A Green On Blue Close to Home

A little over a year ago I left ISAF Joint Command headquarters at the Kabul International Airport. One of my jobs as an intelligence analyst was to research and gather information on insider attackers and help get as many of those individuals who had escaped after conducting those attacks on the JPEL/kill list. This post explains a bit why I took the job seriously, and a bit personally.

Despite all the insider attacks, or as we called them, green on blue attacks, I never felt unsafe or threatened on the base. There were plenty of people around (not that that would have mattered) and very few Afghan soldiers. I was more concerned with the pack of jackals that wandered around the base than I was of being shot by in infiltrator. Not even the insider attack had occurred on the base a couple years prior to my arrival gave me much concern.

Yesterday, an Afghan in a security force uniform (some say police, some say army) killed 3 US contractors and another Afghan.

Just a unpleasant reminder that you're never truly safe over there.

X-Files: Kabul?

Remember during my last deployment to Iraq how 1-14 Cav had some strange shit flying around COP Cobra and nearly shot down a national level aerial asset? No? Well here's the link so you can catch up. I bring this up because I had assumed that when I came to ISAF Joint Command I'd probably never look up to the night sky and say, "what the hell is that?!"

I was wrong.

This story is not quite as interesting as my Diyala UFO story but it's slightly weird nonetheless. It occured last night as I was walking home. A plane was coming in to land and as I watched it something caught my eye. Looking up I saw three, very bright, very orange, stars in the shape of a triangle (I am aware that any 3 points are going to look like a triangle). After about a second the stars/lights/whatever were gone. My first thought was that they were flares.

But flares don't burn away that fast. They were way too high to be flares anyway. What about the landing plane? If it had shot off flares they would have been behind the aircraft. These were in front of and waaaaaaaaaaaaay above. Another plane? I didn't see anything else in the sky.

Perhaps it was the blimp that floats over the Green Zone/US Embassy/ISAF HQ? Nope, the blimp was blinking its standard lights and was pretty low to the ground from my perspective.

The hell did I see?

Like I said, not as interesting but still strange.

But back to the Diyala story...I now have more to add. A college buddy of mine found himself here at NKAIA for a couple of days about two weeks ago. I just happened to tell my "UFO's flying over my combat outpost" story and he gives me a funny look. Apparently he had been talking to someone awhile back to was in Iraq at USF-I HQ around late 2009. This individual told my friend the story of some trigger happy jackasses on a patrol base who tried to shoot down a US aircraft.

Hell yeah, I'm one of those jackasses. Perhaps trying to shoot down US aircraft is why we had so much trouble getting collection assets...