December 04, 2010 pt 2

When I think of it, it's
amazing how different things are here.
Here, it's like God is shining a giant light, a glorious, blinding
light on everything you do.
Seeing each action and judging it,
weighing it,
finding you worthy,
or not.
But in america
it's dark.
It's muddy.
It's dirty.
Dirty in the soul,
rather than the body.
And the choices are never clear.
And they never matter.
Nothing matters.
Here, everything matters.
Everything.
What you eat.
What you wear.
How much sleep you get.
When you last
talked to your loved ones.
Whether you
have your knife,
your gerber,
your weapon
your tournequiteyourammunitionyourglovesyourwatchyourwateryourheadlampyourfleecehatyourwhoopieyourponchotheclsbagyourclpyourseatbeltcutteryourhelmettheheadspaceandtiminggaugeyourhatyourextrasocksthesmokegrenadesdo youhaveitcanyougettoit?
over here everything matters.
In America, nothing matters.
Forget something, so what?
Go get it.
So what?
So what?
Everything in america is so what.
Here, nothing is ever so what.
There is always an answer to that question.
Here, God watches you, and judges you, cruelly at times.
There, God doesn't even know you exist.
You are ants, and your lives without meaning,
or value, or even worth judging.
How am I ever going to leave this?
How am I ever going to go home to my family?
When the war is over?
The war will never be over.
Not the war on the ground,
fought with guns
and bombs
and knives
and stones.
Not the war inside us,
that we cannot put down.
The war will never be over.
How can I go home?

December 04, 2010

Listen
I know you mean well.
When you tell me you wish the war were over,
when you tell me you wish I could come home.
I know you have the absolute best intentions.
But.
You don't tell a police officer to not patrol the streets.
You don't tell a firefighter to stop fighting fires.
You don't tell the surgeon to stop operating on patients.
I am a Soldier.
And this war will not go away on its own.
Listen to me.
I do this for a living.
You trust your doctor.
You trust your banker.
Trust your Soldier.
This is a war we can win.
This is a war we should win.
We have a moral obligation to be here.
When the doctor tells you he looked at the slides, and he
saw something terrible that should not be there,
and he needs to go in with the knife,
you hope, and you pray, but you trust his judgement.
Because that's what he does.
I am a soldier.
This is what I do.
Don't try to stop me.
Don't hold me back.
I've seen something terrible, that should not be there,
and I have to go in with the knife.
Hope,
and pray,
and trust my judgment.
This war needs to be fought, and it will be fought.
And if we pull out, the war will follow us.
You cannot pull out of a war, you can only choose where
to fight it.
Let us fight it here, and now. We've chosen the field
of battle, let us fight here, where we have spent years
learning the battlefield, the people, the language.
Here, in Afghanistan, we have the home-field advantage,
because we've been here for nine years.
If we pull out, we'll fight somewhere else,
somewhere where we don't know the battlefield,
the people,
the language.
Somewhere where we don't have any advantages.
Nine years of continuous war, we've learned so much.
Our armor is different.
Our vehicles are different.
Our computers are different.
Our tourniquets are different.
Our techniques are different.
Everything we do is different.
We are a thousand times the army we were a decade ago.
Almost every one of our soldiers is a combat veteran, some of us many times
over. That experience can only be bought at one price: blood.
Our blood has taught us the lessons we need to know. And we
have learned those lessons. And we are learning those lessons.
Don't shackle us.
Don't hold us back.
Don't give us a deadline,
tell us we have to come home by a certain date.
Give us the men and the equipment and the backing we need to do this
job, and to do it right.
We could have won here years ago, but we never had enough men. We
were never given enough men, enough equipment, enough backing
to do the job right. We were never given enough resources to properly
establish security, to properly rebuild things, to do anything here
properly. Want the job done right? Lets fucking do it. Give us the
men and equipment, the doctors and soldiers and engineers and teachers
we need to secure Afghanistan, to rebuild Afghanistan, to heal Afghanistan,
to teach Afghanistan, and then we can win, and then we can come home.
Stop trying to bring me home before I'm done.
This is what I do for a living.
This is my job,
my profession,
my specialty.
Trust me.
Give me the tools I need and we can win this war.
Give me the committed men I need.
Make sure they receive the very best training.
Give me the equipment I need.
Take care of my family while I'm over here.
Give me the resources to secure,
to rebuild,
to heal
and to teach.
And I will come home.
And I will bring you a victory
we can all be proud of.

