Edward Ford and Alan Chiasson came to Afghanistan with long résumés in uniform and out. Ford was a Force Recon Marine with combat tours in the Gulf War, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan before moving into high-end security contracting. Chiasson was a Navy Hospital Corpsman and Texas paramedic who’d spent years providing high-risk medical support on PSD and convoy details in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the private security firm SOC (Special Operations Consulting) expanded its mobile operations in Afghanistan, both men ended up on armored Ford F-550 gun trucks running some of the most dangerous roads in the country.
At first, their teams hauled critical supplies—ammo, fuel, food, equipment—to isolated Special Forces sites and small outposts the regular military couldn’t cover. Then SOC picked up the Department of Defense contract to move something that sounded almost ordinary: the mail. Ford, Chiasson, and their teammates suddenly became the unofficial “Pony Express” of Afghanistan, hauling letters and care packages from Kabul and Bagram along the notorious Ring Road to places like Ghazni, Sharana, Orgun-E, and tiny dirt compounds with nothing but Hesco walls and a few tents. Troops took the mail for granted; few ever thought about the chain of convoys and gun trucks that got a letter from a stateside mailbox to a cot in Kandahar.
Postcards Through Hell tells that story from the inside. The “Pony Express” ran four teams in a three-on, one-off rotation so three could be on the road at any time. One team took the long hauls, another ran the shorter Kabul ring route while standing QRF, and a third trained, refit, and got ready to swap in. A “good” day might mean an 18-hour, thousand-kilometer push with no major incidents—what they jokingly called the “Thousand Kilometer Club.” Most days weren’t like that. They drove flat-bottom F-550s with level-seven armor and twin turrets, strong against small arms but vulnerable to anything placed directly underneath. Once the Taliban figured out that weakness, a well-buried mine or IED under the chassis could flip a truck or tear it in half.
The book is anchored in specific days and events. Ford saved incident reports, op orders, and run paperwork; Chiasson kept a journal. Together they rebuilt a timeline that lets them write, “On April 30 we were here; on May 1 this happened,” instead of “sometime that spring.” Around those convoy stories they layer the wider war: the Camp Chapman suicide bombing; Special Forces “kill teams” at outposts like Ramrod; Italian forces paying the Taliban not to attack them, which meant somebody else—often the Pony Express—became the target. They were there when other contractor convoys got hit, when friends died in F-550s blown apart by stacked anti-tank mines, and when gun trucks limped back into Kabul with wounded men inside and burned-out hulks left behind on the road.
Their daily life was built around a simple idea: keep your brothers alive. When they weren’t running missions, they were on QRF. When they weren’t on QRF, they were working out. When they weren’t working out, they were training. They ate together, lived on top of each other in cramped villas and compounds, and used the long Afghan “fighting season”—April through October—to sort out who really belonged there. The easy-sounding mail run weeded people out fast. Some new hires lasted one fighting season, some one mission, some one week. Others stayed for years, until they hit what Ford calls “the wall”—that private moment when you look at a body on a slab, or feel age and accumulated blast damage catching up with you, and decide it’s time to go home.
Postcards Through Hell doesn’t ignore the business side of contracting. Ford and Chiasson talk frankly about companies weighing the cost of vehicle upgrades against death-benefit payouts, replacing seasoned expatriate drivers with cheaper local nationals, and relying on Afghan “expediters” whose loyalties sometimes ran in more than one direction. They also describe the strange status of contractors on the battlefield: needed enough that Special Forces teams would call them “badasses” and feed them burgers and beer when they finally rolled in with long-delayed supplies, but not trusted enough to drive onto certain FOBs, even as those same bases later let a suicide bomber through the gate.
The story doesn’t end when the convoys stop. The contract itself ran, under different companies, into 2016, and Ford and Chiasson had to cut whole chapters from the book because of classified work and units involved. Off the road, both men wrestled with what to do next and how to handle the slow-burn aftermath of years outside the wire. Ford eventually settled in Oregon, working as a fitness trainer and volunteering at a veterans’ ranch, helping other vets find purpose. Chiasson became a firefighter-paramedic in Texas, back in the “knife and gun club” stateside, as he jokes. Writing the book together—drawing on their records and long interviews with former teammates—became its own form of therapy and a way to pull their scattered Pony Express “family” back into contact.
At heart, Postcards Through Hell is a book about a very unglamorous, absolutely vital piece of America’s longest war. It shows how something as ordinary as mail delivery turns lethal when the route runs through blown bridges, open sewers, mountain passes, and ambush alleys. It’s also about loyalty: men who kept climbing into vulnerable trucks, night after night, so that a young soldier or Marine on a far-flung combat outpost could get a package from home. Ford and Chiasson want civilians to read this as much as veterans and contractors. They’re not selling a larger-than-life myth; they’re showing how ordinary people, with all their fear and flaws, kept going anyway—mile after mile, letter after letter, on what might have been the most dangerous mail route in the world.
We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!
