1

Combat Studies Institute Press

US Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

Michael G. Brooks

General Editor

Eyewitness to War

Volume III

US Army Advisors

 in Afghanistan
Cover: US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bauer instructs Iraqi Army Soldiers

Photo by Mate 2nd Class Katrina Beeler, US Navy
Eyewitness to War

Volume III

US Army Advisors in Afghanistan

– Oral History Series –

General Editor

Michael G. Brooks

Interviews Conducted By

John H. McCool

Laurence J. Lessard

Dr. Lisa Beckenbaugh

Lynne Chandler Garcia

Lieutenant Colonel James Evenson, USMC Reserve

Major Conrad Harvey

Major Brad Helton

Major Marty Deckard

Major Glenn King, New Zealand Army

Captain Shawn O’Brien

Transcribed by

Colette Kiszka

Jennifer Vedder
ii

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

US army advisors in Afghanistan / Michael G. Brooks, general editor; interviews 

conducted by John McCool Laurence J. Lessard; transcribed by Colette Kiszka, Jennifer 

Vedder. 

p. cm. -- (Eyewitness to War Oral History Series) 

ISBN 978-0-9801236-8-5 

1. Afghan War, 2001---Personal narratives, American. 2. Soldiers--United States-

¬Interviews. 3. Military assistance, American--Afghanistan. I. Brooks, Michael G. II. 

Title. III. Series. 

DS371.413.U8 2010

958.104’7--dc22

2009001603
iii

Foreword

Eyewitness to War Oral History Series: US Army Advisors in Afghanistan is the 

third publication by the Combat Studies Institute that makes exclusive use of oral 

history. This volume is a product of interviews obtained by the CSI Operational 

Leadership Experience (OLE) project and our Contemporary Operations Study 

Team (COST). 

The interviews used in this volume range from a senior officer who 

conceptualized the idea for Task Force Phoenix, the Coalition Joint Task Force 

that execute a broad-based training, mentoring, and assistance program aimed 

at improving the Afghan National Army’s (ANA) ability to field mission-ready 

operational commands, to embedded transition team members assigned to coach, 

teach and mentor their ANA counterparts. The interviews are in their own words; 

they provide frank commentary to a range of topics including pre-deployment 

training, logistics support, poppy eradication (and some of the corruption they 

encountered associated with that task) and integration of Special Forces with 

conventional infantry on operations.

As the US Army continues its advisory mission in Afghanistan and in other 

countries around the globe, the relevancy of US Army Advisors in Afghanistan

grows and should be on the reading list for Soldiers tasked with this mission. 

Soldiers interested in this topic are invited to read two other CSI publications: 

Occasional Paper 18—Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, 

Vietnam, and El Salvador, and Occasional Paper 19—Advice for Advisors: 

Suggestions and Observations from Lawrence to the Present.

CSI—The Past is Prologue!

 Roderick M. Cox

Colonel, US Army

Director, Combat Studies Institute

v

Introduction

Everybody has a story to tell. In 2005, the US Army Training and Doctrine 

Command gave the Combat Studies Institute (CSI) the mission to capture some of 

those stories by conducting oral interviews with Soldiers who have participated in 

operations during the Long War. 

In this third volume of the Eyewitness to War series, the narratives of US 

Army Advisors in Afghanistan are unvarnished, first-person accounts of Coalition 

personnel deployed in support of OEF. Those accounts, because of the immediacy 

of their production, some of them just months after their return from their missions, 

will be of incalculable value and service to historians, researchers, media and 

future generations of Soldiers and civilians to come. The accounts have been only 

lightly edited for clarity to remove the occasional use of excessive profanity and 

the rare injurious personal attack. The content and tone of the interviews remain 

untouched. No classified information has been included in this book and the 

opinions expressed by the participants are their own.

Michael G. Brooks

General Editor

vii

Contents

Foreword.............................................................................................................. iii

Introduction.......................................................................................................... v

Interview Abstracts.............................................................................................. 9

1) Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry............................................................... 15

2) Colonel Dominic Cariello............................................................................... 57

3) Colonel (P) Mark Milley ................................................................................ 95

4) Lieutenant Colonel John Schroeder...............................................................111

5) Lieutenant Colonel Michael Slusher ............................................................ 135

6) Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Stevenson Jr.................................................. 157

7) Major John Bates.......................................................................................... 183

8) Major Stephen Boesen...................................................................................211

9) Major John Clark (UK)................................................................................. 231

10) Major Thomas Clinton Jr. (USMC)............................................................. 243

11) Major Hurel Johnson ................................................................................... 263

12) Major Rich Lencz ........................................................................................ 275

13) Major Christopher Plummer........................................................................ 289

14) Major Douglas Ross .....................................................................................311

15) Major John Tabb.......................................................................................... 329

16) Major William Woodring............................................................................. 355

17) Command Sergeant Major Jeff Janke.......................................................... 369

18) Master Sergeant Michael Threatt................................................................. 397

About the OLE Team....................................................................................... 437

9

Interview Abstracts

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry. Lieutenant General Eikenberry’s first 

assignment to Afghanistan was as Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation–

Afghanistan (OMC–A) and US Security Coordinator from October 2002 until 

September 2003. His second assignment was as the Commanding General of 

Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan (CFC–A), from May 2005 until January 

2007. In this interview, Lieutenant General Eikenberry focuses primarily on the 

timeframe of his first assignment as Chief of OMC–A. He discusses the early 

development of the Afghan National Army (ANA) from scratch the establishment 

of the Afghan Central Corps. Lieutenant General Eikenberry also discusses his 

experiences with the internationalizing of the mission, along with donations of 

Soviet-style equipment and how it made standardizing equipment problematic. 

Lieutenant General Eikenberry continues to discuss topics that include his 

relationship with Afghanistan government officials, security sector reform, creating 

military doctrine for the ANA, establishing a Ministry of Defense and General 

Staff, the recruiting efforts for the ANA, the disarmament, demobilization, and 

reintegration (DDR) program, and the creation of Task Force (TF) Phoenix. 

Colonel Dominic Cariello. Colonel Cariello was the commander of the 

57th Field Artillery Brigade, Wisconsin National Guard. When he was given the 

opportunity to lead an embedded training team (ETT) to Afghanistan, Colonel 

Cariello arrived in theater in February 2006 and, during his 11-month deployment, 

commanded two regional corps advisory groups and served as the senior mentor 

to two Afghan generals, Major General Rahmatullah Raufi and Major General 

Abdul Khaliq, the commanders of the Afghan National Army’s 205th and 203d 

Corps respectively. In this interview, Colonel Cariello begins by discussing 

the pre-deployment training he received at Camp Shelby and then moves into 

his “15-minute right-seat ride” upon arriving in country, which led immediately 

into planning for Operation RIVER DANCE—the poppy eradication program 

conducted jointly with the ANA. 

Colonel Mark Milley. Colonel Milley was the commander of 2d Brigade, 10th 

Mountain Division and was deployed in support of OEF from May to December 

2003. In this interview he talks about the creation of Task Force Phoenix, assuming 

ownership of training the ANA from the Special Forces, and the establishment of 

the Kabul Military Training Center. He also talks about helping to stand up the 

Central Corps headquarters and its staff. 

Lieutenant Colonel John Schroeder. Upon relinquishing his three-year 

command of a Wisconsin National Guard field artillery battalion, Lieutenant 

Colonel Schroeder was offered the opportunity to volunteer for Embedded Training 

Team (ETT) duty in Afghanistan. He was mobilized in January of 2006 and until 
10

his redeployment in January 2007, served variously as the ETT leader assigned to 

3d Kandak, 2d Brigade (3–2) of the Afghan 203d Corps, the 2d Kandak, 1st Brigade 

(2–1), 203d Corps, and finally as the 203d Corps executive officer and deputy 

commander mentor. In this interview, Lieutenant Colonel Schroeder discusses first 

the pre-deployment training he received at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, then moves 

into the process of getting into theater, meeting and establishing rapport with the 

Afghan units as well as his 16-man advisor team and also the circumstances that 

found him changing from 3–2 Kandak in Gardez to 2–1 Kandak in Orgun–E and 

later Ghazni after the ETT leader for the latter unit was relieved. 

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Slusher. Lieutenant Colonel Slusher, a Kansas 

National Guard soldier, served on an ETT in various places throughout Afghanistan 

in 2006. Slusher begins his interview by discussing the treatment of other states’

guardsmen in the Wisconsin National Guard’s mission as well as the generic 

nature of pre-deployment training and his willingness to take the most difficult 

assignments. He explains his role in Operation RIVER DANCE, why he viewed 

it as a failure, and the importance of opium to everything in Afghanistan. Slusher 

closes the interview by stating that he approaches other cultures with humility and 

humor, that many of the problems in Afghanistan have to be worked out by the 

Afghans and that successes in Afghanistan might not be ready solutions for Iraq 

or elsewhere. 

Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Stevenson Jr. Lieutenant Colonel Stevenson 

discusses his November 2005 through August 2006 deployment to Afghanistan 

during which he served as chief of the Special Initiatives Group in Combined 

Forces Command–Afghanistan’s CJ5 or Plans section. In this capacity, Stevenson 

was responsible for the planning and oversight from a policy perspective of 

several key programs, among which were: the partnership program with the ANA 

and Combined Joint Task Force–76; the Afghan National Police (ANP) support 

program; reestablishing provincial coordination centers in the southern and eastern 

regions of the country with the mission of coordinating, synchronizing and deconflicting all provincial security, and development operations by maintaining and 

promulgating a common operational picture of army, police, National Directorate 

of Security, and development/reconstruction organization activities. 

Major John Bates Mobilized in April 2005 for service in Afghanistan as a 

company ETT leader, Major Bates, a full-time National Guardsman, arrived in 

country in July and linked up with 1st Company, 1st Kandak, 1st Brigade of the 

205th Corps. During his roughly five months as an ETT leader as part of Task Force 

Phoenix 4.0, Bates’ infantry company was operationally controlled by Task Force 

31 and was assigned to Special Forces A–teams to conduct operations all over the 

five provinces in the Afghan southern area of responsibility. Midway through his 

tour, he briefly acted as a brigade logistics officer before serving out the remainder 
11

as the executive officer/aide-de-camp to the Commanding General of Combined 

Security Transition Command–Afghanistan (CSTC–A), Major General Robert 

Durbin. 

Major Stephen Boesen. From May 2007 through May 2008 Major Boesen 

served variously as the chief of three different ETT teams within 1st Brigade, 203d 

Afghan Regional Security Integrated Command–East, and as the operations officer 

for 1st Brigade, ARSIC–East. During his tour, he was based, again variously, out 

of Khowst, Gardez, and Ghazni. In this interview, Boesen—an Iowa National 

Guard infantry officer with, at the time, more than 21 years in service—begins by 

discussing the three months of pre-deployment training he went through at Fort 

Riley and then of his advisory experiences with the 203d Corps. 

Major John Clark (United Kingdom). In this interview, Major Clark 

discusses his deployment from February to May 2006 as the commander of the 

Afghan National Army Training Team (ANATT) which was designed to mentor the 

leadership at the noncommissioned officer school at the Kabul Military Training 

Center (KMTC).” In this interview, Clark details the three courses he oversaw as 

part of Task Force Phoenix: “a junior NCO course to train lance corporals and up, a 

senior sergeant course, and a company quartermaster sergeant/regimental sergeant 

major-level course. ‘We spanned the chain of NCO courses. It was a mixture of 

classroom work and field-craft out of the back of the camp.’” 

Major Thomas Clinton Jr. (USMC). Major Clinton deployed to Afghanistan 

in April 2004 to lead a 13-man embedded training team assigned to coach, teach, 

and mentor the 1st Battalion of the 3d ANA Brigade which was considered a 

commando unit. By the time he and his fellow Marines got in country to begin their 

six-month tour, the commandos “were in combat operations and they were pretty 

well versed in what they were doing.” Clinton further talks about his work with a 

number of Special Forces units, the manifold difficulties he had obtaining necessary 

equipment, how higher headquarters often did not have an adequate understanding 

of the real-world problems he and his team had to deal with and which periodically 

required them to do what “Marines have probably done throughout the centuries—

begging, borrowing, or stealing from anywhere we could.” 

Major Hurel Johnson. Major Johnson deployed as a volunteer from the US 

Army Reserve to embed as a trainer and mentor with the ANA. Johnson transitioned 

through Fort Benning’s Continental United States (CONUS) Replacement Center 

with a week of training and in January 2004, Johnson traveled to Bagram and then 

on to Camp Policharki, Afghanistan which is east of Kabul, in order to join Task 

Force Phoenix. The five-man team mentored the Afghan garrison commander and 

his staff. Assisted by contractors from the MPRI Company, Johnson and other 

advisors addressed all manner of base camp and station operations as well as 

support. 
12

Major Rich Lencz. Major Lencz served on an ETT as the advisor to the S3 

and the commander of 1st Battalion, 2d Brigade, 203d Corps. He later served in 

2d Battalion, 2d Brigade, 203d Corps, in Paktika Province from January 2007 to 

January 2008. Lencz was paired up with the other nine members of the team and 

received pre-deployment training at Fort Riley. Once the team arrived in theater, 

they were paired up with the ANA at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Bermel. The 

team would conduct three to four patrols with the Afghans per week. During these 

patrols, they would hand out humanitarian assistance items to the villagers or they 

would travel to the combat outposts (COP) around the village of Shkin. During 

the course of the deployment, there were two missions with the 10th Mountain 

Division aimed at clearing al-Qaeda and Taliban forces out of the Bermel Valley: 

CATAMOUNT FURY and CATAMOUNT FURY SURGE. Lencz talks about the 

operational role the ETT and the ANA played in support of these missions and 

assesses their effectiveness. 

Major Christopher Plummer. For most of his January to November 2005 

deployment, Major Plummer served as the training and fielding officer for the entire 

Afghan National Army or ANA, focusing on marksmanship, small unit tactics, and 

fielding combat, combat support, and combat service support battalions countrywide. Working under the Office of Security Cooperation–Afghanistan, Plummer 

was based out of Camp Eggers but his duties took him “all over the country in 

some of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan.” In this interview, he discusses 

in great detail and with remarkable candor about the full range of his experiences. 

Plummer talks about numerous equipment shortages the ANA had and his poor 

opinion of the general officer leadership he saw, the extensive interactions and 

doctrine-related challenges he had with Coalition partners including the British, 

French and Germans, his assessments and personal waging of the counterinsurgency fight, as well as his analysis of enemy capabilities and motivations. 

Major Doug Ross. From July 2005 through July 2006, Major Ross—a field 

artillery officer in the Kentucky National Guard—supported Operation ENDURING 

FREEDOM on an ETT assigned to the 4th Kandak of the 1st Brigade, 205th Corps 

and operating in Regional Command–South in the Kandahar region. Based out of 

Camp Shir Zai, Ross was dual-hatted as both the operations officer and the artillery 

mentor of this combat support Kandak. In this interview, he discusses the training 

and mentoring process, his relationship with a partnered artillery battalion from 

the 82d Airborne Division, as well as the operations conducted by his Kandak 

in support of infantry units. The principal focus though, is Ross’ participation in 

the major poppy eradication operation in the spring of 2006 which was known as 

Operation RIVER DANCE. 

Major John Tabb. Major Tabb deployed from January 2007 until January 

2008 as both a border police transition team (BPTT) chief and an ETT team chief. 
13

An armor officer, Tabb operated in Farah Province in the southwest of Afghanistan. 

His area of operations belonged to International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 

nations like Italy and Spain and had no US, British, or Canadian forces. After 

volunteering for the mission, Tabb began training under Fort Riley’s relatively new 

program in October of 2006, where he felt they should have received a much more 

extensive block of instruction on marksmanship with the AK47. In Afghanistan, 

his team was stationed about 25 miles away from the regional headquarters at 

Camp Stone, located just outside of Herat. His team advised the 6th Afghan Border 

Police Brigade which had responsibility for the entire Iranian border from Nimruz 

Province in the south to the Turkmenistan border in the north. 

Major William Woodring. As an Alaska National Guardsman, Major 

Woodring served on a brigade ETT for the 209th ANA Corps as part of Task Force 

Phoenix 3.5 from February 2005 through February 2006. In this interview, he 

begins by discussing the less than adequate pre-deployment training he and his 

fellow ETT members received at Fort Hood, Texas, saying that it was manifestly 

not geared toward teaching them to advise indigenous forces. Subsequently their 

team was broken apart and, once in country, Woodring was placed with an entirely 

new team. Based in Mazar-e-Sharif, Woodring personally advised the Afghan 

operations and intelligence officers in the conduct of a broad-ranging stability 

and support/counterinsurgency mission. He was also heavily involved in making 

sure national elections took place as smoothly as possible. Woodring talks about 

the constant problem of corruption, the difficulties he faced communicating with 

his Afghan counterparts and the two US brigades his ETT served under: the 76th 

Infantry Brigade from Indiana and the 53d Infantry Brigade from Florida. 

Command Sergeant Major Jeff Janke. Command Sergeant Major Janke 

volunteered for ETT duty, was mobilized, went through pre-deployment training 

at Camp Shelby, Mississippi—of which he discusses both good points and bad 

in great detail—and finally arrived in country in February of 2006. He took up 

his duties in Gardez as the mentor for the Afghan 203d Corps sergeant major. 

Janke begins by discussing the overall role of NCOs in the ANA and then, more 

specifically, how his comparatively young 28-year-old Afghan corps sergeant major 

handled the myriad challenges that arose from his position. These challenges were 

compounded by his relative inexperience but also mitigated by his many positive 

traits as well. 

Master Sergeant Michael Threatt. Master Sergeant Threatt is a veteran of 

two deployments to Afghanistan as part of 3d Special Forces Group (Airborne)—

the first from January to August 2004 as the 1st Battalion, Charlie Company 

operations sergeant, the second was from June of 2005 to February of 2006 as 

an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) team sergeant in 2d Battalion. Threatt, 

in this wide-ranging and introspective interview, comprehensively and expertly 
14

discusses a range of subjects and issues related to his experiences in Regional 

Command–South (the Kandahar area) and in Regional Command–East (the 

Paktika Province’s Bermel District). During his two tours, Threatt was involved 

in everything from security, reconnaissance, air assault, and other direct action 

missions (both mounted and dismounted) and to advising and training the ANA and 

border police, as well as executing a variety of civil affairs, counterinsurgency, and 

psychological operations. He discusses a number of these missions against (and 

ambushes by) al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in varying degrees of detail according 

to operational security restrictions. He is remarkably informative as well as candid 

in regard to dealing with interpreters, the rapport building process, and working 

and fighting with indigenous forces. 
15

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry

27 November 2006 

This is an interview with Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry (KE), the 

Commanding General of Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan 

at the time of this interview which is on his experiences in Operation 

ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF). The interview is conducted by Dr. Lisa 

Beckenbaugh (LB) from the Contemporary Operations Study Team or 

COST at the Combat Studies Institute or CSI, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

The team compiles a history of OEF covering the period October 2001 to 

September 2005. We are located in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and the time 

is approximately 0810 hours on 27 November 2006. This is an unclassified 

interview. If we ever enter classified territory, please either respond in 

unclassified terms or simply say you’re not able to answer. Thank you 

for agreeing to this interview, Lieutenant General Eikenberry. By way of 

introduction and for the record, please state your name and rank. 

KE: My name is Karl Eikenberry, Lieutenant General. 

LB: Since you have served in Afghanistan twice, could you please list your 

duty positions and the dates of deployment for each mission. 

KE: My first assignment was as Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation–

Afghanistan (OMC–A) and US Security Coordinator. That was from October 2002 

until September 2003. My second assignment was as the Commanding General 

of Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan (CFC–A). That was from May 2005 

until present. 

LB: For the purpose of this interview, we are going to primarily focus on your 

experiences with the Office of Military Cooperation–Afghanistan. Were you the 

first military leader of this organization? 

KE: I was not. I was preceded by a National Guard brigadier general. 

LB: What was your command relationship with Combined Joint Task Force 

180 (CJTF–180), the US Embassy, and US Central Command (CENTCOM)? 

KE: I was under the command of the commanding general of CJTF–180. At 

that time, that was Lieutenant General Dan McNeill from the time of my arrival 

until May 2003 and then subsequently Lieutenant General McNeill transferred 

command to Lieutenant General John R. Vines. So I was under their direct 

command line. It is hard to define with a precise military term but I had a, let’s say, 

security assistance responsibility that took me directly to US CENTCOM and that 

was more in terms of programmatics and resourcing. Then I had a coordination 

relationship, actually more of a partnering relationship, with the US Ambassador 

there wearing my hat as US Security Coordinator. A lot of the work that I was 
16

doing in Kabul at that time with working on security sector reform took me into 

areas of policy that were the purview of the US Ambassador, so I had a close 

coordination relationship with him. 

LB: How did you resolve conflicts between all of these organizations? 

KE: It is interesting looking back at that time, Lisa. I would not characterize 

the year that I was there as filled with a lot of tension between the different 

organizations. The mandate that was given to our command, wearing my hat as 

Chief of Office of Military Cooperation–Afghanistan, the building of the Afghan 

National Army of ANA, there was not really a divide between what CJTF–180 

wanted accomplished, what CENTCOM wanted accomplished, and what the 

US Embassy wanted accomplished. So at that particular time on the ground, 

there appeared to me to be a pretty good common view of what needed to be 

accomplished and a unity of effort that was achieved just by careful coordination, 

ensuring that people were kept informed of what each other was doing. 

LB: I reviewed the CENTCOM campaign base plan and it seemed that initially 

CENTCOM did not perceive the requirement to build an Afghan National Army 

or any security forces. When did the Coalition realize that this was going to be a 

key task? 

KE: Well, I think one of the reasons that I was sent to Afghanistan in October 

2002 was that by that point in time there was clearly, as I was going in, recognition 

that the building of an Afghan National Army would be central to success. I can’t 

talk about what preceded that. CJTF–180 arrived in Afghanistan in May of 2002. 

Certainly by the time I arrived in October 2002, the mission was clear that one of 

our central tasks would be the fielding of a capable Afghan National Army. On 

the other hand, as I look at the time that I arrived in early October 2002, my own 

headquarters on the ground as a two-star general consisted of about 15 people 

working out of a couple offices in the US Embassy. As an adjunct to that there was 

a small planning staff and then the actual training mission was being conducted 

by a Special Forces battalion that was on the ground. So I think as I arrived, the 

mandate was clear and it was a central task but it is also fair to say that up until that 

time there had not been any resources that were committed. 

LB: As the situation evolved, how did OMC–A fit into the overall CENTCOM 

campaign base plan? 

KE: I would say, again, during my first year on the ground, I really considered 

myself a subordinate unit of Lieutenant General Dan McNeill and he had a clear 

line of operation established in his campaign plan which was for the Office of 

Military Cooperation–Afghanistan and the building of the ANA. During that 

period of time, we were still in a phase of the development of the Afghan National 

Army where the army had not achieved sufficient mass and sufficient quality and 
17

experience capability that they were able to go out and conduct combat operations. 

So from October 2002, when I arrived there, until about the summer of 2003, as 

far as the amount of interaction between the operational command of CJTF–180 

and my command, there weren’t strong linkages that were there. Now, that started 

to change by the summer of 2003, in the last several months because we finally 

started to develop capabilities where ANA units could deploy outside of Kabul and 

when they could deploy outside of Kabul they could start to work much closer with 

the operational forces. 

LB: I have read that the Afghan National Army was designed around the NATO 

model. What was the original design of the force structure? 

KE: It was a phase development for the Army. When I arrived in October 2002, 

the emphasis had been placed entirely on the development of the operational forces 

and the first phase of the development of the Afghan National Army would be the 

establishment of one corps, an Afghan National Army corps being the equivalent 

of a very light American light infantry division, so mostly light infantry with some 

enablers. This corps was called the Central Corps and it was to be established in 

the greater Kabul area. The thinking was that we would build up this one Central 

Corps which would then, in terms of its leadership and getting the systems right, 

serve as the foundation and the central point from which the ANA operational 

forces could expand based upon the experiences gained.

The second attribute of the Central Corps was that it would have enough combat 

power that it would be able to act on the behest of the central government and move 

forward into any area of Afghanistan and impose its will upon any contending 

factional force. So that was the idea. Then there was also the more distant thinking 

that after that task was accomplished, we would then start expanding the presence 

of the ANA slowly over time into the different regions of Afghanistan. So, not long 

after that we started to conceptualize the idea that perhaps there should be four or 

five regional corps with the Central Corps in the middle and then maybe four other 

corps that were established throughout Afghanistan and wouldn’t have as much 

capability as the Central Corps. 

LB: When was it first seen that this would happen? 

KE: The thinking was that it would not happen until we had the Central Corps 

fairly well established. If I recall, Lisa, I would have to go back and look. We were 

thinking in terms of late 2004 that we might be able to achieve that. So perhaps 

maybe later in 2004 we might then start to plant flags outside of Kabul and slowly 

build up. So we had looked at this process of building a strong Central Corps as 

being maybe a two-year or a two-year-plus process, with the training of the whole 

Army beginning in May of 2002. So, that was the thinking on the operational force 

but by late 2002 or early 2003, our analysis of the problem was rapidly evolving.
18

I just discussed the operational force in some detail but we had a group of 

staff officers on the ground who were quite capable and they started to think in 

terms that if we were going to build a holistic force, a holistic army, a complex 

organization and a complex institution, obviously building combat forces was only 

part of the equation. So, by late 2002, we were thinking in terms of a complex 

organization that would consist of a Ministry of Defense and General Staff at the 

top which would give policy and operational direction as well as a set of sustaining 

institutions such as an intermediate between the Ministry of Defense and General 

Staff and the operational force and so, the idea of logistics commands, medical 

commands, and so forth, and then finally at the base would be the operational 

force. That thinking began by late 2002. By the spring of 2003, we were starting to 

develop fairly mature plans for that. 

LB: So that significantly changed your mission? 

KE: Yes, very significantly. To go back on that, my mission when I went in as 

a first task was to build an Afghan National Army, defined—as the problem was 

handed to me—to build a Central Corps and we will think about the next phase 

after we get a little bit further into this. So, the evolution of thinking of a Ministry 

of Defense, General Staff, and sustaining institutions, and a complex organization 

all evolved after early October 2002. 

LB: In your opinion, was there pressure to increase the size of the Afghan 

National Army and pressure to do it even more quickly than originally planned? 

KE: Not on my watch. Now, there was some tension or pressure let’s say, or 

expectation, to continue to produce infantry battalions according to the production 

schedule that we had established. What was good was, as I arrived, I was given 

as a first principle that it would stay all-national and it would stay all-ethnic and 

Lieutenant General McNeill was extremely supportive when we reached decision 

points about whether or not we should proceed with the training of another infantry 

battalion. If I were to go to him and report, as was the instance several times, that 

it was not all-ethnic, that we had a much higher percentage of Pashtuns or Tajiks, 

let’s say, and it was not reflecting the ethnic demographics of the country, he was 

very good about showing support for that. So, there were several times where we 

delayed the training of infantry battalions because the Afghan recruiting system 

wasn’t able to deliver the necessary all-ethnic characteristics that we insisted upon. 

Now after my departure, there were a series of decisions made to rapidly accelerate 

the growth of the Afghan National Army. 

LB: Now I am going to ask a few questions about the joint mission. The Bonn 

Agreement stipulated that the Coalition countries support the mission. Could you 

describe some of the international support you received? 
19

KE: Yes. Prior to my time, Lisa, in May 2002, when the mission of the training 

of the ANA first developed, just prior to that, the International Security Assistance 

Force (ISAF) with the British and the Turkish, had helped trained up Afghan 

National Army units. At that time, it really wasn’t a structured Afghan National 

Army program but they were pulling together Afghans and trying to put them in 

battalion formations. So there were several battalions that were trained up with 

their oversight, primarily the Turkish, and then when our mission began in May of 

2002, again, before I got there, the first group on the ground was our US Special 

Forces. They had the task of just training infantry battalions. Their narrow task 

was to train infantry battalions. So they did so but they also partnered with the 

French Army. Then the French Army, with us, went through a period of time where 

the French would train one infantry battalion and then we would train another. In 

fact, it was quite interesting. There was a story before I arrived where we were 

having an extraordinary problem with pay, the ANA soldiers’ salaries. We had 

some bureaucratic obstacle that we had run into and the French actually delivered 

for us until we could work through our own governmental bureaucratic problems. 

So, there was a period of several months where the French were taking care of 

the pay for the army to solve that. Now beyond that, very early on in the process 

of our work in Afghanistan with building the ANA, we did try to internationalize 

the mission. By the fall of 2002, after my arrival, we were able to work pretty 

effectively with key allies and get them engaged in important aspects of the army 

building program. I will give you some examples.

By the fall of 2002, the British had agreed and had established a 

noncommissioned officer training program which has since evolved into a very 

sophisticated program. The French provided for officer training. Then we also 

brought in a series of other countries that were able to do niche missions or make 

niche contributions. As an example, in 2003, we had the Mongolians coming in 

quite expert at using Soviet style artillery such as D-30 122-mm Howitzers. So, 

the Mongolians provided mobile training teams but there are many examples of 

countries that were then making niche contributions. As I recall, the Romanians 

came in and did work with the old T-55 and T-62 Tanks. The Bulgarians came in 

and they did work with Soviet armored personnel carriers. 

LB: So there were a lot of countries that had experience with Soviet-style 

equipment or weapons? 

KE: There was a combination of western contributions that were being made 

with regard to leadership training and basic training and then there were a series 

of countries that had the equipment experience with the Soviet-type of equipment 

that were coming in and helping out in that area. 

LB: How many representatives from Coalition countries were on your staff 

and in what capacity did they serve? 
20

KE: I can’t recall, but I was about to say though that we did have a pretty 

good representation of military on our staff. We had, as I recall, on the staff itself, 

Canadians, British, French, and some of the Eastern European countries that made 

contributions in that area. So, we had a pretty good Coalition group in there. 

LB: Was most of the equipment Soviet-style equipment that you received for 

the Afghan National Army? 

KE: It was, certainly in terms of the weaponry and the ammunition. The vast 

majority of it was Soviet-style. It included AK47s, D-30 122-mm Howitzers and 

the tanks and the mortar systems were Soviet bloc. Then there was also other 

materiel that was delivered that was more generic like boots, ruck sacks, and just 

basic equipment. Then there was a hodgepodge of all kinds of vehicles that were 

being donated but the donation of these various kinds of equipment caused great 

difficulties in terms of standardization for the ANA.

Then, once the decision was made to rapidly accelerate the growth which was a 

decision made after my departure, this started to become a very significant problem. 

It was more manageable when you were talking about one corps in the Kabul area 

but with the decision to expand rapidly with different corps and different brigades 

within those corps and different battalions within those brigades having different 

kinds of vehicles and different kinds of weapon systems, that started to cause some 

great difficulties. Then secondly, it was just the amount of transaction costs that 

are involved in working through a donation system. That is, a country with great 

intentions might offer 1,000 AK47s and 500,000 rounds of ammunition to go with 

them but the amount of staff effort that would have to be put into trying to get the 

delivery of that equipment, actually seeing it through to delivery to the force and 

then the training of the force on that kind of equipment, was extraordinary.

So there is a tipping point, a balance, when you go with a donation system, 

where you have to consider what price you are going to pay for not standardizing 

force and what price you are going to pay for taking less than very significant 

donations when clearly it is worth the effort and it is cost effective from a staff 

viewpoint to take this very large donation because there is a huge payoff. That is a 

political issue as well because you want to keep as many countries engaged in this 

fight as possible and it is very difficult when you are offered a donation from some 

country to reject it. At the end of the day, in many instances, when you fall below a 

threshold of standardization problems and sufficient quantity and quality, you are 

probably better off to ask the country just to donate money. In terms of donations, 

there is also another flaw with the donation system or another weakness with the 

donation system. Generally, when countries make a donation, it doesn’t come with 

the training, it doesn’t come with the sustainment package, and it doesn’t come 

with the ten years of guaranteed spare parts. So in cases of donations of particular 
21

kinds of vehicles and small donations of particular kinds of weapons systems, 

we found those not to be very cost effective. Over a series of several years, the 

equipment simply would not be maintained or operating properly. 

LB: Was there a conscious decision to use Soviet style weapons because the 

Afghans were familiar with them? 

KE: There was. There was absolutely that factor. One was that they were 

familiar with them. Two was that it is rugged equipment and it can take a lot 

of abuse which in the Afghan environment is a good characteristic. Then third 

was the idea that with those kinds of systems in Afghanistan, there was not only 

a familiarity with them but getting spare parts would not be a challenge. As an 

example, when we finally assembled the T-55 and T-62 Tanks for the ANA, it 

was extraordinary when those were first delivered to Kabul from different parts of 

Afghanistan as different militia commanders were under the disarmament process 

and were letting go of some of their hardware and were donating or turning it over 

to the central government. My sense was that this equipment would be impossible 

to maintain because there would simply not be sufficient spare parts available, if 

nothing else. However, the Afghans, after 30 years of warfare and having to figure 

out how to fight in a very autonomous and independent manner, turned out to be 

extraordinarily clever and adept in keeping things running. They would go out to 

the old junk yards where there were rusting Soviet T-55 and T-62 Tanks and they 

would scrounge parts and cannibalize the rusting tanks to keep things going. So 

that decision to go with Soviet systems in the first several years of the development 

of the ANA probably was the correct decision. Now, at this point in time as we look 

at it, should there be a shift to more standardized equipment and better equipment? 

The answer is probably yes. If you go back to that first premise and the use of 

Soviet equipment, it was that the Afghans were capable of operating it. That’s true. 

If you had given them a higher level of equipment at that time, they didn’t have the 

leadership, the maintenance systems, and so on that could maintain it but you have 

to continue to look at this enterprise of building security forces because conditions 

change. As the leadership gets better and as these sustaining institutions do kick in 

and start to develop their own competencies, then you might want to go back on 

some of your initial decisions and maybe change them. Our assumption at the time 

was that we couldn’t maintain the equipment. That was the correct assumption. It 

was much easier to maintain Soviet equipment and they could not maintain more 

sophisticated equipment. I think that was a good assumption at that time but that 

has probably changed now. 

LB: Could you describe your working relationship with the other services such 

as the Marines, Navy, and Air Force? 
22

KE: At the time I was there, Lisa, it was very different from now. It was very 

much an Army-centric program. If I recall, we did have some Marines with us. 

In fact, at that time, we had some very good Marines that were assigned to the 

mission but there were very few from the US Navy. Now we have the US Navy in 

2006. Then, because we had made a decision in the 2002/2003 time frame that we 

were not going to, at that point, develop a very robust Afghan National Army Air 

Corps, we also did not have a real robust Air Force presence with us. 

LB: How was your mission affected by the staffing of OMC–A in 2002 and 

2003? 

KE: When I reported in October of 2002, as I said, we had about 15 people on 

the ground and then we did have a plans section that was an adjunct. They initially 

had a coordination relationship with me but then I went to Lieutenant General 

McNeill and asked if they could be chopped under my command. So Lieutenant 

General McNeill was extremely supportive of my efforts. As soon as I got on the 

ground and made assessments that if this was really a main line of operation for 

Operation ENDURING FREEDOM in Afghanistan that we would need to have 

much more of a headquarters staff implementation capability, we started building 

rapidly. 

LB: So was it easy to find people? 

KE: Well, Lieutenant General McNeill was very good about this. Remember 

that his headquarters was much smaller in terms of an operational headquarters 

than we have today on the ground but Lieutenant General McNeill, wherever he 

could fill my requests, would send people from his headquarters down to join my 

headquarters. He was generous in that area and then he gave me the full support 

as I went quickly back to US CENTCOM through him showing what organization 

I needed to build to quickly achieve success. That did take us a period of several 

months, as I recall Lisa, to actually start getting delivery of people on the ground 

but we had good support from Lieutenant General McNeill and I had very good 

support from US CENTCOM. 

LB: How well do you feel the services supported your needs for personnel, 

equipment, and funding? 

KE: In terms of equipping, because of the decision we had made to go with a 

donation based system, I would have to say that the services were doing what they 

were being asked to do. In terms of personnel, I would say that because of the way 

we were building our headquarters as an ad hoc headquarters, it was not a table of 

organization and equipment or TOE kind of headquarters. We had to build it on 

the fly. So this expression about the joint manning document kind of headquarters 

where it is a headquarters that is made up for a particular mission, ad hoc, tailored, 

and then the call goes out for individual fills to come in, I would have to say that 
23

the record was decidedly mixed. There were a lot of phone calls that were being 

made late at night back to different commands and a lot of direct hires were going 

on from OMC–A to help populate our headquarters as fast as we could. Generally 

what I would find was that back here, at that time, there was not stress on the force 

yet. We were not in Iraq yet so there was great support for whatever I was asking 

for. 

LB: Did that change with the invasion of Iraq? 

KE: Yes, it did. 

LB: Was it a little harder to get personnel, equipment, and funding? 

KE: It was. For instance, our embedded trainer task force, Task Force Phoenix, 

which was a brigade-level command serving as the nucleus of our embedded 

training or mentoring effort within the ANA with the first Task Force Phoenix

being an active duty brigade from the 10th Mountain Division. I asked that they 

be replaced with another active duty brigade but I was told that no, it would be a 

National Guard brigade that would take their place. This was in the fall of 2003 

before my departure and I think that was already starting to reflect the stress on 

the force. 

LB: Afghanistan had next to no infrastructure or military systems in place 

when you took on this mission. Can you describe the process of basically starting 

from scratch? 

KE: Well when you start from scratch, I don’t even know where you start to 

tell the story of starting from scratch but I think if I recall a couple of things about 

the challenges of this starting from scratch, one was in terms of the leadership 

challenges that we were facing. Where do we draw our officers who are going to 

man the ANA battalions, which were being churned off the assembly line in tenweek training cycles? How long will it take us, through pre-commissioning and 

then initial training, to develop a young officer, and then how long will it take to 

develop a battalion commander? We recognized early on, based on our system of 

pre-commissioning in four years and growing a battalion commander in 18 years, 

that we didn’t have 22 years to wait to have the first battalion commander of the 

ANA and that would also be a little bit patronizing toward the Afghans themselves 

to assume that they didn’t have quality people out there and that it would take 

22 years of training. They happen to have very experienced fighters, people that 

had left Afghanistan during the time of very serious trouble but were professional 

officers with great education and great skills prior to their departure.

How do you put this back together again and how do you go through a vetting 

process for officers and leaders given that you also, at that same time, want to 

keep this thing all-national and all-ethnic? Then there was a political factor that 
24

sat behind that too. What is going to be the balance between a former communist, 

a former mujahedeen, and a western trained officer, all from different political 

factions? So suffice it to say that to work through that problem in about 10 week’s 

time for each battalion, it was going to be a very imperfect outcome. It was an art 

form in keeping political balance, ethnic balance, and competency. That was just 

for the officer corps. For the noncommissioned officer corps, the Afghans had no 

experience in having a professional noncommissioned officer corps. In fact, the 

last true army that they saw in the field was the Soviet trained Afghan Communist 

Army of the 1980s, reflecting the Soviet model of noncommissioned officers being 

less than what they are in our system as the backbone of our forces.

So, all of that posed extraordinary challenges for us in terms of figuring out, 

as we moved forward, this requirement to start fielding an army quickly and it 

was not necessarily because of pressure from higher commands to get this army 

going immediately. There was a feeling on the ground of pressure to start to deliver 

something because the Afghans were looking to the left and to the right and they 

were trying to figure out where their national identity was and we knew that fielding 

an incredible army would be essential in delivering that.

So there were those problems and at that same time that we were trying to 

deliver this army rapidly, we also knew that there was the tension against that of 

needing to have an army that was values-based and was a disciplined force for 

the long term. If I look back to October 2002 we had a time rebuilding an army 

in terms of just some observations such as infrastructure that was as simple as 

communications with cell phones with spotty coverage for communication with 

the Afghan Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, in general, you would have 

to get in your vehicle and drive down to an office or to a headquarters to have a 

conversation.

The state of the Kabul Military Training Center, the basic training center in 

eastern Kabul where the training of the ANA was occurring, had a terrible mess 

hall for the Afghans and horrible sanitary conditions. It was a tough winter in 

the winter of 2002. My first thought one day, as I was walking around the Kabul 

Military Training Center on a particularly bitter December day in 2002 was, “This 

is the Valley Forge of the Afghan National Army.” I remember talking to the Chief 

of the General Staff, General Bismullah Khan, about the situation and I said that 

our Special Forces had said there was no heat out at the Kabul Military Training 

Center so everyone was having some pretty rough nights in their sleeping bags 

but that our Special Forces commander said that until the Afghans had heat on 

their side of the compound that they were not putting heaters on their side to show 

solidarity. 
25

Well, I remember General Bismullah Khan smiling at me and saying, “I’m 

very happy to hear that and that is very moving but wouldn’t it be better if both 

sides had heat inside their barracks?” The road from Kabul out to the Kabul 

Military Training Center was in terrible condition. You could probably maintain 

about a five to ten mile per hour speed to get out there. We were rapidly trying to 

get a construction program going with the Army Corps of Engineers, which was 

to rapidly evolve into a hundreds-of-millions dollars program in October 2002 

when I arrived there but we had about three or four members of the Army Corps 

of Engineers trying to do construction projects in a construction program that was 

worth hundreds of millions of dollars and they were quite overwhelmed by the 

enormity of the challenge. 

LB: Things as basic as rebuilding buildings, communications lines, and water? 

KE: Rebuilding implies that there was something there to begin with. This was 

almost all new building. 

LB: Then what about basic communications, fixing roads, and water? 

KE: Yes. It was just an extraordinary set of challenges. I have been in the 

service for 33 plus years and I have never seen a set of infrastructure challenges, 

leadership challenges, and organizational challenges as we were facing in 

Afghanistan in October of 2002. 

LB: How did you prioritize? 

KE: That is a great question. What we did was we formed a very good team 

of who we thought were all the important stake holders in this mission and it 

was a complex group of people. It included the engineers, the planners, and the 

embedded trainers of the ANA. We formed a very cohesive team with them and 

then started quickly to partner with the Afghans but in terms of what we prioritized, 

we prioritized the building of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, 

the reorganization of it, and the reform. That was priority number one. Priority 

number two was the steady development and deployment of the Afghan National 

Army operational forces. Then our third priority was the slow development of the 

sustaining institutions. 

LB: How did the security situation on the ground affect either reconstruction 

or field training? 

KE: In 2002 and 2003, it did not have a real significant impact on the 

development of the army. A lot of our activity during that period of time was really 

close around Kabul. We were building the Ministry of Defense and General Staff, 

Kabul based. We were building the Central Corps deployed in the greater Kabul 

area. There were occasional deployments outside of Kabul but nothing very robust 

at that point in time. Then a lot of sustaining institutions were to be developed inside 
26

the greater Kabul area as well. So one, it was Kabul based, and then secondly, the 

security situation certainly in eastern Afghanistan and southern Afghanistan was 

better than it is today in the main. 

LB: I have read the Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessments 

where embedded trainers said that they were experiencing shortages in uniforms, 

equipment, and vehicles. Can you discuss any of the shortages that you faced? 

KE: For the embedded trainers or for the Afghan National Army? 

LB: For the embedded trainers. 

KE: There were recurring challenges. As the Afghan National Army was 

increasing in size and then the need to keep expanding our embedded trainer 

base was growing, we did have problems in terms of coming up with sufficient 

communications equipment and vehicles and we always found ourselves just a 

little bit behind. 

LB: Also on the equipping of the Afghan National Army? 

KE: We had problems with the Afghan National Army. As I said, we went with 

a donation-based system. I talked about different donation problems but another 

donation problem was the inherent unreliability of the ability to project when 

donations would actually arrive. So there would be discussions that a donation 

was going to be made and then we would come to bank on that donation being 

delivered at a certain time only to be somewhat infrequently disappointed with the 

lateness of delivery. So that was even why we were trying to build just the Central 

Corps. When the decision was made to accelerate the growth of the Army in late 

2003 or early 2004, our inability to keep up with the equipping of it then became 

a very acute challenge. 

LB: Did the Afghan government have money to buy its own equipment? 

KE: They did not and this remains a very difficult problem in terms of our 

building of the Afghan National Army. What assumptions do you make about the 

host nation and its level of resources that it will be able to put toward, if nothing 

else, operational maintenance costs? Now, early on in our development of the 

Afghan National Army and the reformed Ministry of Defense, we did work hard 

with the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Finance to ensure that parts of 

what we thought would be appropriate contributions from the Afghan budget 

would be put into paying for some of the security costs.

So the Afghan government today has picked up a large responsibility for the 

payment of Afghan National Army salaries and they are paying for some of the 

operating costs. I believe today that amount is about 100 million dollars but back 

at that time, we were still at a stage where we were paying, I think, darn near 100 

percent. We were already beginning discussions with them about how they needed 
27

to start to make contributions over each year. However, as the fourth poorest 

country in the world with a very weak revenue system and tremendous problems 

with just their ability to collect and spend revenues, I am under no illusions that 

in the case of Afghanistan that they are not going to have to rely on a tremendous 

amount of support from the international community and the United States for 

the next 10 to 15 years, to include probably at least a portion of their operational 

maintenance expenditures. 

LB: How heavily did you rely on contractors for training and mission support? 

KE: We very early made a decision that we were going to use contractors in 

various parts of our mission and we could divide those into several areas. We relied 

on contractors or utilized contractors to help us with the reform and the mentoring 

of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. We used them to perform niche 

duties within our own headquarters of OMC–A. Then we also committed a group 

of contractors to the training of the Afghan National Army, in particular what was 

called the Kabul Military Training Center, which is the rough equivalent to the 

US Army Training and Doctrine Command. Now, one of the interesting things 

that I think we did get right on the use of contractors was there was a discussion 

that we had among ourselves about whether or not we should have a contracting 

wing that was given a tremendous amount of autonomy and then would report 

eventually up to the Chief of OMC–A. I elected not to use that model. Instead, I 

went with a model in which I would always have inherent US military oversight 

of each one of our, let’s call them, directorates under my command. So I would 

always have inherent US military lead and then contract teams filling different 

requirements would be reporting to them but blended in with other US military 

or US Department of Defense civilian teams. I think, at least for Afghanistan, that 

was the correct approach. 

LB: During the time you were in Afghanistan, the government was in its 

infancy. Who were some of the Afghan leaders that you found were influential? 

KE: Clearly, starting with President Hamid Karzai, then Minister of Defense 

Fahim Khan, Minister of Interior Ali Jalali, and National Security Advisor Zalmay 

Rasoul, were all very important for me. That was the national security community. 

Then at that time not selected but now the current Minister of Defense, Rahim 

Wardak, who is more of an advisor to the president on security. He was, to me, very 

influential as well in terms of his insights into how the ANA should be developed 

and clearly he was a highly respected leader, who, with the reform of the Ministry 

of Defense, became the Deputy Minister of Defense and then went on to become 

the Minister of Defense. There was another leader that I should mention too, the 

current Chief of the General Staff, General Bismullah Khan. He was selected under 

the reform to become the Chief of the General Staff of the Afghan National Army 

and he was also, and is, quite an extraordinary leader. 
28

LB: What was the process for working with the Ministry of Defense? 

KE: Well, during the first about nine months of my tour of duty, the Ministry of 

Defense had still not gone through a reform process. So it reflected very much the 

old Soviet organization and was further complicated by the Taliban years in which 

the Taliban made adjustments to the Ministry of Defense, none of which added 

much in terms of efficiency or competence.

