A Soldier in Afghanistan

My name is James, or Jim to my friends. I was born and raised in Clarkston, Washington. I am 53 years old, married last year to my wife Jody, who is 31. I am on my second and last tour of duty in Afghanistan with the National Guard. I am in the North-eastern part of Afghanistan, with snow capped mountains at the higher elevations and barren, mostly un-arable land in the valley’s. If you just looked at pictures, you would think that I was in Yakima. My friends can’t believe that I actually travelled seven thousand miles to the Karshi province of Afghanistan and the countryside looks the same as if I had driven seventy miles from home.

I was asked by the social work student interviewing me, to describe the culture in which I am existing. I asked her why she thought it was important, surely there are several news articles and tabloids describing what the living conditions are like for soldiers in Afghanistan. She laughed and said I was in a unique position to tell a different story. You see, I am with the American National Guard, but the whole of the unit I live with are shared by the New Zealand and Singapore troops. So I am not only having a “diverse” experience being in Afghanistan, but I am also living with people from different countries in a foreign country.

In the North-eastern part of Afghanistan, we are not really considered in a hostile zone. In reality, if you have to be in the middle of the war, this is a really benign place to be, if you are part of the UN troop system. We have only had to do two “stand-to’s” or be at battle-stations fully armed and ready for a fight, since we have been here. But among the locals, the hostilities have been really rough.

In Afghanistan, there are two main ethnic divisions: the Hazara’s, who can trace their lineage back to Gengis Khan and are very proud of their heritage; and the Bamien’s, who are considered “inferior” and are from Tajikistan originally, lumped in with migrating Arabs called Pashtans who visited the country and never left. Socially, the Pashtuns are the highest “money” class, the Tajiks in the middle and the Hazara’s at the lowest end of the class system. The Hazara’s are more like the aborigines so to speak. The Pashtuns think of them as “inferior” because their features are less finely made, in their opinions, and the Hazara’s are thought to be only good for simple farming.

Our mission here is to help with reconstruction, to help Afghanistan be less of a third world country in a way. The idea is that if the Western world helps them improve their quality of life, then they will be more likely to think better of us than to put their loyalties with the Taliban. We are called a PRT or a “Provincial Reconstruction Team”. The team is made up of forces from Bagram AFB, from Kabul, the Corps of Engineers, Singaporean Armed Forces, and the New Zealand Defense Force. The bulk of the funding for these projects come from Commanders Emergency Relief Program, or CERP. The projects we concern ourselves with are life sustainment issues, clean water for drinking, power through micro-hydro-power stations or well maintenance, Basic Health Clinics or Sub-clinics in more remote stretches of the country. Some people are usually a seven hour donkey ride away from any medical help.

I want to explain a little bit about CERP. The Commander’s Emergency Response Program is a kind of grant program that helps the locals learn to trust the western world as they come in with expensive trucks and more technology than the locals have (Matins, 2005). This program allows commanders to have direct governmental appropriations for operational and tactical forces that help them meet the immediate needs of the locals. There has been a lot of controversy about the CERP funds, but as far as I can tell you, the funds are allowing children to drink clean water again, and their mothers can relax a little more during the day than trekking miles to get water for their families.

The Singaporean troops are mostly concerned with medical projects, helping build medical buildings. Those projects are a few hours away from our base here, in the more remote areas of Afghanistan. The US Corps of Engineers take care of a lot of the “engineering” things that are required, like building bridges or wells or the power stations. The US and New Zealand troops usually take care of security, like training native persons to do their own security. We also make sure that the trained native security personnel have adequate supplies and materials to sustain them as they deal with the conflicts that crop up in their individual sectors.

The military people I am around are interesting to describe. The Singaporean guys, two of them, and they are normally concerned with building the medical stations. They have a better budget to work with than we do, and they don’t roam as far away from the base due to restrictions from their government. I can’t go into politics of the situation, but as a snapshot, that is what it is. Because they have a bigger budget, they are able to do stand alone jobs better than the Kiwi’s, and they have more ready cash to recruit the natives to help out with their projects. They are friendly and competent by my standards.

