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?

What about America?

I've had some questions about my posts. One of those questions was about the little girl who was burned by scalding water.

Could this not have happened in the United States, even in a rural area in the States where it was hard to get to a doctor?

Absolutely. Children are fragile, and accidents happen.

However, approximately 14 million children in Afghanistan live more than a two hour drive from the nearest doctor, and more than a six hour drive from the nearest hospital. And there is no "Mercy Flight" to helicopter you to safety. No helicopter at all, unless the Americans have a base nearby.

When I was seven, the little girl across the street broke her arm while we were playing on a hill. It was a compound fracture. A "compound fracture" is a nice medical way to say her bone was sticking through the flesh of her arm.

We lived in the middle of nowhere, and a horrible hours drive later, a drive on an asphalt road, at speeds of 60 to 70 miles an hour, we were at a hospital, a hospital with doctors and nurses and an orthopedic section.

Do you know, if you have a compound fracture, and you don't get help, good, professional, hospital-level orthopedic help within six hours, you will probably lose the broken limb? Amputation.

I have been asked, generally by people who don't know me very well, why we should help the people of Afghanistan, when there are so many terrible places in the world? Why aren't we helping in those places as well?

I believe we have a moral obligation to be here. I believe future generations will judge us on the course of this war. I believe that these people need us, and to turn our backs on them would be unconscionable. 

Today, in the district of Ma'Ruf

Today, in the district of Ma'Ruf, in the District Center, in the Province of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan,a father brought his son to the American forces. 130 kilometers from Kandahar, the nearest "hospital", although the hospital in Kandahar is closer to a clinic in the United States. 130 kilometers over dirt roads, and the father, a poor farmer, had no car.

His son,

his son was two years old.

They had a kerosene stove for cooking. There was an accident, the boy caught fire.

Over 70 percent of his body was burned.

He was two years old.

His genitals were burned.

Seventy percent.

One hundred and thirty kilometers, over dirt roads, And his father had no car.

One hundred and thirty kilometers, straight line distance.

Seventy percent.

They don't ever trust us, you know, when we first come and set up a base. Often they are afraid of us.

They've always been told rumours and lies and truth and wild make believe.

Seventy percent.

So he brought us his son.

Because what other choice was there?

If there were no Americans there.

If we hadn't built a FOB there.

One hundred and thirty kilometers, straight line, across dirt roads. I guess that would be maybe six hours in a car, if you could find a car. With your son in the back seat.

Next person who tells me we need to pull out of Afghanistan, I'm punching them in the fucking face.

Today in Afghanistan, October 13 2010.

Today, out in the middle of nowhere, someone spilled scalding hot water on an infant baby. Bad enough to need a ventilator, bad enough for her to lose consciousness. If there weren't an American military outpost nearby, and american medevac helicopters, and american doctors, that baby would probably be dead right now. Don't ask me why we have troops here, tell me why we don't have more troops here.

dear America

Dear America, please send me 100,000 more soldiers, so we can fix this poor place.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101005/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanunrest_20101005183300

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – Up to five bombs killed nine people, mostly children, exploding in quick succession as crowds gathered late Tuesday in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, officials said.

It was the second consecutive evening that explosions rocked the city, which the Taliban, masterminds of a nine-year insurgency against the Western-backed government, consider their stronghold.

Todays IN YOUR FACE fact about Afghanistan

Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 2:34am

Annual no. of under-5 deaths (thousands), 2008: 311. One in three kids born here does not live to be five years old. Send me a hundred thousand more troops to make it safe here, and send me the doctors and nurses and engineers and teachers to make this place not a hell for those who live here.

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