December 02, 2010

So the depression is doing its best to kick my ass.
Now I have some advantages.
I exercise all the fucking time.
So that helps.
I keep really busy.
That helps.
I have the respect of very many
people I work with.
That helps.
but my mind wanders,
wanders in dark places.
So many dark places.
There are so many
dark places for my mind to wander.
I fight the depression.
I fight.
Every day.
Every day.


crap
All crap
I swim in a pool of shit
i feel it taste it
on my skin
in my mouth in the back of my throat
i hate
i fucking hate
so much
so much

November 20, 2010

There's this dream I've been having.
First, though I have to tell you some stuff.
Last year, I was in Afghanistan. And I came home for a two week R&R break.
And when people saw me, I'd tell them "I'm in Afghanistan, I'm just on leave"
It was kind of a joke.
Kind of a short hand.
Kind of.
See, I've been having this dream.
Each time, most of the dream is different.
But each time, I'm in America.
Some times I'm on leave.
Some times I'm about to deploy.
And I tell people
"I'm in Afghanistan"
And it's like what I said last year, when I was on leave.
And maybe you could say that it's my sleepy mind,
telling me that I'm in Afghanistan, and dreaming it.
Or you could say what the guy down the hall says,
that I dream of the states because I haven't accepted that
I'm back in AFghanistan.
But I dont think thats it.
I dont think I ever left Afghanistan.
I dont think I ever came home.
I think it was all a dream, and I'm here.
In afghanistan.
Just like I said all along.

November 15, 2010

Twenty one days in a row I have gone to the gym.
I write down my scores.
Each day I attempt to surpass the day prior.
I have studied Farsi for 8 hours, 55 minutes.
I have studied Pashto for 9 hours 15 minutes.
I learn a bit more.
I start to be able to read a bit, some of the
letters I recognize and know what sounds they make
some words I know and can use.The languages use the same alphabet, though
most or perhaps all the words are different.Each day I study.Each day I work out.
No one understands how bad I am at languages.
Or how weak I am.
But I persevere.
That they see.
They see my belief.
Shining through
the dust of my ignorance
and my weakness.
My belief will carry me
to where that dust is long gone.

November 10, 2010

Every dayI grow a little more distant from
the soft
slow
fat
people around me
i grow a little more
angry
a little more lean
a little more hungry
a little more savage
a little more pure
a little more me
a little less them
I grow a little faster
a little stronger
a little more pure
a little more angry
I see the waste
the waste
the wasted resouces
the wasted time
the lack of effort
the lack of dedication.
And every day
I become a little more me.

November 02, 2010

So each day we have a big briefing.

On the JOC floor, where everything happens.

Think of, in the movies, when NASA launches a mission. All the guys at computers

and phones, organizing shit.

We organize RC(S), the second busiest quarter of Afghanistan.

And each day we have a briefing on everything that is going on.

In the same room as everything is STILL going on.

SO.......

usually its quiet while the briefing happens.

Once in a while, an event comes through.

Like yesterday, DURING the briefing, we got the MEDEVAC mission for 8 US

CAT A soldiers.

When you get hurt, and we assess you, we categorize it.

Cat C, you'll live, but should be seen by a doctor, MEDEVAC within 24 hours.

Cat B, you are stable, MEDEVAC within 4 hours.

CAT A. RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

So we had 8 cat a yesterday, during the briefing.

So, when a 9 liner comes in (a 9 liner is a MEDEVAC request, called so because it has 9 lines),

we usually yell it out so everyone in the room hears it.

For yesterdays event, one of the senior people in the room said "9 liner" loud enough for

everyone who needs to know to know, but not so loud as to mess up the brief. Makes

sense, right?