The Kiwi’s are more complex. They have a dual mission of security and reconstruction and all the accompanying stuff like psych-ops and the whole hearts-mind thing (getting them to realize that the Western world is their friend and all that). The mix of civilian and military forces can be complicated in their neck of the woods on the base. The Kiwi’s have a really laid back style and they have a mix of Army, Navy and Air Force divisions here, making it even more complicated. The Army does the security stuff, the Air Force are the techi’s of the bunch and the Navy does the Social issues for the mission. The lack of funding (by our standards) means that they have less quality vehicles and equipment then we (the US) would use. Adding to that the laid back style of their mil-machine allows the easy flow of different forces from varying nations moving through the base with ease. That’s why they are the “Hosting” nation. The Army Kiwi’s are very up to standard and I felt comfortable while traveling around and the rest (Navy and Air Force) are very caring about the locals and their plights.

The Kiwi’s are a very formidable military and I have a video of a ceremony they call “hake”. You could look it up online. It is a very special and secret dance that only the New Zealand army guys do. They taught it to us, and that is considered a very great honor. They have no real armored vehicles and they still go patrol and look for bad guys to round up. I’m very proud of them and want to stress that I would go with them into battle anytime. They are doing what they do with Viet Nam era equipment and very little pay by our standards.

The locals are really an amazing lot and I must say respectful and polite. The difference in our cultures is very evident during site visits since we are not speaking the same language. There are a few females that we are in contact with, but they are professionals and medics so I don’t deal with them as often as the Kiwi’s and Singapore guys. The dichotomy between the two ethnicities is diminishing in this area but increasing in others. In the north east near Eshpesta the coal mining attracts a mix of ethnic groups and the tensions are high.

The daily routine isn’t very routine but I’ll try to tell you about my favorite function here. My job is to take the plans that the good idea fairies come up with and add a dose of reality by putting the work into a plan of action that has a basis of fact and takes into account the costs and engineering practicalities, like how far away they have to go to get the right kind of rock and where they are going to store the materials for the buildings they want to build and the cement and things like that. Then I have to see that the contractors are doing the work right away, and we are one of their Achilles heels, unfortunately. The “engineers” that they hire are of the “shake and bake” variety and we have a disconnect between the language and the technical expertise of the site foreman and contract requirements. In other-words, the good faeries in DC tell us what they want done with the funds allotted to each project, then I have to make sure that what they want is translated into something that makes practical sense, then we have to get the site foreman (often from a different country and very territorial) to get moving on the project and finish it in a timely fashion to correct specs. This can be a very diplomatic process.

That is why I like being on patrol much better. Life on patrol is a very male dominated experience and one I prefer to camp life. I prefer that to sitting around and waiting for some moron who has no idea what to do to tell me what I’m supposed to do, and that means the contractors, the good idea faeries and the upper brass echelon. On patrol its all about getting me to see the projects that I need to see and the meetings I need to be at but all the while keeping our group safe and secure. The IED’s are a real issue when you are not in an unarmored vehicle. The Vehicles we ride in are the same as the Toyota trucks that you drive in the states, but ours have armor. The Kiwi’s don’t. But they have had no deaths from IED’s since they have been here either. They’re either lucky or crazy.

My best time of being here was when I had dinner with the town mayor. We were invited to his home and I had a long talk with him about my home and his and the differences in our societies and we had a real good meal served Afghan style. An Afghan meal is served Middle Eastern style sitting down on cushions with shoes off and the meals are served on individual plates for all to pick from and nan (flat bread) with it, and all eaten with fingers and some flatware as needed. He has only two wives right now, but he has room for two more if anyone is interested.