So my relationship with the Ministry of Defense, at that time, Lisa, was very 

much kind of a personalistic relationship to some of the critical actors who were 

in ministry like Marshall Fahim Khan who was the Deputy Minister of Defense, a 

Lieutenant General named Barialai, and a very capable Army G3 named Lieutenant 

General Shir Mohammad Karimi. What we were working toward over that period 

of time was an agreed upon reform for the Ministry of Defense, with about three 

months to go, we actually began the implementation of it. So with the reform of 

the Ministry of Defense, we reached that point where, obviously with personalities 

of people always mattering, we actually then had the template for an efficient 

organizational structure. So we were then able to start developing processes that 

are essential for a complex organization to work as opposed to making everything 

just based on personalistic ties and handshakes. 

LB: Did you have any problems working with Fahim Khan? 

KE: Fahim Khan was a critical leader in the Northern Alliance after the 

assassination of Commander Ahmed Shah Masood. During the war against the 

Taliban, Fahim Khan was really the first among equals of the Northern Alliance 

and Fahim Khan, when the Northern Alliance then moved into northern, eastern, 

and western Afghanistan to Kabul, was a critical individual in terms of having 

at his disposal the organized forces of the Northern Alliance. Fahim Khan was 

the person who actually took the Afghans from a Northern Alliance factional 

army composition and set the conditions that allowed them to transition to the allnational volunteer professional model that we are working on today. He willingly 

participated and led his commanders, encouraged his commanders, to take 

part in the disarmament process of these different factional forces Without that 

disarmament the door for the robust fielding of the Afghan National Army could 

not have been opened. So he played a very important role in that transition and 

he remained loyal to this enterprise of the new government of Afghanistan. Then 

President Karzai went through a transition of his own cabinet and Fahim Khan 

stepped down as Minister of Defense and paved the way for Minister of Defense 

Abdul Rahim Wardak. I think Fahim Khan would be the first to say that Rahim 

Wardak, if the task is to field a new professional Afghan National Army based 

upon his own experiences to include professional military education and years of 

combat experience like Fahim Kahn, was a good choice to take the development 

of the Afghan National Army to a new level. 
29

LB: Did you work closely with other ministries like the Ministry of Interior? 

KE: I did. I worked very closely with the Minister of Interior, Ali Jalali. 

LB: On what types of projects? 

KE: I had the additional hat of coordinator for security sector reform. With 

security sector reform, there were five pillars of security reform in Afghanistan. 

There was the building of the army. There was an agreement in April 2002 in 

Geneva among the G8 (“Group of Eight”) countries that different major nations of 

the G8 would take responsibility to lead particular aspects of security sector reform. 

So we got the army, the Germans got the police, the British got counternarcotics, 

the Japanese got demobilization as well as disarmament and reintegration, and the 

Italians got justice. So my US Security Coordinator hat was to try to tie together 

those five strands of security sector reform. I came across the notion quite early in 

my stay there by late 2002, that police reform was not keeping pace with our army 

development program. The Germans were concentrating very heavily on training 

and somewhat narrowly based they had established a very excellent police training 

academy for officers and noncommissioned officers but it wasn’t broad based and 

it was rather slow. So by late 2002, I was working with the Minister of Interior, Ali 

Jalali, to see what we could do to try to find ways to accelerate the development 

of the police and to make it a much more comprehensive program like the army 

program. I also worked with Ali Jalali as we saw early on that there were challenges 

with border security which is in one of those grey areas on whether it is a military 

problem or a police problem. So we were working together very closely to see 

what we could do to help the border police with the border police being under the 

responsibility of the Ministry of Interior. 

LB: How did the initial Afghan view of a national army differ from the type of 

army that you were trying to develop? 

KE: Looking back, it is hard to say what the Afghan view was and that was a 

big part of the problem that we were having of trying to get the Afghan view of this. 

What I would say is that if you look back at that period of time, the great challenge 

that we faced in 2002 and 2003 and still face today, if you look at the history of 

Afghanistan by the late 1970s, is that the security institutions of Afghanistan were 

already highly suspect by most of the people.

You had that period of time with heavy communist influence before the Soviet 

invasion. So the army and increasingly the police and the National Director of 

Security, which is kind of a combination of their CIA, FBI, and KGB welded 

together, all those security institutions were suspect. Then by the 1980s, as the 

Soviets rolled into town, they were not suspect, they were puppet institutions of 

repression.
30

Then you go into the 1990s and the mujahedeen armies lacked discipline and 

there were cases of them committing outrages and depredations against their own 

people. Then you go into the Taliban area. So why do I go through all of this? If you 

are a leader in Afghanistan today, here in 2006 or at that time in 2002/2003, when 

do you recall there was a credible Afghan National Army and an Afghan National 

Police? A lot of the leaders that we have today in Afghanistan, for instance President 

Karzai who is in his late 40s, are in their 40s and 50s. They really in their adult 

lifetime have not seen what a good police force all-national, and a good army allnational, look like. What do they really look like? What do they deliver? What are 

their attributes? Worse, they are suspicious of centralized security forces because 

they have been fighting against them most of their lives. So it is the idea of how 

do you get national leaders in a new Afghanistan, who are inherently suspicious of 

national security forces and are much more inclined by way of experience to rely 

on personalistic ties such as friendship ties of the Northern Alliance and friendship 

ties that go back to tribes and families that have fought together, that is where their 

real trust is. Their trust is not in this new experiment called the Afghan National 

Army and the Afghan National Police.

That is less of a problem today than it was in 2002 and 2003 but at that period 

of time it was extraordinarily difficult to, as we saw the problem, field an all-ethnic 

force respected by all the people as an a-political pillar that would be out there 

to give people hope that this country could come back together again. Trying to 

achieve that has proven to be a tall order. 

LB: You not only have to convince the people of the value and the integrity of 

the army, you have to convince the army officers and soldiers themselves, correct? 

KE: Correct. Over time, we have seen that the corporate identity of the Afghan 

National Army has increased and even by 2003 we were starting to see that they 

were a much more resilient force with a good sense of identity. Outside of that, 

if this is going to be an Afghan National Army and it is going to really be an 

Afghan National Police force, what I have said is that the soul of that army can’t 

be breathed into the army by a foreign military power or a foreign military force 

on the ground. Only the Afghans can give their army a soul and its identity. That is 

why it is absolutely imperative that if this is going to work that the civilian leaders 

of Afghanistan and the tribal leaders of Afghanistan, have to embrace that army as 

their own. That has proven to be the toughest challenge. 

LB: How did you begin the process of creating a military doctrine for 

Afghanistan? 

KE: As I was telling you earlier about what we were dealing with at the time, 

truly the developing of a military doctrine, in terms of the thinking here at Fort 

Leavenworth about the development of a sophisticated military doctrine, when 
31

you don’t have any school system in 2002 except basic training. You are looking 

left and right at the group of officers from the Ministry of Defense that are sitting 

around and then the General Staff is looking at you and one says, “Well, I have 

been to Fort Leavenworth in my career,” and another says, “Well, I trained at the 

Frunze Academy,” and then the third one says, “Well, I’m a mujahedeen and I 

despise both of you. I take great pride in that I’ve never been anywhere except 

fighting in the hills.” How do you pull all of that together into military doctrine? 

What I would say is that in 2002 and 2003 it was relatively simple.

We were going to train just solid light infantry. It would be capable of 

performing reasonably well at platoon and maybe at company level given the threat 

that we were looking at during that period of time. A battalion would be more a 

training, accountability, and logistics headquarters. Small unit tactics would be 

very important but more important, when I think in terms of doctrine, the real 

doctrine that we were developing was back to the first principle of all-national, 

well-disciplined, and respect for the rule of law. That was the overriding doctrine 

of the Afghan National Army. 

LB: How did recruiting work? 

KE: Recruiting in 2002 relied very much on the Ministry of Defense that 

existed at that time to deliver quotas on time to the Kabul Military Training Center, 

which at that time, 600 made up an infantry battalion. 

LB: How would they get the recruits? 

KE: They would get the recruits through ways that we will never know. They 

went through their own networks. Very much at that time, it was through networks 

of personalistic ties that existed through the Ministry of Defense and through the 

various militia forces that existed around the country. They would convince young 

men, sometimes not so young men, to come in and sign up and join the force. 

So that would be the soldier level. Then sets of personalistic ties would draw the 

officers for the force with the officers arriving with rank and no pre-commissioning. They were just handed to us as the officers for a battalion. What we did right 

early on though, was that we were just relentless and rigorous in terms of ethnic 

balance.

So there were personalistic ties and that worked to bring the soldiers and 

officers in, but we did a pretty good job of keeping track of ethnic balance. We 

did get that right and whenever it would get out of whack, we would slow things 

down until they could produce an ethnically balanced set of recruits and then we 

would move forward again. That program began to change then. By 2003, we were 

rapidly starting to develop what was to become a recruiting command.
32

Every week, I was making a trip sometimes a day and sometimes overnight trip 

and going out with leaders of the central government of Afghanistan, the still to be 

reformed Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, to meet with government and 

tribal leaders in many of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. There would be huge 

meetings which the Afghans call shuras and we would have leaders from Kabul 

stand up and talk about the new Afghan National Army and why it made great 

sense for their sons to join this Afghan National Army. 

LB: Was this a publicity program? 

KE: Yes, albeit Afghan style We had recruiting posters that were being put up 

in Kabul and then that expanded out to the different cities of Afghanistan but to get 

back to this issue about the doctrine of the army, frankly I wasn’t thinking about 

a fighting doctrine at that time. I was thinking of just light infantry and keeping it 

simple. It was the attribute of all-national to create excitement that this was going 

to be a respected force.

So talking about recruiting posters, still today, if you go into Kabul and you 

go around some of the big traffic circles, there are recruiting posters about joining 

the Afghan National Army. Every recruiting poster that is up will show a mix 

of Afghan soldiers and it is clear when you are looking at this wedge of Afghan 

soldiers with the map of Afghanistan behind them that you are looking at a Hazara, 

an Uzbek, a Tajik, and a Pashtun.

So we got on the recruiting piece of this quite early on. We got extraordinarily 

great help from, at that time, US Army Recruiting Command. They sent us some 

first class officers to help us out. So by 2003 the recruiting was really starting to 

become, by that point in time, much more of a system which we would recognize 

in the United States. I think that when I left in 2003, we already had four provincial 

recruiting offices that had been established and now 33 out of the 34 provinces 

have recruiting offices. They have quotas and they have to keep things ethnically 

balanced within their province. So we got on that relatively early on and I think we 

made pretty good progress within the first year. 

LB: How did you vet the incoming recruits, especially since for most of them 

there was no written record of their background? 

KE: That proved to be a real challenge as well, especially in a society where 

communications are weak. There is not great census data, there are no bureaucratic 

traditions, and there is a 20 percent literacy rate. So how do you work through 

vetting? What we evolved to was a system in which you would have village leaders 

or elders who would take responsibility for when a young man would join the 

Afghan National Army.

At that point, we actually started to have recruiting stations that were stood 

up and it was a requirement that a village elder or parent would actually put the 

thumbprint on the piece of paper as a soldier vetted.
33

Now, the Afghan National Army’s G2 section has worked hard to develop its 

own counterintelligence capability and they do a degree of vetting as well. What 

is interesting is that in that 2002 and 2003 period and still today, we have not had 

instances where Afghan National Army soldiers have turned on each other or have 

turned on the embedded trainers. Of course, I’m knocking on wood when I say 

this, but what you will find is there is a lot of talk about how you have to ensure 

good vetting goes on and you have to have a vetting process and you have to have 

a counterintelligence system. At the end of the day, where is the real test going to 

come, where is the real vetting going to take place? It is going to take place within 

the unit itself. If you have a good unit and if you have good formations, that outlier 

that might have been planted in there or came in with another purpose, he will be 

discovered by his colleagues and that is the best vetting process. 

LB: When you began your recruiting efforts, did you find that most of your 

recruits had military experience against the Soviets or the Taliban or were these 

primarily green recruits? 

KE: In the initial year that I was there, say October 2002, a much higher 

percentage of the group included experienced fighters against the Taliban and in 

some cases the more senior officers had fighting experience against the Soviets. 

That began to change by the summer of 2003. By then, with each battalion that 

was coming in, we saw the percentage of recruits at the soldier level without any 

military experience or without any militia experience steadily increase. I hesitate 

to give you a precise number but if I recall, by the summer of 2003, I think we 

were on the order of perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the recruits had no experience at 

all. They were fresh.

Now with the recruits, the vast majority of them that join the Afghan National 

Army have no military experience. With the noncommissioned officers, they 

were the best and the brightest of each one of these battalions that were going 

through basic training. The best and the brightest were given the chance to be 

a noncommissioned officer. They were pulled aside and given a special training 

course. The officer corps, even into 2003, was still those that were being directed 

to be in the Afghan National Army and they did their own vetting process for them. 

Even that is changing now in 2006 with the establishment of Officer Candidate 

Schools and we have an Afghan National Army Military Academy that has been 

established which is lagging somewhat behind, as to be expected. 

LB: I have read that desertions were a particular problem. What measures were 

in place to encourage retention and were changes made to encourage retention? 

KE: Desertions were a very significant problem. There was an array of 

challenges that we faced with desertion. Fundamentally, there was leadership 

as a big problem. It is a volunteer force. This isn’t a draft army. The ethos that 
34

we were trying to develop with the Afghans would be one of positive leadership 

as we define it but you had severe leadership problems. You had problems with 

corruption. You had problems with the broken infrastructure that we talked about, 

the dilapidated infrastructure of Afghanistan. There were also problems as fundamental as just getting paychecks to soldiers on time. Then, when a soldier got his 

paycheck, that soldier wanted to get that paycheck home. Unfortunately, if you 

were assigned to Kabul and your family lived out in Herat, this could be a two or 

three week trip home and back in order to get the paycheck there because at that 

time, there were no ATMs.

Then there were problems with the facilities. There were problems with the 

quality of the mess halls and I could go on and on and on. So yes, there were 

some very severe challenges but there is one story that I always like to relate 

from Afghanistan from that period of time about one of the very best battalion 

commanders of the ANA at that time who has since gone on to be promoted to 

brigadier general. He is a brigade commander—Aminullah. I was talking to him 

after I had been in Afghanistan for about 11 months and I was getting ready to 

leave soon. Aminullah was just a great leader, so I asked him this question. I said, 

“Aminullah, I see that your personnel manning levels right now are at about 40 to 

45 percent. Let me ask you, if you get a reload of fresh recruits, how much time 

would it take to get back down to 40 to 45 percent or would you hang onto them 

this time?” He said, “No. I would hang onto them. I won’t have these attrition 

problems again.” I said, ‘Well, why is that?” So Aminullah then went through the 

checklist of problems that I just gave you and he said, “Remember, I was the third 

battalion to be formed up. Do you remember how the barracks conditions were 

terrible as we had sanitation problems, food problems, logistics problems, we had 

broken weapons, and we had vehicles that weren’t assigned to me? So here I was 

the battalion commander and I had no resources and I didn’t have communications 

equipment.” On he went. I was a little bit disappointed with that answer because it 

was all material based. He also talked about pay problems but I guess it would add 

up to then an explanation of why he thought, since a lot of those had been fixed, 

that he could right it the second time around with new recruits.

Then as he was walking away from me or I was walking away from him, he 

called back to me. I was very good friends with him. He was one of these guys 

who I had been through a lot of pains and triumphs with but he said, “There is one 

more thing I want to add and it is probably the most important reason I know I 

can hold onto these guys now.” I said, “What is that?” He said, “It is because we 

believe in ourselves now. Remember a year ago when I first came here and we got 

this thing going, most of us didn’t think that this would last. We thought this was 

an experiment by the United States of America and that you guys would work with 

us for a while and then you would let go and move onto something else.” He said, 
35

“We believe in ourselves now. We believe this army is here to stay. So if you give 

me a group of good recruits, they will stay now because we believe in this.” 

LB: Well, we have to wrap up for today but I want to thank you very much for 

your time and willingness to support the Army mission in chronicling its history 

in OEF. 

This is part two of a two-part interview with Lieutenant General Karl 

Eikenberry. The time is approximately 1320 hours on 27 November 2006. 

This is an unclassified interview. If we ever enter classified territory, 

please either respond in unclassified terms or simply say you’re not able 

to answer. 

LB: My first question is what in your background as a military professional 

best prepared you for your mission in Afghanistan? 

KE: I would say there are two parts to this. The first would be for the mission 

of training the Afghan National Army. The best experience that I had was my time 

as a lieutenant in the 1st Ranger Battalion which was a very training-standards 

oriented unit with extraordinary emphasis on discipline and accountability in 

junior leadership. That probably served me the best in terms then of working with 

the new Afghan National Arm as to how you take a band of brothers and pull 

them together as a disciplined and training-oriented group. Then, in terms of my 

responsibilities as the security sector reform coordinator, the best experience I had 

was my time in political-military assignments. For instance, my assignment as 

defense attaché in China, where you have to deal with a very different culture and 

take a very patient approach in a complex international environment. It wasn’t 

about just imposing your will. It was building consensus, forging teams, and 

working through problems that you had to be able to look through a cultural prism 

in order to understand more clearly. So those would be the two experiences for my 

first tour of duty in Afghanistan that were most important to me. 

LB: Do you really think, and this may differ depending on your time period in 

Afghanistan, that there is such a thing as an Afghan nation? 

KE: Yes. I think that there is. In fact, if you talk about big surprises that I had 

on my first tour of duty, one of the big pleasant surprises I had was discovering 

that the Afghans do have a very deep sense of national identity. I had thought going 

into it, knowing very little about Central Asia and even less about Afghanistan, my 

preconception was that I would find a group of tribes and various ethnic groups and 

factions, especially after the three decades of warfare that they had been through 

that would turn out to be just a very fragmented group of individuals. As I got on 

the ground, I developed an appreciation for the Afghans. Despite great pride in 

their tribal identities and great pride in their ethnic identities, at the end of the day, 

their first identification in the main was as an Afghan. Now, having said that, they 
36

have wildly different ideas about what the Afghan state should look like. There is 

a very firm consensus on their part that they are Afghans. 

LB: What was your budget to begin training the Afghan National Army? 

KE: You know, I don’t recall. What I do recall is that we had an adequate 

program. We were using a fund that had been established called the Afghan 

National Security Force Fund. It was primarily for the building of the army. There 

were other funds that were available for the police building which we didn’t have 

the responsibility for at that time. We had the army.

I do recall that there were sufficient funds when I arrived, as we projected to 

have for the establishment of the first corps of the Afghan National Army, what we 

called the Central Corps. Even if there wasn’t on the day I arrived, we were quickly 

in a position, as I recall that we had lined up the necessary and appropriate funding 

to field the first corps of the Afghan National Army. In addition to that, we had funds 

that allowed us to start to put into place other parts of the overall army building 

program. So, for instance, the training base for the army that was established, 

the Kabul Military Training Center, had funds available for development of the 

facilities there. We had funds that were available for contractors as we started 

to broaden our definition of the mission. That was the first of funds that were 

available. Then, when we took it to the next level, where the program started 

to become much more comprehensive in nature, where we went to building the 

Ministry of Defense and we started thinking about the sustaining institutions and 

needed many more trainers and more contractors to support us, much more in the 

way of funds for facilities, that was really the next of the funds that we went after. 

This is where we identified a new and much larger set of requirements over the 

next several years and that was what we had to fight for to get approval. 

LB: That was a supplemental? 

KE: All supplemental. All of this was supplemental, primarily supplemental, 

and then the use of some operational funds where you would have that overlap of 

things that we were doing that were operational but were benefiting the Afghan 

National Army. In the main, money was supplemental with donations. 

LB: Did you work in conjunction with the International Security Assistance 

Force of ISAF at all? 

KE: I did. In a couple of areas we went to ISAF. You asked earlier about how 

much Coalition or non-US we have engaged in the building of the Afghan National 

Army. We were very opportunistic in the sense of looking around to every resource 

that was available in Afghanistan and where we could tap into expertise. So one 

of the things that we did with the NATO ISAF forces, at that time their mandate 

only being for the greater Kabul area and the Central Corps was all being built 
37

in Kabul, we went to them and they provided some opportunity training for the 

Afghan National Army and they provided some mobile training teams of their 

own. For instance, I recall that the Italians did some very good training with the 

Afghan National Army Central Corps for checkpoints. 

Then we got them to also sign up to start doing joint patrolling in the greater 

Kabul area. So that was one primary area where I worked with NATO ISAF. 

The second was in my capacity as the security sector reform coordinator. As I 

put together this international team of the different key actors of the international 

community that were involved in various aspects of security sector reform, this 

also included the commander of the ISAF forces. So, whenever I would bring 

together that coordinating body, NATO ISAF was there as well. 

LB: What types of training were necessary to help the Ministry of Defense 

stand up? 

KE: As I recall, there was collective training that we had identified and then 

there was individual training. It was after we had gone through the reform process 

of the Ministry of Defense and it was tiered. So we had tier one, the highest level, 

down to, the protocol equivalent of one-stars and two-stars within the MOD. I say 

the MOD but it was the MOD and the General Staff. Two different entities but 

the reform was going on simultaneously. So what I’m explaining was not only 

for the MOD but it was for the General Staff. We had collective training for them. 

That collective training had two purposes. One was to first of all just explain the 

reformed Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, the structure of it and how 

we would anticipate the process to work. Then the second, probably the more 

important of the two, was the team building aspect of this. This is where we would 

bring the people from the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff around the 

table, a group that had not worked with each other before, with some degrees of 

suspicion and with different backgrounds and different ethnic groups.

So we brought them together simply to break bread and start to build a team. 

That was on the collective side. Then on the individual side, using the mentor 

program very robustly and occasionally going to the extent of putting teams 

together from the MOD and General Staff based upon their functional expertise 

and their functional area, we would send them back to the United States for maybe 

a one or a two week visit. I will give you an example. I don’t know if this is 

correct for that time or not but it is an example of the things that we were doing. 

Let’s say, taking the head of the recruiting command or the portfolio, the assistant 

minister who had responsibility for recruiting, we would put together a team from 

the Ministry of Defense and General Staff and they would go back to the United 

States for a week or two weeks and learn more about their functional area. Then we 

would also have multiple training teams coming forward from the United States 
38

who would help them along in their functional area. This was very much where 

we used contractors but not always contractors. It was a blend of contractors and 

some uniformed military and some of them were Department of Defense civilians 

coming in, where there would just be the extended mentoring programs that would 

be more one-on-one, or one with the directorate, in working really tirelessly with 

these guys day in and day out helping them to develop expertise.

So we would have a pretty good blend over time of working within each 

functional domain and building up expertise and competency and then periodically 

bringing a whole team together for the team building exercises and seminars where 

we would help them along with working through their collective processes. 

LB: So were you kind of teaching them the basics of what their jobs all entailed? 

KE: Yes, in each area. Like with the comptroller, we had a very strong finance 

team that just sat down and rolled up sleeves and in certain cases it was starting 

with the very basics of developing budgets and accounting. In the case of our 

engineering team, sitting down with Afghan counterparts and helping them. We 

found that there were widely different capabilities there. For instance, I do recall, 

actually in the area of the comptroller, in the area of medical, and in the area of 

engineering, that there was some tremendous expertise that existed on the Afghan 

side. There was a group of people, older officers either trained in the west or by 

the communists that then disappeared during the 1990s or went into remission 

then and then came back. They had some great skills and were highly motivated 

individuals.

So it was dusting off some of their skills, bringing them up-to-date, adapting 

to what would be appropriate for Afghan standards and getting them going. There 

were other areas though. For instance in the area of the Inspector General, another 

example would be in terms of the Strategy and Policy Directorate where these 

were really foreign concepts but even still with Afghan characteristics these were 

very much functions that were needed. Now, what we found that was probably 

the greatest difficulty we had was in separating the Ministry of Defense from the 

General Staff. The old Soviet model had really kludged all this together, so there 

was not a well-defined delineation between policy of the Ministry of Defense, 

representing the civilian side, and then policy in military direction provided by 

the General Staff. That was one of the hardest things that we had to accomplish, 

trying to define the roles and responsibilities in each one of those, with all of them 

wishing to gravitate to the side of the General Staff. It was the idea that, “If I’m 

a real person, I have to be wearing a uniform. I don’t like this idea of wearing 

civilian clothes and being in the Ministry of Defense.” 

LB: So was this a whole different idea of civilian control of the military? 

KE: That’s correct. 
39

LB: How did you integrate Afghans who maybe had considerable experience 

in guerrilla warfare but might not quite be ready to accept the new discipline 

required of the ANA? 

KE: That was one of the most profound challenges that we did face in standing 

up the Afghan National Army. You had very charismatic mujahedeen leaders who 

could not make the adjustment to being a commander in a regular conventional 

force in which you would need a standardization that would have to be applied 

along with a rigid military rule of law that would govern the organization and 

having to subordinate yourself to the hierarchy as opposed to being an independent 

commander in his own for years with a tremendous degree of autonomy and 

actually being a rule of law.

So there was no easy answer to this. In fairness to these mujahedeen fighters, 

some of them had fought brilliantly going back to the Soviet jihad. Many of them 

had fought very well in the Taliban years. Many of them were our allies in the war 

against the Taliban and some of them were our allies in the war against the Soviets.

So where do you draw the line in terms of who gets to come in as an officer in 

the new army and who should not? I think there was a fairly liberal approach in the 

first several years that had a lot to do with making sure that the Afghans perceived 

the Afghan National Army as doors open to all those who had contributed to 

Afghan security in the past. I think that as we went forward in the process, there 

was some attrition that occurred where some of these mujahedeen commanders 

self-selected to move out of the Afghan National Army on their own and decided 

that this wasn’t something that they wished to remain in. Then there were some 

that wished to remain in it but they had not sufficiently adapted to the new ways 

of doing business.

So the Afghan Ministry of Defense, sometimes with our recommendations 

but ultimately always with Afghan decisions, moved some of them. Now fast 

forwarding to today, we increasingly are finding that the Afghan Ministry of 

Defense and the General Staff seem to have now turned the corner in what they 

define as the necessary attributes of a new officer of the new Afghan National 

Army. One of the innovations that they have had of late, which is pretty interesting, 

is for some of the former mujahedeen leaders who have not had the benefit of 

professional military education. They have established a six-month course for 

them where they are pulled from the field and if they wish to continue they have 

to complete this six-month course. This has just started and we are not sure what 

the results will be but I’m cautiously optimistic that what we will see is those that 

would just like to hang on and not adapt, that the course itself will prove rigorous 

enough that they may elect at that time to leave the Afghan National Army. Then 

we will see a good group out there that really do want to stay in. They want to 
40

soldier and they are desperate to learn the necessary skills as a staff officer and a 

commander that this six-month course should offer to them.

Now, there is one other thing that I wanted to say about the Ministry of Defense 

that is important. Actually, I wish I would have said it during my presentation to 

the Leavenworth class here. I don’t think it is on your question list and it is about 

the establishment of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff and it applies 

really as well to the establishment of the Ministry of Interior and the police forces. 

In an environment like Afghanistan, you have to understand that it is imperative 

that this be an all-national force and that it be a reflection of all the ethnic groups 

and all the factional groups with all the different backgrounds of leaders who could 

be in the Afghan national security forces: communists, mujahedeen, and former 

pro-western officers. How do you finally get to the point that you are going to be 

able to select a group that is going to be the first tier and then how do you go to the 

second tier and then the third tier? What is the actual selection process? What we 

did was that we sat down with our Afghan counterparts and we came up with the 

tier one organization of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff.

Then the next step was, given what the tier one organization was, we spent 

a considerable amount of time in coming up with the job descriptions for these 

different posts. Then the third part was coming up with the qualifications that 

matched the job descriptions.

Now, these were not US civil service job descriptions or qualifications that go 

on for seven pages. These were pretty simple like you must be literate, cannot have 

committed war crimes, and then there were other aspects as well. For instance, if 

you were going to be the Judge Advocate General, you must have had professional 

military justice education and maybe a couple things about experience. So that part 

was done.

Then the next step was probably perhaps the most important. What I did was I 

spent an extraordinary period of time, for about three weeks of non-stop time from 

morning until midnight with an Afghan counterpart and I went and I briefed every 

political leader in Kabul. I briefed the President, at that time the four vice presidents, 

the cabinet, and every factional leader. This was before they had a parliament. So 

I went around and briefed and briefed and briefed that this was the plan and here 

was what the organization looked like. Here are what the qualifications and the job 

descriptions were and then here was how it was going to work.

We had established with President Karzai that the way it would work was that 

the Ministry of Defense would come up with at least four names for each position 

and then the President, meeting in consultation with his four vice presidents at tier 

one, would make the choices. The Ministry of Defense would come up with the 

first list of four nominations, it could be more. That would go to the President. The 
41

President then would sit down and before making any decisions could add names 

to the list if he wished in conjunction with the vice president, provided they met 

the qualifications. Then, based upon that, he would sit down in counsel and select. 

That process was painstaking and it took a lot of time but what it did was several 

things. As I look back, these were important and my sense at the time, the reason 

I was doing it, was that I anticipated the following. First of all, the Afghans did 

not really know, because of the chaos that they had been through in their times 

of trouble for over 30 years, what a merit-based and fairly selected Ministry of 

Defense and General Staff might look like and how the process would work. It 

was all with personalistic ties and no transparency. So we laid out the organization.

The next benefit of this was that the Afghans, because I was there, were thinking that this might not be entirely fair but at least the international community and 

the Americans had their eyes on this so there were referees in this process and we 

will trust them. They are trying to be as transparent as they can and if something 

goes terribly wrong in this at least we can get a hold of the Americans and talk to 

them about this, like if I think that my faction got trod upon. Then third, let’s say 

that you were the one who was trying to maximize your own gains in terms of the 

new distribution of power within the Afghan national security forces. If you were 

of that mind, the other thing of going around and briefing all the leaders was that 

you were putting them on notice that the international community was watching 

this. We were watching the process. So you were putting them on notice to be 

careful about overplaying their own hands. Everyone was going to try to maximize 

their own set of gains but they knew that there was a referee. So both on the good 

side and on the not so good side, the role of the referee was important there.

Then we went through this extraordinary six-week period of time when the 

nominations finally came in and the President added his list. We went through a 

six-week period from the time the President got the list until the announcements 

were made. In fact, they were made 48 hours before I got on the plane to finish 

my year’s tour in Afghanistan but it was a very good learning experience. To fast 

forward again to 2005, we did not do that with police reform and that was to my 

regret. Now I’m trying to go back on police reform and make up for that oversight. 

LB: Was that process continued through all the tiers then? 

KE: It was. Now, each time the delegation of authority for decisions went 

down and then eventually by the time it got to tier three, it was entirely within 

the Ministry of Defense but at different levels. We continued to make sure we had 

transparency, engaging with the Afghans to reassure them that the international 

community was watching and saying, “We are not here to make decisions but we 

are going to be here for a degree of assurance and transparency until you guys tell 

us that you have enough trust in each other and enough confidence in your own 

systems that you don’t need us anymore.” 
42

LB: How closely did you work with the Afghan government on disarmament, 

demobilization, and reintegration or DDR? 

KE: Very closely and for two reasons. One was in wearing my hat as the US 

security sector reform coordinator and the second was that if we were going to have 

success in building and fielding the army, we would have to have success in DDR. 

You couldn’t field the army while we had competing militia or factional organized 

forces with heavy weaponry contending for power and vying for control of the use 

of force. So the two processes, fielding the army and DDR, were processes that 

had to be linked. 

LB: How successful do you think the program was? 

KE: The program was very successful. Actually, the rigorous implementation 

of what was called DDR Phase One began in earnest after my departure and it 

succeeded to a far greater extent than I had thought. Now, the approach that we 

used with DDR Phase One was that we would concentrate on heavy weaponry. 

Accordingly, by going after heavy weaponry, you were going after the core power 

and the symbols of power of the major factional commanders around Afghanistan. 

Remember, up until this very organized and methodical DDR began in late 2003, 

we still had tanks, artillery, and even helicopters that were out there that were not 

under the control of the government of Afghanistan. A lot of them were sitting in 

tank parks and a lot of them were sitting on airfields but they were still very much 

under the control of the factional commanders, some affiliated with the former 

Northern Alliance and others affiliated with different commanders outside of the 

Northern Alliance. It did work well.

The government of Japan deserves a lot of credit for not only the material 

resources that they committed to the program but for their political leadership as 

well. The United Nations had the lead for implementation and I think they did a 

fairly good job. President Karzai also got behind the process very strongly but 

it was very much a balancing act because how do you call the heavy weaponry 

forward and bring it under control? Once again, each one of the commanders 

around Afghanistan was looking to his left and right as he was asking, “Is the 

commander on my left flank in the north Afghanistan and is the commander on my 

right flank in the west of Afghanistan turning in their tanks at the same time that I 

am turning in my tanks? Are some of my officers being allowed to join the Afghan 

National Army and are some of the guys in my province being allowed to join the 

army or am I being excluded while these other guys are joining?”

So, that was the relationship that existed between army building and at the 

same time demobilization. So, there were a tremendous amount of discussions 

and a tremendous amount of negotiations and bartering about who would turn in 

what and when but in the main, it went reasonably well. When I arrived in 2005, 
43

there was still one group, primarily from the Panjshir Valley, that had still not 

come forward with full demobilization and disarmament but after several months 

of work with them they also volunteered to join the process. 

LB: I guess that was my next question. How cooperative were the different 

faction leaders with building a national army and a national government? 

KE: It was a slow acceptance of the process. We went through a period of time 

from October of 2002 until maybe the next spring where we would see soldiers 

who joined the Afghan National Army and officers who had joined the army who 

were perhaps compelled by factional commanders to show up in order to check the 

block that their quota had been made but were not seriously engaged in the process 

or committing to it. On the other hand, we saw some that signed up who would go 

through the training, get issued their uniforms, and then we would not see them 

again. Sometimes we got I think, reliable reports that some of them were reporting 

right back to their particular patron and were rejoining that patron’s factional force 

or militia force with a higher set of skills. So it was mixed but in the main what we 

found over time was that these commanders did continue to increasingly support 

the Afghan National Army and there was a tipping point where they had disarmed 

themselves enough that now their only hope was with the Afghan National Army.

So when we got the majority of the heavy weapons, it became clear to these 

factional commanders that they now had no means to really resist the government 

of Afghanistan if the government of Afghanistan sought to impose their will upon 

them. At that point then, success in the modern army became in your own selfinterest to achieve.

Now, there was a limit to how successful we were. What we did manage to 

accomplish through the first phase of the DDR program was to collect the heavy 

weapons and the large formations were eliminated and that paved the way then 

for the Afghan National Army to take the field. What we did not succeed in was 

eliminating what we called illegally armed groups, in other words, lightly armed 

and informal militia forces and informal armed groups, that were beholden to 

local power brokers, sometimes in police uniforms and sometimes out of police 

uniforms, could impose their will with impunity outside of the rule of law. Our 

development of the police program did not begin in earnest until late 2005. The 

army began in earnest in 2002 and it paved the way for the success of DDR Phase 

One by late 2003 or early 2004.

So in order to achieve success in this next phase, to get rid of the illegally 

armed groups, you have to have a coherent police strategy. DDR paves the way 

for the army and then the elimination of the illegally armed groups paves the way 

for the fielding of a robust and respected police force that is under the control of a 

legitimate authority. In that, we still have a distance to go because we are behind on 
44

police reform. It only began, as I said, in late 2005. So if you ask a question about 

DDR, you would correctly hear many people from Afghanistan say that DDR has 

not been a success because there are still people running around with Kalashnikovs 

everywhere and some with rocket propelled grenades or RPGs. They are working 

for local thugs outside of the Afghan government’s control. This is true but this is 

in the second phase and that is what we need to get after. 

LB: I would think that, considering Afghanistan’s history, having someone turn 

in their personal firearm would take an incredible amount of trust in the Afghan 

National Army. 

KE: Oh, yes. You can achieve that in some of the urban areas but if you are 

ever aspiring to define success in disarmament in that every Kalashnikov within 

the country has been turned in to government control, no, that is simply not going 

to happen in the Afghan culture for many decades, if ever. I remember making a 

trip to the south of Afghanistan once with the Deputy Minister of Defense. We were 

talking to a group of Pashtun tribal elders and he was explaining the disarmament 

plan and we were discussing the building of the Afghan National Army. He was 

saying that they would be allowed to keep their Kalashnikov rifles and I remember watching all these tribal elders in their turbans and beards all nodding very 

approvingly. Then he said, “Now, your 12.7-mm heavy machineguns, you will 

have to turn those in.” There were murmurs of disapproval. Then he told them that 

he thought that they could keep their RPG-7s and there were nods for approval that 

this is as it should be. So it is a culture in which a sign of your status is your ability 

to bear arms and actually there are a lot of places in Afghanistan that are still pretty 

dangerous places. It is reasonable to expect that people in villages and rural areas 

be allowed to keep their weapons, more for kind of village defense or village watch 

with Kalashnikovs. 

LB: You talked about wanting an ethnic mix within the Afghan National 

Army and that it was going to be everybody inclusive. Did you have any problems 

because of the ethnic makeup? 

KE: Yes, we did. One of the most significant problems that we faced was that 

because of the way that the history of conflict had evolved in Afghanistan especially 

in the latter years of the mid-1990s until Operation ENDURING FREEDOM 

began in 2001, a majority of the Northern Alliance leaders were non-Pashtun. So 

when it came to the point in time to constitute the new national army, you had to 

draw from who was there. Who was there for the officer corps was a larger number 

of non-Pashtuns who were coming in as officers than who fairly represented the 

demographics of the country. Let’s say that the population of the Pashtun in the 

country of Afghanistan was perhaps 40 to 45 percent. Then I would expect in the 

first year that the officer percentage of Pashtuns would be 25 percent. However, 

it was low enough that there was concern being expressed by the Pashtuns about 
45

whose army this was. Was this a Northern Alliance army, was it a Pashtun army, 

or was it an Afghan army? That posed a challenge. There was a challenge as well 

with regard to the Hazaras. Hazaras are a very significant and important minority 

group in Afghanistan who are racially very different in characteristics and from 

Mongolian stock.

So a group that has a very different appearance and has a history of being 

oppressed in Afghanistan, kind of the down tribe in the ethnic group, accordingly 

were quite sensitive and understandably so given their history, about ensuring that 

the national security forces gave them a fair representation, with a fear that, given 

their history, those security forces, if they didn’t have fair representation, might be 

at some point in time used against them.

So we also had a great challenge with the Hazaras, which for another variety 

of historical reasons there wasn’t a large pool of Hazara officers to choose from. 

So that became a source of contention. I found myself in the first year spending 

a fair amount of time with leaders of various ethnic groups of Afghanistan, very 

factional leaders, trying to address their legitimate concerns about why their 

particular groups were under-represented, especially in the officer ranks, and then 

to an extent among the ranks of the soldiers.

Now, what we did find out very interestingly and only much later after I left, 

but now in force, is that the Afghans have much more of a system of merit to 

screen, vet, and choose officers. In the very early days of the Afghan National 

Army, the noncommissioned officer corps was merit-based. The Afghans had no 

tradition of an empowered noncommissioned officer corps. In the Soviet model 

that was adopted during the 1980s, we all know that the Soviet role for the 

noncommissioned officer is less than our definition of “backbone of the army” and 

I think I talked about that earlier. Then during the 1990s, the Afghans, between 

mujahedeen fighters and the Taliban, had commanders which roughly equated to 

officers, but they did not have noncommissioned officer ranks. So the noncommissioned officer rank was somewhat of a novelty to them but it was also because 

they only had that Soviet experience and that army was a very discredited army 

and noncommissioned officers were discredited, everything about that army was 

discredited, that they seemed to be much more willing to adopt the notion of an 

empowered noncommissioned officer corps.

We did find with some of the older officers that there was a resentment of it 

but in the main, the Afghans did take to it. Now, the way that noncommissioned 

officers were selected was that we would have a group of recruits and they would 

go through six weeks of basic training in what was a ten week long program. At 

about the sixth week, the best and the brightest, if they raised their hand, would be 

selected and pulled aside and then they would be put through a noncommissioned 

officer course developed by the British.
46

So from the first days of the Afghan National Army, the noncommissioned 

officer corps was merit-based. Now, when you talk about different ethnic groups 

in the army, it was fascinating because one of the appeals that I was able to make 

to, let’s say the Hazaras minority group, was I was able to tell the Hazara leaders 

of Afghanistan, “I understand where your frustrations are. You are looking and 

you are 15 percent of the population,” although some would say it is 20 percent 

of the population, whatever, “but when you look at the senior leaders of the 

Afghan National Army there are only five percent or less Hazaras and there are 

very few battalion commanders that are Hazaras. At the same time, look at the 

noncommissioned officer corps of the Afghan National Army. It is pretty stunning 

because Hazaras are doing extraordinarily well.” So we turned to them and said, 

“Look. This is the future of the army that you are seeing here. You are going to 

have to be patient. To get you to 15 or 20 percent right now, you will end up hurting 

yourselves because we’ll wind up putting people in that just can’t get the job done 

and that will end up then setting your cause back.” 

LB: Since this was a Coalition effort, who were the major countries that were 

involved with training and what were their responsibilities? 

KE: We had the overall lead and we took the responsibility for the basic training. 

Then, under our umbrella, the British took the lead for noncommissioned officer 

training but as I said, it has evolved since then and they have the responsibility for 

the Officer Candidate School as well. The French took the lead for officer training 

of both platoon and company-level and then established later the equivalent of 

a Leavenworth Command and General Staff College. We established a National 

Military Academy and the Turks partnered with us on that and gave some very 

good assistance and they still do. That was late during my stay. That was in 2003 

that we put the pieces in place for the National Military Academy.

I talked earlier about some of the specialized mobile training teams that we 

fielded. The Romanians were working on the Afghan armored corps, the Bulgarians 

on the mechanized infantry, and the Mongolians on the Afghan artillery. Those 

were the major assignments and then we took on the overall lead as well when we 

established the reformed Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. We took the 

overall lead in mentoring but we did solicit participation from different non-US 

Coalition allies, so they had an array of mentors and coaches distributed throughout 

the Ministry of Defense with us. 

LB: How well did all these different countries’ ideas of what noncommissioned 

officer or officer duties were, mesh with the overall US model that you were 

projecting? 

KE: There were pluses and minuses with this approach. The plus was that 

there was a big political gain that we had from it and there was a gain on the 
47

information operations front. I firmly believe that if the United States had thrown 

more resources in it, even if we were able to tell ourselves this was much more 

efficient and we were moving much faster, that there would have been a risk in 

that the perception of the Afghan people, certainly with the enemy trying to create 

misperceptions among the Afghan people, would have been that this was merely a 

United States enterprise.

So there was a certain risk in terms of credibility. They had been through this 

experience in the 1980s and it was called the Soviets trying to stand up an army. 

Here we had the British working with a noncommissioned officer corps, the French 

out there doing a great job with the officer corps, ourselves, and all of these other 

armies. The Turks were with us and still are. So that adds to the sense of legitimacy 

of the army among their people as an international enterprise. Look, they have 

great respect for the Americans. They know we are doing heavy lifting in terms 

of resources and we are doing heavy lifting in terms of the amount of mentors, 

coaches, and trainers that we have put on the ground. Still, there is that aspect that 

the whole international community is with them. 

Secondly, there was one other benefit and that was that it would be arrogance 

on the United States military’s part, to say that we had a monopoly on how to do 

this right. What I found was that, and I still find it today, when we see the British 

running the noncommissioned officer course and the French running the officer 

training, I will see certain things that are going on out there that we are not doing, 

so we are learning from each other and very importantly, at the end of the day, this 

isn’t going to be the Afghan-American army, it is going to be the Afghan National 

Army.

So the Afghans, with each year, develop more capable leaders and I think 

the ones whose heads are in the game and have a pride of ownership in their own 

army, they are now in a place where they are looking at different examples from 

the British, the French, the Turks, and the Americans and they are trying to draw 

the very best of each as it applies to the Afghans. Now, what is the not so good 

or what is the downside of this or the liability of this kind of approach? You have 

to admit, there is a loss of efficiency. Our doctrine or American way of war, is 

different from the French and the British, so there is some confusion as you have 

a French Command and General Staff College training a group of officers whose 

basic training came from the US military.

Then there was a bigger challenge but I wouldn’t say this was necessarily a 

Coalition challenge. It was a challenge for us as well, the American Army and 

the Marines as we were trying to get this Afghan army going. I talked to you 

earlier about what were the attributes and what was the doctrine that we wanted to 

follow and I said to you that the most important doctrine was with fundamentals of 
48

discipline, fundamentals of respect for the rule of law, taking care of your soldiers, 

and very basic combat skills. The one fundamental that I wished to apply to the 

Afghan National Army was to make them a very rigorously trained and focused 

group.

Having gone through the experience with our Army when we came out of the 

Vietnam War, which was a broken and shattered Army, and seeing the revolution 

of what occurred from my junior officer days of 1974 to where we were in the 

mid-1980s and what had really caused that revolutionary turnaround, a lot of it 

had to do with the development and rigorous application of training doctrine of 

standards-based training.

So with the Afghan National Army, I had worked very hard to try that approach 

as that is an approach that is not American. You can have a standards-based army 

if you are the fourth poorest country in the world. You can make the modifications 

or adaptations. There was a set of things that were good about that but I had very 

mixed results in trying to achieve that. I could say some of that was Coalition 

because the French and the British don’t look at the problems the same way we 

do in our Army but actually, it was also some of the challenges we had with our 

embedded trainers, where they simply did not have the right skill sets in order to 

apply them. 

LB: Who initially trained the military forces? 

KE: Before the formal establishment of our program, which began in May of 

2002, the British and the Turks of ISAF, first the British and then the Turks in the 

second ISAF command, each trained one battalion on their own of what became 

Afghan National Army. They were finally integrated into the Afghan National 

Army. Then in May of 2002, US Special Forces arrived in Afghanistan. They were 

brought in for the explicit mission of training the Afghan National Army. So it 

began as US Special Forces together with the French, and we had over that, what 

you would call a security assistance office that was there to help administer the 

overall program and work on the programmatics and the broad management of 

these programs. By October of 2002, that was when things really began to move 

up to the next level. 

LB: What were the origins of Task Force Phoenix? 

KE: The concept of Task Force Phoenix was developed when we saw that the 

size of the program was now going to exceed what US Special Forces were able 

to do. First, there was the question of the availability of Special Forces. Special 

Forces are admirably suited for the training and the development of the Afghan 

National Army battalions but the first question was whether there were enough 

Special Forces available. Then secondly, it also seemed to us that we were at a 

point in the development now of brigade echelons within the Afghan National 
49

Army and starting the corps echelon and now starting to get into the complexities 

of sustaining institutions and a functioning General Staff, so we would need to 

rethink our basic training organization.

So we looked at what the requirements would be and we developed the idea 

of Task Force Phoenix which would be led by a brigadier general. It would be a 

US Army infantry brigade, augmented to meet all of the various requirements that 

we had for the Afghan National Army at that time. Those requirements included 

embedded trainers for the fielded forces and then a training command that would 

be at the Kabul Military Training Center. So we constructed Task Force Phoenix. 

In fact, we had a debate about what the task force was to be called and we used 

Phoenix because it was to signify the rising of the Afghan National Army from the 

ashes of 30 years of very brutal warfare. 

LB: I was supposed to ask you who thought of the name. 

KE: I thought of Task Force Phoenix. We had this big debate going around and 

I said that I was going to end that debate. I said it would be Task Force Phoenix

and I explained what it was. So the idea was then to establish this task force and in 

about February or March in the spring of 2003, one brigade of the 10th Mountain 

Division under Colonel Mark Milley, came in and established Task Force Phoenix

on the eastern side of Kabul at what we called Camp Phoenix, led by a brigadier 

general. The 10th Mountain Division then came in with another combat brigade so 

we had two brigades of the 10th Mountain Division and the division headquarters 

there and one wing was operational and the other wing was Task Force Phoenix. 

