Published as part of FLARE‘s 9-5 series.
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What was the best part of your day? Days that I got to go off-base or file a story.
What was the worst part of your day? The rocket attacks. Everyone thinks that on-base you’ll be safe, but there were frequent rocket attacks into KAF. I remember the first one was so startling. The alarm went off, and I was still asleep. My cameraman Jeff, who was on the other end of the tent, screamed to me, “It’s fine just get over here,” so I crawled over to his side. Another time, I was on the phone with my husband and the rocket attack siren went off and I said, “Got to go!” and I hung up. Eventually they give you the all clear and everything’s good and you go back to work. That was normal for us, but not for people back home. Your normal gets to be really weird.
How did you unwind at the end of the day? We watched movies on our laptops. It’s a dry base so there’s no drinking, but once in a while the media crew would be like, “Hey, 5 o’clock beers?” and we would pull our work chairs out in front of the work tent, the guys would smoke cigars and we would drink fake beer.
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Ishani Nath 