Happy Fourth of July
An Afghanistan Summer Throwback Dispatch from The Hunt for Tom Clancy
4 July 2023
Memorandum For: Subscribers “The Hunt for Tom Clancy”
Subject: Happy Fourth of July, Clancy-ites.
This Fourth of July my thoughts drifted back to one in 2006, when we went out to secure an LZ for a Happy Fourth of July airdrop and it turned out to be worthwhile because someone in Kandahar was kind and included a few logs of dip, which we were all out of, and slowly going crazy.
So I went back into my journals and emails to see if I could find anything about it and found these entries instead; new dispatches on Tom Clancy books will be coming later this month (Op Center: Games of State) as well as a few more on some of the Frederick Forsyth books I’ve read recently and some more stuff like this; I really appreciate you for reading and subscribing to the Hunt for Tom Clancy and wish you a very happy Independence Day!
v/r,
Matt Farwell
June 10th 2006
Its late afternoon here, the time when the stillness of the day fades into slightly whipping winds and the sun prepares to slip behind the mountains—the heat of the noontime sun breaks, the small beads of sweat on your back become chilly and the smells of local food being cooked in the Afghan compounds near base tickle your nostrils. It’s a nice time of day—your belly is full from dinner, and a pleasant sense of satisfied exhaustion from the days labor slows your mind.
We’ve left Waza Kwah (Editor’s Note: This is Pashto for “The End of the World”), my new forward operating base, to relieve the people stationed at a small, remote outpost called Terwa a couple of miles away from the Pakistani border.
It is small, maybe 2 acres in landspace, surrounded by a square wall with the guard towers at each corner. Its only my platoon here, plus a 4 man crew of mortarmen so life is pretty relaxed. Whereas at most FOBs I’d have to walk around in full uniform, here I just wear a pair of army shorts, a brown or tan t-shirt, and flipflops.
We have a lot of free time to read or write or sleep. I am the camp cook, so I spend about 3 hours of everyday trying to cook something for 25 hungry guys on 2 hotplates and three butane camp stoves, with no utensils or cooking implements except for my combat knife. It is a somewhat daunting task but I’ve only gotten compliments so far so I’m pretty happy about that.
I could be the guy responsible for burning trash, or the guy responsible for burning the three shitters. They never show that stuff in the recruiting brochures. All in all though, I like it here. We’ll run operations about every other day—last night we sat in an ambush waiting for some Taliban on motorcycles who were supposed to be crossing the border, but I guess our intel was faulty because they never showed up and we returned to the firebase around sunrise, exhausted yet strangely amped from adrenaline and red bull.