Task Force Phoenix was under the OPCON [operational control] of the 10th 

Mountain Division commander and under my TACON [tactical control]. 

LB: Do you see any advantages or disadvantages with using Special Forces to 

train the Afghans? 

KE: I see some great advantages but there are limitations to what Special 

Forces can do. The tremendous advantage of the Special Forces is that it is a 

doctrinal mission for an internal defense, partnering with indigenous forces and 

working with them in very small numbers and providing advice. Then if you are 

in combat, there is the ability of these small Special Forces elements to also bring 

to bear all the combat support and combat service support resources that might be 

needed in order to conduct movement, provide intelligence, and bring in all the 

enablers necessary.

The Special Forces units in the main that I have operated with in Afghanistan 

are extraordinary in their ability to perform that mission. They share the hardships 

with the Afghans. They take risks with them. To use an expression, “The Special 

Forces are the best we’ve got in sharing pains and victories with the Afghans.” 

So the Afghans, when they are with our Special Forces, live with them. They are 
50

the band of brothers. They go into combat together. If a Special Forces soldier 

goes down, the Afghan unit that they are with will fight to provide security until a 

MEDEVAC [medical evacuation] gets called in. If an Afghan soldier goes down, 

the Special Forces fight to hold things together until we can get a US MEDEVAC 

for them. So the Afghans along with our Special Forces have always been the 

deadliest combination from a Taliban perspective. Those guys just fight like tigers 

when they are with us and they get better over time.

What are their limits though? Well, their limits are that there are a set of tasks 

that have to be accomplished with building the Afghan National Army. A lot of 

function systems have to be developed that link that operational unit to their higher 

headquarters or to functional commands. So there are requirements for developing 

Afghan resupply and there are requirements that Afghan soldiers get paid on a 

regular basis. There also has to be some way for us to communicate to the General 

Staff when we have an ace Afghan National Army battalion commander. How is 

that guy going to get promoted? It is too early for them to have a fair and partial 

system and we can’t wait for 20 years for that to occur.

So how do all those things happen? Well, you can have the Special Forces 

soldiers doing it but then you are taking a highly professional well trained operative 

that is out there, that should be out there fighting with the Afghan National Army, 

helping them through their troop leading procedures as they get ready to go into 

combat and you are putting them on other tasks for which you don’t need that same 

set of skills in order to accomplish. That is where the ETTs [embedded training 

teams] come in. You have a combination of embedded trainers that are needed to 

do the tasks I just described, administration and logistics, getting the non-combat 

systems up and running with the Afghan National Army, and then you have the 

Special Forces coming in to partner.

Now, what we evolved to over time is that we have Special Forces who are 

doing that partnering and we have ETTs but then we also use our conventional 

forces to partner with the Afghan National Army if we don’t have enough Special 

Forces. Our conventional forces do very well in partnering but then we continue 

to spread ETTs out. There is also another requirement for ETTs, when you think 

about it, with the Afghan National Army. You still have units that are out in the 

hinterlands of the Afghan National Army and they need resupply and still the 

Afghan system can’t provide their resupply in many instances. We are getting 

better by 2006 but in those times it was still very much US led.

So we shifted to the idea of partnering by 2004. It was actually after my first 

stay but I turned up the heat a lot in 2005 when I got there and that was when 

we covered down and did full-up partnering. What else Special Forces can’t do 

well, because is it really an echelon above them, is when you start getting up 
51

to the brigade-level of command and certainly the corps-level of command. The 

Special Operations Forces can do it and they will give it their best effort but your 

conventional forces seem to have an inherent advantage because they are used 

to operating at higher echelons. When you get up to the command level of, let’s 

say, colonel within the Afghan National Army, conventional trainers are generally 

more appropriate to deliver results. 

LB: How did problems of illiteracy affect training? 

KE: As I recall, it impacted it in ways that we adapted to relatively quickly. 

It didn’t take us long to learn that field manuals were not necessarily a recipe 

for success or that getting the technical manuals on fighting vehicles necessarily 

would help us in any big way when there were literacy problems. Actually the 

most profound impact of illiteracy was in leadership. It proved very challenging in 

the first year as we had problems with literacy with officers and certainly with our 

noncommissioned officers.

There are a lot of hidden assumptions out there that we don’t even realize as 

we are trying to teach in the classroom about what literacy enables you to do. On 

the other hand, we found that the offer of literacy training has turned out to be one 

of the great enhancements of the Afghan National Army. I got there in October and 

by the spring that was one of the mantras that we had, literacy training for every 

soldier. Now we have it in the basic training. Literacy is uneven in the field but 

compared to October 2002, soldiers have access to literacy training and that has 

become very important because of the prestige that goes with it in a society that is 

highly illiterate which Afghanistan still is. I think perhaps about 30 plus percent 

of the country is illiterate. To have a national institution which prides itself or 

advertises that one of the attributes will be reading and writing for the force, that 

offers some compelling advantages in terms of prestige that the civilians attribute 

to that organization and actually the sense of pride that soldiers have.

It is very moving. When you get out and talk to these young Afghan National 

Army soldiers. They are a very honest group. If you are out talking to a platoon 

and you ask them to raise their hands if they can’t read or write, maybe seven out 

of every ten hands will go up and these are new recruits. Then, when you ask them 

the question, “Do you guys want to learn to read and write,” they will say, “Yes, 

we do.” If you ask, “If you get a chance to study are you going to,” their answer 

is, “Yes.” So it puts constraints on the leadership of the force but we are making 

pretty good progress right now in making the Afghan National Army into a much 

more literate group than it was say, four or five years ago. 

LB: So was it an enhanced recruiting tool?

KE: Yes. 
52

LB: How capable were Afghan units in taking over their own battlespace by 

the end of 2003? 

KE: By 2003, not at all. 

LB: Not at all? 

KE: No. 

LB: By 2006? 

KE: By 2006, it depends upon the mission. The mission I like to cite as an 

example of how far they have come along is the Kabul riot of 29 May 2006, 

where the police force had failed in Kabul in a very serious way following a traffic 

accident that our forces got into. Tragically, there were several Afghans killed 

in the traffic accident and a riot broke out. Then our forces, thinking they were 

under fire, fired some rounds into the crowd and several more were killed and that 

led to very serious several hours of rioting that spread quickly throughout Kabul. 

Minister of Defense Rahim Wardak went to President Karzai several hours into 

the riot and recommended that he deploy the army onto the streets. So the Afghan 

National Army took to the streets and within 30 minutes the riots were over. That 

was without US advisors. I told him our forces were not going to put advisors 

out there, they could do this, and they needed to do it on their own. It needed to 

be a demonstration of a national army. So they took to the streets and performed 

brilliantly. When the word got out that the army was on the streets, the rioters 

went back home. I think it was more because of the confidence of the people that 

it settled things down.

By 2006, in the Afghan National Army there are things that they can do well 

such as civil disturbance control. There are areas of Afghanistan where they 

operate by themselves with our embedded trainers and do presence patrolling and 

do extraordinarily well in maybe a dispute between two tribes in a host province 

where they are shooting at each other. The Afghan National Army will roll up in 

their Ford Ranger trucks with their green berets and have an officer come forward 

and say in Pashtun, “Time out. What is going on here? Let’s sit down and have a 

little shura here and talk about this. Let’s drink some tea.” They are able to do that 

phenomenally well.

As far as their limitations, when they get into heavy contact with the Taliban 

forces, clearly for us to want them to win 100 to nothing, which we do, they can 

use our intelligence help, they can use our close air support, they can use our 

medical evacuation, and they can use our firepower. The Afghan National Army 

has been in combat with Taliban with just our embedded trainers. They are in their 

Ford Ranger trucks and we might have an uparmored HMMWV [high mobility 

multipurpose wheeled vehicle] with a crew-served weapon and these guys, when 
53

they make contact, go after the Taliban and they hunt them down relentlessly. They 

are a very brave group but still today some of their critical combat support systems 

are extraordinarily weak compounded by the very difficult challenges of the topography of Afghanistan and the absence of roads which makes this even tougher.

They also do lack precision firepower, not an American standard of firepower 

precision. They need more help in terms of having more heavy mobile weaponry, 

more mortars that they can bring to bear very quickly in a fight and that is what 

we are working on right now, trying to give them those levels of enhancement. In 

the tough places of Afghanistan, where we are fighting more dangerous and wellarmed and trained Taliban and foreign fighter elements, it is going to be three, four, 

or five years before I would be confident that you could have companies of Afghan 

National Army that could operate with maybe just a very small team of embedded 

trainers, where if things really got tough they would be able to call in the necessary 

support to bail them out. 

LB: How did the problems of narcotics trafficking affect your mission? 

KE: In 2002 and 2003, it was not the problem that it has emerged to today. 

We already saw the storm clouds on the horizon in then. The poppy cultivation 

was increasing rapidly but still not to the levels that we have today. There were 

discussions that were going on at that time, even back in 2003, about whether the 

Afghan National Army should be committed to counternarcotics missions, should 

they be committed to the eradication.

I had argued strenuously against that and successfully argued against it. It 

was primarily from our United Kingdom colleagues, who had the lead for 

counternarcotics in the security sector reform pillars. So we were able to protect 

the army at that time. We were able to keep the counternarcotics mission away 

from the army.

My point was, first of all, even if you wanted to have the Afghan National 

Army do it, there was inadequate Afghan National Army available to get them 

committed to that. Then I was terribly worried about the possibility of corruption 

of the Afghan National Army and the Ministry of Defense. Then third, I was quite 

concerned about the loss of respect and legitimacy and the perceived fairness of 

the Afghan National Army among the people. For the Afghan National Army, we 

could even see in 2002 and 2003, that if you looked at the attributes that we saw 

as important for the army in 2002 and 2003, albeit with the threat that had not 

evolved to the level it has today, even then we believed that more important than 

their ability, to take the fight to Taliban militants and insurgents and defeat them 

would be them serving as an apolitical pillar of stability within this very immature 

and still developing but quite rowdy Afghan political system.
54

After 30 years of warfare and now trying to pull their country back together 

again, trying to figure out how to come together as a people and reconstitute their 

nation having a respected, all-ethnic and national army would be a national asset 

far beyond their ability to go out and fight the Taliban forces. What we found with 

the building of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police is the 

challenge that we face that we’re trying to build an institution while we’re at war 

and there is an inherent tension between those two objectives. The tougher the 

war gets, the more the Afghan political leadership wants Afghan national security 

forces now fully committed to fighting a dangerous enemy. That is what their 

constituents are telling them. They need security now, not ten years from now. 

Then you have your international military forces that are fighting and those that 

are operating in the field know that their operational effectiveness, their operational 

effectiveness and the Afghan operational effectiveness, will dramatically increase 

with the synergy that you get by competent Afghan National Police and Afghan 

National Army operating together with international military forces. At the same 

time that you are fighting the war, you have to find a way to build the institution, 

so this is just a tremendous challenge. Our US Army probably has not faced a 

problem of this level really since the Revolutionary War. I talked about the Valley 

Forge experience, going to winter quarters, getting a couple months to try to build 

the institution, and then there was no more institution building. It was back to the 

campaign season.

One of the difficulties that the Afghan military leadership has and we have is 

trying to strike that proper balance. If you look at keeping a stance there, if you get 

too far over on the operational side, you will have a great campaigning season but 

then you will look left and right and your attrition rates will have risen dramatically 

because the forces have been kept in the field too long and the sustaining institutions 

weren’t getting built any more. You didn’t look at the longer term. If you lean too 

far on the side of protecting and you don’t get the guys out of the barracks and they 

don’t fight, one is that they are not gaining combat experiences but there is also a 

growing frustration of the international military forces that we are not going to do 

this forever. We are not here to save Afghanistan. We are here with the Afghans to 

save Afghanistan and to train them to do it themselves.

So there is a lot of tension and we need more Afghan forces. Not only non-US 

forces and commanders are asking for more Afghan security forces but our own 

operational forces are saying they need more. Well, that is great, I know you need 

more but remember that after your one year tour of duty and you go back home, 

those Afghan soldiers are going to inherit now the next infantry division that is 

also going to want them to stay in the field and campaign for their 12 month tour 

of duty. I believe that is an experience we have in Iraq as well, setting that balance 

between building the institution and protecting the institution so that it can build 
55

itself up, its traditions and way of doing business, even while you prosecute the 

war. The tougher the war gets, the harder that striking that balance will get because 

the pressures will start to mount to get them out in the field and just keep them 

there. 

LB: Is there some issue with the Afghan soldiers themselves wanting to get out 

in the field and fight for their country? 

KE: There is. It is interesting with the Afghan soldiers. They truly do like 

being out in the field as long as they are getting paid and as long as they are getting 

taken care of. Minister of Defense Wardak was joking with me once and he said, 

“One national asset that we have in Afghanistan is that we know how to fight.” He 

said, “We would like to export that capability.”

So the Afghan soldiers, yes, they like to be out in the field and they like to 

be out there fighting, provided that they are well partnered and taken care of, and 

indeed you have to protect the Afghans sometimes from themselves because you 

have aggressive commanders in the Afghan National Army that just want to be 

out there fighting for their country. It is a matter of pride. Five years into this, 

the Afghan people want to be exercising their own sovereignty and the greatest 

manifestation of sovereignty is your ability to have your own national security 

forces under your own command and control out in the field and not beholden unto 

foreign militaries. 

LB: So are there quite a few different pressures from different areas to balance?

KE: Yes, there are. 

LB: Thank you again very much for your time and willingness to support the 

Army’s mission in chronicling its history in OEF.

57

Colonel Dominic Cariello

16 February 2007 

JM: My name is John McCool (JM) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute at Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Colonel Dominic Cariello (DC) 

on his experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF). 

Today’s date is 16 February 2007 and this will be an unclassified interview. 

Before we begin sir, if you feel at any time that we are entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information. If classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Okay, sir, could we 

start off by you giving me a brief sketch of your military career up to this 

point and then we’ll focus on OEF. How did you get commissioned, what 

units have you served with, and what were your deployments and duty 

assignments? 

DC: Sure. I started back in 1981 on the delayed entry program. While I was 

in high school and 17 years old, I enlisted in the Armor of the Army Reserve. 

When I graduated from high school, about seven days after graduation, I went 

off to Fort Knox, Kentucky and I was an armor crewman, coming back to the 

339th Brigade, 84th Division. I started that process, started to drill once I got back 

and wanted to get into the ROTC program but because I had a college bonus as 

part of my enlistment, I ended up going into the OCS [Officer Candidate School] 

program. In order to go to the state OCS program as a reservist, you had to have 

60 college credits. At that point I only had 39 credits. So I transferred over to the 

Army National Guard, a field artillery unit, which my father had retired out of. 

He had 20-plus years in the service and retired from the 1st Battalion, 126th Field 

Artillery which I went into.

So I went to the state OCS program, got my commission in 1983 and in January 

of 1984, I went down to Fort Sill, Oklahoma because I stayed with the Army 

National Guard and did not go back to the Reserves. I went down and became 

branch qualified in FA [Field Artillery]. I went back in 1990 for my advanced 

course. I had to go back to the CAS3 [Combined Arms and Services Staff School] I 

got stuck in between those commissioning dates where CAS3 was not a requirement 

to get into the CGSOC [Command and General Staff Officer Course], so I got 

stuck and had to go to CAS3 as a major. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just four weeks 

of added schooling. In 2000, I took command of the 126th Field Artillery. We 

had just converted to Paladins. Then in 2004, after other numerous assignments at 

battalion level and up at brigade level after I was a battalion commander, I went up 

to the 57th Field Artillery Brigade as the brigade S3 [operations officer] and then 

became the brigade XO [executive officer]. In November 2004, I took command 
58

of the 57th Field Artillery Brigade. At the end of 2005, I was tasked by the state of 

Wisconsin to be the Task Force Wisconsin commander for Hurricane Katrina and 

took 500 other Wisconsin soldiers and a bunch of equipment down to New Orleans. 

We were stationed at Belle Chasse, Louisiana. At that point I became the task force 

reception, staging, onward-movement and integration (RSOI) commander. I was 

responsible for the group that was at Belle Chasse in-processing all the soldiers, 

airmen, Marines, etc., who were coming into New Orleans for the disaster. I spent 

three weeks there and then came back to Wisconsin.

Throughout all that, I had been wondering when the 57th Field Artillery 

Brigade was going to get a mission to either go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I had a 

bunch of soldiers who were now looking at what the true relevancy of this brigade 

and the battalions were because we’re not going anywhere. What is the future of 

field artillery?

So I was hoping to get an FA mission to take them over. Everybody else was 

getting into the fight and I had soldiers who were watching that. I started having 

soldiers who were requesting to become fillers for some of the other states that were 

being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan so they’d have some form of relevancy in 

their minds. They were young soldiers wanting to get into the fight to be able to 

have the bragging rights to do that. I was supposed to be Task Force Phoenix 5.0. 

The 57th FA Brigade was tagged back in June 2005 to be Phoenix 5.0.

Within a matter of about three weeks, though, I was called and told that I was 

not going to get it. It was going to the 41st Brigade out of Oregon because they 

were trying to get them into the BCT [brigade combat team] cycle. They wanted 

to convert them under the transformation program and under ARFORGEN [Army 

Force Generation] to get them into that theoretical four-to-six year set and work 

through the last of the general officers who were at each of these separate brigades, 

now going to these BCTs, and it downsizes to a colonel as a commander.

So, at that point in time, I had already had one battery of the 126th tagged in 

2004 to go over to Iraq as a SECFOR [security force] battery for the 141st out 

of Louisiana which was the organic artillery to the 256th BCT. Bravo Battery of 

the 126th deployed so I had a group of guys over there. Now the question was, 

“Okay, when are the other units going to deploy?” I also had another artillery 

battalion under my command, the 121st. They are the MLRS [multiple launch 

rocket system] and the 126th is the Paladin. The 121st guys were now asking when 

they were going to go. So the 57th, the rest of the 126th, and the 121st were all 

looking for a mission. The 126th’s Bravo Battery came back in September of 2005. 

In fact, they came back while I was down at Katrina. Then in 2005, two additional 

battalions from Wisconsin were going to be going over to Iraq and they needed 

fillers. So we took the remnants of the 126th, all the other units minus Bravo 

Battery, and stood them up for deployment as fillers to the 120th FA Battalion and 
59

the 128th Infantry Battalion in Wisconsin. So that now got everybody a tour from 

the 126th. We mobilized them, got them through the in-process, and in country. 

We, the 57th, were still looking for a mission though. We were potentially going 

to pick up another mission that would be in OEF but it was going back and forth 

between us now and Alaska.

What also popped into the picture was, “Okay, you are not selected as one of 

the six fires brigades so we’re going to transform you into a CSB [combat support 

brigade].” So now, at that point, they’re not going to mobilize us as a brigade 

because they had to stand us up as a CSB and they had to work through that 

process. All hopes have faded that the 57th was going to take its flag and go into 

the box. At the same time, a new mission was coming up and the 121st got tagged 

for it. They’re now a transportation SECFOR in Iraq and they are over there. They 

will come back in July 2007. They left in July and will come back in July. So now 

that left the 57th. In order to get the 121st over to the sandbox with the numbers 

it needed as this new organization, we took a bunch of soldiers out of the 57th FA 

Brigade, my brigade headquarters, to fill the 121st so they could stand up and go 

over to the box.

Now both of my battalions have experience. I received a call in November 

from our deputy adjutant general stating, “First of all, I’m going to tell you that 

the 57th is going nowhere. There isn’t anything in the books for you now. You’re 

going to transform to a CSB and there’s nothing until like 2008/2009 as it stands. 

Plus, we’re seeing nothing that’s going to shift to say that you’re going to be a 

fires brigade.” Which, later on, they came and made seven fires brigade out of the 

National Guard but by then we had committed to the CSB. The seventh went to 

Wyoming but I’ll tell you, looking to the future, this CSB is probably the best thing 

for us. It really is. It allows a lot of great leaders to get promoted and it allows a 

lot of great leaders to stand up and go into positions where they wouldn’t have 

had the opportunity to do that before. If you’d asked me when I was a captain or 

a major if this was a good plan, I would have been kicking and screaming. After 

going through the War College and looking at the overall strategic program of 

our Army and our defense, it’s one of those, “This makes sense.” So anyhow, the 

deputy adjutant general called and said, “Do you still want to go on a mission?” I 

said, “Absolutely.” 

JM: You personally? 

DC: Me personally. I said, “Absolutely, what do you have, sir?” He said: 

“Here’s what I have. The leadership we had identified to take a 16-man 

team over to Afghanistan has to back out because he has a job at USPFO 

[United States Property and Fiscal Office] and has to go off to a two-year 

program. So with him went a couple other guys who said they would go if 

he went but now that he was not going they didn’t want to go either. Now 
60

here’s the deal. You have eight vacancies, so you need to fill them if you 

take this mission.”

This was a Friday morning, right before I was going to work. I pretty much had 

my mind made up by the time I got to work that I was going to do it but I hadn’t 

said anything to my family yet. I waited for them to come home to tell them this 

was something I wanted to do.

They told me they supported me and they’d always known that someday it 

was going to happen. So I had to call the deputy adjutant general back on Monday. 

I called that Friday night and left a message on his Blackberry telling him I’d 

take the mission. He called back on Monday and told me okay. Oh, and by the 

way, over the weekend, I began calling some of my FA guys. Lieutenant Colonel 

John Schroeder is my S3, soon to be my deputy commander, under the CSB. The 

other individuals I brought were Command Sergeant Major Jeff Janke, who’s my 

command sergeant major in the 57th FA Brigade. So I put together a team of eight 

individuals who were 57th FA. A couple of them were out of the battalions and the 

rest were from my staff. Part of it was because I have a couple full-timers that I 

know their peer groups have been to the box and the competitiveness that’s going 

to be there. Although it’s not a “criterion” for future promotions or positions, it is a 

criterion and it needs to be a criterion. In some cases, you want somebody who has 

experience. John is going to see another tour and I’ll potentially see another tour 

before I retire in the next couple of years.

My captains will see potentially two or three more tours in their 20 years, if 

they hold this out. So you need people who have that relevancy and experience. So 

I accepted the mission, put together the team and we met. There were eight other 

Wisconsin soldiers whom I had never met before and I met them on 3 December 

for the first time. In January 2006 we deployed. We home stationed, started on 

5 January, and on 8 January we had our farewell ceremony. By 08:30 p.m. on 8 

January, we were at Camp Shelby, Mississippi to start our in-processing. 

JM: Where is your home station? 

DC: My home station is the 57th FA Brigade out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

I’ve got soldiers who are a part of the 32d Brigade, I’ve got some who are part of 

the Joint Force Headquarters, and I’ve got others out of the RTI [Regional Training 

Institute] from Wisconsin.

They were a good bunch of guys, in fact a great bunch of guys who did an 

outstanding job. I’m very proud of them. They did a good mission. I put in some 

tight controls in the beginning and maintained them while we were in country, too. 

So that was the makeup of the group. That’s what got us over to OEF. One of the 

other things, at that point in time, was that we were told that we were going to be 

at Shelby for two to three weeks to process and train.
61

That was perfect. Let’s get in there, do the training we need to do, and let’s get 

downrange. Let’s get this started, let’s get over there and let’s make a difference. 

When we got to Shelby though, we found out we were going to be there at a 

minimum of 45 days. They had now extended the training plan. Some of those 

days you were just looking at each other. They really didn’t need to extend the 

training days. On 23 February, we departed out of Gulfport, Mississippi and on 24 

February we were boots on the ground in Manas, Kyrgyzstan. 

JM: At Shelby, was this embedded training team (ETT) specific training? 

DC: Yes. 

JM: Can you tell me what that entailed and maybe evaluate it? 

DC: Sure. First Army has a program put together for these ETTs. One of 

their issues, which is why they sent us back a month early, was to work with the 

218th and the ETTs. There will probably be a question later on as to what I did in 

country but I commanded two RCAGs [regional corps advisory groups]. I was the 

senior mentor to two two-star generals, the 205th Corps commander and the 203d 

Corps commander. At Shelby, the training focused on a lot of the TTPs [tactics, 

techniques, and procedures] that were coming out of Iraq. There wasn’t a lot of 

information coming back out of Afghanistan.

I’ll tell you, Afghanistan is one of the best kept secrets. Everything is Iraq, 

Iraq, Iraq, success in Iraq/no success in Iraq. I’ll tell you, there are a lot of great 

successes happening in Afghanistan. Part of that is because you have an Army, a 

nation, that’s committed to doing this, so that helps but anyway, back to Shelby. 

Their trainers were a bunch of guys coming back from Iraq.

I’m a very vocal and straightforward person. I look at value versus non-value. 

Everybody’s time is valuable. We were getting training on going out and doing a 

cordon search. Okay, why are we doing that? Well, because you have to do that. 

I asked why we had to do that. They told me it was because it was a FORSCOM 

[Forces Command] regulation. Well, why are we doing this and how does this fit 

our mentoring the ANA [Afghan National Army]? Well, you’ll know how to do 

it, so you’ll know how to mentor them. No, no, no. I want to focus on how you’re 

going to train me to mentor this ANA, because I’ve never done this. Well I haven’t 

been to Afghanistan so I don’t know how I’m going to tell you to do that. I told 

them that basically this was bullshit and they’re wasting our time. There were a lot 

of different training scenarios we went through that we never used in country, all 

the IED [improvised explosive device] training we received. I’m not knocking the 

program. They were just trying to put together what they needed to put together. 

JM: Hadn’t the advisor training previously been conducted at Camp Atterbury, 

Indiana? 
62

DC: It had been at Camp Atterbury. We were the second group, or maybe we 

were the first group, that went through as ETTs at Shelby. So they were feeling 

their way through it. They had done a lot of Iraq training and now all of a sudden 

they’re doing Afghanistan. In fact, I want to say we were the first ones. We were 

originally going to be going to Atterbury because that’s where the crew before 

us from Wisconsin went and all the other teams went to Camp Atterbury. That’s 

where they learned to be ETTs for Afghanistan.

Shelby was running the Iraq scenario. We did cordon and search, convoys, 

convoy ops, ground assault convoys, entry control points, escorting local nationals 

into a FOB [forward operating base], qualification of weapons, going through the 

gas chamber. Oh by the way, we never put our protective masks on. Hell, we never 

took them out of our duffel bags. The JLIST [joint service lightweight integrated 

suit technology] we had to have, we turned them in in-country because we never 

pulled them out. 

JM: What about cultural awareness training? 

DC: We had cultural awareness and again, they were working their way 

through. They hired some guy who had fled Afghanistan in 1974 who was now 

the expert on Afghanistan but could only tell you what it looked like back in 1974.

The language training we received was that we had these little books that had 

Dari in it and some common phrases and some words. There would be a group of 

50 or 60 of us in this room in these force provider tents and you hoped like hell 

it wasn’t windy because the flapping and all the other external noises prevented 

you from hearing anybody. He would have each of us say one of the words in the 

book and then go around the room and do that. So, he’s getting good money for us 

to recite different Afghan phrases. There wasn’t any formal sentence structure or 

how to interface.

Then to get the cultural awareness of Afghanistan, there were PowerPoint 

slides that we had received earlier and all he did was to throw up those same slides 

and make us read them. They were in English. Well, English we know. Plus there 

was a lot of instructing us to never touch them with your left hand, don’t ever show 

them the bottom of your feet, don’t ever deny chai, don’t ever deny food. Well, 

that’s all BS. Now yes, we have to be sensitive to a lot of that and we were but there 

weren’t going to be any international incidents had I touched the corps commander 

or any of those soldiers with my left hand or embraced them with my left arm and 

hand, or when I had my legs crossed, worrying that he saw the bottoms of my feet. 

And you know, you can deny chai and food, although we always recommended 

you didn’t because it’s great. In fact, I miss chai. I had chai withdrawals when I got 

back into country. I drank a lot of chai. Everybody wants to offer you chai all the 

time but that was the training and we were waiting for it to end.
63

We wanted to get started. They were trying to work a program and we had 

block leave coming. Even though it’s a 45-day training program, we had block 

leave coming and we didn’t want it. We wanted to get going. Get us over there. 

Plus, our group was supposed to deploy to Shelby on 11 December. With all the 

hurricanes hitting Mississippi and Louisiana, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré 

gave Shelby two weeks off. He was shutting them down for Christmas. So had we 

gone there on 11 December, we would have been there for a week and a half and 

then we’d be going home for two weeks or we’d be sitting there for two weeks. 

Christmas, New Year’s, we’re here and there’s nobody training us, the post is 

closed. How do we get our life support?

So they pushed us to 5 January. Well, that meant that the 3.5 ETTs that were 

in Afghanistan had an option to extend for 30 days. A lot of them did not because 

we were already a month late. When we got in country, we were over a month late. 

I had no right-seat ride. A lot of the 4.5s did not have a right-seat ride with their 

counterpart because their counterpart left a month earlier. As well I would, for the 

most part. So that was the issue. That was the training at Shelby and they took 

a lot of the recommendations on the AARs [after-action reviews] that we threw 

out. They had the horse blanket which was always changing. You always have 

knuckleheads who have worked behind a desk for the last seven or eight years of 

their military careers and now all of a sudden they are wanting to go back out and 

be Rambo.

So they were trying to influence additional things to throw on there that were of 

no value which started shifting some of the horse blankets. We had a O6 [colonel] 

who was part of team. There were three O6s. The other O6 and I had to finally 

pull him aside and tell him to knock it off. He was now shooting the schedule 

off while he added in what he thinks will be cool/gee whiz stuff that has nothing 

to do with the mission. They’re trying to meet his needs because he’s saying, “I 

think it would be great if we did this.” At the same time, they’re telling us that 

there’s really no need for us to do this. “Do you guys really want to do this?” The 

other O6 and I would say no. We wanted to know what we needed and if we’re 

going to do something additional, how did it improve the current training we’re 

receiving to make us better once we get into country? If this has nothing to do with 

Afghanistan, then let’s not do it. 

JM: What was the handoff like when you got into country? Since you didn’t do 

a right-seat ride, how did you familiarize yourself with the environment and figure 

out who’s who in the zoo, if you will? 

DC: I brought down Lieutenant Colonel Mike Slusher with me. When I got 

into it and I have to step back and will do this very quickly, we still did not know 

where the hell we were going in country when we left Shelby. We did not know 
64

what jobs we were going to be doing but we were told by the LNO [liaison officer] 

who was sent back that we were all going to be split up. Each state put together a 

16-man team to be a brigade or a battalion team. I was going to be a brigade team 

chief and the 15 other individuals I brought from Wisconsin were going to be my 

brigade ETTs. We were under the impression, as well as the others, that we would 

all be together. We would train together at Shelby, we would go to Afghanistan and 

we would all be together.

When we got to Shelby, the second day we were there, a colonel and a command 

sergeant major were sent back to be the LNOs to talk to us. They were Phoenix

3.5 guys who came in and told us we were getting split up when we get into 

country. We were going to do our team stuff here and that’s good but be advised 

that we were going to go in different directions. Well, we got to Manas and I’m 

still calling down to the 53d. Now prior to that, I had tagged into the DCO [deputy 

commanding officer] of the 41st because I understood he was going to be coming 

in at the time I needed to go to my two week War College to finish and there was a 

policy in country that stated nobody went home for schools. I said, “Look, I need 

to know now if I’m deferring or what I’m doing.” 

So I started working with Dave Enyer (ph) and got in contact with him knowing 

he would be taking over in June and I would be going to school in July. “Look, 

I’m going to need permission from the commanding general. Is this going to happen?” Well, then they read into Third Army blah, blah, blah and found out that for 

War College and the Command Sergeant Major Course, those guys will go home. 

However, everyone else could not go home for CGSOC, for ILE [Intermediate 

Level Education], for the BNCOC [Basic Noncommissioned Officer’s Course], or 

for the ANCOC [Advanced Noncommissioned Officer’s Course], etc.

When you’re in theater, you’re in theater, except for those two I mentioned 

because those are Department of the Army appointed. Anyhow, I get to Manas 

and I’m still trying to get info from Dave to see if he could get info, because 

Dave was a 3.0 and the deputy commander of the 76th when they were in country. 

Colonel Butch Redding, who was the DCO of the 53d, right-seat rode with Dave, 

so I figured that Dave knows Butch and maybe we could get something going. 

We’re up at Manas asking what was going on but we were told things had not been 

worked out yet. When we get there, we’ll get our assignments. Two days after I’m 

in Manas, I’m down in Kabul as part of the advance. We couldn’t get the whole 

team down there. I looked at the roster and they had my Wisconsin team going to 

five different locations. For the most part, all the nine other teams were going to 

five different locations.

I said to the lieutenant colonel and the two majors, “All right, why are we doing 

this?” “Well, because we need the fill and we really don’t know the intricacies of 
65

these teams.” was the answer. I said, “Okay, give me the permission to redo this 

and I will fill all your slots with competent individuals but I’m going to restructure 

this so that the states are as close together as they possibly can be. They might not 

be in the same kandak or brigade, but they’ll be in the same region.”

That being said, when I got in there and met Butch Redding, because Brigadier 

General John Perryman was now on leave, the O6s had to go report in person to 

Butch to get our assignments. We still didn’t have our assignments. Butch sat me 

down and said, “You’re going down to the 205th to be the G3.” I said, “Okay.” 

The other two, Mike Slusher went over to the 207th as the XO mentor and Colonel 

Marty Leppert was going to become the LNO of, at the time, the Office of Security 

Cooperation-Afghanistan [OSC-A]/Task Force Phoenix. 

Marty wasn’t happy. He’s a National Guard Bureau guy who is sitting behind the desk all the time and wanted to get out. As it was, we got it rescheduled. 

Marty ended up coming downrange and he was the 2d Brigade senior mentor of 

the 205th. We left Kabul and took 30 brand new up-armored Humvees, so we 

drove from Kabul to Kandahar, which was great. I got to see a lot of countryside 

of Afghanistan in the 18 hours we were driving that day. We had a couple of stops 

along the way so that’s why it was 18 hours.

I got in and we got to the RSOI tent at Kandahar Airfield and there literally was 

this sergeant major holding up a sign that said, “Colonel Cariello.” As I got into the 

tent, I told him I was Colonel Cariello. “Yes sir, come with me. I’m going to take 

you to the TOC [tactical operations center].” I asked him who he was. “Well, I’m 

the command sergeant major mentor, the sergeant major ops mentor for the 205th. 

I’m going to take you and introduce you to the RCAG [Regional Corps Assistance 

Group] commander, Colonel Ken Edwards.”

So we go over to the passenger terminal where the temporary TOC is located. 

They called it “Taliban’s Last Stand” because that’s where the Taliban were. You 

could see inside the one corridor where they dropped the bombs to kill the Taliban 

when we took Kandahar back. We went there but he wasn’t there. He had gone to 

bed because he had been up a long time so we went back over to his barracks. I 

introduced myself and was told he was glad I was here. There was some stuff they 

needed me to start knocking out. They had an IWS [information workspace] brief 

on Operation RIVER DANCE tomorrow morning at 0630. 

JM: Welcome to Afghanistan. 

DC: Yes. So we drove back to the TOC where I met a lieutenant colonel who 

was the G3 and happy to give it up. They made him the deputy commander/XO 

mentor. I had been tracking RIVER DANCE in the 205th because, at that point, 

they weren’t doing the computer IWSs because they were doing TACSAT [tactical 

satellite] command updates on a daily basis at 1700. I went and sat in on that. Once 
66

I found out I was going to the 205th, while I was at Kabul, I would go into their 

joint operations center conference room and sit in to listen to what the hell was 

going on. I started looking at maps and talking to the ‘3s. “Okay, what’s going on 

down there? Tell me about the American leadership down there. Tell me what you 

know about the ANA down there. What’s their strength?”

I just started gathering information from the headquarters and then I talked to 

Ken Edwards a couple of times on the DSN but I didn’t get a lot out of it, just him 

looking forward to me coming down. So my right-seat ride was 15 minutes. That’s 

how long it took to drive from the RSOI tent over to the TOC. I put together some 

slides until about 0130 in the morning, close to 0200 in the morning and then I was 

to meet Edwards at 0530 for breakfast. At 0630, we were going to do this IWS. 

They had just now started the IWS. We were doing two IWSs for Operation RIVER 

DANCE which was the poppy eradication program in Afghanistan. The ANA were 

to provide the security for the Afghan National Police who were providing the 

security for the eradication force which was a bunch of guys with tractors and 

plows who were going to plow under all the poppies all the way up the Helmand 

River.

Of course, where you’ve got water, you’ve got crops. So my immersion into 

country was that I was thrown into it feet running and it didn’t stop. It did not stop. 

Okay, that’s the way I love it. I learned a lot as I went on and 16 days after I came in 

there, I was made the RCAG commander. So then I was the senior mentor/RCAG 

commander. That meant two things: I’m responsible for all those US troops plus 

KBR [Kellogg Brown & Root] and MPRI [Military Professional Resources Inc.] 

[contractors], etc., that are under the 205th RCAG as well as I’m responsible for 

mentoring the corps commander and making sure all the mentoring meshes from 

the corps level, brigade level, kandak level for the operations.

They were just standing up the international forces in Regional Command 

[RC]-South, so we were the combative force with the ANA. For RIVER DANCE, 

there weren’t any Brits, Canadians, Dutch, or Romanians with us. So, like Major 

General Richard Durbin says, “Where goeth the ANA, so goeth the ETT” and 

that’s what we did. If it wasn’t immoral, illegal or stupid, we went. Where they 

went, we went and we had to. We provided the close air support or CAS and the 

MEDEVAC [medical evacuation] as well as our advising, mentoring, coaching, 

and facilitating.

We were also the advocates. We were the advocates for the ANA. We’re the 

guys who, when our own Coalition forces come up two hours before a major 

mission and tell us they need 50 ANA to go out on this, we’d tell them no, we 

weren’t doing that and ask “How long have you been planning this mission?” if 

the answer’s “Well, for two weeks.” then “Good, two weeks ago you should have 
67

come and got us. You’re not getting the ANA.” We don’t do that to our Army, why 

are we doing it to their army? 

JM: This Operation RIVER DANCE, can you talk about how that was 

conducted and the effectiveness of it? 

DC: I’ll tell you from the ANA perspective. The overall picture was this. There 

were boxes that were established up the river and these are the areas and this is 

how we’re going to track it. In fact, as an artillery officer, when I first saw the map 

at Phoenix of these boxes, I said, “Perfect, kill boxes, all right. Okay, what artillery 

assets do we have? What CAS do we have? This is going to be fabulous. Are we 

going to start an array of fires? How are we going to do this?” They answered, “No, 

no, no, those are poppy eradication boxes. We’re going to start here and plow or 

drown everything.” If the ceilings were a certain size, they had pumps and they 

would pump water. Because when they plant, they create these huge troughs, so 

there’s a buildup that they can pour the water in and it doesn’t sift back to the river; 

it stays in this pond per se.

We’re going to eradicate by box and then we’ll shift from Box 19 to 18 to 

whatever. Okay. From the ANA standpoint, this is what we needed to do and this 

was initiated before I got there. They took a kandak from the 207th. 3d Brigade 

of the 205th only had a brigade headquarters. It didn’t have any kandaks, no 

infantry. They come with three infantry kandaks, a combat support kandak, which 

is artillery, engineers and recon, and then a combat service support kandak, which 

has haul assets, maintenance, and medical.

So you have five kandaks that make up a brigade. The headquarters there 

didn’t have any kandaks because they just stood the headquarters up. So they took 

an infantry kandak from the 207th in Herat and attached it to the 3d Brigade of the 

205th. Our role was to take and task-organize at 3d Brigade, 207th into supporting 

the operations of RIVER DANCE as well as grabbing a couple companies of 

kandaks of 1st Brigade of the 205th. This was the first major operation that this 

corps had ever done like this. They had done little quick reaction force of QRF to 

react to an IED and react to small attacks but now they’re doing a planned operation. 

We had to take them through the MDMP [military decision making progress], 

take them through the course of action process, battle tracking processes, CCIRs 

[commander’s critical information requirements], PIRs [priority intelligence 

requirements], take them through all that so they had an understanding of what 

they have to be cognizant of when they send this element down.

By the way, how are we going to support them because these are remote 

locations? When we take them to the bottom of the Helmand River where it 

touches Nimruz in the southernmost portion of the Helmand Province and we’re 

over in Kandahar, how are we going to get them supplies? How are we going to 
68

resupply and refit them? What if they have maintenance issues? How are we going 

to take care of that? We had to walk them through those steps. General Durbin 

has a saying, and we tracked this, “First in your mentoring process, you do it for 

them, then you do it with them, and then you do it by them.” That holds very true. 

During the first part of RIVER DANCE, we were doing it “for them.” We evolved 

into “with them.” 

JM: In the same operation? 

DC: Yes, and there were a lot of moving parts. You had the police who were now 

involved, trying to command and control. At that time, OCS-A [Office of Security 

Cooperation-Afghanistan] had their team in Lashkar Gah working through the 

provincial coordination center which was stood up as part of this to command and 

control the police, the National Directorate of Security which is equivalent to the 

FBI and CIA lumped into one, the local governance, and the Governor of Helmand 

Engineer Mohammed Daud. All these people want to make decisions and want 

stuff to happen. It has to happen in an organized manner or you have no control 

over it. So we had to establish command and control throughout that operation. We 

tagged into that. I initially sent Mike Slusher there as the LNO of the 3d Brigade 

to me as the G3 and eventually as the RCAG commander.

I needed somebody who was going to give me ground truth of what was really 

going on before we launched the 5th Kandak of the 1st Brigade, which was the CSS 

unit, to go resupply these 3d Brigade guys. That’s a two day trip through hostile 

areas and so we had to make sure we had ground troops. We heard they needed 

water but when we got there they had two CONEXs trailers full of water. You said 

you needed water? Oh, well, he didn’t know we had water. We need people to 

make sure that before we do these sorts of things, we’ve got good command and 

control. So the ANA, in this operation, evolved. The 205th Corps evolved. Now, 

that ended taking us up to Sangin.

We moved elements of 3d Brigade, 207th to Sangin, which is north of Highway 

1, up Highway 611. We had a lot of activity that was going on in Sangin because 

Daud had stated that we needed to put a FOB there at the cross rivers of the Helmand 

River and I can’t remember the other river’s name. That other river was normally 

dry unless there was a rain so it was a dry wadi that fed into the Helmand at that 

point but it was a good crossroads intersection for drug trafficking. Daud said we 

had to put it there. In fact, that FOB was in a poppy field. We plowed the poppies 

to start building the FOB. Then we put the ANA in the bottom half of that. There 

was a wall that stretched out and around and we put them down in the one section 

of it and we were up in the top end of it. We had a hole that we dug about 6 x 20 x 

5 and that’s what we were in initially with some triple strand concertina around it 

as we were waiting for the support elements of the CS engineer element from 1st 

Brigade to get up there and start building some infrastructure and force protection.
69

The ANA had to learn how to do that. So we took that engineer element and 

mentored them into establishing force protection. Here’s how you start from 

nothing. We also hired some local contractors to go up there, always keeping in 

mind that we were looking for means by which we can force the stimulation of the 

Afghan national economy. We have to do that. So we hired those folks. Back to 

your question, keeping that in mind and trying to get the ANA to help develop that 

as well. When we needed something, we had the ANA get it for us. We had them 

go through the local contractor to purchase Jersey barriers, for example, have them 

shipped and have a crane there to take the barriers off the trucks. We’re not going 

to do that. We wanted them to do that but again, we were still at that point in the 

“with” process.

By the time I left the 205th which was in July, we had a lot of operations 

under our belt at that point. We had what we called the Sangin mission. We lost a 

US soldier in this one operation at the same time we lost a Canadian soldier. The 

Canadians came up and helped. Now they’re getting into the fight. It was their first 

into the fight. They came up to Sangin. We had the Kajaki. I lost two of my French 

ETTs and we lost 14 ANA in that mission. We had Panjwai, we had Panjwai, we 

had Panjwai, we had Maymwan, and then we had Panjwai, plus the other things 

that were happening in Uruzgan and over in Zabol like Kalat, Shinkay, Naubahar, 

Atghar, etc. So there were always things popping around and happening. At the 

same time, now as we’re in the “with” and almost close to the “by” with the US 

presence, now all of a sudden we’re bringing in the British OMLTs [operational 

mentor and liaison teams], Canadians, Dutch, and Romanians to start partnering 

with the ANA. 

JM: What were your experiences working with these Coalition partners? 

DC: Well, we kind of took a step back when we did that because we Americans 

lead by example. We lead from the front. Where the ANA goeth, so goeth the 

ETTs. We don’t hesitate. I’m so damn proud of those guys, everyone I had in the 

205th and the 203d. They went and did their job in austere locations. When we 

brought in the international forces, though, there was a hesitation and a reservation 

because they hadn’t worked with the ANA like we had. They hadn’t been in combat 

operations with the ANA and now they wanted to bring them back to a comfort 

level that they had. They wanted to see them go through all this.

Well, okay, keep in mind, though, as you’re seeing them go through all this, 

we still have the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan shooting at us 

and trying to blow us up on an almost daily basis. We’re not going to stop the 

fight so you have this huge warm fuzzy as to how the ANA works. So I kept those 

ETTs, because I had to as well. We called them the LSTs [logistical support teams]. 

Because we’re the G8 lead nation, we still have to have US presence holding the 
70

dollars. Our money can only go through our hands, our US hands, so therefore all 

the CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Program] funds, for instance, that 

were being spent in Afghanistan had to go through our guys. We could not give that 

money to the Brits and tell them they could use the cash whenever they needed to 

buy something. So I kept those ETTs with them. Until they fully conducted their 

TOA [transfer of authority], the ETTs were still pretty much in the ETT role and 

not an LST role.

The ANA, as they were now developing, were apprehensive about the British, 

Canadians, Dutch, and the Romanians because we had taken them to a level and 

now all of a sudden the leadership is seeing that they want to take them back. 

They’re questioning why they’re being treated like this. The US, when we’re given 

the order to go, you go. The Brits say, “Let’s be pragmatic about this.”

JM: Did they have national restrictions or anything like that on them about 

what they could do? 

DC: The Brits did. Before they had complete TOA, they really weren’t 

supposed to be engaged in some of the operations they were. I will tell you that 

the Brits were engaged in some operations because it happened. They were part 

of it. There were some perceived caveats but they worked through those caveats. 

The Canadians are strappers, man. Those guys go out and fight. Once they got into 

the game and started standing up their battalion and we started partnering them 

with the ANA, those guys are strappers. I’m really impressed with the Canadians. 

I had never worked with them before. I had worked with the Brits down at Fort 

Sill a couple times but never with the Canadians. I was really, really impressed 

with these guys. Not that they were warmongers. They had something to offer, 

they knew what they were there for and they didn’t want to be sitting at Kandahar 

Airfield or doing local patrols around there. They wanted to get downrange and get 

with the ANA. They had a lot to offer and they did.

