Jingle trucks are painted with intricate patterns and bright colors and usually have thousands of charms hanging from the sides and bumpers that sound like chimes blowing in the wind.
Local superstition tells the jingling charms and the lavish colors ward off evil spirits during the dangerous journey through the mountain passes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And the journey is, indeed, a dangerous one since jingle trucks are the transport vehicle of choice in Afghanistan - for both the US Military and the Taliban.
Why might the US Military employ the jingle trucks to transport supplies when they have their own elite line of armed-and-ready-to-transport vehicles? Because the jingle trucks are less conspicuous. There are thousands of them fulfilling thousands of innocuous non-war related transportation tasks which makes it easier for the hundreds performing military supply missions to traverse the country unnoticed. At least in theory. And, even in practice, the theory is fairly successful. The practice is certainly not without its detriments but, too, it is rife with benefits.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander and the Taliban are not above smuggling their own rockets hidden in the innocuous materials. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see young soldiers and marines with M-16s on roadsides talking to the grizzled, bearded, unkempt drivers in their Afghan "pajamas" and their colorful trucks on old silk routes (for a true picture of the colorful jingle truck drivers -and other photos that bring Afghanistan to life - check out photographer David Lang's site at
http://www.davidlang.com/. His photos are a treat for the senses).
Given the likelihood of the sight, it was with relative disinterest that I waited while troops searched a jingle truck ahead of my vehicle a few days ago. I barely registered the common scene of truck driver climbing down from his cab and being frisked as he turned out his pockets and offered his truck for inspection without objection. I zoned out to endure the delay (waiting is not one of my strong points) and had no idea how long I was gone or how far from the moment I'd traveled until I was pulled back to reality by the sound of Santa's sleigh.
Even my muddled brain quickly deduced that the source of Santa's sleigh bells was not Santa's sleigh at all, but the rhythm of the jingles on the idling truck - which, by the way, the driver had decorated with actual jingle bells tied to the bumpers with red, velvet ribbons.
But long before my brain performed aforementioned amazing deductive maneuvers, my unmuddled soul took me on an unlikely journey from the edge of an Afghanistan mountainside to the home of my childhood Christmases and returned me, in the space of a nanosecond ... grateful and renewed. Unlikely, unanticipated and unconsidered. So welcome.
And now, a Christmas song:
Dashing over the mountainside
In a 4-door up-armoured truck
We run into delay
And i think, "WTF?"
I drift into a nap
Hey, wait, I’m off the map
A second later I'm smiling like
A happy, Christmas sap :)
HEY!
jingle trucks, jingle trucks ...
*FYI: I am told the jingle trucks get their name from the jingling sound their charms make. Just so you know, there is competing name-origin story about a transport company called "Jinga" and the trucks originally being called "Jinga trucks" which morphed into "jingle trucks", blah, blah and blah. That story, however, offends my poetic sensibilities so I reject it on principal.
