email from Mat

7/14/09. Well I got a bit of a surprise today. I walked into the office this afternoon, and the Platoon Sergeant asked me if I wanted to go on a flight -- right now, she didn't have to ask me twice. Myself and another guy had to beat feet in our LPCs (leather personnel carriers) down to the other end of the flight line to board the aircraft. I forgot my camera though, dangit.When we got there we had the usual brief, then took off. Wow, there are a lot more people in the village/city that surrounds this base. It really does look like Utah Valley, but without the traffic and roads, big buildings, and they dress differently too (but I couldn't tell that from the air). As we climbed to 23,000 feet, I could see nothing but mountain tops for what seemed like forever. Many of the mountains still have snow on the tops. The valley below is covered with homes built from mud (and whatever else), with a courtyards, and a mud fence that is at least six feet high surrounding the properties. Many of the courtyards have livestock in them or they have gardens and orchards (the poppy is grown South of here). The size of their property may be dependent on how much effort they wanted to put in to building the fence/compound wall.As we flew West I could see small villages that are built in the small narrow valleys where the streams exist, much like a narrow draw. And up a lot of these draws (throughout the mountains) are more and more villages. From the air it looked like they built their homes as far up the draw as they could go, and built outward going down the draw. It was interesting to see how much vegetation there is in each of these draws where they live, but the mountains in our area are pretty bare.We flew for about an hour and a half, then returned to base. Our initial decent was fairly steep so I asked the pilot what our rate was, and he said that it was 3000 feet per minute. Well that explained why it felt like we were falling out of the sky, lol. We were basically circling above the air base when we started the decent, now we were coming down -- like right now. I could see a few large irrigation canals and a few large roads that had traffic moving about, a large body of water to the South and West of Kabul (we are just a little North of Kabul), and there is a wide, shallow, slow moving river that meanders through the valley near where we are.Next time I will have my camera for sure. Sure was nice to get up in the air again.