The Dutch stood up a force but it came in as a bunch of engineers and the 

Romanians came in but they didn’t bring in their OMLTs. I TOA’d on 4 July with 

my replacement and on 5 July I drove up to Gardez to take over the 203d. At the 

end of that week, the Romanian battle group came in and they put them over in 

the Zabol Province. But they never brought any OMLTs with them down there 

which they were supposed to do. RC-South, RC-West, RC-North were supposed 

to be all OMLT. Under the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force], the US 

contribution was going to be RC-East. Eventually that would evolve into additional 

international battalions, countries coming in and being a part of that as well, so 

eventually the US could fade away or just put smaller pockets as the potential exit 

strategy for Afghanistan. Then we would rotate leadership and units. Now again, 

that’s levels above me at that point of how that was going to be taken care of but 

that’s what was briefed to me as we were developing the OMLTs because I would 

ask what we were going to do with these US folks.
71

Now, 96 ETTs make up a brigade. When an OMLT comes in and takes over, 

that gets our initial planning that we put together. I had Mike Slusher and, at that 

time, Lieutenant Colonel Sean Ward (ph), I think he’s an O6 now, from the 53d 

out of Florida. Sean was the 3d Brigade senior mentor. Mike reported to him. We 

worked together and developed our thoughts of what this LST should be, sent 

that back up to Phoenix, who sent it to CSTC-A [Combined Security Transition 

Command–Afghanistan] and they approved it. That worked for the Brits because 

they came in strong. They brought in 300 OMLTs whereas we had 96 for the 

brigade. The concept was that we’re going to go from 96 to 32. That was the 

number we came up with and I’ll tell you that that number is even shrinking now 

as well, the LSTs but that was based on these international countries fully standing 

up 96 at a minimum if not more for each of those brigades and also provide an 

OMLT for the RCAGs. So the Dutch stand up their combative brigade, because 

they would bring in a battle group. From the battle group, they would dice out so 

many folks to become the OMLTs or they brought in a battle group from, let’s 

say the Netherlands, and then they brought in a separate organization which was 

of that same army and made them OMLTs where they had some form of habitual 

relationship, i.e. the Brits had the 5th Para which was the combative battle group in 

the Helmand Province. The Light Horse Artillery Regiment was the OMLTs. Now, 

that had a habitual relationship.

That artillery supported the 5th Para and the 3d Para in operations. So they 

knew each other. They had worked with each other. So that’s how that was 

supposed to work. Why I got to this, as we reduced that force, we went from 96 

to 32. We now had 64 folks. What are we going to do with them? Well, we would 

start putting them over into RC-East which was the US contribution to the ISAF 

program, so that’s how I knew we were doing that and eventually it would convert 

over to OMLT.

I will tell you, as I left, I was helping process in the 203d. I left 18 January 

and departed Gardez to go up to Kabul. I was already working three weeks prior 

to that. They were going to bring in a Polish battle group and a Polish OMLT and 

put them in RC-East so they were already getting ready to bring an international 

country into RC-East, which is really good. I had 23 Romanian ETTs in the 203d. 

I had 21 prior. I thought we were going to lose them because the word was that the 

next group of OMLTs was going to go down to Zabol and they’re going to work 

with their battle group. Well, okay, that’s only 21, not 96, so you’re not bringing in 

a whole bunch. Then we found out that they weren’t providing any OMLTs. They 

were going to keep the US down there as ETTs and these Romanians would stay 

up at the 203d as ETTs, not OMLTs. 

JM: You talked a little bit about the cultural awareness training, or lack thereof 

that you got at Shelby. Once you got into country, what were your rapport building 
72

experiences? Were there any cultural differences or language barriers you noticed 

or had to overcome? 

DC: Yes, language being the number one. You rely heavily on your interpreter. 

I tell you, these are very hospitable people. The Afghans are very hospitable people, 

especially in the army. 

They know a couple of things. One, they know that you have knowledge. They 

really look up to the United States Army because of our training, education, and 

the caliber of the soldiers we bring to the table. So they respect that.

Number two is that they know we have the checkbook. They know that all 

the equipment, money, and infrastructure they’re getting is coming through us so 

like I said earlier, you really couldn’t offend them because they understood there 

were differences between us and them. The cultural training is spot on, as my Brit 

friends would say.

You start out having chai and you really don’t talk business. When I first met 

Major General Rahmatullah Raufi, we did have chai but we immediately had to 

get into operations because RIVER DANCE was happening and we needed to get 

his soldiers downrange. Normally what happens to build rapport is that you sit 

down and drink chai and they have little dishes where they have these little dried 

chick peas, sugar coated walnuts, and raisins. Not like our raisins because ours get 

real brown with all the sugars and crap that we add. They take their grapes and dry 

them down to a raisin. You eat a little bit of that, you’re drinking chai and you’ll 

talk about things. You’ll talk about Afghanistan. 

They’ll ask questions about the United States. They want to know about you 

and what you’re bringing to the table. Now here’s an O6 mentoring a two-star 

general saying, “What do you know, Colonel?” They’re very receptive to what 

you have to bring to the table. You have to be professional when you bring it to the 

table. You don’t treat them like garbage.

The two generals I mentored had 35plus years of military experience. Major 

General Abdul Khaliq served in five different armies in his military career within 

Afghanistan. He has fought against the enemies of Afghanistan. He was on the 

Russian side fighting against the mujahedeen as a divisional commander. Then 

he went to Pakistan. Raufi did the same thing. They were trained under the king’s 

army. They were under the open government army, as they called it, after they 

punted the king. Then the Soviets came in and they were under them. Some of 

them were under the mujahedeen.

They left the Soviet Army and became mujahedeen or they then became the 

Northern Alliance. Some of those senior leaders went into Pakistan when the 

Taliban came in because they would have been killed. It would have been a main 
73

threat to have an individual with that much experience so they went into Pakistan. 

When the Northern Alliance developed, they started coming back in. 

They were under the new government army and then now there’s the formalized 

army. So they served under all that. You’ll be taught in the cultural classes that 

you have to be very, very polite. You can never raise your voice and you can’t 

embarrass them, and I say, go egal which is Dari for bullshit. Very professionally 

and tactfully, I used forceful mentoring and I evolved into that down in RC-South. 

My days were long and I was always on the phone with the corps commander. 

We had soldiers, his ANA soldiers, who were getting killed all over the place. 

We had US soldiers. We had the Combined Joint Task Force 76 (CJTF-76) element 

that came down and helped support the Brits and the Canadians in operations. 

We had ODAs [operational detachment alphas] in RC-South. At least once a 

week we had ramp ceremonies where we were putting someone on a plane from all 

those forces we had down there. We evolved the ANA into having ramp ceremonies 

as well. They can do a lot. Now, it’s a matter of them getting you to do it or you 

getting them to do it. 

They can be very crafty as can we, but they would love to enable you to do 

what they should be doing and then blow sunshine up your butt. “Oh mentor, it’s 

so great you’re here, we couldn’t do this. Oh, you must never leave me.”

It’s like, “Yeah, I got news for you. One year from now I’m gone. I love you, 

but I’m gone.” So, you could work through things. Now, there were a couple of 

things I would push the line on. I got shunned once by Raufi. When it happened, 

I was at first worried that I may have lost it and wondered how the rest of my tour 

was going to be. At that point, I didn’t know I was going to the 203d so I thought, 

“Man, this is going to be a long year.” Their parades are a big deal to them, a huge 

deal and this kandak was tasked to be the 205th’s representation to go to Kabul 

and be in the parade where President Hamid Karzai sits there and you’ve got the 

artillery going by.

JM: Like a pass in review? 

DC: Yes, and they come marching by. For three months this kandak was doing 

nothing but learning how to march. I said, “We don’t have enough forces for 

RIVER DANCE. We need to pull this unit and get it out of this parade detail.” 

We had to now support troops going up to Kajaki because of a perceived threat 

where Karzai personally called Raufi and told him, “You need to get soldiers up 

there.” That’s how it sometimes works there. I know he’s the president but I told 

Raufi, “Hey, hey, hey. You work for the Ministry of Defense” and Raufi said, 

“Yes, but he’s the president.” “Yeah, well he should go to Abdul Rahim Wardak, 

the minister of defense, and Wardak should go to Bismullah Khan, the chief of 
74

the General Staff, and Bismullah Khan should be calling you. There’s chain of 

command, unity of command. The president should not be calling you.” “Well, I 

will call Wardak.” he’d say.

JM: President Bush isn’t calling commanders in the field . . . 

DC: That’s right. This is how it works, Commandancy. This is how it works. 

He said, “What would you do?” Remember, this is now “with” him and sort of 

“for” him. I’m in between that “for” and “with” on this one because this needs to 

happen. In some cases, and we were warned, it’ll take a month to get a decision. 

Go back to what I said earlier. If you allow them to take a month to give you a 

decision, you’ll wait a month. When you say, “Listen, by the end of the day, we’re 

going to make a decision. You better sit down and plan this out and by the way, 

I’m going to roll up my sleeves and sit right next to you. We need to go through 

this and get this done because we have to get forces out there because I don’t want 

your ANA to die and I don’t want my US troops to die. So we’re going to do this.”

“Okay, we’ll do this.” he’d say. Are they enabling you or are you enabling 

them? I pushed him on getting the 1-2 out of this march. Now I worked into that. 

Well, we’ll take the recon of the 4-1, send them over to Lashkar Gah and make 

them the QRF. We’ll take the 2d Company of the 2-1, put them up at Sangin right 

now and hold that in place until we do a RIP from the 3d Brigade, 207th as they’re 

coming up through Lashkar Gah. We’ll take them from Lashkar Gah up to Sangin 

and rotate them out. That’s what we’re going do.

Then we’ll take the 1-2 and put them at Kajaki for where there are supposedly 

400 (always over-exaggerated) enemies. Fifty used to get us moving and then it 

was like, 50? You know, that’s one artillery mission. One volley of artillery and 

that’s done. “Oh, I mean 100.” was the response. Then it went from 100 to 200 to 

400 and it was always even numbers. I even said to Raufi once, “You know, aren’t 

there ever 43 enemies? Is there never 101 enemies? Why is it always that they have 

it right down to 100, 200, or 400?” So anyway, I rolled in and said, “Then we’ll put 

1-2 from the 205th up at Kajaki,” and he blew a cork. “Why do you say things you 

know are not going to happen?” He ripped into me. “You know damn well they’re 

not going pull the 1-2. They have to go to the parade. 

We are done,” he said. Well, okay. So I left, walked out, got to my truck, got ready 

to start it and then said, “No, go egal.” So I went back in there, “Commandancy, 

Commandancy? Who are you going to put there? Who are we going to put there? 

If there are 400 enemies and you now have Engineer Daud, the governor, who has 

called Karzai and Karzai’s called you, who are you going put there? Who do you 

have to put there? Tell me who you’re going put there? What guys are you going to 

get killed? Because I want to take pictures of them so you can have a good picture 

to send with their bodies back to their families. I want to do that.”
75

“Well,” he said, and Raufi would give his little grin and say, “Chai?” He’d call 

in his aide and tell him, “Bring in chai.” Okay, now we’re going drink chai and 

we’re going to talk. 

We’re going to get over this. At the same time, when I went to the truck, I 

called Phoenix, talked to General Perryman and said, “I need overhead power on 

this. We need to get the 1-2 from the 205th released from this goddamn parade 

so we can put them up at Kajaki. We don’t want to spread his forces any thinner 

because he doesn’t have anybody. These folks, trust me sir, are going get killed if 

there is a 400-enemy force sitting up at Kajaki. We need, at a minimum, 200 to 250 

soldiers there along with our ETTs,” and those were the French. Plus I always had 

to have two US soldiers with them because they can’t touch our money. So having 

Romanian or French ETTs still required that I have US ETTs embedded with them 

to handle all the money.

So anyhow, we got 1-2 from the 205th released. At that point in time, Raufi 

saw some of the power we could bring to the table whereas Wardak would have 

said, “No, you know they’re going be in this parade. How dare you even think of 

not having them in the parade. Who are you going provide for the parade?”

What I brought up as a recommendation was, “You know what? Grab a bunch 

of 209th or 207th guys who aren’t in the fight right now, put together a company 

and throw 203d Corps patches on their shoulders and let them march by. Is Wardak 

going to know? Is Karzai going to know? Do that if you have to have representation 

from the 203d.” 

They ended up doing something like that but they sold it off as, “President 

Karzai, because of your desire to have Kajaki protected. . . .” Kajaki Dam provides 

the hydroelectric for all RC-South. It needs to be protected. So we then established 

a rapport, plus I was always there for the corps commander. Through my interpretor 

he would call at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. If he wanted me there, I 

was there. He and I stood in the soil of the blood of his soldiers and he stood with 

me in the soil of the blood of our Coalition forces. We mourned over our dead 

together. 

We built a rapport. So in that culture, you establish trust and a bond of 

brotherhood. Like I’ve been telling the ETTs, you don’t call yourselves brothers. 

You and I would not sit down and say, “We are brothers.” In Afghanistan, we are 

friends. 

We are only brothers when we go out and do operations together, when we 

get shot at together. See, I proved my brotherhood to them. They don’t have to 

prove any brotherhood to me. I’m out there helping him direct his forces under 

combative fire or on the radios and on the phones, helping mentor, direct, and 

advise him to help array his forces.
76

At the same time, I’m talking to my ETTs to help mentor that level so there 

is success. I’m providing needed things that they know, through their system, that 

they’re not going to get right away. I can have my guys provide or pay for things 

that might be on the fringe of, “Well, that’s really not authorized to be paid for with 

FOO [field ordering officer] funds.”

We needed to get the supplies to them and getting their dead bodies out as soon 

as we can, because it’s a big deal for them. It’s a hard deal with aircraft because of 

weather restrictions and such but that’s how you build rapport with the ANA. Like 

I tell the ETTs, “You have arrived when they call you brother.” I’ve been called 

brother by both of those generals I mentored. Not that I’m that great, just that I 

was there. That’s what I tell the ETTs, “You have to be with them.” You want to 

establish rapport and get through the cultural differences and you’ll learn to love 

Afghanistan. I love Afghanistan. I love their food, their country. I see where it’s 

going. You go to Afghanistan and you’re stepping back to the colonies and you’re 

building a nation and we’re part of that. This whole team, this group and Phoenix

rising is building that team, building that country, and we’re watching it day by 

day. There are new roads, solar lights, schools, medical clinics, and wells going in. 

there are district centers that now are providing governance, a place for the people 

to go to hold shuras and jirgas. Coordination centers are now sharing information 

they wouldn’t share before. So being a part of that and then making them be the 

forefront enabled you to put an Afghan face on things.

Hell, I put on the whole Afghan body. The corps commander handed out 

humanitarian assistance stuff, not me. I wouldn’t allow any of my soldiers to hand 

out stuff. The ANA would hand out stuff to the people. I’d have to coach them, 

“Whatever you do, don’t tell these villagers that you got this from us. They don’t 

need to know that. Say, ‘We, the ANA and the government of Afghanistan, are here 

to provide you food, clothing, and school supplies.’” That’s what you need to tell 

these folks, not, “My American brother has coordinated getting these supplies sent 

from Americans to come help you.” They knew anyway.

So the people would come up, “Oh, please thank your families or thank 

whoever sent this for providing this to the government of Afghanistan.” Perfect, 

that’s what we want. That’s how we get out of there. 

JM: These ETTs, how and how well did they receive logistics, medical, 

airpower, and other forms of combat support? 

DC: We worked that. Now keep in mind that we are not the combatives. ETTs 

are not the combatives. Now in RC-South, we were the combatives. That’s why I 

bring it up because we stepped into that. That’s not for glorification of what I and 

the team I took down and fell into in the 205th created. It was that. Prior to these 

OMLTs coming in, it was that. Under the dual key relationship in Afghanistan, a 

combative force is partnered with the ANA.
77

I told you all about the OMLTs. Now over in RC-East, it was the 10th Mountain 

Division. So they had battalions out of the 3d Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division 

that were partnered with elements of the ANA. I sat with the corps and Brigade 

Commander of the 10th Mountain Division, Colonel John “Mick” Nicholson and 

talking with Nicholson, saying, “Okay, Mick, what do you need? I know you need 

to be partnered and we need to establish a structure for MOUNTAIN FURY,” which 

was going to be the first major combative operation the 203d had ever done as a 

corps. All they had ever done as well, was react to an IED, react to an ambush, go 

off and do some operational training that turned into finding caches, and security 

patrols, etc.

They had never conducted a corps level combative operation. So the ANA 

are now partnered with this group and the ETTs are embedded with the ANA. So 

when we put together one of the brigade task forces, the combative brigade said 

this is the operation we think needs to be done. By the way, we took it to the point 

where we wanted the ANA to come up with these combative operations and turn 

around to the 3d Brigade commander of the 10th Mountain Division and say, “This 

is what I need you to provide me.” That’s where we wanted to take it, that’s where 

Mick Nicholson wanted to take it, that’s where Major General Benjamin Freakley 

wanted to take it as well. “For them, with them, by them,” now we’ll be “by them.”

So how do we get that? Well, we have to develop them, to answer your 

question. For our ETTs we had a LTF [logistics task force] that was assigned at the 

RCAG level. 

We had SECFOR assigned to the RCAG as well. The ETTs downrange, using 

the chain of command, would submit the requests. So not only are they mentoring 

ANA now but they also have to take care of themselves like our formalized Army. 

The S1 had to do S1 stuff, the S2 had to do S2 stuff, S3, S4, etc. So the S4 of that 

ETT kandak would be mentoring the ANA and also having to get his reports that 

said, “We’re going to need more food and fuel, we’re going to need ammunition, 

we’re going to need some lumber because we’re going to do some self-help to 

rebuild our TOC, rebuild our living area so that it’s a better quality of life.”

He’d make that request through their brigade and their brigade S4 would send 

it up to the RCAG S4 and then we would put that request through to Phoenix and 

get our supplies. 

We would ship out the LTF to Kabul or we would have stuff flown in a ring 

flight. Or like in some cases, when it came to the 205th, it would be put on a 

C-130 from Kabul, our LTF would go pick it up and they would pull it over. Now 

remember, we’re pushing the economy of Afghanistan, so we would go do local 

purchases. With our ops funds we would go to town and request 56 sheets of 

plywood. 
78

Then we’d go to a lumber yard and I’ll tell you, plywood is not a good example 

of the quality of their lumber because they don’t have it. They get it. There are 

special contractors that get it but if you need 2 x 4s, 1 x 2s, whatever, you could go 

into town and get it. There’s a lot of stuff you can get in Afghanistan at these shops. 

You can get computers, paint brushes, clothes, and drugs. You know, although they 

do have some formalized pharmacies, a lot are bazaars. So you can go get vicodin, 

percodan, valium, and morphine. You could go to the bazaar and the guy in his 

little box would sell you that stuff. You don’t need a prescription to get it. You can 

just go and buy it. So anyway, supply would come through and then we would put 

together a mission via the SECFOR to attach to the LTF.

Or, if we knew we needed to send ANA supplies via their system, we would 

put some of our supplies on their trucks, add another truck, or we would put our 

trucks in their convoy and go downrange. So our ETTs could be supplied, they had 

communications, they had a pretty damn good quality of life, and they had NIPR 

[non-secure internet protocol router] access to e-mail home every day. Some of 

the FOBs, in fact most of the FOBs, had DSN capability so they could call home 

via their calling cards. Guys would buy cell phones and the SIM chip in country 

which was about four to five dollars a minute but some guys did that. If they had 

compatible cell phones, and a lot of them were, they would just buy the SIM chip 

at a hundred and some bucks and then buy so many minutes per month, throw that 

in there and make a quick call home letting family and friends know what was 

going on. So they could be supplied downrange.

Now, I bring up that combative force and if they needed parts that we couldn’t 

get to them right away, for example the 10th Mountain brought its 710th Brigade 

Support Battalion that had maintenance assets, the PRT [provincial reconstruction 

team] which were part of the 10th and other organizations that were forward 

support elements, had maintenance parts.

You have to love the US service member. Anybody could pull up. My ETTs 

over in Ghazni could go to the Ghazni PRT and say, “Hey, we need new power 

steering on this up-armored Humvee.” “Hey brother, not a problem, two hours and 

I’ll have her done.” You know, not, “Oh wait a minute, wait a minute, that patch, 

that’s not our patch.” So there was good rapport. Nobody ever denied anything 

from the US forces.

Now of course we couldn’t do the same thing with the Canadians, Germans, 

Italians, etc., because of different equipment and different funding sources. We’re 

not going fund your army, okay? Fund your own army. 

JM: You did a lot of coaching, teaching, and mentoring. Did you personally 

learn anything that maybe especially contributed to your professional development? 
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DC: Yes, absolutely. General Khaliq, prior to becoming the corps commander, 

and I learned things from General Raufi too. General Khaliq was the G5 planner 

for the MOD and a great tactician. I learned a lot about tactical operations that 

were relevant to Afghanistan through General Khaliq, things I would have thought 

of differently based on the institutional training I received here, even with the 

counterinsurgency training. 

JM: Differently and you wouldn’t have been as successful, you think? 

DC: There would have been success but it would have been a little bit harder 

or a little bit longer. There would have been success. Our tactics, techniques, and 

our counterinsurgency program that has been put together are damn near spot on. 

It’s a good read. I took the first draft because I had to read it for the War College 

first year. 

JM: The new counterinsurgency manual? 

DC: Yes, and then seeing how it was being applied and watching it unfold. 

In fact, a couple of times I would make copies of pages and give it to the Brits 

and say, “Look, this is what counterinsurgency is about. This is what we need to 

do. This is why I told you what you need to do with the ANA is this because it’s 

not about going out and killing everybody. It’s about going out, killing a few, and 

getting the others to no longer have the enemy come in.” From the personal side, 

just by being the mentor with the ANA, I learned patience, tolerance, acceptance 

and a new and better appreciation of flexibility. 

JM: This is kind of a related question but what would be the characteristics of 

a good ETT member? What are some of the necessary qualities for people who are 

taking on these kinds of training and advisory roles? 

DC: Number one, have an open mind. You have to be patient. Take those four 

other attributes I just gave you as well. You have to be able to apply those. You 

have to understand how an army works and you have to know that it’s not just the 

kinetic piece of the fight. It’s the non-kinetic piece as well. In fact, the non-kinetic 

is a bigger piece. A lot of guys hate the terminology but winning the hearts and 

minds of the people will move you forward a lot faster than going in there with 

guns a’blazing and then doing the battle damage assessment afterwards.

An ETT can’t think that when he goes over there, and I’ll tell you, I was of the 

same mind just not to the extent that a lot of others who have gone over there were, 

that we are going to go over there and we’re going to end the war. 

We’re going to find Osama bin Laden. We’re going end this. Here’s how I’m 

going call in all my artillery and let’s see what type of counter-fire assets I have 

available. How am I going to integrate those and where would I put the 105s versus 

the 155s and integrate that with CAS? You have to go in there with the mindset that 

you are not the combative commander although you have that available to you. 
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We were never denied, for the most part, a CAS mission. It is an in extremis for 

us. It’s an in extremis that we call it in. That was one of the mentoring things, and 

I’ll get to your question even more but I want to throw this in. That was one of the 

other things I had to mentor my own ETTs on, being an artillery guy. 

They see a truck out there that has a PKM on it, so they request an A-10. Hey, I 

got a better idea, why don’t you turn around, go mentor that ANA who has a PKM 

or an RPG to go shoot them because I’m not going through the process of calling 

in this expensive aircraft. A life is more expensive and valuable than any piece of 

equipment we have but instead of calling in a jet or artillery to blow something 

up, what he really should be doing (based on his ratios and the assets he currently 

has available to him) that ANA has an RPG, so shoot the goddamn truck and let’s 

move on. 

JM: Because they’re not going have A-10s when we leave?

DC: That’s right. They’re not going have that. So I was getting a lot of calls 

through the TOC, “We need CAS, we need CAS. They fired at us.” “Okay, fire 

back. What are they firing at you with?” “Uh, AK-47s and PKMs.” “Okay, what 

do you have?” “Well, we have our M2.” “No, no, not what do you have. What does 

the ANA that you have with you have?” and I already knew that it’s a rhetorical 

question. “Get with the commander, tell him to formalize his platoon or his 

company, set up the proper formation, and go after the enemy.” not, instead, let’s 

wait for a half hour to 45 minutes for this CAS to come in. By the way, you have 

no artillery in Helmand, so that one’s off. There isn’t any naval gunfire because 

we’re not close enough to the water unless they have cruise missiles. Forget it, it’s 

not happening. So, guess what? Remember, you mentored the ANA on how to be 

fighters.

You have to have that understanding and appreciation as well. So one of the 

needed skill sets is you have to look at the big picture. Look at what resources 

you really have available, and at what point you draw the line in the sand and 

say, “Okay, now I’m bringing in CAS, now I’m going to bring in everything I can 

possibly bring in.” You have to be able to talk through situations. When we had 

the Kajaki Dam incident where that whole crew which was going up to get the 1-2 

from the 205th because it’s a resort village there, there weren’t any enemy. It was a 

bunch of 400 locals who were pissing and moaning because they had heard rumors 

that they were going to shut the dam down which would shut down the power. The 

reason it pissed off the locals along the Helmand River was because they were 

growing poppies and they needed the electricity for their pumps in order to irrigate 

their poppy fields. So, yeah, I guess if my livelihood is based on that poppy and 

the other crops I’m growing to survive. I too would be up at the dam pissed off if I 

had heard rumors that they were going to shut it down. That’s what got us up there. 

There was never 400 Taliban. It was 400 locals pissing and moaning.
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So now we’re going to get them and they didn’t take a left to go through the 

desert. They stayed on Highway 611 and were fired at the whole way down. That’s 

where the two French were killed and the 14 ANA. Of the 14 ANA, eight of them 

were not killed outright. They were chased, run down from 09:30 and the last one 

died around 15:00 or 15:30. All those people were chasing them down because 

they thought the ANA were up there to cut their poppy fields and they were going 

to kill them. That’s it. That’s why. I had to be on the radio. I had a couple of the 

other individuals on the radios talking to that element as it was out there, as they 

were being fired at. You have to be calm, cool, and collected. There has to be a 

voice of reason, maturity, and assuredness that what’s going on, you’re going to 

get them through it.

“Okay, captain, stop. Take a couple of breaths. Here’s what I need from you. 

Keep your ass on that radio. I got aircraft inbound and I need you to be able to 

communicate with them.” You have to be able to visualize what’s coming over that 

radio and be able to formalize a course of action for those individuals who are in it 

at the same time they’re formalizing their courses of action. Mentor them into that 

course of action. Mentor them into thinking right, thinking straight, at the same 

time while being fired at.

Having been fired at a few times, I can tell you that there are a lot of things 

going through your mind. You need to engage, “I have to be making decisions 

because I’m the damn leader.” At that point, in that quick microsecond when all 

that other shit is going through your head, boom, you need to react because now 

they’re all looking at you. What do we do? Okay, here’s what we do. You have to 

be able to take that to the table. You have to realize that there are going to be some 

gruesome things you’re going to see. That’s a small part of that overall thing but 

what you have to do is go in there with the mindset of two things. The second one 

I evolved into and that was where I told the corps commander, “I am your last 

mentor. I’m your last mentor. That’s it, I’m it.” 

The first thing you have to bring to the table as a mentor or the skill sets you 

have, is that you are going to stand up an army. What they are going to be in the 

future is what you show them to be, what you mentor them to be. Their future is 

dependent on the way you mentor them, the way you interact with them, your 

professionalism, how you look, how you dress and when you think they’re not 

looking at you...they’re looking at you. They’re watching you all the time. So you 

can’t be Johnny straight laced, hard rigid ass and then leave their office, walk 10 

feet and start punching, rope-a-doping your buddy. You have to be what you are 

but you need to be that at all times. You need to be a professional. 

They’re not looking to be rigid. I like to joke around. I had great rapport with 

the generals and everyone else and it wasn’t just the generals I was mentoring. 

I ended up as the RCAG commander mentoring a whole bunch of folks. I even 
82

helped support-mentor the leaders that my mentors were mentoring because they 

were cautious of, Well, I really don’t want to insult them. I’d be the guy saying 

in the staff meetings where they were presenting, “Are you kidding me? That’s 

what you’re going present? That’s what you’re showing the two-star general here? 

You should be ashamed you even thought about standing up and presenting that 

piece of garbage.” I’d be the guy who would do that and I’ll tell you what, the 

next week, that guy would present a good product and then I’d go, “Oh, what an 

improvement! (Applause) Outstanding job!” and then praise the living piss out of 

him. Then guess what? We had product.

They loved to be rewarded. I could take this 5 x 7 card and write, “You are the 

greatest!” put their name on it, sign my name to it, give it to them and you would 

think I gave them a million dollars. Certificates, pictures, small things but that’s 

what you evolve into and that’s what the mentor needs to be able to bring to the 

table. You need to know your government too because I’ll tell you, at the RCAG 

level and even at the kandak, John Schroeder was out at shuras and jirgas. You’re 

with the governor. You’re with the district elders and district leaders. You are reformalizing their government, their local government as well. So you have to know 

that. You have to know how our government works, not just our Army. 

JM: Political Science 101? 

DC: Yeah, Political Science 101, and you also have to be sensitive to their 

religion. They’re sensitive to your religion. In fact, the corps commander and I 

would have many discussions. He wanted to know about Catholicism, Methodists, 

and Lutherans. I said, “Yeah, well, my family was Catholic a long time ago but then 

they became Methodists.” “Well, why did they do that? When you’re a Muslim, 

you’re a Muslim.” Well, yeah okay, I got it. 

Then he would tell me about his religion—the four books that make up the 

Koran and what each of those four books are, the purity and sanctity of a Muslim 

and how they have to be pure. Right before the suicide bombers die, they shave 

because they have to be clean when they present themselves to Allah. They have 

to be clean shaven. They have to have new clothes because they’re going to their 

proverbial pearly gates. Okay, learn all that but you have to know and be sensitive 

to that.

You also have to have some form of decorum because they have a formalized 

program. When President Bush comes to Afghanistan, he’s eating off a paper plate. 

He’s sitting down with the troops, eating off a paper plate but in Afghanistan, if 

somebody from MOD or a high ranking individual came down, we’re breaking out 

the china and then, oh shit, we don’t have enough china and they’re saying, “Uh 

oh. How do we get more china so we can have this? I want the blue plates with the 

gold.” Commandancy, I’ll get you a bunch of paper plates. Oh no, oh I wish our 
83

army and our culture was like yours so we could get away with that, but I have to 

have these plates. You have to be able to work through that.

You have to have social skills. You have to have a sense of humor too because 

if you don’t have a sense of humor as an ETT, this shit’s going to choke you up 

sometimes. You have to look at it and say, “I can’t believe that just happened.” 

In one of the CSTC-A leaders’ e-mail signatures he put T. E. Lawrence’s quote 

which I’m opposed to. In fact, I have a rebuttal quote that I gave as my command 

philosophy. He said, “It’s their country and our time is short,” blah, blah, blah. 

Yeah, okay. What I say is, “If we enable them to do that, if we succumb to that, and 

we don’t force them to strive for perfection, then they will never be perfect. It’s our 

goal before we leave here because our time is short, to drive them to be the best 

they can be so they can stand up their country, provide security and stability for the 

future of Afghanistan.” That’s my rebuttal but in this, he had a quote in Latin that 

basically, when translated says, “You can’t make this shit up.”

There is a lot of that in Afghanistan. An Afghan, with an axe in his hand, walks 

over to a generator. What is he going to do? I don’t know. Well, what do you think 

he’s going do? There’s the power cable that’s coming from the generator. He takes 

the axe, chops the cable, gets flung 20 or 30 feet, he’s smoldering on the ground, 

and his buddies come running out with a Romax cable and they start wiring into 

the power of the generator so they can run that wire to their B-hut to plug in a TV. 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

They’ll take a garbage can, wrap a bunch of wires around it, run it up a wooden 

pole, run it back down and it becomes an antenna for their TV. Some of the best 

reception I’ve seen in country was off a garbage can dish. You can’t make this stuff 

up. 

JM: You said you guys were there 11 months? 

DC: Yes. 

JM: Looking back on 11 months and based on what you know now and the 

little time you’ve had to reflect because you guys just got back, what kind of 

outlook do you have for Afghanistan? Whether we’re talking about eradicating 

poppy fields in a limited sense to the country as a whole, where do you see this 

country in a couple years? 

DC: I’ve told both corps commanders that Afghanistan will have security and 

stability. It will get there in the next couple of years. In the next few months is 

where it’s going to be the make or break. The country is either going to implode 

on itself because the people are still questioning the government of Afghanistan. 

Part of that are the issues of promises that were made via us and the international 

community that haven’t been upheld. “By the end of this year, you’re going have 

a road and we’re going have the Gardez to Khowst road done.”
84

Well, it’s not done. There are a lot of villages in between in what we call the 

KG Pass and the Khowst to Gardez Pass. All these villages have always been 

supportive. In fact, when we went in there the first time, if you remember the first 

bombing missions that were conducted, they were conducted against the caches up 

in the KG Pass. So the Haqqani have been supporting that area. Well, they’ve been 

supporting the people. We’re going in there with the government from both Paktia

and Paktika and we’re saying, “Look, we’re going provide infrastructure, we’re 

going provide a highway, and pretty soon more trucks are going to come through 

here. You can build up your shops, start commerce and you make money and we’re 

going to be here with police and they’re going to have to buy their food, supplies, 

and fuel from you. Economically we’re going to develop you. This is what we’re 

going to provide you. In return, you need to provide us the names of the enemy and 

you need to let us know where their caches are. You need to tell us when they come 

here so we can go nab them, kill or capture them. You need to do that,” and then 

10 or 11 months later, there’s no road. There is no district center. There aren’t the 

bunches of police who are buying the food and fuel, or the ANA to do this. 

Then you got the Haqqani coming in and saying, “What was it they promised 

you? What have they delivered to you? Why are you listening and believing this 

government of Afghanistan or this Coalition force because they’re not doing it?” 

however, I do see Afghanistan being free. I’ve told both corps commanders when 

that becomes a free country, they’ll start tourism into Afghanistan.

An enterprising individual could set up a lot of stuff in that country that people 

would flock all over the world to go to. The mountains, when they have snow, you 

could have ski chalets, ski resorts. It’s unbelievable. You could have casinos in 

that country. It is the hub. Afghanistan is the hub of all the transportation. It’s the 

crossroads. It literally is the hub from Pakistan, India, and Russia to get to Iran, 

Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Germany. Afghanistan 

is that hub. You build that infrastructure, put in rail systems, you put in all that, 

and that country will flourish. I’ve told them, I will have my family back in this 

country.

Afghanistan is a success story. It started with General Karl Eikenberry but 

General Durbin has really taken it over the edge and has done all the right things 

as the CSTC-A commander to stand up that army and now to stand up the police 

to the same level that we’ve stood up the army. The development of the country, 

working with the government and the mentors that CSTC-A provides and that 

the State Department provides as well as what the international community under 

ISAF provides, will cause Afghanistan to flourish. I’m overly optimistic always 

but I will tell you that in the next two years the army is going to be able to stand 

on its own. It’ll take two to three years, maybe four, to get the police to that same 

level. Phoenix has now picked up the mission of training the police and once that’s 
85

accomplished, the enemies against the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan are going 

to see that coming to Afghanistan is no longer going to be an option, the people are 

not going to stand for it anymore. Because under ISAF, they have what are called 

the Afghan Development Zones, the ADZs which make sense. 

We need to focus our energies, our efforts and our resources on a location to 

each of the RC areas (Gardez, Ghazni, Khowst and Sharan) instead of trying to go 

to all these little villages and make a whole bunch of people happy. At the end of 

the day, if I go into the district of Awband and I build them a school, well, what 

does Awband do for the overall security of Ghazni Province? Very little but if I can 

grow Ghazni and get it to be completely secure, remember, the operative word here 

is “development.” Develop it economically and socially so that commerce and free 

enterprise start to flourish in that area along with the security. 

When you have these ADZs where you’re focusing and you start establishing 

security there, eventually they’re all going to bleed into each other. The other thing 

we need to do is help identify what is the level of insurgency we’re going to allow 

in that country or should I say, the level of unlawfulness.

Okay, let’s get the insurgency out. What’s the unlawfulness? The day I got 

back into country, I watched more on the news of more shit happening here in the 

United States (murders, kidnappings, rapes, racketeering, extortion, corruption) 

than we had in Afghanistan. I turned to my guys and I said, “Hell, we were safer in 

Afghanistan than we are in the United States!”

They did a survey over in Afghanistan. I don’t have all the results of that. Task 

Force Phoenix does. We should probably work that out so you guys get a copy of 

that. I’d like to have a copy of it myself, to be quite honest but the bottom line, 

what was presented to us at the commander’s conference for Task Force Phoenix

right before I left which was on January 20th, for the most part the people of 

Afghanistan think Afghanistan is secure. 

They love their ANA. They love their ANA more than they love their ANP. 

When you talk about potential of corruption of ANA against the people, it’s very 

small compared to the corruption they’ve perceived at the ANP. One of the biggest 

complaints against the Coalition forces and predominantly the US, and this has 

taken a 180, is the way we treat them on the roads.

When I first got into country, the SECFOR folks were running them off the 

roads. You’d have the guys up in the turrets, waving their fists, waving them off. 

They’d get on their bullhorns and yell, “Get off the road.”

We’ve now changed, though. We are part of the traffic and we’re not running 

them off the roads but we have created a behavior in them that when they see US 

or Coalition forces coming down the road, they immediately pull over to the side 
86

anyhow. We’re trying to get beyond that, that we are with them. We’re just another 

driver. In fact, I did a lot of driving around Afghanistan, quite a bit of flying too 

but more driving because I control it. Many times I was stuck at places because 

the helicopter pilots couldn’t fly or a storm came in and when you’re out there, 

you’re stuck. It is what it is. When I’m driving, I can come and go as I please. The 

corps commander is driving the majority of the time, he’s in my convoy with his 

vehicles, and we’re driving around. 

We got back in country on 25 January and by 28 January, we were driving up 

here to go to Fort Riley to meet with the ETTs and we were told they could fly us 

out there. No, we want to drive on a highway. We want to drive on an infrastructure 

where we know we’re not going be IED’d, VBIED’d, RCIED’d and everything 

else. 

We want to be able to just do that. We want to see trees, a lot of trees, and green 

and animals. We want to see this infrastructure because for almost a year, we didn’t 

see that.

When we came back the second time, they also said they’d fly us. No, we want 

to drive again because we can. So anyway, Afghanistan is going to get there. The 

ADZs are the way to do it. Focus your money, your resources, and your energies on 

getting roads in there. When the corps commander came to visit last week, he came 

here to Riley and then he came here to Shelby. He came with General Durbin. I was 

able to take him out the next day and give him United States cultural awareness of 

shopping malls, movie theaters, restaurants, Walgreen’s. “Look, Commandancy, 

here’s where we get our drugs.” 

JM: He’s like, “Where’s the morphine?” 

DC: Yeah, yeah, right, right. You know, he did. “Now, how do you get the 

drugs that I get?” Because he thought I was going get it for him because I would in 

country. I would get it for him. 

We would have Lipitor. He’s got blood sugar and high blood pressure. He’s a 

borderline diabetic. A lot of the older Afghans are. So, I would work it out through 

our US, my team, “Hey, you guys got Lipitor?” “Yes, we do.” Okay. In the US he 

says, “I’m running out of my medicine.” “Well, we’re not going to get it here.” 

“Well, what do you mean?” “You have to have a prescription. This is called overthe-counter. These are all over-the-counter.See all of those back there? Those are 

prescriptions which require a piece of paper from a doctor that says this is what 

you need and you’re authorized to get it.” “Oh, that’s how.” “Yes, that’s how we 

get it. There’s no free morphine, valium, vicodin and all that here.” 

JM: I also wanted to ask you how well you feel you were supported by the 

Wisconsin Guard. 
87

DC: Excellent. First you have a family support group for the soldiers. It’s 

real nice going as a small team because first of all, I have a bunch of mature 

soldiers who, I’ll tell you, I did not have any family issues and I did not have any 

knuckleheads in my group. As ETTs, we were busy all the time. You didn’t have 

time to sit around and wonder, “Oh, what is Matt doing today. It would be three 

o’clock in the afternoon. I wonder if he’s coming home from school.” You didn’t 

have time to do that. When I called the leadership and asked for things, I got it.

The state of Wisconsin, Joint Force Headquarters and all the leadership are a 

bunch of professional folks and they always have been. Wisconsin always goes the 

extra mile. Our adjutant general and deputy adjutant general have always taken the 

mindset that we’re going to do it the right way, even if we have egg on our face 

because of this.

How do you fix it, how do you make it better? I’m also smart enough to know 

that the long arm of Wisconsin still reaches over to Afghanistan. I have worked 

with the state leadership being a battalion commander and a brigade commander 

and there are just some things you don’t say or do. I had one soldier who was a 

little frustrated because he was prior service Air Force and was told that he couldn’t 

be promoted to E7 because he had to go through the ANOC. “Yeah, but in the Air 

Force I took this course.” It doesn’t matter. You have to go to the Army’s ANOC. 

“Yeah, but I had this.” It doesn’t matter. He started becoming spiteful against his 

unit’s first sergeant. That got to some of the senior state leadership but at the same 

time it got to them, I got it and was able to defuse it back to the state to take care 

of it.

Wisconsin currently has close to 2,000 soldiers mobilized out of the 7,000 

and at one point, there were close to 4,900 mobilized. I think I can safely tell you, 

except for the 57th, that being a brigade, every unit in the state of Wisconsin has 

been mobilized. It’s either been in Iraq or groups have been over to Afghanistan. 

Some have gone over to Bosnia and some over to Egypt for BRIGHT STAR. 

So yeah, state leadership is very good and the support channels were there. I’m 

transforming from an FA brigade to a CSB.

I was able to get online and be part of state leadership meetings where we 

talked about transformation. These meetings could be held at ten, eleven, twelve 

o’clock at night for me but that didn’t matter. They made it so I could be part of it 

because it does affect me, my leaders, and my unit. They kept me abreast of what 

was going on so I had visibility of what was happening with leadership changes 

and issues with other soldiers. 

JM: I’ve heard it often said about Iraq but also about Afghanistan that the 

US Army is at war but the rest of the government is not and doesn’t have as big 

of a presence or as forceful of a presence in country as it perhaps should. Did 
88

you notice, or would you have benefited from, more other government agency 

presence? What was the nature of your visibility on them? 

DC: Down in the 205th, I had better visibility because. I was going into AEGiS 

and AEGiS had USAID and State Department folks right in the headquarters 

building. They were part of the Monday, Wednesday, Friday BUBs [battle 

update briefs] that AEGiS was conducting and so were we. I had to present at the 

BUB. General Raufi had to present at the BUB but they were talking about the 

infrastructure. They wanted to do all the right things.

The disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program was basically 

pulling in all the old armaments and weapons, munitions, and evaluating them to 

see if they’re good and if they can be reused and if they can be fixed. Destroying a 

bunch of things we don’t want to be out in the public’s eye.

As to agriculture, I went over to the University of Gardez with the corps 

commander and it’s an agriculture and education program so it has teachers and 

farmers. You get a degree in agriculture or a degree in teaching but yes, I think 

there could be more representation. I didn’t have them as part of my RCAG so 

they would be up in Kabul or they might have been over with the CJTF-76 folks. 

Could they get there? Yes, but let’s go back to counterinsurgency operations, let’s 

go now to Phase IV. 

We have now provided the security and stability where we can bring these 

folks in and they don’t have to worry about being abducted, killed, shot at, blown 

up, etc. See, that was part of the issue with the guys not building the road from 

Gardez to Khowst because a suicide bomber blew up where on two days later, they 

were going to start working on the road. It was insecure. They were not going out. I 

think there could be a bigger presence but from the 203d’s standpoint, I don’t know 

that they weren’t there.

We were still in combative operations. We needed to provide the security. I 

didn’t have people knocking down the door. Come to think of it, some of those 

folks were over at the PRT. So at the PRT level, some of them were there. I did 

meet a couple guys who were from the State Department who were helping the 

PRT commander but yeah, we need to have somebody thinking about a rail system 

in Afghanistan and somebody there now planning it.

I didn’t invent it so I can’t take credit for it but they talked about saffron versus 

poppy for Helmand. What are we going to give these people? Ninety percent of the 

people’s income of the Helmand Province comes from selling poppy. Now we’re 

taking it away. Yeah, of course they’re going to take up weapons and shoot you. 

You just took away their livelihood. They have a family to feed. So what do we 

give them? 
89

They talked about saffron. I brought up the University of Gardez professor 

because he went to Syria on a symposium of sorts. He brought back a saffron plant 

and he’s going to try to start developing saffron in Gardez. They found out that 

Gardez has the perfect climate where, two-thirds of the year, it can be growing 

saffron. The US will buy saffron. Saffron can be made for perfume, it has medical 

uses and it can be used as a spice in foods. It’s a multipurpose plant. It will give 

them more money than the poppy will give them. We just have to get them started.

You need a team there now that starts helping that university. I took the guy 

who replaced me over, Colonel Jerry Acton, as part of our right-seat ride to the 

university to meet the professor. Jerry is going to try to see if he can get Utah State 

University which has an agricultural program, to adopt the University of Gardez 

and see about working a partnership program to do just what you’re talking about. 

Get somebody with agricultural experience to start saying here’s what you need to 

do and giving them some money because the government only has so much money 

to give to the schools for these programs. 

We were over there delivering blankets, cots, firewood, rice, beans, chai, and 

sugar to the university because those college students were sleeping on the floor on 

mats and it was getting cold. Winter was coming in. Gardez is 7,830 feet elevation. 

It gets cold there. It gets a lot of snow and we, through the ANA, were providing 

that to them. Because the corps commander is an educated man, he’s interested in 

the university but that’s a program.

The other thing Colonel Acton was looking at was dairy farming. Why aren’t 

we doing that? They have milk, they have cheese and they love milk, they love 

cheese. They get it from goats or they buy it from Pakistan. You got grazing lands, 

start bringing in dairy cows. That’s Phase IV of counterinsurgency. 

JM: On a different note, we were talking earlier about their inability or 

reluctance to have a concept of logistics. What is the origin of that? Is it just this 

warrior ethos, where everybody wants to be in the infantry and nobody wants to be 

a cook? Has it always been that way or did you get a sense of the why behind that? 

DC: I’ll tell you, they are improving their supply and accountability programs. 

It’s now becoming an emphasis and we, as the mentors, are making an emphasis. 

It’s being directed from CSTC-A. I’ll answer the cook question. For men, cooking 

is kind of frowned upon because that’s seen as a woman’s job. So men who cook, 

although they love the food they get, are considered sissies or feminine because 

they’re cooking, although there better be a meal on the table. So they’re very 

apprehensive to sign up as cooks. In fact, we hired a lot of local nationals to cook 

in the dining facilities from that standpoint. Now if you’re a caterer, oh, then it’s 

okay. 
90

JM: You’re kind of a professional? 

DC: Yes, because you’re a professional cook, getting money for it and it should 

be a professional meal, then that’s okay. Being a caterer is one thing, but being an 

army cook is another. They used to have locals. When they started, local nationals 

were doing all the cooking and then they found out that we have cooks in our 

Army.

We can’t say that really now, because we hire KBR but we have cooks in our 

Army and you should have cooks in your army. So we worked on standing that up 

and there were guys who were signing up but they were apprehensively signing up 

in some cases and those who did, they did it because they did like cooking.

On the other side of the coin, a kandak is authorized 613 people and the strength 

of a kandak, like in the 203d, was anywhere from 130 to 225. So now we’re in 

combat operations and we’re working on the recruiting/retention programs as well. 

Now we’re in combat operations and we need folks. I can put a weapon in that 

soldier’s hand and send him downrange but I can’t with that local national.

That would be number one. Number two is that there is a hoarding philosophy 

in Afghanistan. The hoarding philosophy is that you never know when you’re 

going get it again so you get it when you can and if you can get more, you do 

that. For example, we provided 20,000 AK-47 rounds and two days later they 

needed AK-47 rounds and for what? It’s because they didn’t have any. We just 

sent them 20,000 AK47 rounds two days ago. Well, they didn’t have any. Well, we 

better get them 20,000 because we’re about to do an operation. So we get them 

another 20,000 and then you go downrange and you find this CONEX sitting there. 

