The Dooshmen Strike Back

Khowst roared into the news this week with the report of a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents at FOB Chapman. One of the attached articles indicates that the bombing was payback for a series of effective raids staged by the CIA against the Haqqani Network–the family clan primarily responsible for waging war against US and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan. Khowst has been quiet since I left, in part I would say due to effective new strategies employed by both the conventional and special forces. But this week, the dooshmen, as the Afghans call the insurgents, struck back with a vengeance.

While I was in Khowst I didn’t have a lot of interaction with the CIA, though I knew who they were and roughly what they were doing. In my swing of things, they were just one more of the broad but mysterious schmeer of special operators who worked secretly, independently, and mostly at night and in remote areas.

Update:  The last article linked to below reports that the suspect in the FOB Chapman bombings was a Jordanian.  Glad to hear he was not an ANA officer–I had no reason to suspect the loyalty of any ANA officer I worked with in Afghanistan–but he may well been put in an ANA uniform to faciliate his movement in the company of Americans.

NYTimes–FOB Chapman Attack

NYTimes–CIA Role

NYTimes-Jordanian Suspect

Pat Tillman

Like many, I followed the Pat Tillman story closely, my  interest sharpened by the parallels in our lives: joining the Army at a late age, as a college graduate, eager to experience the most military service could offer. Now, reading Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, I learn that Tillman was a devotee of Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche—all proponents of a radical individualism I admire in theory, if not so much in practice.

More importantly, I learned that Tillman had been killed in Khowst province, where I was stationed for eight months. Funny how I was never aware of this fact while I was there; certainly I would have been interested in seeing the place where he died and talking to as many locals as might have memories of the event. In fact, Tillman was shot, in a friendly fire incident, near the town of Spera, in one of the most inaccessible and dangerous districts in the province. But last December I travelled to Spera to inspect voter registration operations at the Spera District Center, which brought me, by Krakauer’s account, within two miles of Tillman’s place of death.

Two pictures below from that day:

The wadi road to Spera

Taken from Spera District Center. The trail to Mana, where Pat Tillman was killed, stretches out between the hill masses in the background of this picture

Short Term, Long Term

The link below takes you to a Stars and Stripes article by the reporter who covered my unit for some time and in some detail last summer. This article describes the problems facing our Army as we try to train the Afghan National Security Forces to become competent and self-sustaining.  Though not everything here-in was exactly like I encountered in Khowst and Paktya provinces, I’ll vouch for its overall accuracy.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=66544

Thanksgiving Coda

I am grateful beyond words to be back in the States for Thanksgiving.  It has been great seeing friends and family, and even the mundane events and facets of my current life are sweet.  But you might say that life anywhere is good, if you don’t have to worry about an IEDs and rocket attacks.

In most ways, it has been remarkably easy to plug back into a near-normal life.  Vestiges of Afghanistan-inspired emotions linger, however.  I think about those still doing the job I was sent over there to help accomplish.  Obviously the war is not yet won, and it seems a little like cheating to not still be there doing my part. 

Even more strongly, I think about the Camp Clark soldiers killed-in-action, and the sadness that must pervade their families as they live through their first Thanksgiving with at least one loved one now missing, forever.

RIP SFC Kevin Dupont, 1SG John Blair, and SSG Alex French.  My deepest, sincerest gratitude to your families for allowing me to know you.

The link below is to a NY Times article by an officer returned from Afghanistan.  It gets at many of the sentiments I express above, more eloquently or at least in more detail.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/the-lost/?ref=opinion

Redeployment

View out the back of the CH47 Chinook flying me out of Paktia province on the first leg of the journey home.

Last Four Months

In July I transitioned to a new job as the mentor to the Chief of Staff of the ANA Corps responsible for Khowst, Paktika, Paktia, and Ghazni provinces. The new position required as much daily contact with the ANA as my first position, but it was a lot safer. Almost all of our work was “inside the wire,” and when we traveled, it was always by helicopter. Still, rockets and mortars were real threats; one night an ANA truck took a direct hit from a 107mm rocket about 100m from our workplace.

It was from the vantage point of the ANA Corps headquarters that I observed the National Elections in August. We worked hard to ensure the security of the election sites in our sector, and though election day brought 188 “sigacts”–reports of enemy activity–and ten ANA KIAs, no polling site was closed because of insurgent pressure and no government or election officials were assassinated. But neither the ANA nor American soldiers were responsible for what happened inside the polling centers in regard to the casting or counting of ballots. In fact, we were strictly forbidden to be present, because the powers-that-be were determined that the elections have an Afghan, non-military face. Understood, but the military, both Afghan and US, stood the best chance of making sure the election was not tainted by the fraud and corruption that undermined what should have been a great achievement.

Me presenting an award to a British Army soldier who served with us. That's the Romanian flag on the left, btw.

Memorial Ceremony

Five Camp Clark soldiers lost their lives fighting the Taliban insurgency in Khowst and Paktia provinces, December 2008 to November 2009.

Movies, Music, Books

For the first 11-and-a-half months in Afghanistan I never had the time, patience, or peace-of-mind to watch a movie.  A few episodes of TV shows on disc here-and-there was it.  While redeploying, we spent three days in Kabul doing nothing, which gave me plenty of time to catch up.  I watched  Zombieland (twice), Boogie Nights, Glengarry Glen Ross, There’s Something About Mary, Enigma, All the Pretty Horses, and one or two others I’ve already forgotten.

My dear Mom bought me an Ipod while home on leave.  I never had one before, and how I lived without I don’t know.  Plenty of friends sent me plenty of music, so thank you very much one-and-all.  If I had to name what I listened to the mostest, I’d say Red Hot Chili Peppers and Thao Nguyen the first half of the deployment, the Killers and Franz Ferdinand the second. 

Reading was funny.  Days and weeks would go by when I couldn’t manage more than a paragraph or page a day, to be followed by reading binges during which most other activities lay neglected.  No consistency either; by the end of the year I’d read Afghan histories and memoirs (Afghanistan:  A Military History, An Unexpected Light), biographies (Andrew Jackson, Joseph Stalin), smarty-pants intellectual/academic stuff (A Philosophy of Mass Art, A Pocket Guide to Jungian Psychology), and plenty of novels (Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Doris Lessing, Chuck Klosterman, Mario Llosa, Peter Straub, Cormac McCarthy, among others).

It was all good.

Eid-al-Fitr

During Ramazan (as the Afghans call Ramadan), Muslims cannot eat or drink anything from sunup to sundown.  ANA soldiers do pretty well to conduct business-as-usual during the morning hours, but by afternoon they really really begin to fade.  Muslims mark the end of Ramazan with an Eid-al-Fitr celebration, a three day glut of eating, music, and dancing.   The pictures below are of ANA soldiers dancing in their dining facility.  They were taken by a US Air Force public affairs team who worked with us and did a great job documenting life on our FOB and the ANA’s.

Iconic or Just Omnipresent?

FOB life in Afghanistan is defined materially by objects and structures that range from banal to ominous.

Pallets of water bottles

Quickly-constructed living quarters, known as "B-huts," made out of either plywood or cement blocks

Walls built out of canvas and wire enclosures, filled with rock and sand, known as "Hesco Barriers"

Small, very durable, very efficient HVAC units known as "Chigos"

Fallen Hero displays commemorating soldiers from each FOB who have been Killed-in-Action