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

To All the Rough Riders

My unit’s nickname and radio call-sign was “Rough Rider”–a jaunty moniker in keeping with all the other sporty unit designators in sector. “Big Guns,” “Dog,” “Headhunter,” and “Glory” are just a few others that come quickly to mind now.

To be a Rough Rider was really something in my book. I wanted everyone on the team, and everyone else in our sector, to recognize the Rough Riders as a thoroughly professional, fearless unit. Our charge to to help the Afghan National Army with whom we were aligned grow as a military organization, and to do that we had to establish mutual trust and respect. As things went in Khowst and Paktia provinces, the only way to do that was to share danger and hardship. The soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Rough Rider team never let me down.

At the end of June, alas, most of my team and I were reassigned as part of a large re-disposition of the American forces in Afghanistan. The changes brought to a close the mentoring mission as it had existed for several years. Time will tell if the new strategy helps us win the war any more quickly–of course I hope so. But it will be hard for anybody to have as many adventures, to appreciate the Afghan soldiers as much, or feel as tangible a sense of accomplishment as those who were fortunate enough to serve on an Embedded Transition Team.

The Worst Day, By Far

On 20 June our mounted-combat-patrol was ambushed. In the ensuing shoot-out, we killed two of them, but they got one of us. Below is a link to a Stars and Stripes article commemorating 1SG John Blair.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=63419

The same week 1SG died, we learned that another one of our Embedded Training Team members, SFC Kevin Dupont, had died of wounds suffered in an IED explosion.  SFC Dupont was blown-up in February and lingered near death at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, for several months. 

RIP 1SG John Blair and SFC Kevin Dupont.

Media Darlings

In June we hosted an embedded reporter from Stars and Stripes, a newspaper aimed at military audiences but which is semi-independent of the Department of Defense. The reporter wrote a number of articles that featured my team and our mission, three of which I’ve posted links to below.

The first details the problems we often had getting the Afghan National Army to “work friendly” with the Afghan National Police and other Afghan security elements.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=63395

The second details problems we had pacifying the small village of Shembowat, which was located just to the north of our FOB:

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=63461

The third describes our operations at Spera COP, a remote outpost located on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=63706