“What’s in this CONEX?” “Oh, nothing. Don’t worry about it.” “No, no, open up 

this CONEX.” There are 60,000 AK-47 rounds in there because more is better and 

as long as I can continue to get more, I’m going take more because then I’m a man 

of power, a man of substance. I have things. I have things you don’t have. A man 

with one goat is a pretty fortunate man. A man with many goats is a very rich man. 

JM: is it the same thing with 7.62 x 39 rounds?

DC: Yes, absolutely. So, you have to remember too, back when they started the 

Phoenix program, it was OSC-A and then Phoenix, we put a bureaucracy in place 

that we’re now beating our heads against the wall because of it. Durbin brought it 

up to the 218th the other day. We created that bureaucracy. It takes 32 signatures 

to get a supply released to go downrange. We made that happen, and there are two 

or three three-star generals who are approving that. We put that system in place.

Now we need to change it and we are starting to do that. General Durbin is 

having his CSTC-A, MOD logistics guys work that. Now, the corps’ were just 

being stood up. Kandaks were stood up first. When they stood up the army in 
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Afghanistan, they needed to have fighters to get downrange to start protecting, 

to start going after the enemies, the Taliban that were there. In some cases, you 

had kandaks that didn’t have brigades. It was the corps to kandaks. The corps 

commander established that he had communications right down to the kandak

level. Well, that’s not unity of command. Even with Raufi and Khaliq, I’d have to 

get all over them because the corps commander would get on his cell phone and 

call the platoon leader down at Shkin and ask, you’re the corps commander.” The 

reply would be, “Yes, that’s why I’m finding out what’s going on.” I’d say “Hey, 

Commandancy, you should be getting that from your brigade commander. You 

should not be calling that platoon leader. Do you think General John Abizaid is 

calling me? It doesn’t work that way in the chain of command. How are you going 

make those other leaders who you say are not good leaders become good leaders 

unless you do that?”

The same applied with the supplies. So we created a system that went from 

the FSD [forward support depot] directly down to kandaks and the brigade and 

the corps were not involved in it. So these soldiers could continue to order. These 

kandaks could say, “I need 580 sleeping bags.” but they only had 200 ANA. “Yeah, 

but I’m authorized 613 and I have the rest to make it 613. I need 580 sleeping 

bags.” Well they’re going get 220 less whatever they have currently on the books.

We created a system that we now have to change. They’re now using jingle 

trucks to get the economy flourishing. They’re contracting movers to throw 

supplies on. 

We’re using the seven and a half ton trucks that the ANA CSS units have to go 

up and get these supplies. Load up the trucks, go get the supplies, and bring it down 

from the FSDs to your brigades. Let’s get the forward logistics elements going. So, 

their supply system is coming along, as well as the maintenance system. Again, we 

put a lot of focus on combative operations. 

We have RM Asia who we contract to fix all their vehicles. With the old 

contract, RM Asia did not have to train any of the ANA. Now, we’re looking at 

this pool stock of guys who can do amazing things to vehicles. Why aren’t they 

training the ANA? So the new contract, RM Asia will be training the ANA on 

how to fix their Ford Rangers, their deuce-and-a-halfs, the five-tons, and the other 

pieces of equipment that are in country.

That maintenance program is increasing too. Remember, we’re getting better 

at providing security and stability. Now we have to build up that army. We have 

to take it to that step to which they can sustain and maintain and we’re doing that, 

making the shift of some of our ETT forces to get in there. 

They now have contact trucks. They didn’t have contact trucks before. They 

have beautiful Ford Ranger contact trucks that have the cases. You open up a door 
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and it’s got all the wrenches, open another one and it’s got the socket set, it’s got 

the jacks and tools so we can now send them downrange. RM Asia, at a minimum, 

should be doing 16 services per day per the contract we have in country. 

We need to get those vehicles up to that. Well, coming from Bermel and Shkin 

or Lawara all the way around to come back because you have the KG mountain 

range so you can’t go from one location to the next. You have to go all the way 

around and come back over here to get two trucks fixed. Well, let’s get a contact 

in. Let’s mentor the ANA maintenance folks and, by the way, we need to go pull 

the maintenance guys out who we made infantry. We need to pull the supply guys 

back from being infantry.

Now that we’re standing up our police and now that we’re securing areas and 

we don’t have to have a 100 percent presence every day, we need to get them back 

to their jobs. Medics, physician assistants, surgeons, need to do the same. Two 

brigades and the corps go with garrison. The 203d is authorized 6,475 soldiers. 

Well, those who were physically present for duty as of January 2007 was 2,724. 

There’s a 3,900-plus disparity. So we had to push folks out. If we’re getting 

attacked, we have to get them out on checkpoints, get them on security patrols. We 

have to get them out there working combative operations with the combative force.

The Bonn Agreement in country says no US or Coalition force runs around 

without ANA. We don’t go killing on our own. We have to have ANA or ANP 

with us. That’s the law. So if we want to do a bunch of missions, we have to take 

ANA with us. The bottom line is that we have to make the ANA put together that 

mission, have the ANA do the mission and we go with them. As a success story 

in the FOB Wilderness up in the KG Pass, the corps commander developed with 

his staff the plan and then went to the 3d Brigade of Task Force Spartan from 

the 10th Mountain and said, “I need two companies, engineers, and I’m going to 

need a QRF.” Perfect. They identified what they needed. I kept telling the corps 

commander, “This is your battlespace, it’s not Mick Nicholson’s battlespace. It’s 

your battlespace. Mick shares it with you. He’s your partner combative force. He’d 

be really happy for you to take more ownership in your battlespace.” 

JM: Do you have any closing thoughts or anything you’d like to add that we 

haven’t discussed? 

DC: There are great opportunities in Afghanistan. As I said earlier, Afghanistan 

is a success story that’s just not getting a lot of press. I get the concern from family 

and friends who see a lot of stuff happening in Kandahar and wonder where we 

are in relationship to that. Of course my stock response would be, “Yeah, well, it’s 

near me. I’m in Kandahar.”

We were the ones, along with all those other forces that were making all that 

stuff happen in order to get at the root of the enemy. There wasn’t a lot of press of 
93

what successes were being accomplished. The model of Afghanistan needs to be 

taken into Iraq and I’m hearing that that’s starting to evolve. This is the best kept 

little secret over there.

Tell Afghanistan. Let the people know that there is success. Our press needs 

to do that. Our Army needs to do that. The Coalition forces and the international 

community need to tout, “These are great successes.” because not everybody’s 

watching CNN and not everybody watched Eikenberry and Durbin the other night 

on CNN in front of Congress. In USA Today, there’s a little blurb that President 

Bush authorizes 3,200 to stay in Afghanistan, extends 3,200, and is going to 

Congress tomorrow and going after $11.8 billion to throw back into Afghanistan. 

Having had CENTCOM [Central Command] folks come over and interview me 

and interview the corps commander and see what’s going on over there, that’s 

$11.8 billion well spent but the people won’t read that. 

They’re going see 3,200 extended and $11.8 billion going to Afghanistan. Well, 

here’s why that’s going to happen. Plus, when we get done with this, we’re going 

have an army that will come to our aid in the future and we’ll be proud to have 

them come to our aid. We’ll feel confident having them come to our aid wherever 

our next fight may be. They will be there because that’s the type of people they are. 

They will be there. 

JM: Thanks very much for your time today, sir. I appreciate it.

95

Colonel (P) Mark Milley

6 June 2007

LG: This is an interview with Colonel (promotable) Mark Milley (MM) on 

his experiences with Combined Joint Task Force Phoenix during Operation 

ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF. The interview is being conducted by 

Lynne Chandler Garcia from the Contemporary Operations Study Team 

at the Combat Studies Institute/CSI, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Our 

team is compiling a history of OEF covering the period October 2001 to 

September 2005. 

We are located in the Pentagon and the time is approximately 0900 hours 

on 6 June 2007. This is an unclassified interview. If we ever enter classified 

territory, please either respond in unclassified terms or simply say you’re 

not able to answer. 

By way of introduction, please restate your name, rank, and duty position 

when you were in Afghanistan. 

MM: My name is Colonel Mark Milley. I was the commander of 2d Brigade, 

10th Mountain Division. I became the commander in May 2003. 

LG: What was the time period when you were deployed to OEF? 

MM: We deployed in May 2003, toward the end of May and the beginning of 

June, since we flowed over time, and then we came home at the end of November 

through basically mid-December 2003. 

LG: Then you were home a few months and then went straight to Iraq? 

MM: Yes. We were home basically for January, February, March, April, and 

May 2004 and then deployed in June 2004 to Iraq. We stopped in Kuwait and then 

went to Iraq. 

LG: When I was doing research, I came across a mission statement for 

Combined Joint Task Force Phoenix. Do you remember the mission statement? 

MM: I don’t but we probably wrote it because we were the first ones. 

LG: The one I found was, “Combined Joint Task Force Phoenix executes a 

broad based training, mentoring, and assistance program in order to enable the 

Afghan National Army to provide effective and legitimate military capability for 

the Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan.” Does that sound right? 

MM: Probably right. Close enough. 

LG: Can you describe the origins of Phoenix? 

MM: Yes. I’m not sure this is going to be 100 percent accurate but, this is 

what I think it was. After the fall of the Taliban, one of the things recognized 
96

early was, if we were going to succeed in stabilizing Afghanistan and help a new 

Afghan government provide its own security, one of the key ingredients would 

be some sort of security forces. So, throughout 2002, US Special Forces not only 

hunted down Taliban and al-Qaeda, they also went ahead and began a program of 

developing an embryonic ANA [Afghan National Army]. However, it was quickly 

determined that the development of a full national army was probably beyond the 

skill sets and capabilities of SF [Special Forces] and, for a lot of good reasons, that 

mission should be handed off to the bigger army, for lack of a better term, and it 

was determined that they would hand it off to an active duty unit. 

The commander at the time in Afghanistan was Lieutenant General Dan 

McNeill. Underneath him was a division headquarters, a two-star command, led by 

then Major General John Vines, and then a one-star promoted into a two-star, Major 

General Karl Eikenberry, who was the Chief of the Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan [OMC-A] and US Security Coordinator. Major General Eikenberry 

was the senior military guy working with the embassy and he had responsibility 

for foreign internal development in the training aspects of a national army and the 

institution building. So he had that responsibility, whereas Major General Vines 

had the responsibility to conduct offensive combat operations against Taliban

and al-Qaeda. So, on top of both of them was Lieutenant General McNeill and 

they decided collectively, with people back here, that it would be best perhaps to 

have an active duty Army brigade take over the mission of developing the Afghan 

National Army. The 82d Airborne Division was in country at the time under Major 

General Vines conducting offensive combat operations and the Special Forces guys 

were doing combat operations and training the national army. So in the January/

February/March 2003 time frame, decisions were being made to go ahead and 

transition this mission over to the conventional military. 

Now, the 10th Mountain Division was replacing the 82d Airborne Division 

at that time. The 10th Mountain Division had two brigades, 1st Brigade and 2d 

Brigade, and Major General, now Lieutenant General Franklin Hagenbeck was the 

commanding general. So Major General Hagenbeck and his division were going 

to go in and replace Major General Vines and the 82d Airborne Division. Major 

General Vines then got promoted to three-star and became the overall commander 

of Afghanistan. Major General Eikenberry stayed where he was, and Major 

General Hagenbeck rolled in with the 10th Mountain Division. So the way the 

10th Mountain Division handled it was one brigade, the 1st Brigade, would do the 

offensive combat operations generally along the Pakistan/Afghan border in what 

today is known as RC-South [Regional Command-South] and RC-East, and then 

my 2d Brigade would take on the mission of training the Afghan National Army.

Now, my brigade was split up at the time. I had one battalion that was chopped 

to 1st Brigade, task organized with 1st Brigade, making it a four battalion brigade 
97

for offensive combat operations. I had a battalion minus in Iraq in OIF [Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM] and then I had one company in the Horn of Africa. So my 

brigade back at Fort Drum essentially had two infantry battalions, a logistics 

battalion, and a brigade headquarters when the mission came to the 10th Mountain 

Division and 1st Brigade had three infantry battalions, its logistics battalion, an 

artillery battalion, and a brigade headquarters.

So the mission came to the division, the division made the decision that 1st 

Brigade would do the offensive combat operations and they would give them 

an extra infantry battalion to do it and we task organized one battalion from my 

brigade over to 1st Brigade to do that. 

Then, my brigade minus that one infantry battalion would go ahead and 

conduct the training mission. So that was how we organized as a division for the 

mission with Major General Hagenbeck as the division commander. 

Before we deployed, we did a little PDSS [pre-deployment site survey] in 

April 2002. At that point, I was in the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii slated to 

take command. So, I went on TDY [temporary duty] and did the reconnaissance 

mission, came back, took command in May 2003, and then 10 to 15 days later we 

were flying the brigade minus to Afghanistan to pick up this mission. 

We went over to Afghanistan and linked up with the Special Forces guys who 

had already started this program and linked into Major General Eikenberry, who 

had supervisory control over foreign internal development and the development of 

the Afghan National Army. So our brigade was part of the 10th Mountain Division 

but our day-to-day operational direction, if you will, with respect to training the 

ANA, came from Major General Eikenberry and then we all worked for Lieutenant 

General McNeill for starters and then Lieutenant General Vines when he became 

the XVIII Airborne Corps Commander and the senior guy in Afghanistan. That is 

kind of the background of how we got involved with that mission. 

LG: So you took over directly from the Special Forces? 

MM: Yes. 

LG: Did you do a left seat/right seat? 

MM: Not really, because they were organized completely different but there 

was a transition period. 

LG: What capabilities do you think the conventional troops brought that the 

Special Forces didn’t have? 

MM: Well, I am a former Special Forces guy so I have an understanding of 

their capabilities and limitations. While Special Forces capabilities are significant, 

when it comes to training a large national army, they soon run out of experience 
98

and skill sets. They have limited capability to train beyond small unit tactics. When 

it comes to things like larger scale command and control, battalion operations and 

brigade operations, logistics and setting up supply systems, doing the tactics of 

combined arms operations at battalion and above and so on, SF soldiers at the 

team level who that actually conduct the training, soon get beyond their former 

experiences. SF guys are great at smaller unit tactics at the squad- and platoonlevel and even up to the company-level but once you start getting up into that level, 

it really gets beyond their mission profile or their mission set. It takes basically 

conventional guys that have that kind of experience when you get to large scale 

operations. So they handed that mission off to us. That being said, the SF guys had 

done a lot of good and had trained the Afghans very well. 

They got an army organized and off the ground, so to speak, in everything 

from ranks and photographs and registration and identification cards to some basic 

training level stuff in individual skills and some collective skills at the squad and 

platoon levels and some basic command and control. They did a lot of good. 

They set the ground work but to go beyond the groundwork and get to the next 

level, you probably do need to have conventional folks working that. That was 

where the 2d Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division came in. 

We took over from the Special Forces and our mission, our task really, was to 

get them to the next step, the next level, up into company and battalion operations 

and then to start working their brigade and corps type stuff since they don’t have 

divisions in the Afghan National Army. 

We also worked on their institutional development, their school system, their 

logistics and supplies, as well as their combat tactics and so on. So that was what 

we did. We got that part set up but it is a long term process. It outlives any one 

single rotation. We got that set up and we started working those taskings in order to 

make those things happen and then we handed off to the next guy and the next guy 

and so on and so forth and, over time, it will become a self-sustaining operation. 

LG: When you came in, what was the planned structure of the Afghan National 

Army? Was it still just the Central Corps? 

MM: I would almost have to go back to look at some slides but, as I recall, 

there was one corps which did not exist at the time, and it was being stood up. So, 

one of our missions was to help stand up the Central Corps headquarters and its 

staff. It was being put together during my time there. There were no division level 

headquarters per se. There was no National Police at the time either. There is today 

but there was not back then to speak of. There was an organization, something 

called the National Police but it really was in its very beginning stages. Now, 

I forget the exact numbers of how many battalions, companies, and troops that 

we had at the time but, I would argue that the basic unit, when I was there, was 

probably the company and platoon. 
99

We were putting them together as battalions and we were trying to train them 

up through battalion operations but, by the time we left, I would say that they 

were okay at company operations but they weren’t quite ready yet to conduct 

battalion level operations but they did have battalions, kandaks, as they are called 

in Afghanistan. They did have battalions on paper, organized, in garrison, and they 

had battalion commanders and a battalion headquarters but to say that they had 

functional, fully operational, combat ready battalions at the time I was there, there 

may have been a couple but there were not many when I left. Now, today it is a 

little different. Today, they have a significant amount more but, at that time, there 

weren’t. So we were standing up a corps. 

We were trying to move them from platoon and company level operations to 

battalion operations and we were trying to get their logistics system put into place 

for equipment and that sort of thing. 

LG: What was their reach beyond Kabul? 

MM: In my time, the reach was very limited. They weren’t quite ready to do 

much. They did some though. It was during my time that we started farming out 

kandaks, and their subunits, their companies; out to my sister brigade, 1st Brigade, 

10th Mountain Division and I would send a package of advisors with them.

So we started to get them integrated into combat operations and the way that 

would work was we would task organize them to work with 1st Brigade, 10th 

Mountain Division. We would pick up some Special Forces guys and integrate 

them with the Afghan National Army and then we would have my advisors with 

the ANA. So the ANA guys would have some SF guys that were working in the 

same area as the 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, plus my advisors, and we 

would take that unit, send them forward to a FOB [forward operating base] for a 

period of time, say 15 or 20 days or whatever, and they would work with a unit 

from 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. They would work alongside them and 

conduct operations. 

We didn’t get beyond that level by the time I left and it was probably, I would 

say halfway through my time there before we even got to that. Now, today is 

different. Today they are doing considerable operations and they are doing independent operations. They are not side-by-side in all cases with US battalions but they 

all still have advisors. 

Another kind of big step forward that occurred while we were there was basic 

training. An American soldier comes in, goes to basic training, and gets six to eight 

weeks. Well, for an Afghan, we decided basic training would be four weeks, if I 

remember. So, at first, the Special Forces literally taught basic training and then 

they handed basic training off to us and we taught basic training. However, while 

I was there, shortly after I got there I think a month a two after we were there, we 
100

handed that off, basic training, to the Afghans. So the Afghans now conduct basic 

training. 

We also had an officer and a NCO [noncommissioned officer] course. The 

officer course was administered by the French and the NCO course was administered 

by the British but they were all part of our organization. Task Force Phoenix, by 

the way, wasn’t just 2d Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. Task Force Phoenix

was a combined organization consisting of, in my time, I think, nine different 

countries. Nine different countries had forces as part of Task Force Phoenix. We 

had Americans, British, French, Bulgarians, Mongolians, Romanians, and others 

so there was a multitude of international folks. 

LG: So, the soldiers that you brought with you, were they the embedded 

trainers primarily? Did they serve as the embedded trainers with the ANA? 

MM: Some did. Within this organization called Task Force Phoenix, we 

had a rifle company which provided some force protection and security. We had 

a logistics battalion from the 10th Mountain Division which provided logistics 

support and then we had other soldiers from that same infantry battalion, most of 

whom became embedded trainers. 

We had embedded trainers from Fort Benning, Georgia. We had embedded 

trainers from the Marine Corps, from their Mountain Warfare School. We had 

embedded trainers from Fort Knox, Kentucky and we had a group from Fort Irwin, 

California, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment [ACR]/the OPFOR [opposing 

force]. They sent out a team of embedded trainers. So these trainers, both 

noncommissioned officer and officers, primarily captains and majors, came out of 

the school houses and they formed these embedded training teams. 

Then we had embedded trainers from the Vermont National Guard and a 

variety of other individual volunteers from the active duty and National Guard 

from around the country that we task organized into training teams. In addition to 

that, we had an international contingent of the countries I mentioned earlier and 

they were embedded trainers as well. 

Then, of course, there were my own guys from the 10th Mountain Division. 

So we had a potpourri of trainers that we put underneath the title of Task Force 

Phoenix for which I was the commander and then shortly thereafter the deputy 

commander because they brought in an active duty brigadier general, Brigadier 

General F. Joseph Prasek, to be the commander of Task Force Phoenix. He came in 

about, I guess, a month or six weeks after we got there. 

Now, when we got there, Task Force Phoenix didn’t exist. The SF guys were 

just doing their thing. So many of the pieces and parts were there but they hadn’t 

been put together in an organization yet. There wasn’t even the compound where 

they currently exist in the vicinity of Kabul. So, we showed up and we literally 
101

went out with some of Major General Eikenberry’s folks and conducted a little 

reconnaissance. 

We went into a parking lot behind a warehouse, we looked around, and we 

said, “This looks like a pretty good place to establish a base camp.” and there was 

nothing but trash but that was what we did. We established that as a base camp. I 

brought in that rifle company, they secured the area, and then we began to build 

that camp from the ground up which they are currently in right now. 

Then, if I remember right, Major General Eikenberry was the one who settled 

on the term Phoenix. I think his logic was that a Phoenix is a bird that rises from 

the ashes. So that was symbolic of what we did and that was where the name came 

from. 

Then, all the other things that go along with building an organization, 

everything from a coin to some sort of emblem or something to represent you, 

letterhead, and command and control, all that kind of stuff had to be built from 

the bottom up. Even the superficial stuff like coins and stuff all the way through 

substantive type stuff like how to command and control, how to train, what tasks 

to train on, and then getting out there and doing them, all of that had to get built 

and that was what we did. 

Then, it was decided that committing an active duty brigade or pieces and 

parts of a brigade, to the mission of training the ANA was a cost that the Army 

couldn’t afford from its active duty brigade structure. So we were a good pick to 

get this thing started and get it off the ground but then the task was to hand it off to 

the National Guard since they would be best suited to do this mission to preserve 

the combat power of active duty brigades to conduct regular combat rotations into 

both Afghanistan and Iraq. So we handed off to a National Guard brigade and it has 

been a National Guard brigade ever since. 

LG: Right. You handed off to Oklahoma, correct? 

MM: I think so. I’m pretty sure it was. 

LG: Did you have any involvement with the Japanese and the DDR 

[disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration] process? 

MM: No. I know that happened, was going on, and so on but we didn’t have 

any interaction with that. That was all done with Major General Eikenberry’s 

headquarters. I didn’t get involved. 

LG: What measures did you use for retention to keep Afghan Soldiers in place? 

MM: We didn’t do anything special other than to ensure that they were regularly 

paid, to ensure they had good leadership that wasn’t abusive, and to ensure that 

they were trained and had sort of a motive for staying. 
102

We strongly encouraged multi-sectarian, multi-religious, multi-ethnic units so 

at least at that time, and I think it is probably true today, you wouldn’t find a Shia

battalion or a Sunni battalion or a Tajik battalion or a Pashtun battalion in the ANA. 

At the smallest unit level, squads and platoons, we integrated that battalion. We 

integrated those units and we kept track of their ethnic and religious background 

because we were trying to create a mental atmosphere of, “I am beyond my tribe 

and I am part of a nation state.” We were trying to create a national army, with 

emphasis on the word national, as opposed to a tribal or sectarian army. We didn’t 

want a militia. 

We wanted an army. So that, I think, helped because I think they eventually 

developed a sense that they were participating in something greater than 

themselves and that they were witnessing the birth of a nation. Good housing, 

relative to the society at large along with good food and clean water, your basics 

of life in a society such as Afghanistan, I think, go a long way to contribute toward 

guys not deserting. Now, we had to give them considerable time off because the 

transportation infrastructure of Afghanistan was rudimentary and, when we did pay 

them, they had to get that money back to their families in order for their families 

to live. So you had to give them a fair amount of time off in order to travel since 

some of these guys weren’t from Kabul. They had to make their way back to their 

family, give the money to their family and then come back. So we had to manage 

that. Erroneously sometimes, that was observed by the casual observer as they had 

deserted and then come back. That was not really true. They might be gone for 30 

to 45 days and some of them might never come back but most of them came back. 

We had desertions but, when I was there, that wasn’t a huge problem. Now, 

relative to today, the Afghan National Army was forming and training and doing 

some limited combat operations. Therefore, there were limited casualties. The ANA 

was not being explicitly targeted by al-Qaeda or HiG [Hizb-I-Islami Gulbuddin]

or Taliban or whatever. That is not to say they wouldn’t get targeted. It just wasn’t 

like what you would see, for example, in Iraq where the Iraqi Army or the Iraqi 

Police are gunned down when they try to go home at night or something like that. 

This was in the early stages and I don’t know if that condition has changed or not 

since I was there. So, I would never be so arrogant as to say that life was good 

for some of these people. Life is hard in these countries and life for an Afghan is 

particularly hard.

However, life in the ANA for your average Afghan youth of army age, in many 

respects, was probably better physically in terms of basic needs than if he were not 

in the ANA and just living out in the society because he got medical, he got water, 

he got food, and he got our shelter. He had something he was participating in, he 

had a certain sense of self-worth and self-esteem and, hopefully, that developed 

into nationalism and so on and so forth. So I think all of those things contributed 
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toward not deserting. I would have to look at numbers again but I don’t recall 

desertion being a big issue at the time. 

LG: Do you have, for instance, your metrics or your PowerPoint briefs that 

have all your statistics? 

MM: No. 

LG: Do you know where I might find all the numbers? 

MM: Probably Task Force Phoenix in Kabul. They probably have a computer 

record. I don’t have any of that stuff. I would suggest probably two places, I guess, 

maybe four. There are four places you can look.

First, I would go to Task Force Phoenix. They probably have a computer record 

that goes back to the beginning of Task Force Phoenix with statistics and data. I 

won’t guarantee it but I would almost guarantee it.

The second place to look is at CFC-A [Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan] which now has kind of mutated a little bit into what is now General 

Dan McNeill’s headquarters, ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] but 

the Embassy Kabul, Major General Robert Durbin’s office, Major General Durbin 

fulfills the function today that Major General Eikenberry fulfilled then, probably 

has pretty good data that can be shared unclassified. So the second place I would 

go to is the US military assistance group there led by Major General Durbin in 

Afghanistan or CFC-A.

You could check with the 10th Mountain Division but I don’t know that 

they would have much there. I’m pretty sure we didn’t keep all that stuff for 

ourselves. XVIII Airborne Corps, however, might have some things because that 

was the corps headquarters. That was Lieutenant General Vines’ headquarters and 

Lieutenant General McNeill’s headquarters in Afghanistan at the time. Those guys 

could have some stuff. Another group here, right here in the building, is the Joint 

Staff J5, although I don’t know who is doing Afghanistan these days but Brigadier 

General Michael Jones, who is in charge of the Middle East, has one guy who does 

Iraq, another guy who does Afghanistan. The guy that does Afghanistan probably, 

almost certainly, has a record because he has to turn in a report to Congress on all 

that kind of stuff. So he almost certainly has a record of the data on things like 

desertions, size of the army, how many battalions, and all that kind of stuff. There 

is a congressionally mandated report, by the way, that has to go to Congress once 

a quarter on both Iraq and Afghanistan and it is a public record. Well, that data is 

the same data that we had. We had to generate, from the bottom up, those reports. 

So that is actually another place to look, the congressional record. You might have 

to go on the classified side, but most of that is unclassified. 
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Then, finally, I would say CENTCOM [Central Command]. CENTCOM keeps 

all that stuff too but, as an individual, I don’t have any of that stuff. So I would 

start with Task Force Phoenix; then go to the J5 Joint Staff, then the congressional 

record; and then CENTCOM. Then, if you can’t find anything in any one of those, 

dip down but those guys, for sure, have the data you are looking for. 

LG: I was reading in a GAO [Government Accountability Office] assessment 

that the embedded trainers said they experienced a lot of shortages of equipment 

and had some quality issues in the equipment that they needed for the new Afghan 

Army. Did you experience shortages or quality issues for the Afghans when you 

were over there? 

MM: Oh, yes; there is no question. First of all, when we started, the Afghans 

had a mixed bag of equipment that was essentially battlefield refuse that the SF 

guys had picked up from the former Afghan Army as well as from the Taliban 

and the mujahedeen, and they were recycling. So, say they were in a firefight and 

captured 10 AK-47s, the SF guys would turn those AK-47s into a pool back at 

the SF battalion headquarters building up an arms collection and then they would 

use those weapons they had captured to give to the new army. So, when I got 

there, that was how they were resupplying the ANA and one of our tasks was to 

form a national system of supply. When we got there, they had no vehicles, tanks, 

helicopters, and no artillery. They did have boots, they had some uniforms, and 

they had just gotten some green berets. They wear this kind of lime green beret. 

Then, for the most part, they had weapons. They had a variety of Soviet-era 

weapons that were older models that were taken off the battlefield but things like 

spare parts or newer weapons, better quality weapons, even if they were Soviet 

era models, there was a lot of that kind of shortage. Major General Eikenberry and 

his guys did a lot of coordination with our allies in Europe, former Soviet Eastern 

European Bloc countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and others 

that used Soviet Russian style weapons. I really don’t know where all the weapons 

came from because I was the customer but they got replacement parts and they got 

like new AK-47s and stuff like that, so we did get a system stood up and the flow 

began while I was there. 

We would get cases upon cases of TA-50 and helmets and boots and uniforms 

and berets and binoculars and maps. All military type equipment just began to flow 

but, to say there was a shortage, yes. There was a shortage. 

They started with zip. They started from nothing and they went from zero to 

60 in a very short time with the Special Forces guys and we were trying to take 

them from 60 to 80 but the bottom line is, yes, they didn’t have a lot of equipment 

and it was not standardized. For instance, radio equipment, they didn’t have that. 

So it wasn’t standardized, it wasn’t modernized, and it wasn’t necessarily in great 

repair but, they did have the beginnings and then when we got there that improved 
105

significantly with major efforts by contributing nations. I don’t know what the 

numbers are today for all of that stuff but I think it is much better today. There 

is no question about that. It is much better today than it was back then. Even, for 

instance, their barracks buildings still had holes in them, gunshot holes, and tankround holes. So there was a great effort in things like self-help projects in just 

facilities and structural fixes. 

LG: So you were trying to stand up a combat service support system at the 

same time then? 

MM: Right. The Afghan Army had no logistics units. 

We were introducing logistics companies. So we not only built and trained 

Afghan infantry companies. We had one company that was designated as a 

commando company. We were building combat support companies and we were 

building headquarters command and control type companies but, yes, we had to 

build a logistics structure. 

LG: Was somebody trying to write doctrine as well? 

MM: Yes. The Vermont National Guard played a significant role in that but it 

wasn’t just doctrine. They were writing things like range regulations so that they 

would have a standardized rifle range rather than just taking a bunch of soldiers 

and going out in the back and plunking rounds in order to train and learn how to 

fire a weapon. We literally built ranges using plows and other equipment. We built 

standardized rifle ranges and live fire ranges. So, yes, training doctrine was being 

written by the Vermont National Guard with the Afghans.

In addition to that, they were taking some basic small unit tactical doctrine, 

like squad and platoon tactics and getting that translated and using that. 

Then, MPRI [Military Professional Resources Incorporated] had a whole 

bunch of civilians that came over and they worked at the higher levels. They 

worked at the national strategic level. They worked with the Minister of Defense. 

So they were not part of Task Force Phoenix but we worked with them closely. 

They ran a lot of the classes for the corps headquarters and they worked kind 

of above battalion level, corps and above. The MPRI guys helped write doctrine, 

plans, and then taught classes and helped them learn to plan, coordinate, and 

synchronize operations at that level. 

LG: So did you work much with the Minister of Defense? 

MM: No but I saw him all the time. The Minister of Defense was and still is 

a guy named Abdul Wardak, I think but I didn’t work at the ministerial level. We 

were tactical level. 
106

We worked up to the corps level which, like I said, didn’t exist when we started. 

We created a corps training team. They had designated some members of the corps 

staff but they hadn’t picked a corps commander. 

They picked a corps, they formed it. We had to find a building for them to 

operate out of. We had to set up their command and control. We had to get them 

vehicles and radios, and we had to train them in the rudimentary stuff of corps 

tactics. Now, the Afghan Central Corps is not like the XVIII Airborne Corps or III 

Corps in their capabilities and span of control and training and tactics, techniques, 

and procedures. It is not even close to that but, it is a corps nonetheless and it is a 

giant step forward for them. We activated them, we stood them up, and there was a 

big huge ceremony but no ministerial, the corps was the highest level for us. 

LG: So the Afghan soldier went through four weeks of basic training and then, 

after that, did he start embedding with some of the US forces? What happened after 

those first four weeks? 

MM: They went and joined their units. Now, to create and build these kandaks, 

you had to train groups of people along parallel paths. You had to train your individual 

soldiers, your junior soldiers. You had to train your noncommissioned officers and 

you had to train your officers. So, the way we did that was simultaneously we 

would train elements of a given battalion. 

We had this very involved matrix but in simple terms, let’s call it Battalion 

1, for example. You were training Battalion 1 soldiers at the same time you were 

training Battalion 1 NCOs at the same time you were training Battalion 1 officers. 

Now, they didn’t actually see each other, but you were trying to train them all 

together. So you trained them for X amount of time which differed for each group. 

So you had to synchronize this so that they were graduating around the same time 

and they could join their unit at the same time. As the soldier graduated, then you 

brought his NCOs in and put them on top of those soldiers and they started doing 

NCO and soldier interaction and some small collective stuff to start to bond into a 

team and then once the officer training was done, which was the longest, the officer 

piled on and now they had an officer, NCOs, and soldiers. 

They all came together and then you had the basics of a company, of which 

there are three in a kandak. So we were doing the building block method and at the 

end of X amount of time, say eight to ten weeks, out spit a kandak, a battalion. It 

was still not ready to go but it was an organization. It had the basics. 

Then you had to get that battalion and marry it up with its embedded trainers. 

So now you piled on advisors and they took them from that level, basically birth, 

they had all gone through their training, up through collective training, squad, 

platoon, and company level tactics, battalion tactics, and they ran exercises, day 

and night live fires and so on and so forth. 
107

Then, at a certain point, once they were evaluated and we certified them as 

being operational, then we thought these guys were good enough to actually 

engage in combat against the enemy. So, once they were certified and ready to go, 

then we would coordinate with the 10th Mountain Division headquarters and say, 

“We have a battalion here ready to be committed if you have a mission for them.” 

Then we would start working the coordination between the SF, the brigade, the 

10th Mountain Division headquarters, and my brigade Task Force Phoenix. So the 

next piece was where to employ them. So it was a considerable process to take 

guys from ground zero all the way to combat employment.

The good thing in Afghanistan is that the Afghan is a very good soldier. 

Afghans make very good soldiers because they are just mentally and physically 

tough. They make good troops. What they have to have are skills. You have to give 

them training and give them skills but once they are trained, Afghans are pretty 

good troops. 

LG: From your time period, from when Phoenix stood up until Oklahoma took 

over, what were some of the themes that were very important for your deployment? 

MM: Well, for starters I would say we were present at the creation. The 2d 

Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, was literally present at the creation of the 

Afghan National Army. Major General Eikenberry used to say to the American 

soldiers that were involved in this whole thing, “Think of yourself as von Steuben 

at Valley Forge because that is what you are doing. You are like the American 

Continental Army in the early days.” That is an organizational comparison, not a 

political comparison, with the American Continental Army and how it was forming 

and organizing. The Continental Army had foreign advisors like Lafayette, von 

Steuben, and others, so Major General Eikenberry used to say that.

So I would say that the 2d Brigade, 10th Mountain Division’s contribution 

was in taking a torch that was lit by the Special Forces and carrying it forward 

and developing it and being present at the very creation of the Afghan National 

Army where it becomes a national army and where it starts forming the capabilities 

and the organizational structure and kind of puts on the muscle and the bone of a 

national army. The contribution of 2d Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, was that 

it laid the foundation. It set the standards. It put on that first layer of muscle, so to 

speak, of the Afghan National Army and it was significant. Task Force Phoenix has 

been very successful as it has been handed off from one organization to another, 

from my brigade to Oklahoma to whoever, all within the greater effort of the US 

effort in Afghanistan and within the effort of the divisions in CFC-A.

So it is a big deal and that army today is not all that bad. It is not as big as we 

would like it or as skilled as we would like it but it is pretty solid. From what I can 

tell, it doesn’t run in the face of the enemy. It engages the enemy. 
108

They are tactically reasonably competent. They maintain reasonably good 

stability where they are physically. The challenge in Afghanistan is not necessarily 

the Afghan National Army but the Afghan National Police but that is a different 

animal. My day wasn’t there but the Afghan National Army has become a fairly 

robust and reasonably decent, competent, and capable organization within Afghan 

society. It has a lot more improvement to do but I feel that we were there at the 

beginning of the creation of that army and kind of set standards that have weathered 

the storm at least to date. 

LG: Are there any other important topics that you want to cover in the 

interview? 

MM: A couple things. We ran into a couple of minor roadblocks which at the 

time were significant but in hindsight were meaningless. For example, one of the 

problems we ran into, a lesson learned, was there was a set of rules on the books 

that restricted American advisors from engaging in ground combat operations with 

the organizations they advised. Now, if you go back in our history and you go back 

to Vietnam, there was an unsavory feeling of what occurred in Vietnam and that 

carried on into a series of laws that took place in the 1970s that prohibited advisors 

from conducting combat operations with host nation units because there was a 

feeling at the time that the advisory effort directly led to what became the debacle 

in Vietnam. So we put laws in place in the early 1970s that said we couldn’t do 

that. Those laws were first tested in the late 1970s and early 1980s in places like 

El Salvador where we restricted both the number of advisors and the duties and 

roles that they could do. Advisors couldn’t carry “offensive” weapons. So we had 

a very restrictive view of what an advisor could do. Now, one of the things that we 

did was we pushed for permission when we first got there. It seems incredible in 

hindsight that after 11 September 2001 and as late as 2003, American uniformed 

active duty infantry soldiers would have to ask permission to engage in combat 

operations against al-Qaeda or the Taliban but we were restricted by US statute, 

at the time, to participate in combat as an advisor. We could do it if we were in an 

American infantry platoon but if we were an advisor to an Afghan National Army 

unit, we weren’t allowed under law to engage in combat operations which didn’t 

pass the common sense test but it was there. So, we broke that barrier down the 

first few months we were there. We said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. The world 

is different from when these laws were written.” So we asked for the laws to be 

changed and they got changed. 

I would say that one of our contributions was the integration in the Afghan 

National Army. We really emphasized that units at all levels were truly national 

in character and we monitored it. We made sure if there was a Tajik commander, 

then you would have an Uzbek deputy commander and maybe a Hazara chief 

of staff but you wouldn’t have a Tajik, a Tajik, and a Tajik. If you had a Pashtun
109

leader, you would have a deputy leader who was Tajik or something like that. The 

counterargument was we would inherently create friction. Well, maybe at first, 

but then they would realize that they had a lot more in common than they did in 

difference and you would break down these barriers, these tribal, cultural, and 

sectarian barriers with the society pretty quickly because of the idea of a crucible. 

The idea is that you all stuck together. Shared misery builds bonds. Put a Tajik, an 

Uzbek, a Hazara, and a Pashtun all together in the same organization, give them all 

a weapon and ammunition and make them all stick together and pretty soon they 

will find that they are bonding together and they are no longer really a Tajik or an 

Uzbek or a Hazara or a Pashtun. They are all Afghans. So I think setting that bar 

right off the bat, there was never a debate about it, it was right at the beginning, 

these organization were built that way and I think that policy approach has been 

successful. So the way we built the organization was important. Then the idea that 

it was international was, I think, significant. Today it is a little different because 

you have ISAF there now but, at that time, it was one of the few places where 

you had this international melding of US and other nation forces at a small unit 

level and it really showed an international face and international commitment to 

the building of Afghan institutions. I think that has mattered in what has gone on. 

So I’m very proud of what the brigade did with the Afghan National Army. In my 

current job, because I actually see all kinds of reports on Afghanistan and Iraq, I 

keep track of it and it seems to me that they are doing pretty well, relative to the 

enemy. 

LG: Any other comments you wanted to make? 

MM: No. It is a long war, we are going to win it, and we have to stay in the 

fight. 

LG: Great. That concludes our interview. Thank you very much for your time 

and willingness to support the Army’s mission in chronicling its history in OEF.

111

Lieutenant Colonel John Schroeder

16 February 2007

JM: My name is John McCool [JM] and I’m with the Operational Leadership 

Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, 

Kansas. I’m interviewing Lieutenant Colonel John Schroeder [JS] on his 

experiences in support of OEF or Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. 

Today’s date is 16 February 2007 and this is an unclassified interview. 

Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information and if classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Could you start off by 

giving me a brief sketch of your military career up to the present? How did 

you get commissioned, what positions have you held, what deployments 

you’ve been on, etc.? 

JS: I enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1984 between my junior and senior year of 

high school and went to basic and advanced individual training during that summer. 

Following graduation, I went to the state’s officer candidate school program and 

was commissioned a year later as an infantry officer. I went to the Infantry Officer 

Basic Course and then to Operation DESERT STORM as a maintenance platoon 

leader with one of the companies from the State of Wisconsin. When I came back, I 

went to the Armor Officer Advanced Course. I commanded a mechanized infantry 

rifle company in the Wisconsin National Guard and then the battalion I was in 

was disbanded so I went over to the field artillery. There I held the typical jobs on 

the battalion staff of logistics officer [S4], intelligence officer [S2], and assistant 

operations officer [S3]. I then went to brigade and held the S3 position there and 

the personnel officer [S1] position as well. I commanded our MLRS [multiple 

launch rocket system] battalion for three years.

Following that command, I was offered the opportunity to volunteer to go to 

Afghanistan on an embedded training team or ETT and we mobilized in January 

2006 and spent about 45 days at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, doing our training. I 

was initially assigned to the 3d Kandak, 2d Brigade (3–2) of the 203d Corps in 

Gardez. 

Then, because of an incident that happened involving a team leader in another 

kandak being relieved, I was moved down to his old kandak, the 2d Kandak, 1st 

Brigade (2–1) at Orgun-E. We also had a company out at Lwara at FOB [Forward 

Operating Base] Tillman where we stayed until the end of May 2006. We then 

moved the whole kandak from Orgun-E and Lwara over to Ghazni and were there 

until November 2006. 
112

Then I was assigned as the corps executive officer [XO] and corps deputy 

commander mentor for the 203d in Gardez until I came back to the US in January 

2007. That’s when I started working with follow-on ETTs at Fort Riley, Kansas, 

and at Camp Shelby. We will demobilize next Saturday. 

JM: Did you know you were going to be a kandak team chief from the 

beginning? 

JS: No. When Wisconsin was offered the opportunity to put a team together, 

we put together a brigade-level ETT with a brigade mentor, a brigade XO mentor, 

which was the position I was going to fall into, and the whole staff. Once we got 

over to Afghanistan, though, our whole team was broken up and sent out into 

different corps. 

We did end up just going to the 203d Corps and 205th Corps. Once I got to the 

203d, they assigned me as a kandak team chief. That was the first time I heard I’d 

be in that position. 

JM: What training did you get at Camp Shelby and what was your assessment 

of it? 

JS: It was a 45-day training program that focused on individual skills. We 

did common task training and common task testing. We did individual weapons 

qualifications with the M9 pistol and the M4 rifle. We did some familiarization 

training on the M249, the M240B and the M2 .50 caliber machine guns. We also 

did some familiarization training with the MK19 grenade launcher. 

We did up-armored Humvee training, convoy training with the up-armored 

Humvees. We did land navigation training and a lot of basic skill tasks.

We did get into some urban training as well. We assaulted the MOUT [military 

operations on urban terrain] village. Everybody went through the combat lifesaver 

program which was a very good program that everybody should go through. 

We also did some Dari language training with a Dari-speaking Afghan who 

had moved to the US back in the 1980s. Overall, the training was pretty good and 

it was just about the right amount of time. Forty five days was enough time to train 

up most ETTs going overseas. Most of these ETTs are more senior people. On the 

enlisted side, they are usually staff sergeants and above and the officers are usually 

captains to colonels. 

JM: Was there any other ETT-specific training? For example, did you learn 

anything about advising indigenous forces? 

JS: We had a few classes on how to work through a Dari interpreter in giving 

a class in a classroom setting. We did also have some cultural awareness classes 

but we really didn’t have a lot of training that was geared towards how to mentor 

somebody from a foreign army. 
113

JM: When you were at Camp Shelby, did you get training on the AK47, the 

PKM, or other foreign weapons systems? 

JS: We got one day of foreign weapons training. One thing I would work into 

a pre-mobilization training program is more training on the AK47 and the machine 

guns, specifically for those soldiers going to an infantry kandak because there is 

a weapons company there. I think there needs to be more training on the mortar 

system and the SPG9 anti-tank system because those are both combat multipliers 

that can be very effective if the kandak can use them properly. 

JM: What would be an ideal POI [program of instruction] for an ETT going to 

Afghanistan? 

JS: Before we left Camp Shelby, we actually put together a 40 days training 

program for them. A lot of what we got at Camp Shelby was disjointed. In some 

cases we’d go out and work on a collective event and then after that event was 

over, we’d go back and work on the individual tasks that support it. We laid it all 

out in a more logical sequence for them. For example, soldiers would arrive and do 

their in-processing, admin, and medical tasks. 

Then they’d move to common task training, weapons qualifications, and work 

their way up to collective tasks. That’s how our 45 days could have been better 

spent had the tasks we did do there been in a more logical sequence. 

JM: Did you do anything personally to prepare yourself for this deployment? 

JS: I did some reading on Afghanistan to learn about the history and the 

operations we had already conducted over there and we got some of that at Camp 

Shelby. The contractor, MPRI, put on some battle analysis and history classes but I 

think most people just did some cursory background information collecting before 

they went over. 

JM: Can you walk me through the process of getting into theater and how you 

linked up with the kandak? 

JS: Once we left Camp Shelby, the 139 of us who flew over took a chartered 

flight to Bangor, Maine. We refueled there and headed to Germany. We refueled 

again there and then landed at Manas Airbase in Kyrgyzstan. 

We spent about 48 hours there. It was just enough time to download our 

equipment off the plane, get processed into theater, re-sort our luggage, and get put 

onto a tactical C-17 aircraft to get flown into Afghanistan. 

We were fortunate in that our C-17 landed right at Kabul International Airport. 

The group behind us had to go to Bagram and then get trucked down from there. 

Then we were trucked to Camp Phoenix. We got stuck there for 10 days 

because the group behind us had numerous issues that came up with their aircraft. 
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President Bush had actually flown into Kabul the week they were trying to get out 

of Manas and to Kabul International. I think they were actually in the air flying 

when they got word that Air Force One was going land at Kabul so they had to turn 

around and go back to Manas.

During those 10 days we were there, we identified what corps we would be going 

to. We got some additional communications training on the actual communications 

systems we’d be using downrange. We did some basic in-processing and filled out 

some forms. 

We were fortunate in that a large group of new up-armored Humvees had 

just arrived at Camp Phoenix and they needed people to drive those vehicles to 

the corps areas of operation. So, we broke our group into four-person teams and 

identified the drivers, gunners, TCs [tank commander], and passengers, and we 

actually drove them to our corps headquarters. Gardez was about three hours south 

of Kabul. The kandak I was initially assigned to was at Gardez. 

We arrived at about 1700 hours and had a meeting with the corps team chief at 

1900 hours when he gave us our assignments. We then headed over to the brigade 

headquarters and the brigade team chief gave us our specific assignments. 

Then finally I went over to the team chief I would be replacing in 3-2. He left 

the next day to go on a pass for four days in Qatar and so I was pretty much on my 

own to work with the team and figure out what needed to be done. 

JM: How many people were on your team? 

JS: The first team I was assigned to in 3-2 had a full 16 people. For the most 

part, they had all been there about nine months already. It was a very experienced 

team. 