Today, again during the brief, we had another 9-liner, this one for 4 CAT A ANA. The ANA

are the Afghan National Army. They do something like what we do, with less equipment, training,

pay, medical care. So four of them were in a truck and hit an IED. MEDEVAC.

So I see it, I say "9 liner" in a tone of voice quiet, but loud enough to be heard. JUST IN CASE

the people in medops two rows behind me are tieing their shoes, or looking at the speaker, or ANYTHING besides looking at the screen (and there is ALWAYS the chance that the message came through on my screen and not theirs, THAT HAPPENED EARLIER THIS WEEK).

THEN

I take the grid coordinates that show where the patients are, and the grids are wrong.

The Army has a complicated grid system for the whole world. A grid looks like 41 RSR 41689 98888. Thats a grid that makes sense. Other grids are NOT POSSIBLE IN AFGHANISTAN. The grid that is given is NOT POSSIBLE IN AFGHANISTAN.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Someone typed in the wrong grid. Too easy, I check on a second type of program to be sure. yep, does not work. So I post in teh chatroom we use

"request confirm on that grid" or words to that effect.

And the medops chief of operations sends me a private chat to the effect of "the grid is correct:,

So I'm like "roger"

and

I go check again.

Because thats the kind of soldier I am.

AND ITS WRONG.

So I say in the private chat, no, grids still not working on two programs.

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

She posts updated grid.

BUT

NEW GRID IS EVEN WRONGER.

See, all Army grids have an even number of grid digits.41 RSR 41689 98888Makes sense, 10 digits.41 RSR 4168 9888less accurate, but still makes sense, 8 digits.41 RSR 416 988less accurate, still makes sense, 6 digits.An army grid CANNOT have an odd number of digits.

This grid she has reposted has 9 numbers.SO IT CAN NOT BE RIGHT.

I SAY AGAIN, CAN NOT BE RIGHT.

so I post "grid given has 9 digits"

a minute goes by

she sends me a private chat message with the full grid.

BUT NOONE POSTS FULL GRID IN THE CHATROOM.

So I wait for a minute, see there is still no accurate grid, and copy the line with her saying the full grid and paste it intothe chat room window.


SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAfter the briefing she comes downand first informs methat we dont say anything during the briefingandthat her medops people were tracking the eventandthat we are all intelligent peopleand we could have easilyseen that the numbers from the first WRONG gridwhen combined with the letters from the second WRONG gridmade a POSSIBLE grid, so CLEARLY that was the right oneand my posts added to the confusion.

Yep.My battle captain stood up for me.The best moment was when he asked if the whole grid had ever been posted,And she said "yes, of course"and I squintedand looked closely at my screenand said"i can only find it posted here, at 1929"and my captain says "didnt you post that?"And I said "yes".Precious.

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosomeone taught me a trick about lies. When someonesays something to you and it makes no sense, reverseit and see if that makes more sense.So:

You shouldnt have talked during the brief!We had it under control!We are all smart people here!YOur comments added to the confusion!I'm mad!

does not make sense.Try this on for size:You did the right thing talking during the brief!We didnt see that event and you pointed out for everyone what we had not noticed.You are an idiot!Your comments made sense and pointed out my mistake!I'm mad because you made me look stupid!


Odd how the second version seems to make sense and be believablewhile the first doesn't.

So that's what I did today: I made an officer mad at me by doing my job.

November 11, 2010

The only one who can teach you
is your enemy.
And every year,
every year
they learn from us
every year
they get smarter
they get sneakier
they learn
but
every year
we learn from them
slowly
We learn
slowly
we didn't used to know
but we're learning
we're learning.
We're learning.
And when we learn enough
when we learn enough
when we learn enough

more from last deployment

from last deployment

these are from last deployment, just copying them here to have them all in one place.

35 straight days at the gym.
16 1/2 hours of Rosetta Stone Farsi.
14 hours of Rosetta Stone Pashto.
And I just sent out a ton of greeting cards.

