it’s been hot. I don’t want them to know how miserable I feel.   Two weeks, fourteen days, three hundred and thirty-six hours, that is it that is all that is left between leaving Kabul and arriving in London. That is all that separates me from returning to living and escaping the mind-numbing coma that has been a project manager. I am choosing life.

 A bit of a depressing one, sorry for that! Still now I have finished typing I have only three hundred and thirty-four hours left.

See you all soon.

David