My worst time that I can tell you about is when I hurt my back when I first came here. I lost thirty pounds and had to be on steroids and testosterone pills and I had to be on light duty for about a month, and developed the reputation for being a “slacker” and I have had a hard time living that down. The other bad thing is that they have a hard time bathing the way our standards dictate. They do bathe, about once a week, and they have to haul water from a stream or well and then heat it on the stove using dung/wood/straw fires. So it doesn’t happen enough by our standards and sometimes our nostrils are assaulted.

Living here, I think that I have learned a very important thing. I have learned that you cannot always see people the way you expect to see them. That is so cliché, I hate to even bring it up, but it is really true. The person you think should be your worst enemy, turns out to be your greatest ally. If I hadn’t tried to be really open to the people around me, I would have had a really hard time seeing the good in the Afghani people, or in the New Zealand people. I think that social workers could learn something from that. Instead of being hung up on the differences that people offer to you, even people who look like you, really try to enjoy the diverse experience that person is offering to you. Look at it this way: that person is there in front of you and isn’t going anywhere. You can either accept them the way they are, learn from them, and experience the feelings of change in a dignified and calm manner that allows you to build a relationship with that person. Or you can freak out because something is totally different from you, you can make yourself and that person have a really negative experience, and really miss the whole point of being with other people.




There is one thing that I could hope social workers would know about us, soldiers here in the desert. Please respect us. Please write to us and let us know what it is like to live in the world we miss so much. Please know how much we want to come back to you and how equally much we want to be mates to our colleagues and do our best for them. Please stay loyal to us even though we are so far from home. We are staying loyal to you, at least most of us are. Remember us in your prayers. And above all, don’t be ashamed of us and what we are doing. It does matter what politics say about us. It’s hard for us to admit that we are here for reasons we don’t agree with a lot of the time, but when we hear our country say the same thing, it really hurts our feelings. Like, it is ok if we say those things in private, but in public and in our hearts, we are united and loyal to a president who is our commander in chief. But to know that our country is only half way behind us, well, it sort of takes a lot of “reason” out of our missions. So please respect that we are sweating and missing our families and dying out here, out of loneliness or bullets or both, and that we need even an illusion of a united country to welcome us home. We don’t want you to be ashamed of us. We want you to be proud of us.

Research suggests that because of the unique situations soldiers are exposed to, when we come home and need counseling, I would ask that social workers have a smattering of knowledge about different types of therapy geared for us. For example around the soldiers I knew at home from deployment, we found that types of therapy like TF-CBT or EMDR (Russell & Friedberg, 2009) tend to help in the long term than more traditional forms of therapy. Also, we would like social workers to learn about relationship issues that crop up for us when we get back home. Research shows that depression, sexual problems and communication problems are all a factor between soldiers and our spouses (Goff, Crow, Reisburg, & Hamilton, 2007). In the real world, that is the truth, and when we come back, it would be nice for counselors to know the specific troubles that plague marriages between deployed soldiers and their spouses when the soldiers come home after the honeymoon period.

I think there is one main thing I have learned here. People are people, all around the world. We all basically want the same thing: love, support, children, food, shelter, employment, something that makes us get up in the morning and try even though the day before was a complete failure. I think that if social workers can learn to see those basic traits, they will have an easier time making a relationship with a person than if they took a rigid us vs them attitude.




Bibliography
French, L. M., & Parkinson, G. W. (2008). Assessing and Treating Veterans with Traumatic Brain Injury. Journal of Clinical Psychology , 64 (8), 1004-1013.
Goff, B. S., Crow, J. R., Reisburg, A. M., & Hamilton, S. (2007). The impact of individual trauma symptoms of deployed soldiers on relationship satisfaction. Journal of Family Psychology , 21 (3), 344-353.
Matins, M. S. (2005). The Commander Emergency Response Program. Joint Force Quarterly (37), 46-52.
Russell, M. C., & Friedberg, F. (2009). Training, Treatment Access, and Research on Trauma Intervention in the Armed Services. Journal of EMDR Practice and REearch , 3 (1), 24-31.