BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan – This sprawling U.S. military base woke up to alarms shortly after midnight on Sunday: insurgents just beyond Bagram’s north side fired two rounds of indirect rocket fire. One damaged a concrete blast wall and the other didn’t make it into the base. The general warning was to stay where you were, but some residents got out of bed and crouched into the concrete bunkers outside the various living quarters housing the 30,000-plus population of the base. Others, like me, snored through the whole thing.
No one was harmed in the incident. No one was arrested, either. Public-affairs staff for the base didn’t say what kind of rocket impacted the base. By mid-day, soldiers and airmen shrugged the attack off or made half-hearted jokes about it.
The rocketing was a far cry from a May 19 assault on the base, when insurgents with rockets, grenades and suicide vests charged Bagram, killing an American contractor and wounding nine NATO troops. Absolutely no one jokes about that. People here discuss “May 19” as a stand-alone date, signifying an event that requires no elaboration, and point to bullet-pocked blast walls on the south side that testify to the attack. May 19, according to members of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, which is responsible for base security, catalyzed a lot of new blast-wall construction, hardening the base in the event of an inevitable follow-on attack.
By coincidence, the rocket attack occurred a few hours before a long-scheduled drill that tested reaction on base in the event of a “mass casualty” event. The simulation placed a white pickup truck laden with ersatz explosives in the busy pavilion near the main Post Exchange right off Disney Drive. Firefighters -- some dressed in astronaut-like silver jumpsuits with oxygen tanks on their backs -- and military medics showed up expeditiously, in the view of the one of the drill’s co-directors, Air Force Major Eric “Beckham” Johnson. After an hour, the only remnants of the exercise were troops and contractors covered in fake blood and cinematic-looking fake shrapnel. Some were wrapped in gauze and wearing placards around their neck indicating the location of their injuries. Finally, they cleaned themselves off, and went back to their jobs, directing and supplying the very real war going on outside the walls.
Photo: Spencer Ackerman
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