Greetings from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. I’d say this was my inaugural blog but I think that a piece I wrote last month was posted already.
If you read my bio it will explain who I am and generally where and what I am doing. What I will try to do in a few lines here is explain in better detail what is going on here, without the clouding of a liberal media and disassociate the reality from the politics of it all. After all, I can only tell you what one soldier sees.
I am the Operations Sergeant Major for the 4th Brigade Combat team of the 82nd Airborne Division. Our BDE is responsible for Afghan Army and Police development in RC’s South and West. We took over for the 33rd BDE IL NG. I am in RC-West, commonly referred to as “In the West”. If you are following along on your Nat GEO map of Afghanistan we cover the four provinces of Herat, Farah, Bagdis, and Ghor. We have two Battalion sized elements that are responsible for advising Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan Border Police (ABP) Acronymed out yet? I’m just getting started.
American Forces are not out here alone and unafraid. We have Two Italian battle groups, they are the actual Battle space owners for RC-W. They have a combined HQ of Italians and Spanish. There are Lithuanians in Ghor. The security for The Herat airfield is supplied by Slovenians and Albanians. The advisors to the ANA Corp out here are an Italian and Spanish OMLTs (Small advisory groups)
What we do here is Advise ANA and ANP Kandacks (Roughly a Battalion sized element) The police here are not your run of the mill Andy and Barney small town sheriffs. They are more akin to SWAT teams. This gives a whole new aspect to community policing.
I’d like to keep all of this short, and it does get very complicated, so I’ll leave it at that for now. In the future I will try to zero in place by place and refine the whole mess for you. Hell I am just now getting it figured out.
The Soldiers here are living ok. Except for a few outlying companies, everybody has hot chow, mail and at least shelter and a cot. Most have access to internet and get mail regularly. The West was not set up to accept as many Soldiers as we have flooded into here in the last 60 days and it will take us time to build infra structure to better project our forces out into sector. We are already seeing a difference. We have cleared a town of Taliban, found several large cashes and killed several key bad guys.
The Soldier’s Moral is high. I heard somebody reported morale was low, and I probably saw a headline or two that blared it out. Morale is a tricky thing, after three combat tours I know that it ebbs and flows, is influenced more by your immediate leadership, sleep, mail and hot chow than anything else. It also varies from Soldier to Soldier. Two people that should never speak about morale are Politicians and reporters. They will always state what they think the public wants to hear without a care for the truth.
Also, don’t anticipate tales of blood and guts, shoot ‘em in the face combat. I’m at the Brigade level and deal more with operational and Logistics things. My days of having bullets humming by, RPGs exploding against the side of the truck, of stepping off a Helicopter in the dead of the night and slipping into an Al Queda compound are over for a while. But then again who knows, the enemy always gets a vote.
I will be happy to entertain questions or opinions any of you have. After all I do work for each and every one of you, even the ones protesting what I do. Isn’t that a kick in the head? I will answer as completely as I can. Beware, if your assumptions are wrong I will straighten them out. 23 years in the Army has pretty much used up my patience with fools that can’t think for themselves and have a very naive view of the world.
Until next time,
SGM OX
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