Into the Korengal

'Stand to' comes early in the field - it's the hour when all are to be up and on watch, guarding against a daybreak attack or other suspicious activity. It wasn't hard to be up that early when sleeping on a rock river bed anyway, so I didn't mind much.

Even the jingle truck drivers get bed head out here! Mornings were still chilly in Kunar at this point. A couple of these trucks would be part of my latest hitched convoy, from the Pech River to a just-established outpost in the Korengal Valley.

More jingle trucks! These colorful beasts, decorated as festively as possible, transport anything and everything for the Afghans and often for us. Check out the crown on this one...

King of the jingles, right here.

Meanwhile, the river crossing still continues, as some vehicles remained on the other side for security overnight. Soon though, the convoy was whole and ready to roll...

Naturally, in no time the local population had turned out to watch the show. Look at the feisty guy in the right. Buddy, watch where you're throwing those stones! (he was actually just chucking them into the field - probably undoing a project that we funded at some point)

Soon we were making our preparations to roll, after a convoy brief and threat assessment. Villagers had to be reminded to stand back from the vehicles about every 5 seconds, as usual. I can't blame them for being curious though - we were in one long train of vehicles.

I found my friend Al Andriotti on the convoy...this guy was a complete riot, raised in Sicily and later all over Europe, he was one of the unlikeliest Marines you'd ever come across. Naturally for a Sicilian, he handled payments to the locals.

At long last, we were underway...and driving literally up a river for a stretch. As noted before on this journal, sometimes that IS the road.

This is my favorite shot of curious passersby. It gives a pretty decent perspective on how wedged in between the banks we were.

A few tight twists and turns and we were out of the creek and heading up past large compounds into the entrance of the valley...

I was stunned at how close the Afghans would walk by our lumbering vehicles, although there were clearly weren't many options on these slopes. It was definitely their main route of transit also.

Sorry, sorry...coming through. In places they were hard at work, "improving" the road. How larger jagged rocks improve it, I'm not sure, but they sure were working back-breakingly hard.

The higher we went, the more gorgeous the views became. I'll admit that it became easy to be distracted by such scenery, so it's probably a good thing I wasn't driving or manning the .50 cal machine gun.

This road was no joke. I thought I'd travelled some harrowing ones before in this country, but this took the "Please watch the edge!" cake. On the passenger side, we'd guide to the rock wall until we were scraping it in order to avoid drifting the other direction.

As with elsewhere in the valley, terraced fields could be found way, way up there. How on earth these farmers get down to the river beyond sheer rock cliffs remains a mystery to me...it looks dangerous as hell.

You take the high road and I'll take the low...actually we took the high while our jingles took the low when it split, so they had to climb back up to re-join the convoy. I liked how the roads just snaked away from this vantage point.

There's my trusty gunner and the vehicle that took me up this last leg. After a few hours we'd reached the lumber yard, where the Marine battalion had set up an outpost a couple of days earlier.

A view of the emerging outpost, looking up from the one flat area. It was a crazy scene, with shelters and lean-tos springing up all over the hillside, like an Old West mining camp.

The center of a sprawling lumber yard for years, this building was heavily reinforced for use as a command post. But it was an individual effort to go stake out a sleeping spot. In true wandering fashion, I'd be in a different location every few nights while staged out of there.

By the Grace of God, I was able to pull a building crew together to assist with my construction...that's the chaplain, his assistant and a combat cameraman with me, in between some heavy lifting.

Soon I was chillin' in my new digs, adjacent to one of the towering lumber piles of the hillside. That Kunar timber is extremely heavy, and they don't use machinery to cut or haul it...it's done the same way it's been done for millenia here, by hand.

I'd spend the next few days primarily at the outpost, getting out only for a few patrols and missions in the surrounding valley, and will post some of that too. It's strange to be posting this all now that I'm leaving soon, but time and internet didn't allow for it sooner, so I hope you still enjoy the journey...