SGT GEERTS 1.mpg

fail

Basically, people just have no idea what goes on in Afghanistan. The US government has failed us utterly by completely not selling this war, and the media has contributed by playing along. 99% of America have NO ieda what goes on here. None. Possibly more than 99%.

My love, you will be so proud of me. a little girl in Ma'Ruf district was hit by a car, 4-6 years old. Massive head trauma.They couldnt get us the right grid. NOBODY could get the right grid. I had made a map of all the districts. I found the map, found the province center. Got the information to the medops people so we could send the chopper. Got the bird off the ground a good minute and a half-two minutes faster than if we had to wait for the grid. So happy.

Blood has no color, blood has no gender. If you deploy by my side, I don't give the slightest shit if you are white, black, gay, straight, a man or a woman. If you stand by me here, you are my brother and my sister.

The Virgas of Fall

The sky in summer is so blue

it's black.

But now, in fall

here the earth has been lifted by the wind into the sky

and huge monsters

of dust

and more solid than dust

of dirt and wind and blinding stinging twisting blowing

stride across the sky

to do battle.

The Virgas of Fall.

The dust in your nose, in the back of your throat.

Your skin, dry, your eyes, on the edge of tears,

The sky, so huge, so monstrous.

Patrol minimize, MEDEVAC  missions are limited.

I think I've been too isolated

If you know me well, you know

I used to be very introverted.

Then, I was very shy.

Then I studied the subject, and learned how to meet people.

Then I went through some long dark times

and I became very introverted again.

And a side effect is that I find I am, once again, shy.

Which feeds terribly into the anger, in a bad, and self-destructive,

cycle.

So I think I need to rebuild a social network.

Because meeting people is really hard, when you don't know people.

And isolation is not healthy.

So, I'm gonna study the subject a bit, and figure something out.

Peace Talks with Taliban Leaders?

Ok, the news is all nuts with talk about "Peace Talks with Senior Taliban Leadership".

Listen.

There is NO senior Taliban leadership.

We killed off the Taliban a while back.

There is no real senior leadership of anything LEFT.

There are a LOT of grass-roots groups of young, unemployed

hoodlums, who are out to make a name for themselves like their Grandfathers

who fought the Russians.

They are NOT Taliban

And they don't HAVE leaders.

We've been here for nine years. We've killed every senior leader of every organized group that opposed us. Some of these guys don't last two weeks when they come here from Pakistan.

The closest thing there are to leaders are

local warlords, who have a couple hundred at most gunmen,

drug lords, who again, have a couple hundred men at most,

Al Qaeda, who are not local to this area, but ship in troops and weapons, and

there is no peace with them,

smugglers who bring in weapons,

mullahs who preach violence, usually from outside the area,

and fucking secret agents from certain "friendly" and certain "unfriendly"

powers who use these poor fools as pawns on the Afghanistan chess board.

There is NO leadership to have peace talks with.

As to reintegration, or re-assimilation, or any form of these armed bands declaring peace,

that happens on a very regular basis. When the legitimate governement of afghanistan

sets up shop in an area, puts in place ministers of education and finance and health and agriculture,

when the outsiders get pushed out, local warlords sign up with the government. It happens

on a regular basis as the stabilized parts of the country slowly grow, and progress is made,

and people begin to see that the government won't collapse tomorrow.

Half the population of the country is under 18. There is no organized structure to oppose us. What there is is a constant flow of young footmen, willing to fight if there's nothing better to offer them.

I had a big thing I was going to type in that is ISAF policy on reintegration, but it's long. Here it is in short: they can stop fighting whenever they like, but mostly they'll need jobs and security and a more functional government before they will want to.

Sorry, not my most poetic post, but I figured this misunderstanding needed to be addressed.

pictures

Me and two of my friends, one from Australia, one from Estonia. KAF, October 2010.

Belief

You know why they can't hurt me, don't you?

Why they can't touch me?

Why I am safer here, doing this, than anywhere else?

Belief.

Doubt saps the will.

Doubt weakens the spirit.

The man who is pure of thought,

pure of heart,

the man without doubt,

that man

is a dangerous man.

Because doubt is weakness.

Doubt is thinking about home, when you should be

watching where you step.

