I could hear Crawfs holding court.
I had parked my beat-up white crew-cab Chevy Silverado in the lot by the B-Huts, and I could smell the smoke from the fire as four of us walked home across the grey gravel. It was late evening, and we were all tired after driving home from the squadron over on the east side of Bagram Air Base. We had just debriefed a 6-hour mission over the cold white mountains of Vinoland in Northeast Afghanistan. Feb 2008.
The closer we got to the Bing, the better we could hear the laughing. Crawfs was regaling a big circle of 335th Fighter Squadron "Chiefs" assembled around our blazing Bing Firepit with a lively story about his Mutton Chops.
Our UK exchange officer and one of funniest guys in the squadron, "Crawfs" Crawford looked like an American fighter pilot. But with his strong English accent and his bushy mutton chops on each cheek, he thoroughly and frequently irritated the group of senior non-commissioned officers at Bagram, whose job they thought it was to police our Fighter Squadron's facial hair.
Unlike US regulations, which restricted mustaches from extending beyond the left and right edges of the smile, UK regulations allowed unlimited facial hair, as long as it remained above the horizontal line of the mouth: Mutton Chops.
Crawfs was giddily explaining how he, upon being challenged about his big, bushy Mutton Chops at the BX by a grumpy NCO, had produced a folded letter from his tan flightsuit pocket, from the QUEEN no less, expressly giving him Royal permission to wear the hair.
The crowd all laughed, louder now as we made our way through the forest of plywood B-huts to the Bing where we could see the pallets burning in the fire, and the group standing all around, drinking St Pauli Girl near-beer and smoking cigars.
It was a cold February night, we had arrived in Bagram a few weeks earlier in January, the fire was warm, and our "Chiefs" Lieutenants were stroking their infant, bullet-proof mustaches, wishing them to grow faster as they giggled at Crawfs.
Knowing that science has firmly proven a well-grown, rules-busting mustache has made any fighter pilot invincible since the early Vietnam war, each Lieutenant was looking forward to his own personal run-in with an irritated NCO about the illegal width of his stache.
As commander, I enjoyed the harmless tension of it, and I worked hard to make mine grow faster too.
Half of one of our Chief B-Huts had been turned into a sort of community living room with a couch and TV, and over time, it had become the epicenter of our squadron when we weren't across the base in the squadron or flying missions. Because we were a 24-hour flying operation - someone was always sleeping in a B-Hut, so we used the Bing, especially outside by the fire, as a place to be.
We were placed near the store and the clinic and the dining facility and all the normal things an air base has, but everyone spent their time together at the Bing. Just outside the Bing's front door, a previously-deployed A-10 unit had built a covered-plywood porch, and made for us a small firepit inside a high-walled area reserved just for our squadron.
Spent 30mm A-10 cannon shells were provided all around for decoration. It was always just a bit of a mess, and it was the scene of a thousand war stories.
It was our home.
In the night, those pallets turned into ashes over Bagram.
By the fire, our Fighter Squadron taught itself the lessons of the day:
How to strafe a valley; how to orchestrate tanker Yo-Yo ops; how to drop JDAMs through the weather with a wingman down low under the clouds in the valleys; how to check in with SOF; how to work with the Brits trolling for Taliban; that time they worked on the radios with Prince Harry, how to use prox fuzes for Taliban shooters up in the mountains firing down at friendlies; flaring for a guy duck-hunting with his AK-47 off the end of the runway.
How to leave a dud tasking and get your two-ship moved over to a better killbox for a hot fight; how to make a faster target talk-on; Toby Keith visiting our squadron on his umpteenth USO trip to a combat zone; how to target a bomb-toting mover in a man-dress on a motorcycle; how two lieutenants averted tragedy by holding fire when they knew something just didn't feel right. Launching the alert jets to cover the visiting Senators when their Blackhawk helicopters were forced down in a snowstorm.