They were one of the last teams to link up with the kandak at the Kabul Military 

Training Center [KMTC], finish up the kandak training at KMTC, and then bring 

the kandak downrange. That’s the way it was originally set up. The ETTs were to 

fall in on the kandaks still in training, go downrange with them, and then train them 

for a year. 

They had tons of institutional knowledge on this kandak and they knew these 

guys inside and out. It was a really good situation for me to fall into because I had 

experienced people who already knew the kandak and knew all the idiosyncrasies 

of the personnel in the unit. The next day I went over to meet the kandak commander 

that I would be mentoring. That went well and we got along very well. We worked 

together for about three weeks and then I was sent to 2-1 down in Orgun-E. 

JM: You said there was an incident with this kandak that resulted in the ETT 

chief being relieved? 
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JS: Yes. They had placed into custody a local national who was carrying an 

AK47 and didn’t have any identification on him. As it turned out, though, this local 

national was working with some of the other government agency [OGA] forces 

in that area. They locked the local national in a latrine to secure him instead of 

securing him in a regular detention facility, so there were some borderline human 

rights violations. Nobody on the team had reported it up through the chain of 

command so they relieved the team chief and sent me in to replace him. 

JM: How did you introduce yourself to your counterparts? What was the 

rapport building process you went through? 

JS: The first thing I did was to spend time with my interpreter so I could get 

to know him. 

JM: Did you have the same interpreter all the time? 

JS: Yes. We typically had nine or 10 interpreters per team and one was assigned 

specifically to work with the team chief. Sometimes a company team would have 

one interpreter assigned to them for the two ETTs that were there. A lot of times 

you ended up sharing interpreters because one would be on leave and one would be 

off somewhere. I spent some time with my interpreter and got to know him and his 

level of ability to interpret for me. I then went over to meet the kandak commander 

and, as per tradition, the first meeting we had was strictly social. 

We just got to know each other and didn’t talk any business. It was a good 

meeting and I found out that he had spent time in the Afghan Army before the 

Russians invaded. When the Russians did invade, he stayed with the Afghan 

Army on the Russian side. He made some combat jumps with them against the 

mujahedeen. He had a real solid military background and career. He was a pretty 

professional officer, knew what a professional unit should look like, and was trying 

to get his unit towards that.

One of the things he did was wear a pin above his nametag with the Olympic 

rings on it. When I asked him about it and he told me that he used to be the Afghan 

national field hockey coach and he actually took them to the Olympics one year. 

That gave us another thing to talk about on a more social level. He had to give 

up that position when he became a kandak commander in the new Afghan Army 

because they obviously didn’t want him splitting his time. During the next meeting 

we had the next day, we sat down and started establishing the goals for the unit, 

how we wanted to manage missions that had come up, what training events he 

wanted to do, and how we could support him. So, we developed a pretty good 

relationship fairly quickly. 

JM: What was your overall philosophy about how to approach this mission 

and what your level of involvement was going to be? 
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JS: Going into it I thought I could spend a lot more time with the person I 

mentored and with the unit I mentored. What we discovered when we got there 

though, is that you can spend two to six hours a day working with your Afghan 

counterpart but there are a lot of other US issues you have to deal with as well. As a 

team chief, you have 15 other US soldiers underneath you which brings 15 family 

issues, 15 awards issues, and 15 personnel evaluation issues. 

We discovered when we got there that our time was split a lot more between 

just taking care of the day-to-day household activities that needed to happen for a 

US unit and we couldn’t spend as much time as we wanted to mentoring, training, 

and just working with the Afghans. 

JM: How experienced was this second kandak that you fell in on? 

JS: They had been there much longer. They had graduated about two years 

before I got there so they were very experienced and were already downrange. 

They were at Orgun-E and at Lwara and FOB Tillman which is right on the 

Pakistan border. 

They were more of a combat-seasoned unit. Their authorized strength was 613 

soldiers. When I got there, though, they were already down to less than 300 due 

to AWOLs, combat losses, and transfers to different units. It was a much different 

organization when I got there. It wasn’t really a training kandak that still had all the 

spit and polish from KMTC like the first kandak had. This was a unit that had been 

fighting the Taliban for probably about a year and a half by the time I got there. 

JM: How did you approach rapport building with the whole kandak itself? 

JS: As the kandak team chief, I worked primarily with the kandak commander, 

the XO, the S3, the sergeant major, some of the other staff guys, and the company 

commanders. I never had an opportunity to work with every member of the 

kandak. I really had to focus in on the people I was supposed to mentor. You do run 

across certain people you wind up working with. In 2-1, we had a very good motor 

sergeant who was a very good mechanic but he wasn’t very good at managing a 

maintenance program, so I tended to spend a lot of time with him. 

We had an S4 who wasn’t working well with the S4 mentors I had on the US 

side, so I spent some time with him as well. I had to identify those key places that 

needed to have extra mentoring time. 

JM: What was your overall impression of the condition of the unit and what 

their capabilities were? 

JS: The Afghan soldiers in the units are very capable. They were actually more 

capable than I expected to find them when I got there. For the most part, almost 

everybody in those units has been fighting in some way, shape, or form since they 

were about 10 years old. The country has just been in a state of constant conflict 
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for the last 30 years, so everybody had military experience. Everybody knew the 

AK47 weapons system because everybody owns one over there. 

They had a good military background. What they didn’t have was a good grasp 

on how a professional army should look. They still brought a lot of their cultural 

habits and cultural mindsets with them into the army. We really had to deal with 

breaking them of those cultural habits. 

JM: What were some of those and how did you address making them more 

professional? 

JS: One of the big ones was the way they hoarded things and also the “me first” 

mentality they had. Before we got there to 3-2 the officers would get paid first, then 

the NCOs, and then the enlisted. 

We turned that around and told them we wanted to see the soldiers get paid 

first, then the NCOs, and then the officers. The officers have a bad habit of having 

enlisted assistants live with them and do things for them. They’d go over to the 

chow hall, get their chow for them, and bring it back to their rooms. We told them 

they had to stop that and eat in the dining facility with their soldiers.

If they were given credit cards for their cell phones, they typically didn’t make 

it beyond the kandak staff or the commander. They really needed to get down to 

the S2 and the S4 so they could take care of day-to-day business. We needed to 

get them to push those assets down to the people who needed them. There’s still a 

hoarding mentality over there because they don’t know who the next bill payer is 

going to be, so they tend to hoard the things they get. 

JM: What did the kandak staff most need from you? What did they look to you 

for and what do you think they most needed your help with? 

JS: The biggest thing they wanted from us was resource management. The 

logistics system in the ANA [Afghan National Army] was broken when we got 

there. It’s getting better but it’s still broken. That’s the Achilles’ heel of the ANA 

right now.

The problem is that they can’t decentralize their logistics system because they 

can’t trust that if they send cash downrange it will get spent on the things it needs 

to get spent on. They’ve centralized their logistics system and everything comes 

out of depots in Kabul. It goes down to a forward support depot at the corps and 

then the kandak either comes and gets their stuff or the combat service support 

kandak pushes it out to them. What they really needed from us was a redundant 

system to communicate their needs up our ETT channels to higher headquarters to 

make sure they got the supplies they needed. 

They also just needed mentorship in that area to constantly push the supply 

system to work for the kandak. For the most part, they had the tactical operations 
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down pat. They knew how to fire their weapons and they knew how to engage the 

enemy. What they needed was for us to help them sustain themselves. 

JM: What about things like the MDMP [military decision-making process] and 

battle tracking? 

JS: In the 2-1 Kandak, we were lucky in that our S3, Major Mohammed, was 

a graduate of the Command and General Staff School for the ANA and so he knew 

the MDMP very well.

The problem they have is that the officers tend to live and work in their 

bedrooms. They have a room where they’ll sleep and that’s where they’ll typically 

set up their office, so they’re not always in an environment conducive to exchanging 

information. We had to build them a TOC [tactical operations center] with rooms 

off it where the primary staff officers could live and work so they could exchange 

information. The S3 would be putting together a good solid operations plan but the 

S1, the communications officer, or the S4 weren’t involved with it. He had a good 

plan that wasn’t completely staffed by the kandak staff. 

JM: Were you living and eating with the Afghans? How embedded were you, 

so to speak? 

JS: I lived in three different types of situations. At Gardez all the ETTs lived 

on one side of the FOB and the ANA were on the other. There’s a HESCO [earthen 

barricade] wall and a gate in between. We were kind of collocated but not truly 

embedded. When we moved to Orgun-E, we lived on a FOB with a US infantry 

battalion from the 10th Mountain Division. We lived on their side of the FOB and 

there was again a HESCO wall in between and then the ANA FOB was there. Now, 

our offices were on the ANA side of the FOB.

During the day we were with the Afghans and we always had the opportunity 

to eat with them. We could either eat in our dining facility or in the ANA’s dining 

facility on their side. We had guys who ate more meals with the ANA than they did 

on the US side and vice versa. It just depended on people’s personal preferences.

When we went to Ghazni, we lived on an ANA FOB. It was an old Russian 

helicopter base that had been used in the 1980s. It was still Ministry of Defense 

[MOD] property. We had our 250 ANA soldiers on that FOB and there was an 

inner set of buildings within their FOB that we occupied. 

JM: Can you evaluate those various arrangements? Was the latter better in 

terms of being an effective ETT? 

JS: Yes, I think it was. Having the ETTs living closer to the ANA is better 

for both sides. You build better relationships and better rapport right from the 

beginning. Major General Robert Durbin, the CSTC-A [Combined Security 

Transition Command-Afghanistan] commander now, is mandating that all the 
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inner-FOB walls between the ETTs and the ANA come down. He wants to have it 

where the ETTs are totally embedded with the ANA and I agree with that. 

JM: so, those HESCOs can be physical as well as psychological barriers?

JS: Exactly and where there weren’t HESCOs, there was usually a large steel 

gate or door that literally separated the two groups. We never had a problem with 

ANA guys stealing US property. There was a mutual respect between service 

members on both sides. 

JM: In regard to the combat support and service support issues, I’ve heard from 

other people that there’s this warrior ethos among the Afghans in which everybody 

wants to be in the infantry and nobody wants to be a cook or a truck driver. Did 

you find that as well? 

JS: Yes, especially with the cooks. Now, I haven’t heard it with respect to 

the artillery, transportation, or medics but there is something about Afghan males 

that they don’t want to be cooks. They look at it as women’s work. However, we 

were always able to go out and find local civilian males who were willing to come 

onto the FOB under contract and cook meals for us. It ended up being a civilian 

contracted business on the FOB, and I think it actually worked out better. The 

cooks we hired took a lot of pride in their work and they actually produced better 

meals for us. 

JM: What were some of the major cultural differences that impacted operations? 

JS: The biggest one was the work ethic. There isn’t as strong of a work ethic 

in the ANA as there is in the US Army, especially among the officers and NCOs. 

When a kandak was brought to KMTC for training, about midway through the 

cycle they’d identify those strong ANA soldiers who should be NCOs and they’d 

take them out of the kandak and send them to NCO school. At the end when the 

kandak graduated, they’d come back to the kandak as qualified NCOs because of 

their schooling and then they’d go downrange as a unit.

What you didn’t have was the command sergeant major in that kandak who 

had 20 or 25 years experience in the army like we have in the US military. In fact, 

our sergeant major in 2-1 Kandak was a university professor at the university in 

Kabul. When he joined the army, he could speak English so he was pulled out right 

away as the kandak began their training. He was sent to the basic NCO schooling that he needed and became the kandak sergeant major but he never had the 

sergeant, staff sergeant, or sergeant first class experiences behind him to make him 

a good command sergeant major. Culturally, that was a problem. With a lot of the 

officers, it wasn’t what they knew or what experiences they had that gave them 

their positions, it was who they knew and how much they were willing to pay to 

become a kandak commander or a brigade commander. 
120

JM: Can you explain the process of how the ETTs themselves received logistics 

and other forms of combat support? 

JS: We had a couple unique situations. When we were in Gardez, all our 

supplies came from Task Force Phoenix in Kabul. Our logistics task force ran 

missions back and forth to Kabul every three or four days. They’d bring down 

everything we needed from food and ammunition to major end items and repair 

parts.

When I was at Orgun-E and in Lwara, we were collocated with US maneuver 

forces and we got most of our supplies from them. When you only have 14 or 15 

extra people on the US side, feeding us was never an issue. Fueling our trucks 

wasn’t an issue either. It was a fairly easy way for them to support us. When we 

went to Ghazni, we were two miles down the road from a provincial reconstruction 

team [PRT] and another US maneuver battalion headquarters, so they provided the 

majority of our support. They gave us our food, fuel, some ammunition, medical 

supplies, and repair parts.

The major end items we needed still came through Task Force Phoenix. They 

provided things like trucks or weapons systems and they gave us our sundry kits 

as well. There were some small things we got from Task Force Phoenix too but 

the majority of it came from Combined Joint Task Force 76 (CJTF-76) units that 

were there. 

JM: How responsive were they? 

JS: There was some inefficiency based on the road network there. Anything 

that had to come by ground convoy was going to take a week to two weeks to get to 

you just because they didn’t plan too many ground convoys. Obviously there was 

an element of risk involved every time you went out on a ground convoy. 

They did fly these ring flights every four or five days. Those were problematic 

though because of weather and altitude. The ring flights were also responsible for 

moving mail, supplies, and personnel between areas. So, it was a 50/50 shot that 

you could get something moved on a ring flight at any given time. 

JM: Can you characterize the general security situation in your various 

locations and tell me about the nature of any enemy contact you had? 

JS: When I was in Gardez we were rocketed twice and they both fell wide 

of the FOB by a few hundred meters. When we moved to Orgun-E, one of our 

vehicles was struck by an IED [improvised explosive device] when we first got 

there. I had three ETTs out in Lwara with a company-plus size element of ANA 

and they got rocketed and mortared periodically.

The observation posts would end up getting into small firefights with ACM 

[anti-Coalition militia]. They typically stayed on the Pakistan side of the border 

and shot across, because they knew we wouldn’t pursue them across the border. 
121

In Orgun-E we had a couple rocket attacks. One was extremely effective, and 

I’m not sure how. They launched nine rockets at our FOB. Eight of them hit on our 

FOB and one hit dead center on the TOC. Luckily it hit right on top of an I-beam 

that was supporting the roof. Otherwise, probably 10 soldiers from the infantry 

battalion would have been killed in the TOC.

We had numerous occasions where local civilians would come in and report 

unexploded ordnance that they had found in their area. That was good and we 

would reward them for that. We always went out and looked for it. When we went 

to Ghazni, we ran a real effective medical clinic on the FOB. 

We spent a lot of Title 10 and Title 22 money on our FOB. 

We had a good rapport with the local community and we never got attacked. 

We did have one instance where a vehicle-borne IED went off about mid-May 

out in front of the FOB, right before we moved the kandak there. 

JM: Were there any memorable operations that your kandak participated in? 

JS: Yes. We participated in MOUNTAIN FURY. That was the 10th Mountain 

Division’s major operation that went from August into October. The way we ran 

MOUNTAIN FURY was to start out in the districts in Ghazni that were already 

supportive of the Coalition forces. We reinforced the success and cooperation that 

we had with the governors in there. 

We did humanitarian assistance drops, medical civic action projects 

[MEDCAPs], and veterinary civic action projects [VETCAPs] and then we 

gradually worked our way into the districts. 

We used kinetic operations where we knew they were less supportive or where 

the Taliban were hiding out. It was a very successful operation for us. 

JM: How would you assess the performance of the Afghans? 

JS: Overall they did very well. 

We had a very good working relationship with the 102d Infantry Battalion 

from the Connecticut National Guard that was in Ghazni. They were completely 

supportive of the ANA and trusted the ANA to the point where, as soon as they 

started planning a combat operation, they would involve the ETTs and the ANA 

leadership in the planning. That was a great teaching tool for the ANA. We’d 

actually be involved with the planning right up front with them. The ANA and the 

US forces would be doing parallel planning. I think that led to better operations 

because it wasn’t just us telling them they needed to do something. They knew 

why they had to do it as well. The officers could explain it to the NCOs and the 

soldiers and I think we got a lot better response out of the ANA and they performed 

better. They knew what they were going to do and also why they were going to do 

it ahead of time. 
122

JM: Did you have any kandak-specific operations that your guys did and they 

planned themselves? 

JS: Yes. In October they had received some information from the human 

intelligence gathering they were doing that there was a vetted target in the Andar 

District. They had made contact with an associate of the vetted target and were 

calling him on the cell phone and trying to arrange a meeting with the vetted target 

to place him under custody. They did put together the operation and put some 

soldiers downtown to meet with the acquaintance. 

JM: Where was this? 

JS: In Ghazni. This operation was unique in that it was planned and executed 

by the ANA but supported by the Coalition forces. At that time, we had Task Force 

Iron Grays which was the 102d Infantry Battalion from Connecticut. They used 

their Shadow UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] to follow the ANA through the whole 

operation. They were supporting them the whole time. As it turned out, they did 

meet with the acquaintance and they did go down to Andar but they never captured 

the vetted target they were looking for. From our standpoint, it was still a success, 

though because they had planned and executed the whole thing by themselves. 

JM: Colonel Dominic Cariello was talking about the concept of “for, with, by.” 

Was that something you followed as well? 

JS: Yes, absolutely. 

We always tried to get to the point where we were just rolling with the ANA 

to provide them the combat multipliers of medical evacuation, fire support, and air 

support. That’s the point we need to get to with all the infantry kandaks that are 

out there now. 

JM: At what level do you think you left them? 

JS: The kandak is only scheduled to stay together for another four or five 

months. They operate on a three-year rotation. If they could have another year 

together, they would be at that point where they could stand on their own. The staff 

has been together for a long time. The kandak commander has been in command 

for 15 months. If you could just get them to the point where you can entrust them 

with funds and resources, I think they’ll be all right. 

JM: Did you have much visibility on what motivated people to join the ANA? 

JS: Just like in our Army, I think there is a certain percentage of people that 

join because they want to see the national government succeed. It’s probably a 

small percentage. Some joined for the money which at the time was only $60 

a month but was more money than they were making doing nothing and being 

unemployed. Typically anybody who is employed in Afghanistan is probably 

going to be supporting anywhere from 13 to 15 family members. The families are 
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very tight over there and they live together and stay together until someone can go 

off and support themselves. That doesn’t happen often because there’s still about 

40 percent unemployment over there. For a lot of them, it’s a job they need to do 

to support their families. 

JM: Did you guys have any poppy eradication responsibilities? 

JS: No. I was in Regional Command-East and we didn’t have to deal with that. 

JM: Did you get a sense of how the local population viewed the ANA? 

JS: The ANA we were with were very well respected in the communities. 

There was a lot of animosity towards the ANP [Afghan National Police] though. 

Unfortunately a lot of the ANP officers were not being paid so they were running 

graft on the side on their own behalf. They were shaking down jingle trucks for 

money and robbing people. They’d just go into merchants, take what they needed 

and not pay for it but the ANA was well respected. 

We made sure the soldiers were getting paid and that they got a chance to go 

home and bring the money to their family. 

We weren’t living right in the communities like the ANP were. We’d go in and 

do something good like a MEDCAP, a VETCAP, or conduct a security shura and 

then leave. We really didn’t have a lot of the issues you have when you’re actually 

out there living in the communities. 

JM: What was the US unit again that you had that great relationship with? 

JS: It was 1st Battalion, 102d Infantry Regiment of the Connecticut Army 

National Guard. 

JM: Generally speaking, did you have good relationships with the US units in 

your areas of operations? 

JS: Yes, they were excellent. Those relationships were based on a mutual 

respect for each other because US forces that go out and conduct combat operations 

need to have Afghan forces with them. 

JM: Wasn’t it actually official, the Bonn Agreement? 

JS: Yes, exactly. It was also in their best interest to give the ETTs whatever 

they needed to make the missions with the ANA productive and safe. We drew a 

lot of our life support from those units as well. 

JM: What kind of support did you get from back home in Wisconsin? 

JS: The state provided great support. They made sure we had everything we 

needed. Family members and friends were always looking to send things. Because 

of our medical clinic we were running in Ghazni, we always asked that they send 

something like Beanie Babies, writing tablets, pens or pencils because those were 
124

always great giveaways for the Afghans who came through our clinic. It also just 

created a lot of goodwill. 

JM: You did a lot of coaching, teaching, and mentoring during your tour. Is 

there anything that you personally learned from your experiences that you’ll take 

forward with you in your career? 

JS: One thing I learned is that soldiers and armies, no matter where they are, 

have more similarities than differences. We had discipline issues in the ANA and 

things like that and we have the same thing in the American Army, although usually 

to a much lesser degree. The positive things you see in the US Army with young 

soldiers taking initiative and getting things done that they know need to be done, 

you see in the ANA as well and that was very encouraging. 

JM: What kind of advice would you have for someone who was going to hold 

a position similar to yours? 

JS: I would tell them to spend as much time with the ANA as they could. It 

doesn’t have to be anything formal. You don’t always have to go to the kandak

commander’s office or the kandak staff and have a formal meeting. A lot of times 

it’s nothing more than going over and just spending time with them and talking 

to them, finding out what their issues are and talking through with them how they 

should address those issues.

I would also recommend that people spend as much time as they can socializing 

with the Afghans because they are incredibly sociable people. They’ll always sit 

down and offer you chai. If it’s around a meal time, they’ll always ask you to stay 

for a meal. I would say take advantage of all those things. That will probably be 

the one opportunity you’ll have to really immerse yourself in a foreign culture and 

you should take advantage of it. 

JM: Was your immersion a positive experience? 

JS: Absolutely. In fact, I joke around with people and tell them that I only got 

sick once in Afghanistan and that was on the US food, not on the Afghan food. We 

ate everything over there. They have this yogurt that people said to stay away from. 

I tried it and it was delicious. They have this custard dessert they make and that 

was delicious as well. I was even offered sheep’s brains at one of the meals and I 

tried that. We also had sheep’s heart one morning after we had slaughtered a sheep 

the night before and that was fantastic. The rice was great and the naan bread they 

eat is good. It was just neat to eat that kind of food with Afghans in that culture and 

talk to them about their past experiences. It was very interesting. 

JM: What are the characteristics of a good ETT member who’s going to be 

training, working with, and mentoring indigenous forces? What do they need to 

bring to the table to be successful? 
125

JS: The most successful ones I saw over there were soldiers who came over 

and didn’t take charge of the company but took ownership of the company they 

were mentoring. They saw that as their unit that they needed to get to the next 

level. Because they took that ownership in it, they worked with their counterparts 

and worked with the subordinates of that organization. 

They spent a lot of time over there with the ANA on missions. Even at night 

after the evening meal, they’d go back over there and sit and socialize with the 

NCOs or officers from the company and just get to know them. Spending time with 

the Afghans is really the key to a good mentoring relationship. 

JM: What do you look back on as the major accomplishments for your team? 

JS: The biggest one we had was when we got to the point where the kandak

was doing parallel planning with the US maneuver forces. They were putting 

together missions on their own. 

We had a rifle range that we built for them on FOB Ghazni. It got to the point 

where they were coming over and telling us that tomorrow morning at 0900 they 

were going to have 20 people on the range firing and they needed the ammunition 

to do it. We’d work through with them how much ammunition they could have 

based on what they needed for operations and things like that. When it got to 

the point where they took the initiative to train themselves, that was really the 

highlight of the year. 

JM: Conversely, were there any major frustrations or heartburn issues that you 

had to deal with? 

JS: I still think a lot of their culture is getting in the way of them being a 

professional army. There are always two cultures in any community: the civilian 

culture and the military culture. Too much of what they bring with them from the 

civilian side is affecting their military culture and they definitely need to continue 

working on building a truly professional acting army. 

JM: Based upon your 11 months there and what you learned, what’s your 

outlook for Afghanistan in general and the ANA in particular? 

JS: I think they’ll do fine. What they need right now is a good strong economy 

that will keep the insurgency and keep terrorism out of Afghanistan. Once they 

have that and they can figure out a way to fairly tax the businesses and the people 

over there or develop some sort of national income and use that to fund their own 

army, they’ll be in better shape.

What you’ll see then is the population becoming the check and balance 

system for the ANA. It won’t be the Coalition forces or the US forces over there 

keeping an eye on them. It will be their own population mandating that they have 

a professional and an honest army.
126

We’re at the point now with the ANA where they need less help working on 

intelligence, operations, and administration of their army. They really need to get 

into more specialized areas. 

They need help in their legal section. This past summer they implemented 

their UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] program and their non-judicial 

punishment program for the ANA. That was a huge step forward. When I first got 

over there last year, it was still based on officers literally beating up soldiers as a 

form of discipline. 

We need to get to the point where we’re mentoring their public affairs people 

and their information operations people. We need to start digging further into their 

army and training the more specialized staff areas. 

JM: When you were at Fort Riley, did you get a chance to evaluate the program 

they have going on there? 

JS: Yes. One thing we noticed at Fort Riley that’s different than Camp Shelby 

is that Camp Shelby is a Reserve Component training center. 

They tend to pack a lot more into each day and they train seven days a week. 

That’s how we got out of there in 45 days. Fort Riley is on an Active Component 

post and was given to the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division and they’re 

treating it more like a PCS [permanent change of station] type move. The soldiers 

come there and they get six to eight weeks of training on being ETTs but there’s 

a lot more downtime in that training. They’re not working at all on Sundays and 

they have half-days on Saturdays. It’s a lot slower paced but I think they’re getting 

better training. When we were there, we saw the Humvee rollover trainer. That’s 

great training that none of us ever got. They work more on preventive maintenance 

checks and services (PMCS) of the Humvees. 

They take them out to the ranges. They do more work on weapons qualifications. 

I think they’re doing some better training but they really stretched out the whole 

program a lot further than Camp Shelby did. For Reserve Component soldiers, 

I think it’s important to get them into that training, get them as much as they 

can get in a short period of time and then get them overseas. A lot of them have 

civilian employers waiting for them to get back, to fulfill obligations at a civilian 

corporation somewhere. 

JM: You mentioned the ACM. Did you get a sense of who they were and what 

was driving them? 

JS: I’m not sure all of them were true al-Qaeda or Taliban. I think a lot of 

them were more criminally-based individuals. The villages and towns we went to 

over there didn’t really have an anti-government attitude. When we went into the 

villages, they were supportive of us during the day.
127

At night, though, the Taliban or recruiters would come in with weapons trying 

to recruit people and, for the most part, these are defenseless villagers who don’t 

have any choice, so of course they’re going to say they support the bad guys. It 

really wasn’t a coalition of the willing over there on the ACM side. It was more 

coerced participation on the part of the villagers. I think when we’d roll into a 

village, if somebody was recruited the night before and they saw our Humvees 

rolling in or our helicopters flying overhead, they’d take the AK47 they were just 

given by the Taliban and drop it down a well or hide it somewhere and that would 

be the extent of their participation. I don’t think there’s a huge movement. I think 

they join the Taliban out of fear of being killed right on the spot. 

JM: Did you find any counterinsurgency strategies that worked particularly 

well and have you seen the new counterinsurgency field manual? 

JS: One of the things that really works over there is getting away from the large 

base mentality. You can’t have tons of Coalition forces and your ANA all on one 

FOB somewhere and try to operate out of that FOB. You need to push down to the 

kandak and company level and put forces out into the districts.

You need to do the same with the police. They need to be everywhere as well. 

You need to have a large government footprint out there even if it’s only small 

numbers of police officers in the village. You still need to have that connection to 

the government. 

We developed some good TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] in Ghazni 

where we had the maneuver force and the ANA go in and separate the insurgents 

from the villagers like it says in the doctrine. 

Then we had the PRT come in behind and do the MEDCAPs and VETCAPs 

and bring in jobs and projects such as drilling wells, building district centers, and 

building schools.

On a tactical level, we had a really successful operation the night before we 

kicked off Operation MOUNTAIN FURY. We were able to exfiltrate out of the 

PRT into Andar based on some deception operations we had done.

We had noticed that across the street from the PRT and the ANA compound 

where we always drove our vehicles out, there were always people hanging around 

watching our activities. We assumed some of them were reporting our activities 

and where we were going. That night before, we had all our vehicles meet up at 

the PRT and at about 2200 we all drove north towards Dih Yak District but all the 

vehicles were empty, although all the people watching us didn’t know that.

Task Force Iron Grays then conducted some fire missions with their 105 

howitzers out of the PRT but they were all directed north. They fired illumination 

rounds and some HE [high explosive] rounds into the hilltops to the north.
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About 0200, we literally cut a hole in the HESCOs and in the wire on the south 

side of the PRT and our forces marched out of the PRT into Andar and when the 

sun came up at 0530 the next morning, we literally had two ANA companies and 

a US rifle company already in the village. There was no time for the ACM to react 

or get out of there. During the next week, we ended up killing about 44 Taliban

in northern Andar. We had just completely surprised them and showed up at their 

doorsteps the next morning. 

JM: How impressed or unimpressed were you with ACM tactics and 

capabilities? 

JS: For the most part they were just hit-and-run activities. They were setting 

IEDs. Once in a while they’d follow up an IED with some small arms fire. I think 

our tactic of driving through the kill zone empowered them to conduct more 

of those types of operations. When our forces stopped, turned, and pursued the 

enemy out of the kill zones, it was more effective. That was a TTP we developed 

in response to that. The attacks slowed down if we went right back into the kill 

zone and hunted down the enemy or else if we stopped right there in the kill zone 

and hunted them down. 

JM: You mentioned the PRTs. Were there other agencies you worked with? 

JS: One of the things we noticed when we got there is that there were a lot of 

agencies working. There were OGAs as well as many civilian agencies. 

We had a UN contingent in Ghazni and a lot of NGOs [non-governmental 

organizations] running around the country. The PRT was a good way to put together 

the USAID [US Agency for International Development], State Department, and 

Department of Agriculture but there were still a lot of other agencies that if we 

had had our druthers would have all been in the PRT working for that commander.

In our case, the PRT commander was a Navy commander. He really understood 

what needed to happen in Ghazni Province and had some good plans that he set 

up. There were just a lot of agencies out there that were doing things that were 

disjointed from what he was trying to accomplish in Ghazni. So if you could pull 

them all together under the PRT umbrella, I think it would be a lot more productive 

in the long run. 

JM: So the agencies were there but there was just no central authority directing 

them? 

JS: Right. I think they really could have cooperated and accomplished much 

more with the resources they had, had they not been off on their own trying to do it. 

JM: What were some of the NGOs working there? 
129

JS: DynCorp was there training the police. There was a group called Doctors 

Without Borders. The UN was there. There were probably more up in Kabul than 

in Ghazni. There were also the civilian contractors working on the roads. There 

was an Australian organization building roads along with a group from Turkey. 

JM: At any of the places you were at, did you have any Coalition partners? 

JS: In Gardez we had a Romanian ETT. Their teams had about 24 personnel 

in them and they only stayed for six or nine months. Instead of assigning them 

as one solid team to an Afghan kandak, we broke up their teams. There were a 

few reasons why we did it. One of them was because they brought a fantastic 

knowledge of Soviet weapons systems.

We also broke them up for force protection reasons. If we gave the Romanians 

to a certain kandak, we wouldn’t be allowed to give them up-armored Humvees or 

US weapons systems but by integrating them into existing US ETTs, they could 

ride in the US Humvees and use US weapons systems. It was our way of looking 

out for them and making sure they were protected. 

JM: Were they as competent as you needed or wanted? 

JS: Yes. The team we had that we split and sent to Ghazni had already been on 

one rotation to Afghanistan already. 

They were very well-rounded and were a professional group of soldiers and 

officers. They did a great job for us. 

JM: Did you do a right-seat ride with the guy who was replacing you when 

you left? 

JS: The recommendation I made and was accepted was to pull up the officer 

who was my S3 mentor to be the kandak team chief when I left and we replaced 

him with another major who came in on a later rotation. He had actually been there 

longer than me because he started out in that kandak. He was well read in to what 

needed to happen and he knew the unit better than I did. 

JM: Did you think you had sufficient rank to accomplish all what you needed 

to do? 

JS: At the kandak level I did because I had already been a battalion commander. 

That was a great help and I would highly recommend to the Army that they make 

the kandak team chiefs senior lieutenant colonel positions. Right now, they’re 

slotted as a major’s position. That way, you can tell that guy you’re mentoring that 

you’ve already been in his shoes and you know what he’s going through. At the 

brigade level, I really think there needs to be a full colonel mentoring the brigade 

commanders who are one-star generals in the ANA. If the colonels we send over 

there have brigade-level experience, they’ll be okay.
130

A colonel mentoring the corps commander seems to be working out really 

well right now. Plus, I think it would be very difficult to get anything higher than 

a colonel assigned to the five corps of the ANA right now unless you went with 

retired general officers on some sort of contract. The other advantages we had when 

I was mentoring the corps XO during my last couple months there was the small 

MPRI team we had living on Gardez that consisted of S3, S1, and S4 mentors as 

well as a couple property book officer mentors and an NCO mentor. 

By the time you get to the corps-level ETT staff, there’s much more 

responsibility and many more actions that need to be accomplished on the US side, 

so you really can’t spend as much time as you need to on the ANA side. That MPRI 

staff was really a huge asset to help mentor the ANA corps staff. We also had them 

at the brigade level which was a huge help there as well. 

JM: Were they all retired Army guys? 

JS: Yes. As an example, the individual who mentored the corps G3 was a 

retired lieutenant colonel who began his military career in Vietnam in the ‘60s. 

He’d been with the Army through all the changes from the ‘70s, the buildup in the 

’80s, into the ‘90s. He’d seen a lot and had a ton of experience.

By the way, an ANA corps looks pretty much like a US division. The corps 

commander was a two-star general. The deputy commander was a one-star general 

as was the corps chief of staff. The primary staff was made up of colonels. When 

you got to the G5 and G6, they were lieutenant colonels and their secondary staff 

was at the lieutenant colonel and major levels. 

JM: Are there any other lessons learned or takeaways you’d like to impart? 

JS: One thing we really made large use of, especially when I was in Ghazni 

and we had our own FOB and were sort of on our own, was the Title 10 and Title 

22 money that we were allotted. 

We got about $25,000 funding every month to six weeks depending on how 

quickly we were going through it and that really became a combat multiplier for 

us. We were able to put local nationals to work on our FOB. We were able to buy 

services to come onto our FOB to take care of things. We bought a lot of products 

off the local economy like steel, lumber, plastic bottles, and pot-bellied stoves. 

That created a lot of goodwill around the community of Ghazni.

At one point, we had 16 local nationals setting up HESCOs around the FOB 

and we had another team of eight just doing miscellaneous projects. We had the 

cooks we brought onto the FOB every day as well. All the metal we bought was 

purchased right across the street from the FOB. 

We really became an asset to the community and that was one of the big reasons 

we didn’t get rocketed as much as other places. Even the PRT, which was just two 
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miles down the road, must have been rocketed a half dozen times while we were 

over there and we didn’t have a single attack on our FOB. 

JM: Did you have any interaction with the local government? 

JS: Yes. As the Army unit in town, we sat in on all the weekly security meetings 

at the governor’s office. In fact, we were in an unusual situation. The reason our 

kandak was sent to Ghazni was because the governor of Ghazni, Haji Sher Alam, 

served with our kandak commander in the mujahedeen. He had been the logistics 

officer for General Ahmed Shah Masood and my kandak commander had been his 

assistant. 

JM: What sense did you have on how well organized the government was? 

JS: It wasn’t really. Haji Sher Alam was there most of the time we were there 

in Ghazni. He ran it more like his own personal business. He had about 200 to 300 

hired security forces that he was paying for himself throughout the district. 

JM: His own mini army? 

JS: Yes and when he left, they left, so that was a big hit security-wise in the 

province when he was removed by President Hamid Karzai. He really didn’t run a 

professional government. He didn’t give guidance to his ministers, have them put 

programs together and then come back and brief him. The ministers were basically 

working with their contacts at the PRT doing what they could do but it was always 

removed from what the governor was working on. 

JM: did the fact that you had guys who were former mujahedeen as well as 

some who were in the former Russian–Afghan Army who were now all in the same 

unit cause any problems there? 

JS: Not openly. Our kandak commander fought with the mujahedeen. Our 

kandak XO stayed in the Russian Army and was a regimental commander with the 

old Afghan Army and fought with the Russians. I even went into a meeting one 

time where a general officer from the MOD was there. He was sitting next to our 

kandak commander and they were laughing about something, so I asked if they 

had served together in the mujahedeen. The room got real quiet all of a sudden and 

we came to find out that they had actually fought against each other in some of the 

same battles. I got out of it by saying that that’s one of the strengths of the new 

Afghan National Army. Former enemies can now be friends and serve together. 

There was a lot of that. For the most part, they’ve gotten over that and have let the 

past stay in the past. 

JM: Were these ethnically integrated units as well? 

JS: Yes. The ANA is doing a real good job about that and they’re putting a lot 

of emphasis on mixing up the ethnic groups. Our kandak commander was Pashto. 
132

Our kandak XO was Uzbek. Our S3 was Tajik. You see a lot of cliques that develop 

within the kandak based on the tribal backgrounds. The kandak commander had a 

personal security detachment of eight soldiers and all eight of them were from his 

tribe and some even from his village where he was from. 

JM: Was a lot of the recruiting done from the local areas? 

JS: They had a colonel who was in Ghazni assigned as the recruiter. As he 

recruited people, they’d be sent to KMTC. When they had 600 soldiers and they 

were ready to start the class, they’d start the class. The kandak that went through in 

the past was strictly a cohort kandak. The whole kandak would go out somewhere 

and some of the soldiers may be from that area and some may not be. For the 

most part, most soldiers wouldn’t go back to the area from which they came. That 

creates some problems because you can join the ANP from Ghazni, go to the 

regional academy in Gardez, become a police officer and they’ll send you back to 

Ghazni. So you’re serving in about the same position and making about the same 

pay but you’re in the police and you’re back in your hometown. Whereas, you may 

end up somewhere across the country if you join the army.

JM: So about 600 men comprised a full-strength kandak? 

JS: Yes. 

JM: It seems to me that it wasn’t all that common to have a kandak at full 

strength but maybe 30 to 40 percent strength? 

JS: Right. There’s no replacement system there either. You may even start 

with 650 but as time goes on you lose people through AWOLs or “escaping,” 

as they call it, and there’s no way to get them back. The numbers would change 

daily. When we moved from Orgun-E and Lwara to Ghazni, Ghazni was actually a 

better place to serve because it was only three hours from Kabul on the Ring Road, 

whereas Orgun-E was about six to eight hours away. 

We actually gained strength when we got there because guys would call up 

their buddies and tell them to come back, that they shouldn’t have left the unit 

because now we’re in Ghazni. So, a week later, the guy would show back up, he’d 

get his uniform back and his weapon back and he’d be back in the army. It’s a lot 

different than what we’re used to here in the US.

Some of the kandaks that are going through KMTC right now are filler kandaks. 

They’ll send out 30 soldiers to one kandak, 40 to another to try to bring the strength 

back up where it needs to be. 

JM: Did you think they have good strategies in place now to prevent this kind 

of attrition? 
133

JS: They’re starting to develop some retention programs. A soldier who stays 

beyond his initial three-year tour will get more than the normal $100 a month that 

the others get. He’ll get $120 or $150. 

They’re also starting to develop disability pay where if they get injured on 

active duty and can no longer serve, they’ll give you a monthly stipend for that. 

There’s a death benefit now where if a soldier gets killed on active duty the family 

gets enough money to bury him. I think they’ll eventually turn around the AWOL 

rate and the ETS [end tour of service] rate. 

JM: Because that’s a huge obstacle to building and maintaining a successful 

army, correct? 

JS: It is and they’ve really plateaued on their strength. All the people we’re 

recruiting and putting through KMTC right now are just covering the AWOLs. So 

they’ve really hit a plateau of about 30,000 where they can’t go any further. 

JM: Thank you very much for your time. 

135

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Slusher

16 February 2007

LL: My name is Laurence Lessard (LL) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute at Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Lieutenant Colonel Mike Slusher 

(MS) on his experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM 

or OEF. Today’s date is 16 February 2007 and this is an unclassified 

interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information and if classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Let’s start with some 

background. Where are you from, how did you get interested in the Army, 

and where did you get your commission? 

MS: I was born and raised in Leavenworth, Kansas. I had every opportunity to 

join the Army and I associated with a lot of kids in high school whose parents were 

career officers or noncommissioned officers passing through Fort Leavenworth.

Following that I enlisted in the Marine Corps in the middle of the Vietnam War 

because they were the only ones who sent me anything. They sent me a letter in the 

mail asking me to come down and join.

At that time I was dating a girl whose father was the chief of staff on Fort 

Leavenworth. He immediately stopped talking to me and wasn’t happy with my 

decision. He thought I should go into the Army. He said, “Do you understand there 

is a war going on?” I said, “No, not really.” I was busy in high school. So I went 

in the Marine Corps when I was 17 and spent almost the next five years with their 

special operations community.

When I got out I was a policeman out in California for six years. I came back to 

the Midwest for some family issues and went to grad school at Kansas University. 

I joined the Kansas National Guard and stayed with them except for a couple of 

years that I spent with the US Army Reserve and an ODA [operational detachment 

alpha]. I was an infantry officer the whole time.

I’m 56 years old now. In 2001 I had been running a research foundation in 

Topeka, Kansas that did public policy and criminal justice work. I went on active duty 

with the Army in January 2002. I went to the Pentagon and worked G3 [operations] 

Army. I was hired into the Guard’s AGR [Active Guard-Reserve] program as a G3 

for the 35th Division which is just off post here at Fort Leavenworth. I spent three 

and a half years in the AGR, including a Balkan deployment and a lot of TDY 

[temporary duty] time. Then I took this Afghan deployment in January ’06. 
136

LL: You were one of the few people who went from the Wisconsin Guard to 

this deployment? 

MS: Actually, that’s kind of a point of contention. That mission goes back 

and forth and they argue between United States Army FORSCOM [Forces 

Command] and National Guard Bureau as to whether that’s going to be a RC 

[Reserve Component] or an AC [Active Component] mission. Thus far, it’s stayed 

a Guard mission, although I hear that the AC would like to pick up the Task Force 

Phoenix mission. The Guard has used it to finish out their brigade deployments. 

They wanted to get all of their combat brigades to pass through an OIF [Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM] or OEF theater.

What happens is that a brigade headquarters will get the mission. They will 

take the command and control piece and all of the senior pieces they can for their 

states. 

Then they have to go out and get people to take the ETT [embedded training 

team] missions. The Guard Bureau was then advertising them as brigade and 

battalion teams of 16 people, with slightly different compositions, and the states 

would sign up for it thinking they were going to send a team from their state and it 

would remain intact. As soon as the teams would deploy, they’d find out they’d be 

broken up as soon as they got into country and redistributed based upon the needs 

of Task Force Phoenix. There were a lot of hard feelings over that. 

LL: When were you given the opportunity to volunteer for this? 

MS: It went back and forth. We were supposed to mobilize 17 December. 

This was the first time Kansas had this particular mission. Rightfully so, the state 

had a lot of concern over who takes their kids different places. I’m a fairly senior 

infantry officer in the state, so they basically said it was something they wanted me 

to do. Was I interested? I said sure.

That was in the first part of November. At that point we were getting ready to 

do an exercise the next spring called COBRA GOLD with I Corps. I was on my 

way to Bangkok, Thailand to one of the meetings on that. When I got there, there 

were some folks from Singapore I had worked for the previous year and they were 

looking forward to it because we would be hosting them at Leavenworth. I had to 

tell them that I wouldn’t be there.

The December mobilization date got pushed back to 5 January 2007. I’m 

told that Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré had decided that Camp Shelby, 

Mississippi had to shut down for Christmas because they had been fairly busy for 

an extended period of time. 

We got pushed back three weeks. The problem with that is the 3.5, 4.5, and 

5.5 series all arise in country, normally in January. Because they moved our 
137

mobilization date into the first part of January, that only left about 20 days to train 

and then ship. That didn’t meet up with any of the FORSCOM guidance on the 

training requirements. So, they slipped the arrival date back to the third week in 

February so they could spend more time at Camp Shelby. 

LL: Can you describe the pre-deployment training you received at Camp 

Shelby? 

MS: I can describe it and I won’t describe it very glowingly. All of these 

deployments have issues as they’re generally based upon the Annex T training 

and exercises, of FORSCOM, of whatever theater they’re going into. They’ll set 

up a series of one-size-fits-all training lanes that indemnifies the US government 

from being criticized as to whether they prepared the soldier. That’s my opinion 

but I believe that it’s commonly shared. As a consequence, you go through a set 

of training events that may or may not have anything to do with the theater you’re 

going into but are titled “theater specific”.

For example, as a senior O5 [lieutenant colonel] I had to go through, as did 

everybody else, a lane that made sure we knew how to do the low crawl and three 

to five-second fire team rushes. There were no exceptions. Everybody had to do 

that. There were several cases of things that were similar to that.

The issues that were truly essential for everybody to learn, such as learning 

to use the radio systems in theater, or BFT [Blue Force Tracker] or even spending 

time in the vehicles, weren’t done because they didn’t have the equipment sets 

there to do that. Most of the senior guys made the choice of ensuring the junior 

folks got through the communications training, the BFT training, the vehicle time 

and banked on being able to have the opportunity to pick up those skill sets once 

they arrived in theater. In many cases the schedule drove the training and it was 

dictated by a higher command. When I came back a year later I figured it would 

have been resolved but it still hasn’t been. 

LL: Was there any piece of that Camp Shelby training that was useful? 

MS: No. There wasn’t enough time spent on the ranges to achieve any 

competency. The foreign weapon systems were limited and there wasn’t enough 

time spent on them to achieve anything. I never saw the radio systems or the BFT 

until I got into theater. The training on the up-armored vehicle was extremely 

limited. It amounted to simply about a mile drive to ensure licensing and didn’t go 

over in any great detail the maintenance of the vehicle or recovery operations. As 

I came to learn very early on, recovery operations are a part of everyday life over 

there. The terrain is such that those vehicles wind up getting stuck and damaged. 

It’s a system that requires everybody to pitch in. The manpower levels are low 

enough that if you don’t, things just don’t get done. You’d have six vehicles for 16 

folks. That’s about two folks to a vehicle. You can’t put all that on one person to 

take care of. 
138

LL: Was there any cultural or language training? 

MS: There’s never going to be enough time to learn any of the ethnic Afghan 

languages in the US going through a training readiness cycle like that. Dari which 

is kind of the Rosetta Stone over there, is pretty complex. It doesn’t always have 

words that are translatable from English into Dari. What you find is that it takes 

a lot of Dari explanation to get from English to where somebody understands it.

As far as cultural awareness, I think that country has had an extensive American 

presence long enough that the culture is changing or adapting to our presence 

there. Some of the things we were told were gospel just weren’t true. They may 

have been looked at through the eyes of whatever resource was available. That 

may have been an émigré who left during the Russian occupation in the 1980s and 

was now providing language training and cultural orientation.

There were some smart cards provided by the DOD [Department of Defense] 

and they were out of date and were culturally inaccurate. I don’t feel bad about 

that. This is one of those theaters we were dropped into. The map sets weren’t 

in existence and there wasn’t a lot of information out there. It wasn’t part of our 

strategic targeting. It kind of came up on the screen as something you had to go 

do and there was a scarcity of information and a scarcity of maps and everything 

else. There are parts of the world that we’ve been to for extended periods of time 

and have an opportunity to go back to again and the maps still aren’t good. Japan 

is one of those areas. It’s just the way it is and you learn to overcome all that stuff.

I found that the Afghans like to teach about their country and their culture. It’s 

like anywhere you go. If you ask somebody about something and why you want 

to know it, they’ll generally give you that information. When I deal with people I 

apologize right up front. I would say, “If I do something to offend you, it’s not my 

intent. It is merely because I may be ignorant about your culture or the issues that 

we’re trying to talk about.” That generally opens the door and gets you in. 

