The USO's Handshake Squad

The Washington Post ^ | December 24, 2004 | Tamara Jones

[neverdem]

In Afghan Outposts, a Low-Key Tour for a Low-Key War

BAGRAM AIR FORCE BASE, Afghanistan -- Christmas comes cautiously to this hostile place. A tinsel wreath appears outside an Army tent. Military buzz cuts are hidden by camouflage Santa caps. An inflatable snowman wobbles in the desert wind. Across the freezing dustscape of Afghanistan, the soldiers fighting America's war on terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom, do just what the slogan advertises. They endure.

Entering a fourth year now, their war is rarely headline news anymore, not like Iraq with its daily battles, its suicide bombings, the kidnappings and beheadings, the flag-draped coffins sent steadily back home.

This war is more subtle than that, shifting from combat to reconstruction. Enemy rocket attacks are rare now, and the American troops rolling into remote mountain villages are more likely to be digging wells than foxholes. What the service members talk most about is not fear, but about months passing without having to fire their weapons even once. They talk about isolation, boredom, about the way loneliness can burrow so deeply into hours so empty.

Last week, though, out of the flat, white sky, a Chinook chopper appeared, swooping down on a handful of bases to deliver a quick dash of holiday cheer, courtesy of an organization famous for that: the USO. From the dust cloud, two men emerged. One was a graying punk rocker, the other an actor few readily recognized.

And with that, a strange war briefly got even stranger.

Politically, Henry Rollins and Patrick Kilpatrick occupy opposite corners. Rollins, the 43-year-old frontman for the '80s punk band Black Flag, focuses now on "spoken-word" tours peppered with rants against the Bush administration and its motives for war. Kilpatrick, a strapping 55-year-old who specializes in playing on-screen villains, defends as righteous both the president....

[rlmorel]

Ahhh. The Washington Post. I didn't even have to register to know what the rest of this article is like.