Troops in Afghanistan find cheer with a Yule logon

Kabul, Jan 5 : Marine Cpl. Brett Bass will do what a lot of American service members hope to this Christmas Day: “I’m going to give myself a gift of not turning on my alarm clock,” he said.

Maj. Bryan Burke will be trying to coax his 4-year-old daughter to say hello in a video chat. Specialist Marshall Little will have worked the graveyard shift as an intelligence analyst, so he’ll still be sleeping when an extravagant Christmas lunch is served at noon. By the time he wakes up, though, it will be morning in America, and he will go online with his wife to open some of the half-dozen presents waiting in his tent.

After more than 11 years of war in Afghanistan, there is still plenty of work to do. But this is the time of year when the tempo of the war slows dramatically. Insurgent attacks drop off as quickly as the snow piles up on mountainsides.

Here at one of Kabul’s main military bases, Camp KAIA, where the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command runs the war’s operational headquarters on the edge of Kabul International Airport, officials have done their best to put a festive face on a dusty and sometimes dreary landscape.

While Afghanistan may sometimes seem like America’s forgotten war — it was scarcely mentioned in the presidential campaigns — soldiers here say they do not feel forsaken. Technology helps, and many here said they would try to have video chats during present-opening time, despite time differences ranging from 9 1/2 to 14 1/2 hours. The military has also tried to create a festive atmosphere offline. Live Christmas trees have been flown in from New York, with a two-story-high one near the passenger terminal and eight-footers in the dining facilities. There is a big inflatable Santa on a roof, and next to the chapel is an inflatable helicopter driven by Santa, with a snowman along for the ride.

For weeks, the base has been deluged with packages, not just from family and friends but also from schools and churches back in the States. Capt. Dan Einert’s church, Beautiful Savior Lutheran in Topeka, Kan., shipped eight boxes full of 20 presents for everyone in his unit; the soldiers opened them at an office party.

“It was a very touching gesture,” Captain Einert said.

Until a week ago, Specialist Monica Martin, an Army mail clerk from Bell, Ga., and the rest of her unit had been handling two tractor-trailer loads of mail a day — more than 5,000 packages daily, not counting cards and letters, on a base with about 5,000 soldiers.

“I’m going to be sleeping all day on Christmas,” she said.

The American dining hall on the base will have a huge selection on Christmas, perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the desserts than usual, and heavy on the pie. The hall will be dressed up, too: two of the Sri Lankan cooks for the contracting company that runs the place carved and painted plastic-foam sleighs, religious figures and reindeer on Christmas Eve. Crepe paper decorations in red and green had been strung (interspersed with “Stop Suicide” stickers, with a base phone number).

When it’s mealtime, 32 generals and other top officers will dish food out to the rank and file. It is an old American military tradition, but not one that allied brass share — or, in some cases, understand.

Still, nine Afghan generals will join the serving line this year, said Maj. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the deputy chief of staff and one of the servers. They were good sports about it, he said. “A couple of them were, ‘Great, I’m coming,’ ” General Nicholson said. “A couple were: ‘O.K., explain this to me again? We will do what?’ ”

The general knows that Christmases on deployment take a toll; he’s had four, and some here have had more. “This is one of the toughest times of the year,” he said. But he noted at least one upside: “You don’t have to worry about shopping malls.”

Deployed soldiers at bases like this one do have an on-base bazaar, where some can buy presents like Afghan souvenirs and lapis lazuli, rugs and carvings, and pay only United States domestic postal rates to ship them to people at home. Still, most do their shopping entirely online, where, many noted with satisfaction, the wrapping can be done for you.

“When you’re deployed, you make a second family,” said Major Burke, an Air Force officer spending his fourth Christmas away. “You do a lot of things together, and you make friends quickly. Misery loves company, I guess, and in this case you have plenty of company.”

The major said he would try later to talk to his daughters, Reagan, 4, and Ellie, 8 months, over Skype. Reagan has taken to refusing to speak on the phone, he said, but Skype entices her. “The younger one just thinks I’m on television,” he said.

Col. John Wilbourne, an Air Force trainer, is spending his first Christmas away from his family of four, and said he had come to Afghanistan somewhat “disenchanted” by the public mood of uninterest back home. “But I’ve seen the tremendous strides we have taken, and I know it sounds like a public service announcement, but I mean that,” he said. “I believe we’re going to win this.”

On Christmas Eve, he used his iPad to record part of a candlelight service, which included a soldiers’ ensemble of two saxophones, violin, drums and keyboard, as well as a choir to lead the caroling. His wife and mother had organized their relatives and friends to each send him a Christmas ornament, and the ornaments arrived day after day, to add to the tree on his desk.

“It’s been sad this Christmas, but kind of exciting, too,” Colonel Wilbourne said. “My children, they’re 13 and 12. They’re troupers. They miss me a lot, but it makes you feel better when we’re actually doing some good — helps them cope a little better.”

At the candlelight service, the senior chaplain, Col. Rod Lindsay, gave an impassioned sermon, talking about how soldiers are driven to do their work “because someone lit up their life.”

He talked about the soldier’s life as being constantly on guard against darkness, and noted that war zones had no monopoly on it. “There’s a place in Connecticut where the light is very dim,” Colonel Lindsay said. “We don’t have to go all the way to Afghanistan to experience a deep, gloomy, dreary darkness.”

For now, though, they are experiencing it here, and for the most part making the best of it.

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