Doubt wonders, doubt questions, doubt blinds you

when you should be watching their hands

the set of their shoulders

the way a man of arms carries himself.

Doubt leaves you empty and wrung out and tired

and you make mistakes.

Without doubt, without fear, with

absolute confidence,

with a laughing disregard for danger,

with the strength and surety

of knowing

knowing

utterly

that who you are,

and what you do

is right

and those who stand behind you

love you

utterly,

with these things

a man can do anything.

Without doubt.

Without fear.

With absolute belief.

Dust

The wind blows from the Southwest.

Across the desert,

across the sand

and the parched plains.

The wind blows,

and it lifts the dust

and carries it into the sky.

And the air is thick with it.

And they day turns

and it is no longer day

and the night turns

and it is no longer night

and the earth turns

and it covers you.

And the whirls

And the whorls

of earth

in the sky

earth in the sky

red on white.

And the dust,

in your chest,somewhere in the back of your lungs.

And the dust,on your clothes,

your freshly washed clothes.

And the dust,on the floor,

on your sheets,

in your lungs.

The wind blows

from the Southwest,

across the desert,

across the sand,

and it lifts the dust

and carries it into the sky.

A thousand years of history

ground into dust

dust in your lungs

dust in your clothes

dust on the floor

dust on your sheets.

The emotional rollercoaster

Every day here, you live closer to the edge.

Boring, grinding sameness, over and over and over and over.

Frustration that randomly boils to the surface as rage,

often over seemingly meaningless events.

Finding yourself at the brink of tears.

And again with the grinding boredom.

Weird emotions drifting through your head, like unexploded

landmines waiting for prey. Like creatures of darkness,

gliding through the shadows, through the depths. Creatures

of darkness, creatures of teeth.

Finding yourself twistingly

jealous over your partners actions of more than a decade past,

before you had even met. Twisting poignancy, like the smell of

flowers on the desert wind. Loneliness mixed with rage, like

you haven't felt in so long. Isolation. Helpless longing.

Obsessiveness, playing games for hours and hours, working out

in the gym with a punching bag till your hands bleed through your

gloves and you realize you have to stop when you see the blood on

the bag. Watching every episode of every season of some stupid show.

And the fear. When a jet rushes by overhead. When the sirens go off.

When you hear an explosion you weren't expecting. The fear that you

will feel even when you come home, but then mostly at night, late,

when you wake and look at your watch, and lay, pretending to sleep.

The fear, like cold water inside, mixed with the adrenaline, and everything

so clear here, the colors so much brighter, the sun so strong you have to

wear dark glasses or you can barely see, everything razor sharp, and home

is distant, shrouded in fog, shrouded in death, like the mist in "The Others".

The frustration. When things don't go the way you planned, the way you

hoped, the way you expected. The bitter frustration, the feeling of

pointlessness, over little things, things that shouldn't matter.

The moon above, bone white. I've seen her from the side of a mountain,

and the moons of Jupiter, seen through a telescopic spotting scope.

The dust, hours after putting on fresh clothes, you hit your leg

and a cloud of dust poofs off.

The sky above, not a cloud in months, so blue as to bleed on the edge of black.

And you are so far away.

And the anger.

And the jealously.

And the obsession.

And the random lust.

ANd the loneliness.

And the boredom. Always the boredom. Always always the boredom.

The problem of the Border

I figured you might want to know some of the progress we've made here, what it is, why it works, why we do it, what we hope to accomplish from it, so that what we do here wouldn't be a strange mystery.

So, let me talk for a bit about the border.

Afghanistan has the stupidest border in the world.

See, the British conquered India and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1800s, and they

had this idea

"Lets make the border as stupid as possible, so that no one can forge a united country and rebel against us."

True story.

So they drew this crazy border that squiggles all over the place, and they drew it that way to deliberately split up any group with any form of solidarity, drawing that border right through the middle of clans, tribes, and history.

Now you know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

This is an AMAZINGLY non-straight line. If Afghanistan had its borders put in place by any other method, they would be about half as long. All those little squiggles mean a LOT of border.

