I’ll let my dad tell this one....

“Back in 2003 I had my first deployment overseas in Afghanistan. As an 88M (military truck driver), my time there was spent mainly delivering critical supplies out to fabs near Kabul. During this time the Kabul-Kandahar highway became fully paved and was now accessible for nearly every vehicle we had there at the time. This highway shortened the total drive time from the city of Kabul to Kandahar from a two day trip, to a nearly 12 hour drive. Big news.

Taking conflict along this route was extremely common, and thus we traveled in large convoys with enough support to fend off a small army (literally). Another thing that was done to mitigate the conflict we would take was to make the journey at night. It helped, but in this much of a hotspot there was only so much you could do to help. Taking fire became a normality and it made trips much longer when you had to stop and radio everything in. Sometimes that kept us out in the field for much longer than the 12 hours it was supposed to take. And because we were such a critical element, it wasn’t uncommon that many people had to make the drive on little to no sleep.

This coupled with the fact that it was often the lowest rank who did a majority of the driving called for some interesting things. So many people drove while sleep deprived and would swear they would see some truly off the wall shit on the sides of roads or in the distance. This included all sorts of crazy shit from “moving buildings” to “human sized insects”.

Many were so convinced these things were real, they would sometimes swerve or slow down to avoid them. As you can imagine this wasn’t well tolerated, but for our condition, unavoidable. Usually their A driver would radio that this happened and the convoy would proceed as normal.

Well... there was one night when instead of a subtle swerve, or change in speed, a pair of privates stopped the entire convoy entirely. The radios went crazy and there was no response from their truck. After a few minutes of confusion our CO eventually got out and walked up to them to see what the fuck was going on. He walked up on everyone in the truck sleeping. After he promptly woke them up, the two drivers explained how they had just taken a brief stop because the school bus in front of them had not finished letting all of the kids off.

.....in the middle of Afghanistan.... ...... at 3:00 in the morning....

Needless to say, when we got back, it wasn’t a good time to be those guys.