What I did in Afghanistan
I realized with my earlier post I never really wrote what I did in Afghanistan. Basically, in a year on the ground as an engineer officer with no engineer troops, I got passed around like a cheap bottle of schnapps. My team was initially assigned to Task Force Phoenix, at Camp Phoenix in Kabul. That task force is standing up the Afghan Nat'l Army, the ANA. We worked on the US and ANA basecamps that were being built in the Kabul area, there were 6 total. We worked with Afghan, US, and TCN (third country nationals like Pakistanis, Egyptians, Turks, etc.) contractors to build all these things. Plus we occasionally mentored the ANA officers and deployed with them downrange when they needed engineer support.
For a few weeks I got loaned to the engineers in Bagram, who actually had engineer troops, to help with their runway project. It took my bosses quite a while to realize that I do airport engineering for a living back home. Typical allocation of military assets, I guess.
In January I was reassigned to the engineer staff of the Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan, CFC-A, the 3-star command that they set up to run theatre ops out of Kabul instead of Bagram. It was typical staff weenie stuff for about a month, honing my powerpoint skills and tracking all the construction projects around the country. Which, incidently, was like herding cats because there's troop construction by U.S. and Coalition engineers, locally contracted projects for basecamp expansion and humanitarian needs, and all these non-gov't-organizations (NGO's) like World Health, USAID, and hundreds others doing humanitarian projects all over the country that may or may not coincide with the long-range goals the Afghan gov't is developing in Kabul. Educational, but not very exciting.
The good stuff began in Feb. when I began working on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) mission. There are about 15 of these PRT's set up around the country, with many more to come. They're basically a fire base from where the reconstruction efforts of Coalition and NGO's are based. I moved to the Kandahar PRT and ran around with the civil affairs teams there setting up clinics, schools, wells, bridges, and lots of other civil-military reconstruction type projects. Some days were actually fun. We went to the outlying provinces and villages, met with the elders, and tried to set them up with whatever projects they needed most, as long as it jived with what the Kandahar governor's goals were. The PRT also housed several civilians with various NGO's who were running their own projects, but those civilians needed secure quarters and transportation, they couldn't exactly go set up in the Kandahar Motel 6 for the duration of their projects. Basically the PRT's support the Coalition civil affairs units' and NGO's reconstruction work. We generally set up our projects in the "less permissive" areas (that's PC for 'hostile') and supported the NGO's doing their projects in the more permissive (friendlier) areas. While at the PRT I ran around to most of the villages in the Kandahar province, some in the neighboring provinces, and helped put together a 540km road recon from Kandahar to Herat and back. The Civil Affairs team I rode with most days were all Special Forces NCO's and I can't speak highly enough of those guys, I learned volumes working with them and they kept me on the straight and narrow. I'm like most other officers, I do better under close adult supervision. Here's a news article that discusses the PRT's more in-depth
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/03/9e47b144-6807-42da-9924-dfcccdc53592.htmlMuch of the effort in the country right now is simply to broaden the safe areas to allow these NGO's to expand their reconstruction efforts. The civilian agencies are much better at it than the military, they always have been, we're just trying to expand their footprints and safe-travel areas, so our footprint can shrink and we can get the hell out of there someday. I would even go so far as to say a short-term buildup in troops and effort will allow us to leave there sooner in the long run. Seems like the bad guys are onto our MO though, as they keep targeting the soft targets like civilian TCN workers to get their NGO to pull out.
Of course, one is hard-pressed to hear about any of this in the mainstream news. I've quit watching TV news, all the stories were simply who and how many got killed in Iraq that day. I hate to sound crass, but that's war, and that's the cost of war, it doesn't strike me as news. Hopefully everyone will remember the exact and horrific definition of war next time we go anywhere with sabers rattling. Some things are worth it, some aren't, it's certainly not up to me to debate that, I've got the luxury of having to focus on the small picture when I live it. Since I'm still on Uncle Sam's dime I salute smartly and ask how high when he says jump. Anyway, I can't really speak to what's going on in Iraq, we lived in a news vacuum while deployed to Afghanistan.
