The thing about the local nationals doing work at bases...it's a *expletive deleted* repeat of Vietnam where locals worked on base...then turned around and reported intel to the VC or took part in base assaults. Yeah, I know they do a lot of the menial labor but it is piss poor security.
Roger that.
Case in point: I was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division, based in the central highlands around Pleiku. Toward the end of my tour I was in the division base camp, Camp Enari. We lived in hooches, not tents, and we had local mama sans come in every day to make the beds and do our laundry. My group typically got off duty and went back to the hooch about the time the mama sans were loading into deuce and a halfs to be hauled back to town.
One afternoon we got back to the hooch and, as usual, said to our mama san, "See you tomorrow, Mama San."
To which she replied, "No, no. I no come tomollow. GI go 'way, be busy tomollow. No see you tomollow."
It wasn't until several hours later that we were informed there was going to be a MAJOR sweep and clear mission conducted in the vicinity surrounding the camp, for a distance of 10 clicks out. Seems the base commander was getting tired of incoming mortar fire almost every night. Sure enough, bright and early the next morning (well, actually too early to ven be bright yet) we turned out, loaded up, and were trucked out 10 clicks to cordon off the camp, and then we closed the circle until we were back home. Needless to say, we didn't find anything. How could we, when the locals knew all about the bleepin' operation hours before we GIs did, and they had all bleepin' night to move whatever they wanted out beyond the range of our sweep mission?