Oral History Of Iraq & Afghanistan: Lt. Col. Kirk Whitson

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The son of a World War II veteran, Kirk Whitson grew up in the shadows of a major Army base.

I grew up in Rolla, Missouri, a little town outside of Fort Leonard Wood. My father worked for 30-plus years at Fort Leonard Wood as a pipefitter-steamfitter. He did seven years in the Navy, was an E-7 in the Navy, and then got out back after World War II.

Whitson enlisted in the Army in 1986 and was commissioned as an officer in 1990, just in time to deploy to the Gulf War. As logistics officer, he has served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Central Command headquarters overseeing both conflicts.

In Iraq, logistics was on cruise control. In Afghanistan, it's graduate-level logistics to make it happen.

What you did to get food, fuel, ammunition out to this remote outpost today, you can't do tomorrow, and oh by the way, if the asset goes away -- whether it's the helicopter, the CDS bundle that comes out the back of a C-130 -- if you don't have that asset, there's not another one to replace it. In Iraq there was, and there is. And you know that's all changing now; as we draw down there, assets will move from Iraq to Afghanistan.

I clearly saw that in Afghanistan, you did not have the resources available that you had in Iraq. You know, I go into Iraq, and I mean, the assets were unbelievable -- the amount of trucks that were there to push stuff throughout the country, the amount of aircraft that were there to move stuff around, the forces that were there to do it, you were just sitting there going, "Wow, this is a huge operation." It's great.

You go to Afghanistan and you go to Bagram, Bagram being the largest distribution hub -- you know it's where everything flies into, there and Kandahar -- you go there and you're like, "So what do you use to move stuff around?"

"We don't have anything."

"You don't have any trucks to move -- ?"

"No. We have to rely on jingle trucks, these local trucks."

And you're scratching your head.

And so really what we ended up having to do, because Afghanistan was not the number one priority at that point, was we had to hire a lot of assets to make it work.

So here's one difference that I can tell you that you had to work towards in Afghanistan. Because weather affected the helicopters, weather affected the ground movement because of flooding, because of snow, ice -- there's only one good road in Afghanistan; it's Highway One that runs from Bagram through Kabul all the way down to Kandahar, the "ring road" -- what you had to do was build up stockage levels at all those locations so that if you couldn't get back there for a week, they had what they needed. The whole concept was, I need to give you 21 days of supply so that you could literally survive for three weeks. If I gave you 21 days of supply -- of water, food, ammunition, fuel, you know, that's the main sustainment stocks there -- but I had to make sure you had all that stockpiled at your location in the event that I couldn't find one of those ways that I just mentioned to get to you.

Eastern Afghanistan, where Whitson served, is an extraordinarily difficult place to move around.

You've just got to get over there and see the terrain, and then you'll understand that -- that those roads, albeit about the worst roads in the world, they're there because they just can't go anywhere else. There's nowhere else for that road to go. There's nowhere else for you to travel. You know, I mean, it's mountainous. It's just a mountainous region.

On top of the natural obstacles are the manmade ones.

The IEDs in our area were pretty bad. So we have -- I mean, these guys are amazing, they're the engineers, and that's called the route-clearing packages? You're tracking these MRAPs and these special vehicles that go out and look for IEDs. Well, that's how we would clear the routes. And in most cases, my guys would follow behind these route-clearing packages or shortly thereafter.

And really you couldn't, you can't afford to get off the path that they've cleared because you don't know if there's some mines out there. You don't know. So the limiting factor was really the availability of those route-clearing packages. And boy, let me tell you, that was a big deal, because there just wasn't enough assets, and so you had to really work hard to get the right assets.

I had great guys doing all that for me. And then those guys were superstars that were out there moving around, clearing those routes.

In Afghanistan, my battalion lost no soldiers due to enemy activity. Probably on an average two and a half to three times a week, I would send a convoy out of my FOB pushing supplies out. A ground convoy. I would say every other convoy got hit, by either an IED, small arms fire, RPG, you know; and in some of these cases, no damage; in some cases completely destroyed the MRAP.

Helicopters can simply fly over these hazards -- but they have limits of their own.

Here's a great example that people don't think about. You can use your helicopters there anywhere in Iraq because you're not at sea level but you're pretty close. In Afghanistan, where I was living and where I was supporting from at the FOB that I was on called FOB Sharana, it was at 7,800 feet above sea level. Basically what that meant was, helicopters who normally could lift about 22,000 pounds could only lift 8,000. Because of the elevation. Because as a helicopter goes up in elevation, it loses its ability to lift.

The result of all these difficulties is a constant struggle to keep outposts from going dangerously short on key supplies -- what the Army calls "going black."

Now, while I was there, there were many locations in Afghanistan where across the CJOA -- the entire joint operating area -- that you would see a location, not necessarily in my area, that a small outpost would go black on a commodity. And then, at that point everybody from the highest level to the lowest level does everything they can to get the assets there, to get them what they need. And trust me, you know, they always did. You know, they almost always did that. And the only way that -- reason they wouldn't do that is if the weather wouldn't allow the helicopter or the airplane to get anywhere close.

It is no doubt the most geographically challenging, logistically challenging location in the world.

It is also, as a logistician, that year in Afghanistan -- and I did a year in Iraq -- that year in Afghanistan was the most professionally rewarding year of my military career. It was probably the fastest year I've ever been in because you were working stuff from, you know, zero-four in the morning to when everything always went bad, which was ten o'clock at night, 2200 at night. But professionally, the most rewarding job that I've ever had was my year as a battalion commander in Afghanistan providing logistics to about 10,000 folks -- soldiers -- soldiers and airmen, sailors, Marines, civilians.... Really, it was an amazing time for me.