Russian leftovers

Since a request was made to see some of the stuff the Russians left in Afghanistan I put together this little compilation of photos that I took in August 2003. All of these pics were taken in the same village in the mountains of south eastern Afghanistan. The bombs you see are clearly just lying around the village, the two large rounds lying next to my M-16 were brought to me by two little girls who picked them up and brought them when they saw we were looking at stuff like that.

Which leads to an interesting tale. When I first arrived in Afghanistan, one of the early interrogations I did was of a man who had been detained because the US Soldiers found a large stack of landmines in his barn. Naturally enough they suspected him of caching weapons and preparing them to plant in the roads or to make IEDs out of. His story was a bit different He said his children would pick them up and play with them. When ever the kids brought one home he took it away and put it in the barn so they wouldn't get it again. But they kept finding new ones. I really didn't believe his story until those two little girls brought be the two shells.
Land mines, unexploded rounds, guns, bullets, are just lying around. Needless to say there are many injuries/fatalities from these things.

The scary thing I suppose about the big bombs (and the little ones) is that the older they get the less stable the explosives inside them are. So they could go off if someone kicks them, or a pebble falls on them, or just because someday. And it might be today, or it might be in 10 more years. If we had tried to blow those bombs in place we would have probably flattened two thirds of the village. The one you just see the end of sticking up out of the ground was literally less than ten feet from an occupied house. We took GPS readings on the locations and the infantry LT was going to report them to the engineers so someone could come in and clean them up. These were not all of the bombs in that village. Just the ones the elders took us to see right in and around where we were operating.

PS - As I recall the Guy with the landmines in his barn was determined not to be a threat and was let out after a couple of months with a stern warning to report landmines to the police at once instead of keeping them in the barn. I hope we were correct in our read on him.