And since tribes and families were split by the border, people cross it all the damned time to visit family, to trade, for whatever reason.

So, there's LOTS of border, and people cross it all the damned time.

So, there's LOTS of smuggling.

Drugs gets smuggled out, and in.

Guns and bombs get smuggled in.

And propaganda gets smuggled in, trainers get smuggled in, foreign spies get smuggled in.

And it's really hard to stop, because there is SO MUCH border.

So this is what we've been doing.

First, we built a road. Route 1. It's the "Ring Road" that runs in a big circle through Afghanistan. It allows our forces

freedom of movement and resupply, it stimulates trade, it helps the country a LOT.

Then we started building other roads.

See, before we came here, there were almost no paved roads. Little internal trade, no external trade. Farmers can't get their goods to market, people cannot get to doctors or to schools. Most roads were single lane dirt roads, sometimes they were dry riverbeds.

So each paved road changes, fundamentally, the nature of the country, both it's physical terrain and it's human and economic terrain.

Some of these new roads we have built lead to the border, and on the border we built checkpoints.

So, if you want to visit family, or import scarves, or export oranges and grapes, you use the paved roads we built,.

And you pass through the checkpoints we built, which are manned by the Afghan National Army, and the Afghan Border Patrol.

And if you smuggle, and pass through these checkpoints, we might catch you.

And if you smuggle, and you bypass the checkpoints, we KNOW you are a bad guy, because who the FUCK wants to trek over the mountains with donkeys when they can just drive there on a paved road?

So, we opened the borders by building roads. And opening the borders has allowed us to finally start closing the borders to smugglers.

Why the Army, and why the Infantry?

I love this question. This one, even people I work with ask me sometimes.

Why not a different branch of service? And if I picked the Army, why not

choose military intelligence, or fix computers, or do something else?

Why the Infantry?

You see, I believe you cannot win a war flying overhead. When you fly overhead, you are there for a minute, and then you are gone. The people on the ground dig themselves out of their bunkers, they dust themselves off, they shake the fist at the sky and tell each other how they could beat you in a fair fight, and it is only because you are rich that you are powerful.

I do not believe you can win a war safe behind a computer screen, plotting information demographics, or calculating angles of trajectory on an artillery shell.

I do not believe you will ever even know who the enemy is until you take your weapon in hand and visit the villages on your map, and speak to the people there, and ask them.

I do not believe you can find that enemy until you walk the fields that are contested, putting yourself in harms way, waiting for them to feel brave enough to try to take you down.

And I do not believe you can conquer that enemy until you engage him, break him, chase him down, and make it utterly clear to him that continuing to fight will result in his utter extinction. Only when you are up close, in someones face, with their breath stinking, do you have the opportunity to absolutely convince them.

You cannot protect the innocent from a distance. It might be safe for you, but it is not safe for them. You cannot defeat the enemy from a distance. You can hurt him, but never defeat him. You cannot win a war from a distance. You have to get in close and dirty and actually do the job that needs to be done.

When you put your ass on the line, and step right up and say "No matter how dirty this job is, no matter how hard, I'm doing it, try and stop me", that's when your enemy will lose the will to fight.

I don't believe any soldier should ever lead unless he has been on the front line, in the trenches. I don't believe you can make an intelligence assessment, or tell me what things are like if you haven't been there. I don't believe you can tell another man to do a job you are afraid to do or are unwilling to do. I don't believe you can issue an order and expect to have it carried out if you are not willing to carry that order out yourself if need be.

That's why I'm in the Army and that's why I'm in the Infantry.

Americas War?

I've been asked why America is in this war.

I work with an Estonian Captain.

And two Sergeants from the Netherlands.

An Australian Major.

A french girl, I have no idea what rank she is.

A veritable HORDE of Canadians.

In the chow hall today were soldiers from Jordan.

There are Australians, and Romanians, and soldiers from New Zealand.

There are Germans here, and yes, there are Americans.

It's not our war. Its large parts of the world uniting to do a job that needs to be done,

and I wonder how many people in America are aware that we don't do it alone?