How to strafe a mortar-lobbing insurgent before he melts across the Pakistan border, the chaos of supporting a mis-planned end-of-tour infantry raid; how to track the opium drug runners up north, how to shoot better with the WSO using the pod to cue the gun pipper after rolling in Hot.
And how to find and buzz that Everest-like 21,000'+ peak in the Hindu Kush just this side of the Pak border.
For me, there was a clear line of discipline between the squadron building over on the east side of the runway, and the Bing on the west. I insisted our squadron look and stay tight ever day - and our guys hated me making them clean and tidy up the working areas, the vault, the briefing rooms, the planning areas. Nobody wants to do that.
But I knew precision in the air required a sense of precision on the ground. I believed our discipline in the place we worked translated directly into combat discipline in the air. I expected it.
The Bing was that place.
Every night, we got better by the fire at the Bing, and taught each other how to take care of troopers on the ground all across Afghanistan. But much too frequently, we'd hear the base loudspeaker announcing the worst: A truck or a caravan of Humvees carrying the bodies of brave Americans who had just been killed in a fight.
Coming to us from out there somewhere - they were now being transported from the Army helo ramp up the street past our area north to the C-17 waiting by the tower for their long flight home. We'd leave our Bing fire together, and move just outside our plywood wall to stand in solemn silence on the main north-south road.
Shoulder-to-shoulder with people from all the services - Army, Navy, Marines, and our Air Force Airmen, we respected and honored these strangers passing slowly by in the dim light down the dusty "Disney Drive" to America. Unlike most standing with us, however, we knew our job was to prevent this from happening.
Every one of those awful ceremonies snapped us back to the hard reality of our mission. They sharpened our minds as we returned to the fire at the Bing, a whole lot quieter and much more focused than before.
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Inside or Outside, the Bing was always lively. Near-beer and 'Rip-Its" made a combat zone social, and good cigars made the mood. But the fire always got too big, and as much as I loved a good fire, I really didn't love that tension.
Even though I knew it was great for community and combat learning, I also knew a big fire was a safety hazard, it would draw too much attention, and they would rightly shut us down because of it. So I had quite a few 'Knock It Off, Guys!' moments after somebody would head over to the stack of pallets, intent on making the blaze bigger. Thankfully, we managed to keep our fire small enough, and just under control enough during the coldest months of the deployment, to keep us in business at the Bing firepit well into March when the air began to warm.
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"You know, your squadron is gonna have to lose that fire pit, JJ."
General Mobile Holmes was gently correcting me in a private chat together, just after he arrived later in our deployment as our new Wing Commander. He had just pinned on his first star in a big hangar nearby, and it was so great to have him flying again with our squadron at Bagram. He had been my Boss at Seymour Johnson, I knew him well, and to me he was like a much-older big brother, way smarter than I was (am) and 10 years wiser than me.
It was the coolest thing to have him out there with us. Mobile was flying on my wing, and we were giving him a short combat checkout so he could lead Strike Eagle missions with us in the 335th Chiefs, and later on, fly with the 494th Panthers across Afghanistan.
During our post-flight talk, I could tell he had already heard an earful about our squadron spirit at the Bing.
"That's good."
"...But it means a lot to us sir."
"Well JJ, It'll mean a whole lot more to you when one of your pyro lieutenants sets off a conflagration fire from the Bing and burns down 300 plywood B-huts."
I really couldn't argue with him - of course he was right, and of course it was true. One of our fires had recently gotten way too big, and the sparks...not good. It was noticed. Bagram was growing bigger exponentially, and the Seabees were building whole new villages of plywood B-Huts into every empty space, creating what was effectively a big plywood city west of the runway. It was a tinderbox.
"You got it sir."
We did.
Split Reid help me scout for the spot in my Silverado, and that fire we built over there was glorious....
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For me, the Bing was a place of distraction. When I wasn't flying a night sortie, I'd always look at the schedule to see who was tasked to fly up in Vinoland that night.
