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The convoy of seven vehicles pulls off the main road and drives slowly over the hard, broken ground and gets as close as possible to the refugee camp. This one has about two hundred people; men, women and children of all ages. The soldiers that will provide security quickly get out of the armored SUVs and form a protective ring around the other vehicles. To call it a refugee camp does violence to the word camp. This place is not a camp. Its a few acres of hard dirt that has no value to...read more
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American strategy in Afghanistan is built around an army of advisors. They are the key to every initiative and program here and they are everywhere, from the very top of the government in Kabul building ministries and infrastructure, all the way down to the districts building bridges and roads, to the battlefields in Helmand and Kandahar building effective Afghan fighting forces. There are thousands of them scattered across the country and, due to the increased emphasis Afghanistan is getting...read more
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Ahmad Faisal is a 29 year old Afghan who lives in a rented apartment in downtown Kabul with his pregnant wife, Sara. Like many Afghans his age, he has witnessed the horrors of the Taliban first hand and has spent much of his life in neighboring Pakistan. We often talk about that period in Afghanistan’s violent past, how he wore a fake beard because men were supposed to have real beards and he couldn’t grow one, and how his family had to hide their small TV in a hole in the yard during the...read more
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War changes you, War changes everything. It’s an event that shakes your soul Like nothing else, That jolts you into a sense of altered reality. Thank you. Thank you for being so inconsiderate To end your life In such a grand fashion. Blown into bits of misery. The explosion at the marketplace Was without regard To anyone around. I’m not that great at math, But I think you just Eliminated yourself from the equation of existence, In less than a fraction of a second, No...read more
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Mao-tse-Tung once quipped that all political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Apparently, he never spent much time in Afghanistan. Here, real political power neither comes from the barrel of a gun nor from legally established bodies such as the Afghan parliament or the office of the president. There are no pure political parties here, at least not ones that would be recognized as political parties by Americans. Here, raw political power is based on tribal identity. In essence, the...read more
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Food for thought: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/womens-work/?hp I find that being one of two females in my unit enough of a challenge. Being the lowest ranking doesn't help matters any but we all have to start from the bottom at some point. Do I agree with Ms. Ross' opinion on the APFT standards? Being a hair above 5 feet and a buck o' 9 does not make me appear less capable than my male counterparts. I know there is no way I could ever do 80+ pushups...read more
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The final days of the All American Bowl were quite exciting. We had some down time before the Awards Dinner with the Rotary Club to get all dressed up in our Class A's and Blues. We took quite a few pictures, mostly us ladies. The longer you're in the military, the more you come to appreciate having friends that are women! After the mini photo shoot, we headed to the banquet hall where the tables were spread out so far that it looked like the room was the size of a football field. The...read more
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These are President George Bush’s words, not mine. I wish they were mine. They are from his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention in 2004. The point he was making concerned the sorry state of public education resulting in a high rate of failure. He believed American educators had set the achievement bar too low due to the mistaken belief that some students simply could not perform. The same can be said about our present situation in Afghanistan. We have set...read more
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There is no place, anywhere, quite like Camp Eggers in downtown Kabul. Home to over 1,600 military and civilians, Camp Eggers is also home of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan as well as the newly-formed NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. Both of these organizations are commanded by LTG William Caldwell. In very simple terms, the mission of these two commands is to show the Afghans how to save their country and provide them the tools to do the job. The camp is named in...read more
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You would think that as you mature, celebrate birthday after birthday, that the bullies in life would fade away, that being an adult means having some semblence of respect for other human beings. Oh, how naive I have been... When I was a kid and later a teenager, I dealt with the torment of bullies on an almost daily basis. From the classroom where I was teased for knowing all my Spanish vocabulary words to having read half of my new history textbook before the first...read more
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