destroy the spent and lug the rest home Duty done: Worn-out boots waiting to be shredded. In a dusty yard on Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan lies the detritus of a long war. A couple of crates of used military boots - which will be shredded - sit by rolls of never-used Hesco barrier material, still in its packaging, to be sold or given away. Nearby are the more valuable items, a cluster of 16 Bushmaster armoured vehicles, which are waiting to be scrubbed clean for quarantine then shipped home. The mighty "Bushy" has served Australian soldiers well. Not one Digger has been killed in one. The stuff in the yard is among an estimated 5 million pieces of equipment the Australian Defence Force must lug home, sell, destroy or give away as it prepares to close the main base at Tarin Kowt and bring most of its soldiers home. Operation Slipper is giving way to Operation Nostos, Greek for "homecoming." Australia is estimated to have spent more than $8 billion on the Afghanistan war. Military hardware is just one part; much of the bulk of the war effort lies with the support to keep operations going. Australia must shift or offload about 1300 shipping containers, 2700 buildings and pieces of infrastructure and more than 5000 computers and electronic gear. Defence began the laborious job of packing up in November. They have 34 weeks left to meet the government's year's end deadline. They will need every one of them. Right now, the base is one big work site, with piles of used Hesco gathering in great tangles, waiting to be destroyed, and Afghan contractors pulling down building frames unceremoniously. "The changes on the base just in six months are massive," Captain Darrin Tyson, 37, of the brigade advisory team, said. These guys [the Afghans] are ready for us to go ... we're almost like that annoying neighbour. There's a lot of blood and investment in this place. We'll never take that away. But it's time to go.