Another day in Afghanistan

Tuesday, Mar 11, 2008
By Luis Castillo, Chargers.com

Chargers defensive end Luis Castillo joined Bears defensive tackle Tommie Harris and Panthers defensive end Mike Rucker on a week-long USO tour to U.S. military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. Chargers.com caught up with Luis again Monday to recap some of experiences.

I’m a couple days behind at this point but I’ve had so much that I want to share.  We got back in the U.S. Monday but I’m going to share a few things that we did over the weekend and then do another entry this week to wrap things up.

Thursday night I got the best night’s sleep so far on our trip.  We woke up around 8 a.m. and took a Blackwater plane into Kanduhar and landed around 1:00 in the afternoon.  After we landed, we visited pretty much every department on base and had another great experience just chatting with everyone. 

Kanduhar is a lot closer to the action than some of the places we visited earlier in the week, and the further you go, the more you see people’s personalities change.  You can just see and sense the intensity.  The people are more serious and you can see it in their eyes. 

When we checked into our bunks at Kanduhar, we saw a group of Army Rangers that were in the group next to us.  We chatted with them briefly but we had to get to a couple activities so we told them we’d meet up with them when we were done for the night. 

I continue to be blown away by the technology our troops use.  While in Kanduhar, we visited the UAB’s, the unmanned planes that they have.  The takeoffs and landings are handled by pilots here via remote control in Afghanistan but as soon as the plane is up in the air, they turn it over to a group in Nevada.  The planes fly for 22 hours and do surveillance.  They also have the ability to fire missiles, and they’re controlled by someone on the other side of the world. 

As they’re doing surveillance with their infrared cameras at night, they showed us videos of Taliban digging and putting roadside bombs all over the place.  They could track where they were placing them and then go destroy the bombs later.  It was unbelievable the things they do with these unmanned aircrafts.  It’s a ridiculous weapon that our military has.

We did another meet and greet Friday night, which was great.  We took a lot of questions from the soldiers, and it’s obvious that they know their football.  They’re all big NFL fans and had some really good questions to ask.  A lot of it was personal stuff about players.  They asked what it was like to play against Adrian Peterson or they’d ask me about playing with some of my teammates like LT.  I enjoyed every Q&A session that we did. 

We played a lot of ping pong with the troops, which was a humbling experience.  I played with a female lieutenant the other night who just kicked my butt for about an hour straight.

After our evening was done, we went back and hung out with the Rangers like we’d promised.  We stayed for a couple hours just listening to their stories.  They’ve been here for 15 months.  They’re finally going back home and the stories they had were unbelievable.  One of the group leaders is from San Diego and is a diehard Chargers fan.  He has a Bolt tattoo on his arm and he recognized me as soon as we got there.  His stories blew me away.

These guys go out in their platoons, groups of 30.  They split up into individual groups of about eight and each group has two snipers.  They go out for 40 or 50 days at a time doing all kinds of patrols and missions.  The guys that we were talking to were all 24, 25 and 26 and have been in the military for six years. 

One of their stories, if you had walked in in the middle of the conversation, you’d think they were talking about the movie Blackhawk Down.  They started telling a story about a helicopter going down and they had to go search and rescue to try to get the men out after the crash.  Several soldiers died during the crash, but everyone was trying to get them out.  It was the middle of the night and they were getting ambushed.  The Taliban knew they were coming because they had to respond to the plane that went down. 

It’s unbelievable to hear these young kids talk about it all. They love what they do but they’re also so calm about it.  They’re talking about getting shot at and they’re just walking around very peaceful.  It’s very emotional, though.  They’re telling us about some of their group members who have passed away. 

I’ve always been a big supporter of the troops, but the respect that I’ve gained for our military over the past week can hardly be put into words.  I was so ignorant to so many things before my trip.  I thought the kids that joined the military were the ones that didn’t try very hard in school, ended up not going to college and took the military as a way out. 

You get here and you see how the military takes these young, extremely intelligent kids and molds them into disciplined, extremely polite, genuine, organized, very task-oriented soldiers that are unbelievably wise, especially for their age.  That’s a discipline you don’t see every day in our culture in the United States.  That in itself has been a great lesson for me to learn.

I’ve joked several times over the last week that it makes me feel a whole lot better about all the tax money taken out of my check when I see how it’s being used.  It feels better knowing that all that money is going to help us be the most advance military with the best technology.  It’s going to help our soldiers and give us technologies that allow us to fight and win these wars.  I see it’s helping save American lives. 

We finished our trip Saturday in Jalalabad and I’ll check back Tuesday to give you the full update on the final swing of what was an amazing, life-changing experience.