I don't remember who started calling it that, but Vinoland was the area in far northeast Afghanistan in the general area of the Korengal Valley. We imagined the valleys might be good for grapes some day after the war; it was beautiful, and rugged. But deadly.
Vinoland is where the tallest and steepest mountains were, and where the worst weather and terrain impacted our operations.
To me, those rocks to our northeast were our biggest threat.
I never said anything about it to the squadron of course, but every night, I'd pray ceaselessly for our young aviators flying up there, the way a Dad might pray for his Daughter or a Son. Of course we focused every day on operational risk management, and of course everyone was trained and disciplined and prepared to operate well in that place.
But I also knew I had 22 lieutenants, feeling bulletproof with their half-grown mustaches, all ready and determined to get down in there and protect Americans under fire in those valleys - whatever it required. It was in their DNA, it was what we taught them; it was what we expected.
In the day time, it was a piece of cake, relatively. It was the most beautiful and majestic place I've ever experienced in the air. And the mission was always intense but fun.
But at night - in the dark and the snow and the steep valleys with low weather and ceilings, it was a mission that carried significant risk.
The enemy was always up high in the hills, shooting down at our troops down in the valleys who were moving on the roads. And I knew that feeling you can get in a fighter cockpit when you hear a grown man calling you with intensity over the radio for bombs as you hear the bullets and the chaos echoing behind him, and see the tracer rounds out the window corresponding with the fires you are hearing.
The mind sharpens, the pulse quickens, the fangs come out, and you want to do absolutely anything you can do to get in there and lay down fire to protect those guys.
That make-it-happen feeling, compounded by the tight valleys, the ridiculously steep mountains and low winter cloud decks made for a combination that would challenge any aviator.
It was balanced, however, by the discipline and the training in the night Appalachian mountain low levels we flew, and in the airspace over eastern North Carolina throughout hundreds of training sorties we flew together preparing for this deployment.
Inevitably, I'd get up, I'd put on my flight suit and walk quietly in the night through the chill next door to sit alone in the Bing and distract myself from the worry. Maybe I'd write a note to Meredith on the couch, or maybe I'd pick up the remote and watch whatever episode of 'Family Guy' was loaded in the DVD player.
I consider all of it a blessing.
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Towards the end, in May, as I was preparing to lead our squadron with our 14 Strike Eagles back home to Seymour Johnson, my USAFA 90 classmate, Norm Peterson was bringing the 494th Panthers in from Lakenheath, UK.
We knew our B-Huts and the Bing were going to be destroyed: a Turkish company was building 2-story metal dorms around us, and we could see the surge of permanent construction morphing Bagram into a bigger and more established larger-scale operation.
The plywood smelled fresh, they were bright and spartan, clean and unspoiled - much nicer than our faded & weathered and years-old B-Huts, and our Bing.
Looking from the porch through the door into one of his bright new plywood spaces, I advised - "Norm, you're gonna want to make sure you carve out half of one of these B-Huts to make yourself a Bing area for your guys to get together."
"Oh yeah, JJ, you bet - sure we'll have a Bing, easy day."
I didn't tell him what I was thinking. That there would never be another Bing. There couldn't be.
The Bing, and its firepit, and all its "Chiefs"' combat stories were gone, now just a memory. The Chiefs were leaving and things would be similar in the Panthers- in a new place. But it wouldn't be our Bing.
Whatever they called it, it would be theirs.
Every fighter squadron has a Bing somewhere, and in the winter & spring of 2008, our Bing and our stories and our camaraderie is what made the "Chiefs" better and sharper every day in the air over Afghanistan.
Some of those Lieutenants who enjoyed those stories with me by the fire are now retired, or are senior USAF officers, leading units all across the Air Force.
I don't know whether their memories and the lessons we learned there together at the Bing shaped them as much as they did me, but I hope so.
Wampum.
JJ
Chief Painted Fists