What I can offer up is the fact that, in Afghanistan, there are tens of thousands of troops, contractors, and civilians doing great work and it is all greatly appreciated by the locals. The average Afghan wants their country back, and realizes they need a huge helping hand to get to even a crawl as far as a functioning gov't and infrastructure are concerned. It's not without sticking our ss's on the line, either, it's still a very dangerous place, there's still the 1% of the population that wants to see the Coalition fail. But Every time we left the wire, we ran the gauntlet of people who wanted to kill us. Roadside bombs, mines, rocket/mortar attacks, ambushes, suicide bombers, and snipers are still a very real threat in every part of the country. Kabul was a little safer, but not by much, the suicide bombers did the most damage there. When a guy with rockets strapped to him runs out of the crowd as you drive over a speed bump and flings himself onto your hood, you're lucky to be quick enough to squeeze off a shot. Even then, he still blows. One just sort of gets a fatalistic attitude after a while resolving to "when it's your time to go, it's your time to go."
Most of the country is starting from scratch, infrastructure-wise. There are small pockets of civilization with a few paved streets, multi-story buildings, and occasional city power in Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kandahar. But I liken most of the country to the worst Indian reservation you've ever seen.... after a few carpetbombing runs. There are virtually no sewage treatment plants, it all flows down the streets or goes into septic pits, usually just feet from the drinking water wells. There's no water supply systems or prime power. Everyone runs their own generators and wells. Locals would set up roadside stands to sell shredded tires by the pound for people to burn to heat their homes. After an air-quality test in Kabul, it was rumored that 40% of the dust particles were fecal matter. I never saw the actual results, but it's believable. Some days we couldn't see 100 yards between the dust and the smog and you always had some sort of sinus infection or cough, not to mention the weekly bout of high-velocity rounds at the latrine. When you'd wake up and see guys sleeping in their tennis shoes in the rack, you knew they were battling the old soldiers' disease. The standing joke about the air was to step outside in the morning, take a deep breath and say "Aah, smells like %20 disability."
I got a little banged up 3 days before I was supposed to leave country. An Afghan gravel truck broadsided my vehicle in a convoy between Bagram and Kabul. It could have been an innocent accident, or it could have been more, I never did find out the details. Driving over there is complete anarchy anyway, it's like bumper cars with guns. With a few new holes, concussion, torn up ribs they hauled me to the ICU and then still whisked me home on time a couple days later. I remember leaving the gate and time starts again as they were stitching me up after all the x-rays, there's a few hours there that are just gone. Anyway, most of it will heal and I'm just glad I got only the few injuries I did. I saw pix of the wreck and it was ugly, I've seen bodies pulled out of similar wrecks. And nobody but me got hurt.
I've got thousands of pix and way more stories than my fat fingers can knock out here. Suffice it to say it was an education. I met a lot of good people, some bad, and am just happy that I had the luxury of getting a rewarding job for at least a little while. It's nice to look back on the PRT work since my tour cost me a year away from my life at home. There's lots of folks over there doing mind-numbing work that I would loose my marbles doing. The MP, infantry and artillery kids have it the worst I think. In addition to their combat missions, there's many of those units doing 'force protection' manning the perimeter and gates at basecamps. I know several kids who never left the wire of their assigned basecamp in a six-month tour. That would have killed me. I found a deeper appreciation for some groups (DOD civilians, Marines) and lost respect for others (best discussed offline over beers). The best compliment I've received since I've been home was from an old buddy I used to survey with for years, we grew pretty tight. He said he worried about and prayed for me, but most of all felt better knowing there were guys like me over there.
Thanks again for being here guys. Here's a picture of me outside one of the clinics we worked at. There's always kids everywhere. We used to hand out and play with footballs and soccer balls, since candy just caused fights.
Superdave
