Recon soldiers carve out life at Hatchet

[unhappycamper]

Soldiers from the reconnaissance platoon, part of 4th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment, clear brush at Combat Outpost Hatchet in Eastern Afghanistan.


Recon soldiers carve out life at Hatchet
By Michael Gisick, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, October 4, 2008

NURISTAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan — A few of the soldiers in the reconnaissance platoon say they can see the image of a wolf in the rocks on the mountainside across the ravine. But Pfc. Byron Norris isn’t one of them.

"I don’t know," the 19-year-old says. "Sergeant Leach says he can see it."

"I can’t see it," Pfc. Jonathan Wilson, a baby-faced, cigar smoking Californian, chimes in from his vantage point a few feet away. "I cannot see that wolf rock."

Over the past three months, Wilson and Norris estimate that they’ve spent an average of about eight hours a day staring out from a fortified position on their mountainside, watching the other mountainside. They look for movement, change, anything that hasn’t always been part of a landscape they’ve all but memorized, wolf rocks or not.

And inevitably, in all those hours, they daydream about seeing something else on the mountainside: their enemy.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=57881