Guns and Welding

I was play­ing around with my stick weld­ing skills when I attract­ed the inter­est of one of our secu­ri­ty guards. He wan­dered up, try­ing to look non­cha­lant, to check out what I was doing that was mak­ing so many sparks.  I showed him the sec­tion of an ammo case lid where I had ground off the paint and was prac­tic­ing lay­ing welds.

When he saw I also had a 40mm bul­let cas­ing, then he got real­ly excit­ed. He pulled out a clip of live ammu­ni­tion from his cam­mo vest and took an AK round out to ask, through ges­tures and hand sig­nals if what I had was also a bul­let. I nod­ded in agree­ment and he was hooked. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the bul­let cas­ing turned out to be alu­minum not steel, but I had acquired my first student.

Mean­while, dur­ing our bul­let exchange, Mustafa, the “house com­man­der” joined us. Not want­i­ng to be left out of the fun he picked up my angle grinder and ges­tured how he should use it, look­ing to me for a nod of assent. I showed him where the but­ton was and next thing I knew the two guards were grind­ing all the paint off of my ammo case, prep­ping it beau­ti­ful­ly for lots of weld­ing prac­tice. If we got those two guards into the Boxshop, all our FLG grind­ing prob­lems would be over. They worked the thing metic­u­lous­ly, get­ting at every scrap of green paint until the thing shone.

And that’s how I came to teach two Afghan men with very large guns who speak absolute­ly no Eng­lish how to stick weld. We’ve arranged for les­son two tomor­row, inshal­lah, as they say here.