LL: If the entire issue of pre-deployment training were placed in your hands, 

how would you put it together? 

MS: We’ve had some discussion on that. I think the idea of getting the folks 

who have had the experience to come back and be part of it is the right thing to 

do. However, you have a problem with the RC in that respect. Generally, anybody 

that comes back from a deployment with the RC and you want them to stay and 

work on that, they probably won’t be allowed to. The people you want are the same 

people that their jobs want them back as well. Those are folks that are in demand 

by both the Army and the civilian force. As a consequence, you end up with a lot 

of folks who are probably there because they didn’t have a job to go back to in the 

start. That’s not the right clientele.
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There is a lot of discussion right now on the length of tours. It would seem to 

me that if there was some way of having more of the folks that actually worked 

in theater to then come back and work as trainers, this would be helpful. I think 

there is a way to impact that. Send the Title 32 folks that go on these missions on a 

two-year tour. They spend a year in theater and then they spend the last year at that 

training site. That would be doable.

The non-AGR, non-technician people are probably going to have to go home. 

This whole process for the RC is going to become more difficult rather than less 

despite what we want. It has to do with this policy that’s now hitting us of the 12 

month plus a month. My understanding of what they’re doing, and why I think 

it’s going to be so problematic, is that they’re going to take the Guard year, the 39 

days, and put that in front of the MOB time. Whatever training is not accomplished 

in that 39 days, spills over into that 12 months and that’s how they finish the MOB 

training. Then their tour begins and then it ends. Whatever leave time they get 

comes off outside that 12 month window.

Having gone through a couple of these rotations before and dealing with the 

AC validators, or the TSBs [training support battalion], there’s been a reluctance 

for them to certify any training that didn’t occur at the MOB site that they didn’t 

supervise. States are going to fight this because they’re not going to want to send 

people to the MOB sites before they absolutely have to because it doesn’t make 

any sense. If they’re trying to do the 12 month thing, we’ll just allot 14 months. 

That’s the same thing that I wound up with before this policy was in place. 

Trying to do any of the training at home station and get it validated is going to 

be a problem. The certifiers aren’t going to be able to send folks out to certify those 

events on a daily basis. If you send them to the MOB station to do their 39 days 

beforehand, I don’t know if we have any issues on Title 10 versus Title 32 status 

or not. There’s a lot of stuff to work through. It’s just getting more complicated 

instead of less. I suspect that almost every state will wind up with some type of 

training support detachment that will be tasked with providing the training for that 

first 39 days for those missions. That’s what it looks like. 

LL: Can you talk about the actual deployment to Afghanistan? 

MS: Yes. I’m one of those guys who thinks that I’m a lot tougher than I am 

and I still see myself through 21-year old eyes. As a consequence, when I got into 

Kabul and Phoenix I said, “Give me the toughest job you have. Send me where 

it’s the worst.” I shot out of Phoenix and hit Kandahar. I got in late one day and 

left early the next. I got a Thuraya [satellite phone], a couple of vehicles, and an 

azimuth. That was it. I still didn’t know how to use the radios, I still didn’t know 

how to use the BFT, and they said, “You’re going to the desert for two months.”
140

I went west across the Helmand River out into the southern part of Helmand 

Province and started on this Operation RIVER DANCE which was the poppy 

eradication. There was nothing out there. I mean absolutely nothing out there. 

There were times when we were two days by vehicle to get within MEDEVAC 

[medical evacuation] range.

You had your ETTs out there with the Afghans. At that time, the brigade I was 

going to didn’t own any so we were taking kandaks from corps outside of the AOs 

[area of operations]. You had the border police, the State Department, the South 

African mercenaries, and a bunch of other folks who I didn’t know. We were out 

there trying to plow up these thousands of acres of poppies and provide security 

operations for the guys who were actually running the tractors. That went on for 

three or four weeks. 

Then we went out to a new FOB [forward operating base] they were building. 

An interesting thing was every time you got one of these new groups of ETTs or 

kandaks they wanted to change your call sign. They’d end up with some call sign 

that gave them some state of identity with their state or some personal identity. 

They had some very unique call signs. It was secure comms so everybody had a 

Hollywood call sign. I walked into an established call sign. It was Marshal and the 

FOB was Tombstone, whatever.

So we’re out in the middle of the desert and we’re at a FOB that we’re trying 

to stand up. We’re about 60 days into it and all we have is a perimeter wall and 

contract Gurkhas guarding it. There weren’t any Afghans out there and we had a 

brigade’s worth of ETTs, about 16 ETTs. 

We did have another FOB that had been sent up, up the Helmand Valley north 

of the ring road at a place called Sangin. It really wasn’t a good location tactically 

or a good place to be. What we had up there was basically a mud hut and some 

concertina wire. I define that area north of that river and up the Helmand Valley as 

Talibanistan.

We were at the capital of Talibanistan. Routinely the mortars would start about 

2200 and end about 0100, just a lot of harassing fire. There would also be some 

incoming small arms fire as well. It was difficult to get up there because we didn’t 

own the highway up there. It was constantly mined and ambushed, so we’d have to 

stay off the highway and run out through the desert.

Until you really got to know the terrain, you’d have problems identifying what 

the choke points were. There were certain chokepoints but as long as you avoided 

them you were okay until you got up close to the FOB where there were some 

chokepoints into the entrance. Sometimes they would be mined pretty close into 

the FOB. 
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We had a guest battalion in there until we got our kandaks in out of the KMTC 

[Kabul Military Training Center]. Then we started pushing them up there. It 

became the main effort after RIVER DANCE had stopped. As it turns out this FOB 

had been put in there by the government. The governor had requested to President 

Hamid Karzai, the establishment of the military presence there. So they started to 

build it up. 

We spent about two months building up the force protection there and trying 

to do some improvements for the soldiers we had assigned there. We wound up 

building a HESCO perimeter around it with wire. We redid the well and put in a 

septic system so we had some showers, toilets, and laundry. 

We never did wind up with a good situation for the meals. The people up there 

wound up just cooking out of UGRs [unitized group rations]. The OPTEMPO 

[operations tempo] never slowed down. The violence kept getting progressively 

worse. At one time we had an ODA in the camp, a mechanized company from 

the Canadians, an ANA [Afghan National Army] battalion and an ETT battalion 

supporting that and it was still busy. The Brits came in and we changed hands. I am 

not an Anglophile. I think they’re arrogant without cause. When they first came in 

they were talking about all the great things they were going to do.

I remember the guy I was interfacing with saying two things. They had had a 

suicide attack down on Lashkar Gah before they did the transfer of authority and 

so Whitehall had told them they couldn’t leave the FOB because a soldier had been 

killed. This colonel proceeds to tell me how his great grandfather had been at the 

Battle of Maiwand and it didn’t work out real well for them. So I said, “You’re here 

to regain the family honor.” He said, “I guess you could say that.” I said, “That’s 

going to be real tough to do if you can’t get off the base.” 

We progressed to try and build our relationship. We never really got there. We 

were there in the early spring while the illegal agriculture, the poppy season, was 

still going on. It hadn’t gotten as bad as it did as soon as the poppies were harvested. 

As soon as that happened then the drug lords weighed in and the Taliban weighed 

in and it got real tough. That was right around the same time we handed it off to 

the British. Although one of our soldiers and a Canadian were killed one night 

up at Sangin, as soon as we handed it off to the British within a week they were 

taking numerous KIAs [killed in action] and WIAs [wounded in action] pretty bad. 

I stayed on through there until the end of June and then passed through Kandahar 

and went over to the 205th Corps that was in Gardez.

One of the other fellows getting interviewed was the corps commander at the 

203d and then over at the 205th. I went with him. My stipulation was that I didn’t 

want to go to a headquarters so they sent me downrange. I got into Gardez and 

went down to Khowst.
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We were building a FOB there just as we had at Tombstone. In both these 

cases I was the XO [executive officer] or team chief for that brigade. This was the 

first chance we had to work with the ANA. The business out at Helmand was just 

combat operations and keeping things going. When we got down to Khowst, the 

OPTEMPO had dropped somewhat. 

We had considerably more rocket attacks, IEDs [improvised explosive 

devices], and suicide bombers than out there but it wasn’t the continuous units in 

the field combat operations. I had a greater chance to interface with the leadership 

of the brigade and try to do what I thought I was supposed to do with them and try 

to get that FOB opened up. Eventually we got the FOB opened in November. I put 

a lot of effort into getting all the units that were out at different locations moved 

in before the winter hit and closed down the pass that was between us and Gardez.

About the same time some other operations came up that took some of our 

resources and we wound up building another temporary FOB in the pass between 

Khowst and Gardez. 

We couldn’t get the convoys through there because of the combat activity. 

That kind of quashed that and we were able to turn most of our efforts towards 

winterization. In January I got a call that said I was heading back to the states to 

work with some of the next folks who were coming into theater to give them a 

heads-up on some of the important things they need to know.

In the middle of January I started moving up towards Gardez and eventually 

Kabul. I spent a couple of days there and then got out. The most important thing 

in my tour was that I managed to spend only a week in Kabul which was good. I 

avoided having to take leave. I avoided all the passes. It was just too difficult. If 

you wanted to take a four day pass, you lost about three weeks in the field and I 

didn’t want to do that. I didn’t believe in taking the leave because I thought it was 

tough enough on my family with one goodbye let alone two. I did have to come 

back to the states one time because one of my soldiers who had come over with 

me was killed. I took the body back and was the command representative for the 

services there. That’s pretty much what I did in country.

There are other things that are more detailed. For a while I did a pretty good job 

of writing down most of the things that I did on a daily basis. I’m pretty inquisitive 

so I’m always interested in why things happen. I spent a lot of time learning the 

politics of the region and the politics of the country and the Army. I tried to learn 

some cultural things and I spent a lot of time interfacing with several groups 

of village elders to learn how things work in those particular areas. Anybody I 

could talk to, I would talk to. There were a lot of little smaller details about my 

deployment but what you have are the operational details of my deployment. 
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LL: You said you spent a lot of time in the field with the ANA. How good are 

they tactically? 

MS: The KMTC training program is pretty good although they train very 

limited MOSs [military occupational specialties]. They trained just a handful, and 

of course one of them was infantry.

The problem was there were a lot of kids. The older guys, the guys who’d 

worked with the Russians and the National Army and who had been around and 

had done this for 20 years. They understood how to do this stuff. It still has all 

the things you hear about. It’s still tribal. It’s still corrupt. It’s still political. As a 

consequence, even though they have pretty good company-level leadership, the 

soldiers do mob assaults. What will happen is they’ll get into contact and everybody 

will jump out and start running towards it and shooting up all their ammunition.

What will happen is that although they may have learned things at KMTC, 

they get caught up in the OPTEMPO of combat operations and there isn’t enough 

repetitive training done by the ETTs on basic combat skills. 

They have to have structured requirements to keep the weapons clean. They do 

need to go to the range once in a while. You hear all this business about the great 

Afghan marksmanship. I didn’t see any of it. I was fairly confident that if I didn’t 

get hit by an IED, I sure wasn’t going to get hit by a rifle over there. I was out there 

where they were shooting and it wasn’t going to come anywhere near me. That was 

the bad guys who probably did actually work on marksmanship. I think we need to 

work on a lot more soldier task basic fire and maneuver things down at the platoon 

level. That will continue to be a major emphasis for a long time to come.

You keep getting new guys in the units and they’re not scared. They go out and 

they run right into the fire. It’s kind of crazy because the anti-Coalition folks will 

sit in those defensive positions and just let these guys run right up on them. They’ll 

run right up the side of a mountain after them shooting all the way and yelling. 

They’re brave little dudes but that’s not the way we want to do business. 

LL: How receptive were the Afghan commanders towards you as their mentor? 

MS: I think I was pretty effective. The reason being, since I didn’t get a lot 

of culture training leading up to my deployment, I decided I would just figure 

it out on my own. What I have learned is that there are certain universals in the 

military and probably in cultures all together. The first thing is that you have to 

talk to people. Everybody communicates the same way. There are two styles. You 

are either friendly or you’re threatening. The approach I always used was to joke 

around with these guys. I used to tell them all kinds of jokes. Pretty soon they 

started telling me Afghan jokes and we’d talk about their culture. I would show a 

genuine interest in them.
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Before I go into a country, I spend a lot of time reading about the history of it. 

They don’t always get that. People come in and they might not be steeped in the 

history of their country but if you can talk about the history and they’re educated 

then they’ll start telling you the same things. If you can bring up points that they 

wouldn’t expect a foreign national to talk about or have knowledge of, that will 

give you bonus points. Then they become much more cooperative because you’re 

obviously interested in their nation and probably in them also.

I spent most of the time working with the brigade S3 [operations officer], 

XO, and commander. I think it was pretty successful but that’s because I worked 

very hard to develop some type of personal relationship. I found it enjoyable as 

well. I love going into another country and telling jokes through an interpreter. It 

always creates some interesting situation that’s humorous. Most of my stuff isn’t 

offensive. The joke I’d always tell them is, “Did you hear about the three legged 

dog who came into town. He said, ‘I’m here to get the man who shot my paw.’” 

That doesn’t translate into Afghan and that little thing usually takes about a half 

hour to work through. They’ll scratch their heads and then they finally get it. 

They’ll tell one of their jokes and their jokes aren’t funny either. So you reach 

an agreement where I’ll laugh at your jokes if you laugh at mine. Once you start 

doing that, then you can start talking about other things. You can start building a 

relationship built on trust. 

LL: Was there any area in particular that you tried to emphasize with the 

Afghan officers you were working with or were things more generalized? 

MS: I’m confident that they can operate tactically and I’m confident they can’t 

operate logistically. Logistics is a big problem. There are many reasons why. The 

first is that they can make money off of the resources. Their system dictates that if 

something gets sent down from higher then it gets taxed at each level.

The best of whatever it is winds up at the higher headquarters. Not that that 

ever happens in our Army. I spent a lot of time pushing logistics and pushing it 

with tough love. I told them they had to get it fixed and they had to get what was 

entitled to them because I wasn’t providing it. I wouldn’t pay for it and I wasn’t 

going to go get it for them. I’d go with them to get their stuff to make sure they got 

it but I wouldn’t do their work for them. They’re not lazy but they’re incredibly 

cunning, and it they can get you to do their job, that’s just fine with them. 

LL: How were you set up with interpreters? 

MS: We had plenty of interpreters but none of them spoke English very well. 

Interpreters were a real problem. Most of them were young. The ones that were 

educated were a bit older. There were schools they could go to in order to become 

interpreters. They could invest a little bit of money to get one of the better paying 
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jobs in the country. The families would scrape together money, send one of the kids 

to the interpreter school and then he’d get a job as an interpreter and his money 

would go back to the family. Because they’re young, they’re still young, so they 

kind of interpret things the way they want to interpret them. You constantly have 

to check on them.

I would make sure they understood what I had said. I would ask them to tell 

me what someone had said or what they were going to say so I could get some 

feedback. Other guys would throw things into it so they could check what they 

were saying. They’d throw a name of a city or a person so they could recognize 

it during the translation. Another reason a lot of the interpreters were young is 

because being an interpreter over there can be pretty dicey. 

They’d travel to cities on their own and they’d have to go back to their 

hometown for leave on their own and they could get shot at. If they get stopped at 

a checkpoint that the Taliban had set up, those kids would get killed. I remember 

coming into Kandahar one time from out west and we were coming into the 

Panjway district. There were a couple of dead dudes laying in the road. We found 

out that the day before there had been four interpreters kidnapped from near one of 

the bases in Kandahar. One was killed on the spot, one they hadn’t found, and those 

two guys on the ground were the other two they were looking for.

Being an interpreter can be dangerous. In some cases these kids take these jobs 

without telling their parents what they’re doing. 

LL: Were these interpreters provided by the US Army or were they contractors? 

MS: They were on contract provided by DOD. Just before we left the contractor 

was Titan. They hired all the interpreters and brought them to the FOB to work. 

Somebody else has picked up that contract since then. The way it would work is 

that there would be a section of the camp that would be “Terp Town”. That’s where 

the interpreters lived and ate. They had their own cook house and their own cook 

who would provide their meals. That was all part of their contract.

The US government had to provide them with comparable quarters to what the 

US soldiers were living in. At one point, before “Terp Town” was finished we had 

them living next to the ANA. Normally you don’t want to do that because there can 

be a lot of friction between the soldiers and the interpreters, mainly based on pay. 

We were having them eat at the American dining facility. That was a problem 

for some of our soldiers. Some of the soldiers thought it was fine and that’s what 

we should do but some of the others didn’t think it was a good idea. Most everyone 

over there is a fairly big health risk to you because of tuberculosis so getting them 

into our dining facility around food and in close contact made some folks pretty 

uncomfortable. 
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LL: How was the support for the US forces? 

MS: I thought it was reasonably good. I didn’t have a lot of expectations. We 

had our vehicles, our ammunition, our communications and both of the FOBs I 

worked out of we had KBR in there to provide limited maintenance for the facility. 

KBR also provided some pretty good food at our dining facilities. 

We also had some MWR [Morale Welfare and Recreation] support in the way 

of some gym equipment, internet access, and DSN [Defense Switched Network]. I 

thought it was reasonably good.

I think we fall down on vehicle maintenance. You had to go find an AC unit 

that has some maintenance shops to get your stuff taken care of or else you’re 

doing it yourself and if you don’t know crap about vehicles, like me, it can be 

pretty damned challenging especially on some of the more intricate systems. If the 

air conditioning goes out on that Humvee, that thing is like a pressure cooker in 

the summertime. It’s very uncomfortable. I think we have some problems there. 

We didn’t have all the systems that we needed. We had all the systems we could 

get but as the Chief of Staff of the Army explained, Afghanistan is not the main 

effort. Iraq is the main effort. They were providing what they could to Afghanistan 

so it wasn’t exactly the best or enough of but it was adequate. 

LL: Did you run into any situations where there was some kind of cultural 

obstacle or misunderstanding that really prevented you from getting done what 

you wanted to get done? 

MS: The best example of that is the brigade operations center. We went into a 

new structure and I was trying to get this brigade operations center set up along the 

lines of how a US unit would do it. I couldn’t really get buy-in from the brigade 

commander or much work out of the ANA that were assigned there. We worked 

through this for four weeks.

Then we were getting close to doing a dedication for the opening of the base. 

President Karzai was going to come down and do that. We went through this big 

long thing of setting up the training room so it would be acceptable. I finally went 

up to the corps headquarters and looked at their training room and then I got it. 

He’d been talking about religious slogans and all these things. He needed help 

buying those things and I hadn’t known what he was talking about until then.

We worked through building the stage he had to have and getting a calligrapher 

to make the religious slogans they had to have. We were talking one day and he 

said, “I need you to help me on this. I have many competitors.” So much of what’s 

done over there is appearance and not necessarily how it performs. Performance 

is an individual thing and it’s almost like an act. For example, is someone a good 

general? Well, he’s a good general in their minds by how he and his surroundings 
147

look such as his uniform, his awards, his office, and how he talks. In a tribal society, 

you’re talking about accoutrements and how you inspire others. 

We finally got the operation center done but there was an agreement. I told 

them that I would work on functionality and that they would work on decorating. 

That’s what we did. He had to have curtains, these religious slogans, and specific 

pictures but he didn’t give a shit about how it functioned. He would provide the 

resources so I could get the functionality done and it was happening. His boss 

came in and it looked like his did, so everything was okay.

I was able to get the commander to have an accountability formation every 

Sunday morning. He’d bring the whole brigade in there and he wanted to talk to 

them. He’d talk to them about issues that he and I had discussed. Things we needed 

to do in order to make that base successful.

He’d talk about establishing standards for the appearance of soldiers, the 

operating facilities, driving safety, and all the things that have to happen in a 

garrison situation. He’d get up there and he’d talk to them. He’d cover those issues 

and others that I was surprised to hear him talk about. He was very eloquent and 

very inspiring to his soldiers. It was almost like a pep rally but that’s what they 

expected to hear.

Afterwards they’d do their pass in review. They loved to march. It was quite 

the little ceremony. It looked a little like when Patton was in Tunis and the camel 

guards were coming across the front. Everybody was happy. That’s what mattered. 

LL: I’ve interviewed some people who say that the Afghans are fine tactically 

but that they have to work on the institutional side of things. Would you agree or 

disagree? 

MS: Yes, I’d agree because it never existed before. Maybe at some point they 

had an institutional army that provided rules and regulations and all those things, 

but it’s gone now. 

We’ve been in the process of developing the institutional side of it, a uniform 

code of military justice, doctrine, and a training base utilizing the capabilities of 

the KMTC which has been around for a long time but hasn’t had the capacity to do 

what needed to get done. 

We’ve been in the process of improving it and making it efficient and standard. 

That stuff has all been created. For the last 15 or 20 years they’ve been a field 

army. They haven’t had the chance to be a garrison army. They’ve been in the field 

operating. 

They really didn’t have the logistics or the national infrastructure to have 

logistics. They don’t have the internal production capabilities to produce their own 

uniforms. All of the other things that an army moves on today comes to them 
148

from outside their country. That says that if it’s coming from outside your country, 

somebody else is providing the logistics tail for quite awhile. They haven’t had the 

need to create it. All they’ve had to do is provide the bullet-stoppers. 

LL: Did you come across any situations where there were some tribal or 

sectarian differences that got in the way of you doing business? 

MS: How’s this for an example? When I got to the camp at Khowst I looked 

around and said, “Why is this here?” The contractors building the camp were the 

first to explain it. They said it was here because of the Zani Khel and the Mani Zai

tribes.

I scheduled a meeting with the tribal elders from both tribes and I asked them 

how things were between them. They told me that they had been fighting for 80 

years over the land where the camp was being set up. They took it to President 

Karzai and he said he would build a camp for the ANA right here. He said it would 

create jobs for us and we wouldn’t fight over the land any more. So we were right 

in the middle of one of those tribal feuds. 

We had to get right into a lot of mediation between them. In our particular 

case, I tried to provide work for them. I’d have contracts for the different things 

they could do with the equipment they possessed and the skills they had. We’d 

buy the products we could from them and we’d do what we could to honor the 

government’s promise to them of bringing some economic prosperity to them. 

We sat there as the keepers of the peace and as the biggest dog in the herd and 

it pretty much kept them quiet. Down the road, there was the village people of 

the Bak District and the migrant Kuchis, who had an equally long-standing land 

dispute. The Kuchis had decided in recent years that they were tired of wandering 

the desert and they wanted a piece of the Bak District but the villagers didn’t want 

to give it up. Both these tribes had acquired multiple shot rocket launchers, DShK 

machine guns and explosives. That thing still hadn’t been resolved by the time I 

left. Every couple of months it would flare up and somebody would wind up dead 

over it. Tribal disputes are alive and well. 

LL: Did you ever see any of those tribal disputes manifest themselves within 

the ANA? 

MS: There was a propensity, even at the brigade, to try and reshuffle the deck 

to wind up with tribes in certain headquarters or companies or battalions. I never 

really saw any open conflict between the tribes within the ANA. You’d hear remarks 

made about guys but the same thing happens in the American Army as well. 

LL: Were the ANA units you dealt with predominantly from one tribal group 

or were they completely integrated? 
149

MS: The government of Afghanistan and the MOD [Ministry of Defense] has 

done a pretty good job of trying to use the army for social engineering. All of the 

brigades I was in were pretty well mixed. They even seemed to go to a fair amount 

of trouble to place commanders that aren’t from that location or that tribe. 

We were firmly in the Pashto area and the commander of our brigade was 

Tajik. What he did was make sure there were a few Tajiks immediately surrounding 

him. He knew he was in an area that was not necessarily of his persuasion. I’ve 

seen him operate in Pashtun shuras, and at least overtly, they were accepting of 

the fact because they respected his position as a general in the army and as a 

representative of the central government.

What you would see is that sometimes we’d have to get an interpreter for the 

Afghans because there are different dialects within Dari and Pashto. If you’re not 

from the right part of the country you won’t understand the other people. 

LL: How did the Afghans view you and the other soldiers from the US Army? 

MS: I think they liked the Americans for the most part. Some of them they 

didn’t but that’s because they made themselves unlikable. In my particular case 

it was pretty humorous. The ANA leadership in that brigade referred to me as the 

camp village elder. I was older than them but before they really signed on to things 

or went in certain directions, they could consult me just like they would an elder 

within their tribe. I was the older guy that supposedly had some experience and age 

carries some weight over there. It doesn’t mean the oldest guy is always the village 

elder but generally they give a lot of respect to those folks. At first it was funny but 

then you could see it was very serious. 

They really wanted to know what I thought. At one time there was another guy 

who was the team chief and I was his XO but the leadership would still come to me 

to see what the village elder thought than the team chief. 

LL: When you first showed up in Afghanistan, were you the first one to hold 

that position or did you do a handoff? 

MS: There were some other people there in each case but the hand off wasn’t 

all that formal. There is a lot of discussion out there on the right seat/left seat thing. 

It’s a pretty good process but in some cases it’s flawed. Sometimes it’s too long. 

Sometimes it doesn’t require as much time as we want to put into it because it’s just 

not that complex. Always the incoming guy needs to be smart enough to just shut 

up and watch a little bit so he can absorb what’s going on around him. That way, 

when he does ask a question, it’s not something that he should have figured out on 

his own. The answer is that I’ve always picked up something from somebody else, 

except for that time when I was thrown out in the middle of the desert. 
150

LL: You weren’t replacing anybody when you went to the desert? 

MS: No. (Laughter) 

LL: What was the biggest challenge you had to deal with in Afghanistan? 

MS: The most difficult thing was dealing with the US. Other combatant US 

forces always seemed to want to misuse the ANA. I wound up in a fair amount of 

arguments with the ODA and the combatant ground forces because they wouldn’t 

include the ANA in their planning. They’d cite operational security as the reason 

why but they’d always want the ANA to do the dirty work. They’d want to put 

them out front if they were going somewhere in a convoy. They’d want the ANA 

to run over the mine with their little Ranger instead of running the risk of running 

over it with an ECM [electronic countermeasures]-protected up-armored Humvee.

They wanted the ANA to run up that hill instead of them. Almost always the 

ANA did not have the air cover or the ground fires that the US operation had. We 

didn’t either. We had what the ANA had. The AC over there would not move unless 

they had aviation or artillery support. That didn’t get shared. 

LL: Was there a partnership program between your ANA units and an American 

or Coalition unit? 

MS: Yes. We tried to have them matched up with everything and we tried to 

have a habitual relationship. Each kandak had a US battalion or company that they 

would match up with, and if there was an ODA in the area they’d be matched up 

as well. 

LL: Did that relationship work the way it was supposed to? 

MS: I don’t think it ever worked at all. From my observation, the US used 

them as an expendable resource and not as a true partner. 

LL: Let’s go back to RIVER DANCE. Can you talk a little more about that? 

MS: Narcotics is a big driver in Afghanistan of the internal politics. It’s 

probably the reason NATO is there. I think if Afghanistan had not had heroin that 

NATO wouldn’t have come to Afghanistan. I think the Germans, French, and 

British saw it as a way to try and impact their drug problems. The Germans are the 

lead company for the narcotics but so much of this is happening down in Helmand 

and Kandahar where the British and the Canadians wound up being. 

The Canadians always wind up going where the British go and sometimes 

where we go. It’s like 90 percent of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan. 

Almost 100 percent of what goes into Europe comes from there. They were late in 

coming because, up to a year ago, we really hadn’t pushed much out from Kabul. 

We certainly had the air base at Kandahar but we didn’t have much presence 

out there. Part of the reason behind that is because the ANA has been slow to 
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build and the numbers haven’t been there. Another part of it is because the foreign 

NATO partners have been slow to respond. It was a big deal with the Brits sending 

that Para Regiment out there because they hadn’t sent that kind of presence before. 

They didn’t come until after the RIVER DANCE had already happened.

As best as I could sort out how things were happening was that the Department 

of State owns drug reduction. So the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] was over 

there and they had to persuade the Afghan government that something needed to 

be done.

It wasn’t the first drug demand operation but it may have been the biggest. 

They say it was very successful. I think that’s just plain B.S. The State Department 

went about it through a combination of military resources and contracting stuff 

out.There is a section of DynCorp that works on drug reduction. They subcontract 

that out to some other folks. South Africa is a big player over there. You’ll have 

South African security working for corporations and building things. You’ll also 

have the South African security folks working within that drug reduction. 

They have a bunch of people involved and a bunch of border police, the ANP 

[Afghan National Police] and we had one kandak of ANA. The ANA mission along 

with the ANP was to provide a security perimeter so the reduction folks could get 

in. Their plan was to plow up these poppy fields. This ran down south along the 

river towards the Pakistan border. It was marked up in a series of very large grid 

squares that they would work. 

They would report that they had plowed up and destroyed so many hectares 

per day of the poppy fields. Mohammed Daud was the governor of Lashkar Gah, 

the capital of Helmand Province. He used to be a warlord there. The reason why 

I think this whole thing was B.S. was because you’d see the tractors go out in the 

morning and they’d plow stuff up.They wouldn’t plow too much up. They’d flood 

the fields. The tractors would get stuck. They’d plant some IEDs and blow up some 

of the tractors. When they got up into the area that Daud controlled, they just went 

around his fields in the city of Lashkar Gah. 

They didn’t fire him until he openly took $900,000 from the Coalition guys. 

I don’t think that the eradication through RIVER DANCE was worth a damn. 

There’s a lot of irony there. This river began to be developed in the 1950s and 

1960s and the Peace Corps came in and helped them. There was a bunch of canals 

that would give you four or five kilometers on each side of the river that was 

farmable. The canals would move the water back into there and they’d have the 

fields in there. They’d have a patch of wheat and a patch of poppies.

Some of those poppy fields were 400 acres. While the flowers are blooming, 

it’s a pretty safe place to be because they don’t do anything to get anyone 

unnecessarily shot that needed to be working in a poppy field. As soon as those 
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fields are harvested, it is a dangerous place to be. All kinds of bad things happen 

down there. I don’t think what we did was very effective. I think the only way to 

really get rid of them is to spray it.

There is a reluctance to that because the Soviets used herbicides over there and 

the Afghanis think that is bad juju. They say it would destroy some of the wheat 

fields in the process. They don’t raise enough wheat over there amongst those 

poppies to amount to anything. It’s probably a nine to one ratio. I think you need 

to go in there with herbicide and spray the poppies and convince the folks not to 

grow them anymore. Why don’t we offer an alternative? We were supposed to do 

that but nobody would fund it. It never got off the ground. 

LL: Is a replacement program even economically viable? 

MS: One of the first targets hit in the bombing of Kabul was the warehouse 

that the Taliban had with $3 billion of opium paste in it. They didn’t blow up any 

granaries with that much grain in it or anything else. I don’t think there’s anything 

that you can replace it with that will have comparable economic benefit. 

When I was a cop in California, I used to work narcotics. You always get into 

these discussions about trying to deal with drugs. Do you go after the user, the 

dealer, the producer, or do you jump that and put your money into treatment? Do 

you go after the producer and try to give him another way to make money? That 

never works because what happens is if you offer some other alternative or you 

make it impossible to work in that region, the money is still fluid even if the land 

isn’t.

They’ll move the money somewhere else, and where you didn’t have a 

production problem before, now you do. I guess I’m always convinced that you go 

where the money is. You go after the people who hold the money and you go after 

the people who finance it. We’re trying to do this but the lure and the effect of cash 

in those quantities gets to just about everybody. Everybody has a price. If you have 

$1 billion, you can buy almost anyone. 

LL: Did you see more resistance based upon economic interest with the poppy 

fields or was it based more on ideological things with the Taliban? 

MS: The Taliban isn’t everywhere and they’re not the only problem over there. 

They have a triumvirate of problems. 

They have the religious fighters that are the Taliban and that’s kind of a cultural 

thing and they’re, in some cases, a band of thieves.

Then you have the criminal thing. The criminal thing is the drug lords but 

it’s also bandits. There are people who just make a living by killing, robbing and 

intimidating people. 
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Then you have the third group who are the insurgents based on political reasons. 

They have not solved some important political issues there. This Gulbuddin 

Hekmatyar thing is political. Al-Ghani is political because he is still a warlord and 

his family still has control and sway in a good part of the regional core east area. I 

think that exists in other parts of the country as well.

Before they can come close to fixing the criminal thing they have to come 

up with some political concessions. If they reach a political agreement, they can 

probably get a handle on the religious thing. Senator Bill Frist was over there 

several months ago and he said that it will probably come to a point where they 

will have to make concessions to bring the Taliban into the government and to 

bring Hekmatyar into the government. Once they’ve done that, then they can take 

a shot at the drug lords. I think the drug lords profit because they put money into 

the other insurgencies. 

LL: So are you’re saying the people with the drug interest spread money into 

the other problem areas to keep the attention off themselves? 

MS: Yes. I think that’s part of the complexity of it. 

LL: Did you have much contact with other US services or Coalition forces? 

MS: We had Air Force and we had Navy on our compound as part of our team. 

The Air Force kids were good. We didn’t have anybody above a captain and all of 

the Air Force people integrated very well. 

We had a bunch of Navy garrison guys who were majors and lietenant colonels 

and they were lazier than shit. They didn’t do much more than feather their nest. 

Their biggest issue was how good the MWR was going to be. They didn’t want to 

spend any time with the Afghans so they spent less than the minimal amount of 

time with them. As a result the Afghans didn’t like them because it was obvious 

they weren’t going to help them and they weren’t going to do anything. I don’t 

have much good to say about them at all.

Now, that may have just been that team except I had almost the same exact 

experience at another location with another Navy team. The Navy has some issues 

over there. They’re struggling for relevancy so they’re trying to get into installation 

management but the Reservists they’re sending are not the right guys and they’re 

just not cutting it. 

We had some Marines and they did a good job. My other encounters were with 

the Air Force and the Navy at other locations were positive. 

LL: Were the Marines involved in the training teams or were they working on 

the garrison side? 

MS: We had one ETT down at Bermel that owned that area. Bermel was 

probably the crappiest place we had. It was always getting rockets and mortars. 
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About a month ago, the anti-Coalition folks had massed and about 120 guys 

attacked the camp. Our guys found out early enough and they smacked them down. 

About 80 or 100 were killed. The Marines were fine down there and the Afghans 

liked them. 

LL: Did you have any other contact with Coalition forces aside from the 

British? 

MS: We worked with the Canadians. They’ve taken a couple of good whacks 

over there but they’ve stood their ground. I worked with the Canadians in the 

Balkans and they were the same way there. They’re good fighters.

The Australians are good as well.

The Romanians got a bad reputation initially because the first folks that were 

in the area where I worked let the Romanians stay in a group. They kind of came 

up with their own national caveats about what they would do and wouldn’t do. 

When I wound up getting some of them I told them I would be treating them just 

like I treat my soldiers. I said some days would be good and some days would be 

bad. I told them they wouldn’t be paired up together but they’d be paired with a 

US soldier. I told them their national caveats were no good here so what the US 

soldiers do, they’d do. They were going to live where we lived and eat what we ate.

They liked it and they did a great job because they brought skill sets we didn’t 

have in working with the Soviet weapons. They liked the way we treated our 

soldiers and were very comfortable. I had a good experience with the Romanians.

I didn’t have a lot of contact with the French. I don’t hate the French. There was 

an incident with them. We had this operation in this area called Kajaki Dam. They 

sent a French ETT up there to work with the Afghans. This area was a problem area 

at the time. We sent some SECFOR [security force] and another pair of ETTs to go 

get them out. The guys going up ran into contact and had a big firefight. Coming 

back out with the French they got into another big firefight and they got chased 

for about 18 kilometers. All the French vehicles got destroyed and several of the 

French got killed.

One of the kids that was driving one of our Humvees was on the radio. We 

asked him where the French were. He said, “Yeah. They’re running.” (Laughter) 

We asked him what he meant and he said that all of their stuff was on fire and 

they were running to get into his vehicle. He came back down to the camp with 

nine guys in the Humvee. It was bad because you don’t like to see your allies get 

whipped on like that. It even got worse because we wound up having to buy the 

bodies back from the locals. That was a very nasty situation. 
155

LL: Did you have any contact with the media? 

MS: The higher command effectively kept them away from me. We did have 

a journalist come and stay with us for a couple of weeks. He was a guy who’d 

written a couple of books. I brought him to a couple of different things and then 

sent him on his way. He got to see how things were and was pretty happy with that. 

LL: I take it that he really wanted to see the rougher side of what we were 

doing in Afghanistan? 

MS: Probably. It makes for a good story. 

LL: Did you ever have to deal with non-government organizations while you 

were there? 

MS: No. Most of those guys worked out of the provincial reconstruction team. 

Broadly define what you think NGOs are.

LL: Organizations like Doctors Without Borders or United Nations International 

Children’s Emergency Fund or something like that. 

MS: Okay. No. I never worked with anyone like that. I misspoke. The OGAs 

were at the PRT. There wasn’t anybody over there in that part of the country. 

We did have a guy come down from the UN one time but he was part of the UN 

observer group. That was about it.

I dealt with some civilian contractors who were not Kellogg, Brown, and Root 

but who were some construction people working on building FOBs. I sometimes 

jokingly describe my time as the CNN tour of shitty places because in plus or 

minus 24 hours, if it made international news, I was probably there.

There was a civilian contractor called the Fluor Company. They worked in 

Khowst and they were the ones that lost all those people in that Russian helicopter 

that crashed back in August. It killed 14 people including one guy’s entire family. 

For some reason he thought it was a good idea to fly them in to visit him. 

LL: What are the biggest professional lessons learned that you took away from 

your time in Afghanistan? 

MS: Most importantly I learned to trust my instincts. The human body seems 

to process information quicker than your consciousness does. If something doesn’t 

feel right, it probably isn’t. If someone doesn’t feel right, they probably aren’t. 

I’m a very firm believer in that and I draw impressions pretty fast. If I’m not 

comfortable with someone or in some situation, I’m not going to get comfortable 

because I think there is some danger in there. That’s not just in combat. That’s in 

all phases of it. I walked away from this last year firmly convinced in trusting my 

instincts. 
156

LL: If you could make a recommendation to the military powers that be, what 

would it be? 

MS: I guess it would probably be advice. Don’t confuse Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan is successful where Iraq isn’t because of the people that are there. If 

we have success in Afghanistan, it’s because the Afghans are different than the 

Arabs. The Afghans will correct you on that, too. They will tell you they’re not 

Arab. They’re not in any way, shape or form. Don’t think that whatever is working 

in Afghanistan will work in Iraq. 

LL: If you were given an opportunity to go back to Afghanistan again and do 

your same job again, would you go? 

MS: Yes. I’ve been on active duty since January 2002, so that’s five years. I’ve 

been home 18 months in those five years. This is my 31st month on OEF and then 

I had a whole bunch of TDY in the Pacific Rim on top of that. I owe my family a 

spring and summer. I haven’t been home for any holidays in quite some time. My 

wife already knows that I’m going to be deployed again next winter. I’m not going 

to stay around the state headquarters and play around with politics. I’d rather go 

somewhere else where stuff is going on and it really means something more that 

somebody’s ego. 

LL: How have you dealt with family separation? 

MS: It’s not a problem. I have a wife that’s smarter than I am. I’m kind of a 

big and burly guy’s guy but I have an exceptionally attractive wife who makes 

probably twice as much money as I do and I have four adult children. Three of 

them have careers established and I have grandkids. My son says, “We don’t mind 

you being gone, Dad, because you like us better anyway when you’re a couple of 

states away.” It’s a family that has a good attitude about things and that’s positive 

about everything. My wife supports whatever I do. She respects the things I do 

because they’re generally based upon values based in patriotism and loyalty and all 

of those things that I think are important. My youngest daughter said that she used 

to worry about me but she doesn’t as much anymore because she says she knows 

I’m indestructible. That’s fine. 

LL: Is there anything else you’d like to add to this interview? 

MS: No. 

LL: Thank you for your time.
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Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Stevenson Jr.

9 January 2007

The following is the interview with Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel 

Stevenson Jr. (NS) conducted by Laurence Lessard (LL) of the Combat 

Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It covers Lieutenant Colonel 

Stevenson’s November 2005 through August 2006 deployment in support 

of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM during which he served as chief of 

the Special Initiatives Group in Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan 

or CJ5.

LL: Let’s move on to your deployment to Afghanistan. When did you find out 

that you were going to be deployed to Afghanistan? 

NS: I found out for sure about two weeks before I left Naples and headed 

here to Fort Leavenworth. I knew prior to that that it was a possibility and that the 

assignment officer sent a note out to all the lieutenant colonels that basically said 

there was a lieutenant colonel billet in Afghanistan that had to be filled quickly, 

about two months down the road. That was pretty much the extent of the message. 

She sent it out to all the lieutenant colonels in the career field. So I sent her a note 

back asking what the job was, where it was, how long a tour—just some questions. 

Well, I asked the questions and she took it as me volunteering for the job. After 

the conversation, in her mind, Nate Stevenson was going to Afghanistan but in my 

mind I just got a little bit more information to help me decide whether I wanted to 

volunteer to go or not. My intent was to come back to the States and retire. After 

we talked, though, I told her to go ahead and throw my name in the hat, expecting 

she’d come back to me a little bit later thanking me for volunteering but after 

looking at all the guys who volunteered, they were going to take someone else. So 

waiting on a message similar to that, when I had gotten down to about two weeks 

before I was getting ready to do a permanent change of station, the PCS, from 

Naples to here at Fort Leavenworth, I hadn’t heard from her so I just assumed 

someone else had been selected for the position. 

The position was the deputy to the CJ5 on the Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan, the CFC-A, staff. I called her one day just to verify and that’s when 

she told me it was actually me who had been selected. I told her it would have been 

nice to know that a month ago because I had my family with me in Italy and they 

would rather have stayed there than come here with me being gone for a year. I 

would have to turn around and leave my wife with a house full of boxes, trying to 

get resettled in a new area.

What made it easier for us was that we had been assigned here before and we 

knew a lot of people in the area. My wife told me, though, that she would rather 

have stayed in Italy while I was gone for a year. So I found out about two weeks, 

for sure, before I left Italy that I was going to Afghanistan.
158

That basically meant I had enough time to get here and get signed in. I didn’t 

have time to look for and close on a house. Since they had quarters available on 

post, we moved into them. I got furniture delivered. Of course these quarters are 

a little smaller than all the furniture I have so I arranged to have other stuff put in 

storage but I really didn’t have any time to get into any work here, so I was useless 

to the unit I was assigned to which was the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, 

the CADD, because I was going to turn around and leave within 30 days.

About 30 days after getting settled in and everything, I started processing to 

turn around and go to Afghanistan. So I had some notice. It wasn’t like two weeks’ 

notice and I’m on a plane to Afghanistan. It was two weeks’ notice and I PCS’d 

here to turn around and do a temporary change of station, the TCS but with that 

PCS, there was some leave and some time here to get a little settled before I left. 

LL: Did you have any pre-deployment training before you went? 

NS: Yes. Individual augmentees had to go to the CONUS Replacement Centers, 

the CRCs, to draw combat gear and do the theater-specific training and other predeployment training. 

LL: Which one did you go to? 

NS: I went to Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a little over a week long. I had 

mixed emotions about it. Most of what we did there could have been done at home 

station so that I wouldn’t have to spend as much time at Fort Benning. In fact, most 

of what we did there, I did have to do here. 

They don’t care that you did it at home station. You’re going to do it again at 

Fort Benning. So there was some repetition. Even though I had the checklist of all 

the things I’d done that had to be done and they were the exact same things they 

were going to do, signed off and stamped by the command here, I still had to repeat 

much of it there. It could probably be more focused on country-specific things 

such as the command, the mission, the command organization, the command and 

control. None of that is looked at in the CRCs. 

They’re getting you qualified. They’re getting you medical and dental, legal, 

personnel, and all that kind of stuff which was done here. There was some training 

on basic infantry stuff such as moving under direct fire, reacting to ambushes if 

you’re in a convoy, reacting to improvised explosive devices, the IEDs, which 

were things I thought, at least for me, were a waste of time. These things are kind 

of second nature to me. I’d done them for so long as an infantry officer that I didn’t 

feel like I needed that. However, about half of the people in the group who went 

through with me did indeed need it. So I wouldn’t cut that out. 

We had some civilians there. We had some Defense Intelligence Agency, the 

DIA people there. We had one woman there from the FBI and we had individual 
159

reservists who hadn’t been in a uniform in 10 or 15 years who needed that kind of 

stuff. They didn’t know how to put their gear together. They didn’t have any idea 

how to put the load-bearing equipment together and to wear that. They didn’t have 

any idea how to put the body armor together and how it was supposed to fit.

So a lot of that kind of stuff was needed for a lot of the people but it wasn’t 

needed for a lot of other people as well. To make sure everybody’s covered, you 

just make sure everybody gets it but there wasn’t any training on country and 

mission specific stuff. I didn’t expect them to give me any kind of training on what 

I was going to be doing in the CJ5 over there but it would have been nice to have 

known what the command structure was like, what some of the operational issues 

were that were being dealt with at the time. A lot of that kind of stuff you can get. 

LL: Was there any language or cultural training? 

NS: No language training at all. As to cultural training, I would say no. There 

were a couple hours, and it literally was just a couple, on the history of Afghanistan 

but no, it was almost a waste. 

LL: Was there any further pre-deployment training that you thought, in general, 

was a waste? Was there any part of it you thought was really great and you wish 

you’d had more of it? 

NS: Yes. The nuclear, biological, and chemical, the NBC training there wasn’t 

any NBC threat in Afghanistan. In fact when I got there, I never pulled my NBC 

stuff out. There was some training I would have liked to have had more of and that 

was basically technology stuff, things that I was personally not familiar with. In 

fact, the vast majority of us were not familiar with it. The precision lightweight 

GPS receiver, the PLGR devices—I had never worked with one or used one. 

We got a real quick block of instruction on what it is. I needed them to go a little 

slower on that and maybe do it a little longer. Do it actually in a vehicle, moving 

around so I could see how the thing was working and gain some confidence in it. I 

didn’t have enough of that. You can take this all with a grain of salt.

I’m an infantryman and I like firing and maneuvering, so I enjoyed the reactto-ambush-in-a-convoy training. I just liked it. It was really fun. I really didn’t 

need it but it was fun. There were a lot of people there who did need it, so I think 

we probably should have had a couple more of those and a few more hours of 

that—a couple more scenarios where you’re actually moving and you hit an IED 

and how you react to it because that’s very real in both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

You have to know how to react. Every convoy I traveled in when I was in 

Afghanistan had a convoy briefing by the convoy commander. One of the things 

you go over is actions on contact if you hit an IED, if you’re ambushed, stuff like 

that. Quite frankly, most of the people you’re convoying with when you’re not in 
160

a unit are other individual augmentees and staff guys and they’re not familiar with 

how to do that. So you get a little routine. In fact, I was actually in at least one 

convoy where the convoy briefing was nothing more than telling us where we’re 

starting, what route we were taking, and how to contact the different vehicles. 

There wasn’t any rehearsal on actions on enemy contact or if you get hit by an 

IED. That threat is very real in country. It’s much more so in Iraq but it’s very real 

in Afghanistan as well. So I was uncomfortable on just about every convoy. I led 

about three of them and I made sure we did a good briefing. I actually had a major 

come up to me who was on his first convoy with me. He told me he was impressed 

and he was being a little facetious. I asked him what he meant. He said, “You 

actually gave a convoy brief­ing!” That told me that the convoys he had previously 

been on didn’t have a convoy briefing. There isn’t any admin headquarters over 

there but at the higher headquarters people tend to get a little complacent about 

convoy security.

