@pickles Almost everyday. We lived with the soldiers and border patrol. sometimes the police would stay the night or ride out with us. Everytime we stopped we made a point to hang out with people, whichever district of Khost we happened to be in. The only place where nobody was good was yakubi. We often picked up local trucker convoys that were waiting to enter the city. If they tried to pass through the city they would be robbed and beaten.
My favorite places to patrol, mounted or discounted, were Khost city, garbuz, and narizah. The city people were chill and relatively educated. The kids were the most educated. They would ask to practice their English or just walk up and we would roast each other. We handed out pencils, markers, sketch pads, coloring books Qurans, etc. they liked to ask for band aids because they thought they fixed everything.
The country people were cool too. They are exactly like the people in the Bible if you ever imagined meeting random people in the Bible. They didn’t understand the concept of black people and would ask me if I was a robot sometimes. Some have never seen a TV and rarely listened to radios. They had Taliban motorcycle gangs that didn’t really do much fighting, they just like to look cool for bytches and act hard around us.
Some of the kids would throw rocks but only because it was fun for them. They would run up afterwards to look up close. One kid threw a puppy at our trucks once.
In a bad situation they wouldn’t hesitate to come ask for help or alert us to something. They stopped us on the road to warn us that there were rockets in the grass, waiting for us to drive by, or fresh IED’s. If someone was doing something stupid they would try to beat/kill/stop them. If they couldn’t they would call for help.