Now, one thing I would do if I was king for a day, I deployed over there with 

a nine millimeter but I would have liked to have had a rifle as well. I did some 

traveling while I was there and when I did I had to borrow a rifle from somebody in 

the staff group who wasn’t traveling that day. So I think everybody should deploy 

with a rifle.

Now there are no arms rooms over there so, I have a rifle and pistol. Where do 

I keep my rifle? The pistol is easy to carry, it’s on your hip or your vest and you’re 

carrying that thing but you’ve got a rifle now, you have to have that thing on you all 

the time or secure it someplace and there really wasn’t an arms room, if you will. 

That could be problematic. The requirement to have a long gun in every vehicle in 

the convoy I think is a good requirement and that was a requirement. Every vehicle 

had to have at least one long gun in it. So if you had a six-vehicle convoy and 

you’re mostly officers, you have to start looking for long guns and that shouldn’t 

be. For the most part, you never had trouble meeting that requirement. You would 

always meet that requirement. You didn’t roll without that but there were a couple 

times where I had to go outside of my directorate, outside of the CJ5, to make sure 

I had a long gun in every vehicle in my convoy. 

LL: When did you actually deploy? 

NS: I finished CRC in the middle of October 2005 and it took almost 10 days 

for me to get a flight to Afghanistan. So I literally sat around waiting to get on a 

plane but having said that, I just didn’t sit around. Georgia is home and I’m in 

Georgia so I went to visit my dad, my brother, and my grandmother. My kids are 

in college in Florida, so I came back and a couple days later I’m in a car again 

driving down to Tallahassee to see my kids in college but it was a couple weeks 

later before I actually got on the plane to go to Afghanistan. 
161

LL: Did you have a handoff for the position you filled or were you the first 

person to do that? 

NS: No. I wasn’t the first person and I didn’t have a handoff. On the joint 

manning document, the JMD, I was going over there to fill the deputy CJ5 position. 

The position was actually filled by another guy. I mean, you put guys where you 

need them and I didn’t have an issue with that. The guy in that position had been 

there a few months and was very good. It was more admin-focused not planningfocused. It focused on running the directorate. When I got there and saw what the 

deputy did, I didn’t want to do that, so I was one of the planners initially.

I worked for a Marine colonel who was short. When he left, I took over that 

branch and we renamed the branch the Special Initiatives Group. So I was the 

Special Initiatives Group chief but doing the same thing, just different title. I didn’t 

have any overlap. The CJ5, in terms of our JMD, was between 55 and 65 percent 

manned so there wasn’t anybody to have a handoff with. When I left, though, 

my replacement arrived a couple weeks before I left and we had a really good 

transition. 

LL: What exactly was the Special Initiatives Group and what did you do? 

NS: The name might imply, and probably rightly so, that whatever projects 

come up that need focus, you got it. 

We had a policy section in the CJ5, a plans section and then we had the 

Special Initiatives Group. Within the Special Initiatives Group, we focused on 

policy direction for key programs that were either being stood up or running in 

Afghanistan. An example would be the partnership program which is a training 

and support program between Afghan National Army, the ANA, and Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan, the CFC–A. So we oversaw that program as it 

evolved while we were there. We were involved with the constant evolution of that 

program and the planning that went along with that with the Ministry of Defense. 

We did the initial planning for these programs with the Afghan ministries and 

General Staff; Combined Joint Task Force, the CJTF-76, actually executed the 

programs. We were responsible for setting up, at the policy level, a similar program 

for the Afghan National Police, called the ANP Support Program. 

We were responsible for transition policy planning, not the actual plan itself 

but from the policy level, and developing orders for these projects. We did some 

transition planning with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, the 

ISAF. NATO was going to eventually take over the whole country. When I got 

there, they had the north and the west and we had the south and the east. So we 

were responsible for that transition planning from a policy perspective, not the 

actual nuts and bolts of the transition itself. The plans section was doing the actual 

details of time lines and things like that. 
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We were responsible for a program that we started that we called the Primacy 

Program. It’s basically how, when, and under what conditions do we hand over 

territory from the coalition to the Afghans. This was bigger than battle handoff 

of a piece of ground because we rolled development into it. We were basically 

planning, with the Afghans, the criteria, what conditions must be met, and how are 

they measured as well as the process for handing over to the Afghans full control 

of a province or area. This full control we termed primacy. We were basically 

turning over sovereignty to the Afghans. Now that sounds funny because we 

never occupied Afghanistan unlike Iraq, where we deposed Saddam and set up 

our own government initially as the provincial authority. In Afghanistan, we never 

governed. We never “occupied” the country. 

They were always a sovereign nation so they always had sovereignty. The 

Afghan minister of defense could do with the Afghan Army anything he wanted to, 

whenever he wanted to. He didn’t need our approval to do it. So I want to be very 

clear on that but the truth of the matter is that with the stage of development the 

Afghan government and country is in now, they cannot exercise full sovereignty. 

We are doing a lot for them. So one of the key planning things we were 

working on was how to transfer full sovereignty and we were looking at doing it 

by province, back to the Afghans. What do we need to do, programmatically, to 

facilitate that? If security is an issue in this particular province, what can we do 

programmatically to make sure security isn’t an issue? If in our ANA development 

program, this region is supposed to have three full brigades and they’ve only got 

two and a battalion, then maybe they need another battalion. If the next battalion 

is not due to come online for eight months, well maybe we need to change the 

program and bring that battalion online in three months. So we’re looking at the 

programmatics that went into development, security, governance, and all that stuff. 

We tried to figure out where, when, what, and how can we affect the transfer 

of full sovereignty to the Afghans. It was a major undertaking that dealt with all 

the headquarters, to include NATO headquarters under the ISAF, the Ministry of 

Defense, the Ministry of the Interior, and some non-governmental organizations, 

the NGOs. It was a huge undertaking and took a lot of time. 

We were also responsible for working with the Ministries of Defense, Interior, 

and Finance as well as the US Embassy staff on developing a border management 

plan. Now in this case, we were actually working on a plan. 

We were focused on the policy but we were also focused on the nuts, bolts, and 

details of a plan. It was a little strange because it was a plan that was eventually not 

going to be executed by us but by the Afghan government. So it needed the input 

and buy-in of key ministers. 
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We were working with all of them to develop a detailed plan on how we 

managed key border crossing points. There are, I think, 13. This is a major revenue 

generation issue for the Afghans so it addressed security, customs, customs 

police, transportation, commerce, and treasury. You’re inside the border zone 

which is covered, in terms of security, by the police and not the army. It’s a major 

undertaking. The embassy, in fact, was standing up a border management task 

force and we were helping to design what it should be and what some of the job 

descriptions should look like. So that was another project we worked. 

LL: How much personal survey, personal liaison did you have to do? Did you 

go out into the provinces and such? 

NS: My work was more in Kabul at the ministry level. I worked very closely 

with the assistant minister of defense for strategy and policy. That would be 

Lieutenant General Muhibullah. I worked very closely with his deputy, Major 

General Payenda, and his staff. I worked with the minister of the interior’s staff. 

Back during the presidential election, the national assembly, and the provincial 

council elections, the UN actually established in several places around the country, 

what they called provincial coordination centers or PCCs. These were really just 

to support the elections, securing polling sites, and making sure things were going 

well. After the elections, though, they all but disappeared. 

We realized that those things worked very well and the potential to stabilize 

provinces in areas through the use of PCCs was great. So we were trying to get 

those reestablished, manned, equipped, and getting people trained to execute 

specific functions. This was a major undertaking and, in conjunction with this, I 

traveled to different provinces to see existing PCCs, to survey them, to see what 

they needed and what kind of training and equipment were needed. So there was 

some interface and travel with regard to that aspect of what we did in the CJ5 shop 

but mostly I worked right there in Kabul. With regard to the support program, the 

police program we were trying to get to mirror the partnership program we had 

with the army, I was traveling to some of the different forward operating bases, 

the FOBs, to talk to guys down there. These are the guys going out patrolling and 

responding to requests for fires and things like that. 

We had some interaction with these guys with regard to what works and what 

doesn’t work because we were getting ready to publish an order that they were 

going to have to execute.

Just by chance, I happened to be escorting the Training and Doctrine Command, 

the TRADOC, commander on a visit to one of the FOBs. I was talking to some 

of the guys down there and realized we had several things in our order that really 

weren’t going to work well at their level. So I went back and told my boss that we 

had to get out more. This trip, just call it serendipity – I don’t know, I discovered 
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some things that we needed to change in the order we were preparing. So he told 

me to get out as often as I can.

The problem is transportation. It’s just tough getting around in Afghanistan. 

The roads are bad and the distances you have to travel are great. You almost need 

a helicopter to go everywhere you need to go. So we often had to hitch a ride with 

people who were traveling by air. That might mean you’re out for four days when 

you really only need to be out for one or two days. You’d like to go out in the 

morning and come back in the evening but you’re traveling with the general so if 

you go on this trip, you’re not just going to go to one place, you’re going to go to 

multiple places and you’ll be gone for four days. Four days out of my shop hurt 

me. Actually it didn’t but nobody likes to be away for that long a time. So there was 

travel out to the provinces and interaction with Afghans in all those areas but by 

and large our work focused on our immediate subordinate headquarters, CJTF–76, 

and to Task Force Phoenix. We worked directly with them as well. We did direct 

coordination with them and with ISAF headquarters, and with the ministries in 

Kabul. 

LL: In general, what kind of support did you have? 

NS: we ha transportation support. We owned one vehicle and that was the 

director’s vehicle. It was an unhardened SUV. For the kind of traveling we needed 

to be doing it would have been great if within the CJ5 shop, not necessarily the 

Special Initiatives Group, we had had three hardened Humvees with PLGRs and 

long guns. That would have been great. So that kind of support, if you will, the 

combat type support for the higher headquarter was wanting. There was a recognition that our role was operational and strategic planning, not the actual warfighting. 

We’re not out conducting patrols, we’re not out training on the ground with the 

police and the army but we did have to get around. It was potentially scary getting 

around in unhardened SUVs. They were easy to spot, easy targets. We had guys 

who were ambushed. So in terms of that kind of support, it was lacking. Of course 

the guys who were out there fighting would tell you that that kind of support was 

lacking for them as well. So if it’s short, who should have it? They should.

When I traveled, to Herat, I got on a small jet and we flew out there and 

landed and then moved around in unhardened SUVs. I didn’t have any issues with 

the flying piece. There isn’t any air threat but landing in areas where you could 

possibly get attacked as soon as you hit the ground and then moving around in softskinned vehicles, I would have liked to have had hardened vehicles. 

LL: Is that endemic to basically everything in Afghanistan? Everybody would 

like to have that kind of asset? 
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NS: Yes. The NATO guys seemed to be better equipped in that respect than 

we were but they traveled around in soft-skinned SUVs as well. Everybody would 

have liked to have had more of that. I don’t think I would complain about any other 

type of support we had over there. 

LL: You already mentioned that you had a lot of contact with the Afghans in all 

different capacities. Did you have any interpreter/translators with you? 

NS: Yes. 

LL: How many and how good were they? 

NS: How many depended on what we were doing at the time. Usually only 

one or two and you usually didn’t need any more than that. They weren’t great 

but they weren’t bad. They did a pretty good job overall. The problem we were 

having is that a lot of these guys spoke pretty good English but at a very basic 

level. So sometimes their translations were literal and you can lose something in 

the translation. 

We used one guy whose name was Omar. He was actually born right in Kabul 

but Omar, prior to the invasion, had spent the previous 18 years in upstate New 

York. So Omar is American. His dad migrated to the states 23/24 years ago. 

Omar’s understanding of English was outstanding, as well as his understanding of 

our culture and how we use our language and the use of idioms. He went back to 

Afghanistan when he saw he could perhaps help. 

They’ve got different dialects over there. They’re speaking Dari, they’re 

speaking Pashto, probably more Dari than anything else which is essentially 

Farsi. Omar was very good at that. At meetings where we had different people, 

Omar would make sure the translations were correct. 

We did have some problems. We probably had more issues not with the spoken 

translation as with written. I would produce documents that had to be translated 

into Dari before I sent them to the Ministries of Defense or Finance. 

We worked with their NDS a little bit, their equivalent of our CIA. Those guys 

were key in those PCCs that we were reestablishing and standing up. They were 

also key in the primacy effort that we were working on. My problem with the 

written translations was that they were also translated literally. You lose so much 

that way. 

We had one document that we had translated and I gave it to General Payenda, 

the deputy assistant minister of defense for strategy and policy, and he then, as we 

were going over this document together with our Omar and another interpreter, 

realized there were several problems with the written translation. So General 

Payenda whose English was better than he ever let on but probably wasn’t as good 

as I imagined it was, understood a lot of what was said. He said he would take 
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it and get with Lieutenant General Karimi. General Karimi was the operations 

officer, the G3, on the General Staff. General Karimi is a US Army Ranger and his 

English is excellent. This guy is a fantastic story altogether. We won’t go there but 

what General Payenda did was get together with General Karimi and they took our 

translation and, working from it, put it in the right words. Then they gave it back 

to me. Of course, they didn’t have the automation to produce documents the way 

we did but he and Karimi went through and put this thing in the right words and 

then gave it back to us. Then our translators looked at it and approved it, so then 

we published the documents. 

We had more problems like that with written communications than with 

verbal. The verbal wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t too bad at all. Every time I went to the 

Minister of the Interior, he had his own interpreter, and every time I went to the 

Minister of Finance, he had an interpreter too. They were pretty good. The guys 

in the NDS that I worked mostly with, one of them got his master’s degree from 

Georgetown. So we didn’t have problems talking with him. The NDS director’s 

English was excellent. 

We didn’t always need an interpreter but we always took one with us just 

in case. For the most part, verbally there wasn’t any issue. It was the written 

translation of documents that we had more problems with. 

LL: Did you run into any cultural obstacles while you were there in Afghanistan? 

NS: Yes, much like the one I mentioned in Iraq in how we get things done. 

There is a tendency to do things the way you’re familiar with and there’s nothing 

wrong with that. The Afghans need help and they recognize they need help, so 

they’re very reluctant to say they don’t want to do something and that it wasn’t a 

good idea or it’s a good idea but they don’t want to do it that way. So they’ll go 

along with a lot of stuff or they’ll say they will and then go out and do it their way 

which can be a frustration and cause problems. So there were some issues like that.

One of the things had to do specifically with bodies. We moved some bodies 

and handled the corpses in a way that was taboo in their religion and it caused a 

stink. We didn’t know any better.

When General William Wallace was over there and I was escorting him to the 

different FOBs and to our various subordinate commands, he would ask the guys 

what they needed and what he could do for them. One of the things he wanted to 

know was how could TRADOC, as an institution, better train and equip guys for 

the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I gather from his comments that he got some 

of the same responses when he was in Iraq doing the same thing – language. That’s 

just impractical, though. To train an Arab linguist in the basic course at the Defense 

Language Institute, the DLI, which we say is the best language training institute 

in the world, takes 63 weeks and we’re lucky if we get a 2-2 linguist which is the 
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a level two in reading and a level two in comprehension, out of that. That’s one 

guy for 63 weeks. You just can’t train enough guys to put several linguists in every 

unit. You’re not going to get that and General Wallace, I think, made the comment, 

“You’re going to get in trouble more from cultural faux pas than from saying the 

wrong thing.” These guys understand that this is not our language. 

We just have to be able to hire good interpreters. You’re going to say the wrong 

thing at times if you’re trying to speak the language. You’ll laugh about it and 

you’ll move on but the cultural things such as handling corpses the wrong way, 

handling children or women or whatever the case, that’s going to get you in trouble 

more than not being able to speak the language. So we did have some problems 

and that one with the corpses jumped out at me. We didn’t handle the bodies in a 

way that’s acceptable in their culture. By the way, I didn’t have a cultural advisor 

either. 

LL: Did your translators ever try to steer you in the right direction with regard 

to certain cultural items? 

NS: Well, yeah, Omar was very good and I’ll use him as an example. He 

actually wasn’t my translator. He worked for the ‘3. We in the ‘5 didn’t have our 

own but I could get him anytime I needed him. So I kind of saw him as mine. He 

was very good at that.

Of course the guys who translated documents were just a pool of people. We 

turned in our documents and it could be somebody different every time translating 

documents. I don’t know exactly how many translators they had in that pool of 

four or five, whoever could get to yours quickest would get to it. So it’s not like 

you’re using the same guy all the time who understands your lane. Those guys 

would just literally translate what you gave them. They wouldn’t put the right spin 

on it, although I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to translate and then we’ll talk 

about the kind of spin that needs to be there. We didn’t talk about what the meaning 

is. Omar kind of guided us. He gave us a little bit of guidance on some cultural 

things. Some of the other ones didn’t. They’re there to do the job. You work with a 

guy and get to know him and you get that kind of guidance. If it’s somebody you’re 

not working with regularly, you don’t. 

We had it great with Omar. Some of the other guys we worked with, some of 

the contractors over there we worked with, had their interpreters they worked with 

all the time and they got that kind of support from them. So when we worked with 

them and their interpreters, that bled over to us as well, so that was good. We got 

some of that but not always. 

LL: Did you ever encounter tribalism or sectarian divides that stopped or 

slowed you down from doing what you wanted to accomplish? 
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NS: Not me personally in anything I did. Of course you heard about some of 

that stuff and that was more at the tactical level. One of the things we insisted on 

in Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic army. I don’t mean you have an Uzbek company in 

the battalion, you have a Tajik company in the battalion, no, I mean full integration. 

You had Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras all in the same platoon. We insisted on that. It is 

working and the Afghans kind of like it.

Now, that creates some problems with them in terms of some travel type things 

and language, believe it or not. There are some Afghan company commanders who 

can’t communicate very well with some of their platoon leaders because they’re 

speaking different dialects and that creates problems but yes, we had heard about 

some of those things occasionally but I never experienced any of it. 

LL: In general, how did you find the conditions there? 

NS: Rotten. Let me qualify that a little bit better. You’d asked about support 

earlier. As to life support, the food was great. Of course you have to complain 

about food because it’s the easiest thing to complain about. The air quality was 

horrible. In fact, I had heard and it was pretty much acknowledged by the medical 

community over there that 15 percent of the pollutants in the air are fecal matter. 

It’s dirty, it’s dusty, the road conditions are bad but the food was good. 

The living quarters were adequate. As a lieutenant colonel who has been in the 

Army as long as I have, I kind of like to have my own room but I had a roommate 

and the rooms were small. I ended up moving once while I was there onto the 

installation as a matter of fact. I was the only one in the room I lived in at that 

point. My walk-in closet here is bigger than that whole room. I could literally stand 

in the middle of my room there, hold my arms out, lean back and forth and touch 

one wall and then the other. So in terms of living conditions I wouldn’t complain 

about them but they weren’t great. 

The same was true with working conditions. We worked long hours, oftentimes 

with ambiguous guidance. That’s not a reflection of poor command guidance. That’s 

a reflection of very complex issues. Travel was very difficult in terms of not always 

having the assets to travel and the roads were just horrible. The living conditions 

weren’t the greatest but I wouldn’t complain about them. I’m an infantry guy. The 

Air Force guys over there, that’s all they could talk about.

One of the things I always made sure I did when I was going to be at Afghan 

facilities, I used the latrine before I left to go there because facilities like that, you 

didn’t want to walk into in a lot of places. So the conditions weren’t great. To say 

they were good would be a stretch.

As an infantry guy, I will tell you that you’re in a combat zone and there’s active 

fighting going on every day. So you could argue that it isn’t bad but I expected, as 
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a higher headquarters, and we were the highest US headquarters there, I expected 

a three-star headquarters to have some nice facilities but that wasn’t the case. In 

fact, Camp Eggers which is where CFC-A was, was probably the smallest camp 

in Afghanistan. The accommodations and the amenities, if you will, were better at 

every place I’ve visited than they were at CFC-A. Now, frankly, I don’t know that 

I have a problem with that. I want the troops who are going out every day to hunt 

bad guys down to have the best. I’m sitting back there in Kabul relatively safe. 

Push some of those creature comforts down to the guys. Use the money for their 

facilities instead of up here. It’s adequate back here. 

LL: How much contact did you have with other US services? 

NS: Quite a bit. 

LL: Did you run into any cultural differences? 

NS: You always do. I just mentioned one. Strangely enough too, my boss after 

the Marine colonel left was actually the CJ5.

One day we were complaining about the food. This guy’s a British colonel. We 

were in the chow hall eating together and he just kind of laughed and said, “Oh 

yeah, this is really bad.” His sarcasm put things in perspective for us. We were 

eating, the chow was very good and it was pretty well prepared but when you have 

the same thing a lot, it can get old so you start complaining about it. Essentially my 

boss was saying, “This is the best I had ever seen, anywhere, in my whole career, 

and you guys are bitching about it? Give me a break!”

In terms of contact with the other services and other countries that were part 

of the Coalition, there were some cultural differences but nothing that hindered 

our work. What hindered work, in some respects, was that the Air Force would 

only send guys there for three months at a time or sometimes for four months. It 

takes you three months to really figure out what’s going on. Well, if you’re leaving 

in three months, you never really quite figure out what’s going on. Depending on 

what job they were in, some of them would be there longer. So that created some 

problems. 

We have some of the same problems in the Army, though. The Army will send 

some guys there for six months at a time. Well, okay, I’ll get six months from you 

but it means that I’ll probably get three months of good work out of you but were 

there any cultural differences between our services that hindered the mission? No. 

I didn’t see it anyway, other than the tour lengths. The Marines would send guys 

there for four to six months. The Navy would send guys there for six months. The 

Army, we’d send guys there for a year. 

The Navy has come on board and has started sending guys there for a year. 

Before I left, we had a couple Navy guys come to the directorate for a one-year 
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tour. So I think all the services have recognized that the three-to-four-month tours 

don’t really cut it. You can have an LNO, the Liaison Officer, for three months 

but I would even argue that an LNO is a guy who really needs to understand more 

than his mission. He needs to understand yours, your subordinate element’s and he 

needs to understand the bigger picture. You need him there for longer.

So, the cultural differences happen at the institutional level of the Department 

of the Army, the Department of the Navy, and the Air Force level where tour 

lengths are set. That then got in the way of some productivity because what do you 

do with a female MP or a female information technology specialist who’s in your 

‘5 shop for three months and hasn’t any idea about plans? There was an Air Force 

billet on the JMD for a lieutenant colonel and they gave us a lieutenant colonel 

for three months. Even if it’s the right mix and you say what you want in terms 

of experience in those positions, the services try to fill that, I think. Still, for three 

months, you’re not getting a whole lot out of somebody in three months. 

LL: What about NGOs? Did you ever have to try to coordinate with NGOs in 

some of this nation-building planning? 

NS: I was in meetings where there was NGO representation but these weren’t 

my meetings. I was part of some joint planning groups, the JPGs. I took part in 

JPGs that had NGO representation but they weren’t my JPGs. Essentially no. 

LL: Contact was just incidental? 

NS: Incidental, yes. 

LL: What did you find to be your biggest challenge or challenges while you 

were in Afghanistan? 

NS: From what I did, and I’ve already kind of hit on this, getting out and about 

to have a different perspective on things from top down. That top-down perspective 

isn’t always accurate. Your information will be accurate but the perspective is 

different. So it was a challenge getting out and about to understand things better 

from the perspective of the subordinate headquarters. I thought working with NATO 

was challenging. I’ve been assigned to a NATO unit before. I really enjoyed it and 

I think NATO does good work but there was a challenge getting things coordinated 

with them because we basically go about things differently. The American way 

of doing things versus the European way of doing things is, I think, what it really 

boiled down to. So coordinating some things with NATO was a bit of a challenge. 

We wasted far too much time on details which, to me, were inconsequential. 

There was a document that we were coordinating with the Ministry of Defense 

that NATO obviously had to be a part of because they were going to take over 

this program. It had to do with the partnership program. You wouldn’t believe the 

amount of time we spent on this sentence or these words. Words are important, 
171

they mean things and I understand that but we spent an inordinate amount of time 

on documents, getting them both to our satisfactions.

I think that wasn’t so much at the commander’s level. Lieutenant General Karl 

Eikenberry never saw these things until we were ready for him to sign them. Yes, 

he’d have a draft copy to comment on earlier and give us guidance but then as we 

went through and were able to get the commander’s guidance and his intent, he 

wouldn’t see it again until we thought we had the final product to put before him 

and Lieutenant General Sir David Richards, or his predecessor Lieutenant General 

Mauro Del Vecchio.

So it isn’t commanders, it’s their staff guys who are making sure their 

commanders’ interests are protected. I had too many issues on some of that. Now 

some of that is that there’s one NATO headquarters but you’re dealing with 26 

different nations within that headquarters. In other words, there are some things 

that General Richards as the commander down there would like to be able to 

mandate but it was just the nature of the beast. So that was a big challenge, getting 

some things coordinated with NATO. Another challenge I think that we have in 

Afghanistan is resourcing and this isn’t just me with regard to my job, obviously 

this trickles to everybody who is working over there. 

LL: How would you say the overall effort in Afghanistan was or is being 

resourced? 

NS: I think the mission in Afghanistan is under-resourced. We say the main 

effort in the Global War on Terrorism, the GWOT, is Iraq. Strictly my personal 

opinion which does not reflect the command’s view is that it’s misplaced. The 

main effort should be Afghanistan. Iraq, in my mind, is going to be what it’s going 

to be and we’ve done everything we can to influence that. In terms of the political 

Iraq, post-Saddam, we have done everything we can to influence what Iraq is 

going to look like five years to a decade from now. We can’t do any more than 

we have already done. Iraq was a developed nation with good infrastructure of 

communications; roads, banking, and its people were educated. You’re not going 

to change that culture. You’re not going to change their mindset in just a few years.

Yes, we were helping to reestablish a government but to the extent that we can 

influence what that government long term is going to look like, we’ve culminated. 

This is Nate Stevenson’s personal opinion. That’s not the case in Afghanistan when 

60 or greater percent of the population can’t read their own name, they’re illiterate. 

They understand right and wrong, good and bad, and that we’re there to help, 

and they still overwhelmingly want us there. Now, there are some who are saying 

that our presence there does get in the way sometimes and innocents get hurt 

sometimes when we conduct operations and whatnot. So, it’s easy to find people 

who are discontented with our presence but overwhelmingly the Afghans aren’t. 
172

They understand we need to be there and they understand that we, the international 

community, are pumping a lot of money into their development. 

Given the extremely high illiteracy rate there, it’s going to be a couple decades 

before we can really step back. That gives us a couple decades to get it right, make 

friends and really influence what it’s going to look like 20 years from now.

The kids in Iraq would maul me, trying to sell me candy and gum at outrageous 

prices, or they would beg for gadgets. The kids in Afghanistan were asking for 

pens, notebooks. We’re starting schools and they want to go to learn to read and 

write and do math. That’s what they were asking me for. Well, it’s when those 

kids are 25 to 30 years old and are now local leaders, store owners, members of 

parliament, other government jobs, that we then can proudly say our job there is 

about 95 percent done. Because those who follow them are going to hopefully be 

educated broadly. 

We have to make sure they’re broadly educated, not just in madrassas. 

They need to have a broad education and they need to understand how the world 

outside Afghanistan works, looks, and functions. They don’t need to understand 

computers. Well, they need to understand that too but that’s not what I’m talking 

about. I’m saying they, from a systems perspective, need to understand how the 

world works. So it’s when those young kids who are on the streets now begging for 

school supplies are in jobs and their children are teenagers, that’s when we can say, 

okay, “We’ve probably got it licked here.” So we have all that time to influence 

Afghanistan. 

We’re not making a little America over there. That’s not what I’m talking about 

at all. I’m talking about a country that understands global standards, global norms, 

and global ways of doing business. I think that’s where our main effort ought to 

be but it isn’t and the resources reflect that. Arguably when and if we finally draw 

down in Iraq, we might be able to divert other resources to Afghanistan and maybe 

make a bigger difference faster. One of the things we’re trying to do over there is 

accelerate how quickly we can give them full sovereignty but we’re trying to do so 

much with a very small percentage of the population that can read a document we 

give them, a document in their own language.

So that’s, I think, a challenge that we’re trying to do the mission and I think 

we’re really under resourced. I don’t mean that just from the military perspective. 

Overall we’re under-resourced. The international community is not putting in the 

effort in terms of building civilian institutions and providing mentors for those 

civilian institutions. The military is trying to build some of those but we need to get 

out of that business. Yes, we have Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

the CERP, funds that we can use for this and that but you know what? We need to 

get out of that business. 
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We need to let some international contracts for people to come in there and 

build roads so the military isn’t doing it. Build them here, build them there, the 

plan is to develop with the Afghans. Roads support commerce and the military too 

but if roads support commerce, getting your goods to and fro, they’re also going to 

support getting people to and fro. There are things the military is doing over there 

that are better done by civilian contractors so we can focus on crushing a resurgent 

Taliban, so we can also focus on maintaining security here. 

We go into an area and do a security op for a month, get rid of all the bad 

influence and now we have to move on to the next place to clear them out. Well, 

guess what happens in the previous area? The bad guys move back in when we 

go because we don’t have the resources to stay. It’s getting better now but our 

development plan wasn’t synched with our security plan. In other words, we’d go 

in and do a security operation in one location, move on, and the bad guys would 

move back in a month later. While we were there and had it secured, we needed 

to come in there with development, strong development efforts, to get the proper 

facilities stood up and things going before we moved on. Even after you move on, 

you still have to have something from keeping the bad guys coming back in and 

blowing up what you did.

Schools were a popular target over there. They don’t want the kids educated. I 

heard recently that a school principal was assassinated. He was shot in the head by 

the Taliban. So they’re targeting schools and children and teachers, and you know 

what? The teachers, the parents, and the kids themselves are still going to school. 

They want to go to school. So that’s a challenge. It’s a long way of saying that 

resources are a challenge. 

LL: Any other challenges that come to mind? 

NS: Some of our other challenges we should have overcome by now. They 

were related to the command structure there. You had a US-led coalition, you had 

NATO, parallel headquarters not subordinate to the others, and different ways of 

doing things.

NATO won’t do the counterterrorist mission so we maintain that mission. 

We reserve the right to go anywhere in the country to conduct counterterrorist 

missions, even in NATO-controlled grounds. Well, that still has to be coordinated 

and you have to have agreements and things like that. Those are some of the things 

my shop did too. 

We negotiated this agreement with NATO. The Central Command, the CENTCOM, commander and the Joint Force Command Commander Brunssum signed a 

memorandum of agreement basically detailing how they would support each other. 

Then we developed an implementing arrangement that gave the details of how that 

would happen. My office was responsible for that implementing arrangement. 
174

We got into a lot of issues with NATO and the challenge of coordinating things 

with them on that. We’d say, “Guys, you’re not doing counterterrorism, we are, 

and we reserve the right to go anywhere in the country to do it.” The two higher 

commanders understood that and said it was acceptable, we could go anywhere 

in the country to conduct counterterrorism but then we had to work out what 

coordination measures needed to be in place and what we were going to do when 

we need to come into their battlespace to conduct these. Oh by the way, if it’s 

time sensitive, some of that can’t happen, so this is what we do. So we had a lot 

of challenges with that kind of stuff but now that NATO has control of security of 

the whole country, we’ve turned over all the ground to them. Some of those kinds 

of problems should have gone away. That happened after I left, so I say “should 

have.” The counterterrorism piece is still there because NATO will not do that.

One of the challenges that I hinted to is synchronizing the development plan 

with security. I think we’re doing that better. We recognize it as a problem area but 

that’s not something the military by itself can solve. That’s why you do have to get 

NGOs in there to work on development issues.

The provincial reconstruction teams, the PRTs, do development stuff. They’re 

not there for security purposes. They’re there for reconstruction and stability. So 

you have to get those guys involved. In our areas, the PRT commander worked 

with that brigade combat team commander, that tactical commander who owned 

the ground. In NATO that wasn’t the case. The PRTs answer directly back to their 

capitals, not necessarily the NATO commander on the ground. So, synchronizing 

all those efforts for development and getting it synchronized with security 

operations so you don’t lose your development effort or it doesn’t take three steps 

back because now you’ve got to focus somewhere else on security was a bit of a 

challenge. I know NATO had this plan called “development zones” that they were 

trying to implement to fix that. 

They were basically saying they were going to secure different areas, stay 

there and they had a plan for securing these areas while development takes place. 

No, they couldn’t cover the whole country simultaneously so they had to do it in 

small bits. They would use their resources where they could.

One of the other challenges and it’s not so much our challenge but rather an 

Afghan challenge that we deal with, is they don’t have a banking infrastructure. 

My check goes directly to the bank and I can write a check anywhere in the United 

States and basically anywhere in the world. Well, in Afghanistan, they don’t have 

such a system. So when Joe Private gets paid, he’s got to take his check home. 

He’ll spend half his check on the round-trip bus ticket to get home. These guys 

only get $70 a month but he has to take it home and it takes a long time to get there 

and a long time to get back because of the roads. He’s been fighting this war since 
175

2001 and the army, I guess, really didn’t exist before 2001 as a national army. So 

since 2001, he’s tired. He’s home with his money, he stays for a while and doesn’t 

get back right away, so he’s AWOL. He doesn’t care because there aren’t any 

consequences. Now we’re working to put consequences into the system, so we’re 

developing this stuff. It isn’t that this guy wants to be a deserter. He just wants to 

spend some time at home. When he’s ready to go back, he goes back. Some guys 

show up two months after they’ve been declared AWOL ready to go to work. 

The attrition rate of Afghan National Army soldiers is a bit of a challenge for us, 

attrition for all reasons such as combat losses and desertions. 

They lose a lot every month, almost as much as they take in. So the growth rate 

is slow in the military or their contract is up. It’s an all-volunteer army so nobody’s 

drafted over there. So when the contract is up, they’re gone. Since we insist on this 

ethnically diverse organization, guys are far removed from their home areas. We’d 

have a Tajik who lives in one spot but he’s in a unit far from home, so it takes him 

four days to get home. They want to be close to home. The police, on the other 

hand, we haven’t made them ethnically diverse. The police work in the areas where 

they live and they’re at home. That’s probably a good idea.

So there are issues we’re dealing with in regard to the police and the army and 

how they’re managed and so on and so forth. Yes, you could say that’s an Afghan 

problem but that’s a coalition problem too because we’re helping them develop 

their institutions and their procedures. So we deal with that. I don’t know if those 

are the kinds of challenges you had in mind when you asked the question but those 

are just some of them that we’re facing as an organization.

Here’s another challenge. One that I talked about was the resourcing. Well, 

part of that too is configuration. CJTF-76 comes over there to fight a war, to go out 

and hunt down Taliban and insurgents and shoot them in the face. Hoo-ah! That’s 

what we want them to do. I think we’re at the point of development but again this is 

Nate Stevenson’s personal opinion here and not necessarily a command viewpoint. 

The Afghan National Army can fight. We’re not teaching those guys how to fight. 

We’re trying to teach them how to be a professional army. 

They’ve been fighting for a long time. What we need to do is accelerate 

their development as a national army and we don’t have the training structure in 

country to do that. Every year we send over and rotate the CJTF–76 to come over 

to fight a war. I think there’s less warfighting that needs to be done over there than 

training and development. So the training and development unit that’s over there 

is inadequate in terms of size to take care of the function. That’s what Task Force 

Phoenix does. All the embedded training teams, the ETTs that are embedded in the 

ANA are what those guys are there to do. They teach them how to run an army 

and how to run a company. Not how to fight but how to run a company. One of the 
176

things they do, because these guys are out in combat with the Afghans, is if they 

have a need for medical evacuation or close air support, the ETTs are calling that 

in. 

We don’t have any Afghan pilots flying close air support missions for us. So 

they provide some of those, what I used to call combat multipliers. We’re calling 

them “enablers” now because they enable the ANA. So we’re providing those 

things through our ETTs. Well, we don’t have enough of those out there to do that. 

With the Afghan National Army spread out all over the country, these 16 ETT 

guys have to coordinate with a battalion that’s conducting company operations in 

three different locations for example. Well, you have to cut that ETT up in four 

different pieces with a battalion headquarters and three companies. So we don’t 

have enough of that structure to do the job and that’s creating a bit of a challenge. 

That’s why we came up with the partnership programs. 

We link these guys up with the US combat units out there to kind of accelerate 

their operational development but we need more of those Task Force Phoenix

organizations over there. You could probably take the CJTF–76 and make sure it’s 

more configured, not specifically for a lot of combat operations but for some of 

that training development operation, the guys in Task Force Phoenix doing that? 

Those are guardsmen and reservists who are mobilized and come over to do that. 

We don’t have that rank structure in an Active Component element to do that. 

To take a brigade out of the Active Component and give them that mission, you’re 

going to have to take a division and gut its leadership to get enough of the right 

rank and expertise in that brigade to go over to do that mission. So, we don’t have 

the right force structure over there to do what I think is the predominant mission 

now.

Yes, the combat mission is still there and you still have to do the security 

mission. NATO is taking on a bigger part of that and the training piece now. With all 

the caveats the different nations have against certain types of functions of combat, 

getting on aircraft, not providing any kind of fiscal or material support causes the 

bulk of what’s happening in terms of their development as an institution is being 

underwritten by the US. So we need to make sure the force structure we’re sending 

over there is configured more for that mission and less for the combat role now. 

LL: What were the biggest professional lessons learned you took away from 

your time in Afghanistan? 

NS: The getting around. You have to do that. There is a tendency for us to 

make a decision on things and go with it and then the Afghans just kind of get on 

board. 
177

We need to start pulling them in. In fact, they’re starting to assert themselves 

which is a good thing and we recognize that and appreciate it. The biggest lesson 

learned from my perspective with what I did was getting out and about. You can’t 

be a staff officer in a combat zone and just stay at headquarters and think you know 

what’s going on because you don’t. 

LL: If you could make one recommendation based on your experience in 

Afghanistan to the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Secretary of the Army or the 

Secretary of Defense, what would it be? 

NS: Afghanistan needs to be the main effort in resources in this GWOT. I 

know that’s broad and not a specific recommendation but I think we need to look 

at resourcing the mission in Afghanistan better. When I was getting ready to leave 

to come back, I wanted to have a final office call with the guys in the Afghan 

ministries I’d been working with. I was sitting in General Payenda’s office and 

he commented that, “Just about the time we start working really well together 

and we’re getting to know each other really well, you guys leave. That’s not a 

complaint. I understand that. I understand you all have families, you’re separated 

from your families, you have to go home and we really appreciate your efforts 

but I’m sorry to see you go.” Quite frankly, I was in a hurry to get back to see 

my wife and children but I was sorry to leave. So I’ve been heard to say, and I’m 

not sure how much I believe it but I think a year is too short; and I think for unit 

deployments, a year is too short as well. The guys in Task Force Phoenix will 

tell you: “We got it, we’re starting to click, and then presto, we’re starting the 

transition with another unit.” That’s a two-year assignment per unit. I’d just make 

that a two-year assignment. You’ll then experience some of the things we now 

have trouble conceiving of with the Afghans. Okay, you’ve been here two years 

fighting but that guy’s been fighting for four years. Now you understand why we 

have to be real hard on implementing a red, amber, green training operations cycle 

because these guys need some red time. 

They’ve been in the green cycle for four or five years, you know? They need 

some red time. While we have that in writing, it’s not being implemented very well 

for a lot of reasons but we’ve just got to be pricks about it in making it happen. I 

would make tours over there two-year tours. I would certainly get rid of the sixmonth tour and anything less than that. Nine months might be about right for an 

individual augmentee to a staff. So that would be my recommendation to resource 

it better and with longer tours. 

LL: How did you deal with family separation while you were over there? 

NS: Well, you know, it’s not so bad. That wasn’t the first separation in my 

military career. My wife and children understand that and everybody in the 

military understands that. At the headquarters level, you have pretty good access 
178

to computers, so you’re emailing every day or every other day. There’s such a great 

outpouring of support for the soldiers over there and in Iraq.

You get these packets from www.anysoldier.com. They send you phone cards. 

You use phone cards when you can and you call home. In some places guys were 

able to call home every day. When somebody asked me if I called my wife every 

day, I said I didn’t talk to my wife that much when I’m at home. Why would I call 

her every day? The separation isn’t too terrible to deal with. Why is that? Well, in 

Nate Stevenson’s opinion, you’re more focused on your job there. 

Everything is real. It’s very real that you could die tomorrow. It’s very real 

that your vehicle could get blown up by a suicide VBIED on your way to your 

safe house this evening. It’s very real that you could hit an IED. The days are long. 

You’re focused on what you’re doing. You’re not concerned about paying this bill, 

how well Ben’s doing in school, the football team, or how your wife is dealing with 

all of that. So you have to call her frequently to make sure she’s got you to vent 

to and whatnot and keep you informed but that’s not your focus. You’re over and 

you’re focused on your mission, so it makes the time go. The year was up before I 

knew it which kind of helps support my idea that a year is too short. 

We tried to put things on our camps to give soldiers some diversions. We’re 

into gyms and staying in shape, so we put a gym in on the installation. We had some 

free weights in there, some machines and some treadmills. We tried to make sure 

your chow was the last thing you’re upset over. So the contractor who provided the 

food was doing a great job. So things like that. 

We didn’t get a whole lot of morale, welfare, and recreation or MWR while I 

was there, although a few USO shows came. I’m personally not into USO shows. 

We did have some NFL football players come over and I thought it was interesting 

to talk to them but it was good when we had congressmen come over. We probably 

had them coming over too often. There were representatives from your state and 

things like that. Yeah, I think we probably had too many of those visits but those 

guys need a firsthand view of what’s going on so that’s just something you have 

to live with. We had some representatives from my state and they’d want to have 

dinner with the guys. So I had an opportunity to eat with one of my representatives 

and it was a good conversation. He’s a good guy. So all those kinds of things 

mitigated the ill effects of separation from family but guys don’t really focus so 

much on that, especially if they know they’re going to be there for a year. 

They’re focusing on the mission. If you’re only there for 90 days, you can’t 

wait to get home. What you’re hoping is that your flight out actually starts on the 

second of the month so you get the combat pay and tax exclusion for that whole 

month too but yes, the 90-day guys are waiting to go home. The one-year guys 

settle down, nose to the grindstone and get it done. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s 
179

kind of a blanket statement. The guys who are there for 90 days hit the ground 

just like everybody else, excited about being there, want to work but after 30 days 

those guys know they’re going home in a couple months and you lose them after 

the next 30 days. When you’re 30 days out, if you’re lucky and you got somebody 

backfilling you and you’re doing some transitions, you got other things you’re 

trying to do and there are some social things to go to. You want to get to the market 

if you can and buy scarves and souvenirs and things like that, so your last two 

weeks there you’re not being very productive.

Dealing with the separation is a personal thing. People deal with it differently. 

If you’re there for a year, you get a mid-tour two weeks of leave and your time 

doesn’t start until you hit the ground in the States and it ends when you leave. 

Getting in and out of theater can sometimes be difficult. You might fly from 

Afghanistan to Qatar and then you might wait in Qatar for a week before you 

can get a flight back to the States. You don’t have priority. Units have the higher 

priority and you’re space available. So, mid-tours are great. Guys look forward to 

mid-tour leaves.

If you’re there for a year you also get a four-day pass in each half of your tour 

there too. In Afghanistan, you take your pass in Qatar. That’s the pass location. So 

you go to Qatar and you go to movie theaters and you hang out at the pool, you can 

have a beer. You can’t have beer in Afghanistan. So if you’re there for a year, you 

take advantage of those things, you’re focused on the mission, the amenities are 

there. The conditions aren’t great but you have a gym. Yeah, okay, I eat in a tent 

but it’s not too bad. 

LL: Do you know what your next assignment is going to be? 

NS: Retirement. I got my orders. On 1 July 2007 I retire. 

LL: Any regrets? 

NS: About going to Afghanistan? 

LL: No, no, about the retirement. 

NS: Oh no. I’ve loved every minute of it. My retirement will be my mandatory 

retirement but frankly, when I was a lieutenant I never thought I’d be in the Army 

20 years. I didn’t come in with the intent of making it a career. I came in with 

the intent of doing one tour, maybe two, and then getting out. There was just one 

thing after another. I just kind of liked what I was doing, or this looked good and 

I wanted to try it.

At about the 12-year mark, I was going to get out and work for the Drug 

Enforcement Agency, the DEA. I had interviews set up and so on but I had a long 

conversation with my dad and after that I figured okay, yeah, I’ve been in 12 years, 

I might as well do 20. As the 20-year mark was approaching, I hadn’t done a whole 
180

lot to transition into another job at that point in time. When my oldest son told me 

that if I retired he would be a senior in high school and have to face another move, 

I said I’d stick around for another year. It was that year that I deployed to Kuwait. 

While in Kuwait, I got offered the opportunity for the fellowship. I got selected 

for it which was a year with a two-year payback. I was overseas for that payback 

so it was a three-year tour, and I was going to come back to the States to retire but 

then there was Afghanistan, so it was just one thing after another and it dragged 

it out this long but I don’t have any regrets in any step of the way. I enjoyed it but 

it’s time to move on. 

LL: Is there anything else you’d like to add about your deployment either to 

Iraq or Afghanistan? 

NS: Our presence and our efforts are needed in both locations. There’s a lot 

of talk today about drawing down in Iraq or to use the president’s words, “cut and 

run.” I indicated to you earlier that I thought we’ve done about as much good as we 

can in terms of influencing the midterm political future of Iraq or what it’s going 

to look like politically, economically, socially. We’re not going to change much in 

Iraq so it’s probably time to leave but the conditions haven’t, in my mind, been set 

to leave yet. I think we can’t leave a fledgling government incapable of governing 

that whole country in the wake of our departure. 

We’ve got to have solid institutions, not all of them but key institutions firmly 

grounded under the command of the central government that has security forces 

loyal to it before we can leave. I’m not sure we have all that in Iraq yet. We have 

to create that so we can get out. Now, I think we need to surge to do that, although 

I don’t necessarily mean militarily. 

We might need to surge militarily temporarily to quell the sectarian fighting 

in Baghdad, and I’m sure there might be some elsewhere in the country too but 

what we’re all hearing about is what’s happening in Baghdad, so militarily we can 

surge to get that under control a little bit but the international community needs 

to surge too. NGOs need to surge, international organizations need to surge, the 

organizations that are helping to ground Iraqi governmental institutions need to 

surge, so that within a year our presence there can be significantly reduced. I think 

we’re going to have to have some kind of a presence there for the next four or five 

years but we don’t need 140,000 troops there. 

We could probably go with 30,000 troops there after this year or after a year 

and a half if we surge in the right places. Like I said, if it’s up to the US to do it 

alone, we’re going to be there awhile but if we can convince the international 

community, those international organizations, those NGOs, the other governmental 

organizations, our friends and allies to all come together and agree on a plan for 

surging to make sure that that fledgling government is well grounded and its key 
181

institutions are well grounded and we’ve got security for the most part in Baghdad, 

then we can start to pull out. When we pull out, Iraq is going to start to look 

different because the Iraqis are going to have more and more control of it and 

they’re going to do things differently than the coalition is doing things. 

They might be much harsher and more brutal in putting down sectarian 

violence. Sometimes it’s the only thing these guys understand is the hammer. So 

there’s some efficacy to that old adage that you fight fire with fire. Of course our 

national values don’t allow us to do that and I agree with that national value. You 

just can’t be brutal sometimes but war is not pleasant and sometimes you just 

have to crush your enemy. We’re fighting a coalition war over there with coalition 

partners who don’t believe in crushing your enemy. So, we have to surge to create 

the right conditions to allow us to draw down within a year to 18 months. This is 

my personal opinion. 

We can draw down that much by the year’s end or by 18 months and be down 

to about 40,000 troops which means bringing 100,000 home, and maybe 30,000 of 

those end up in Afghanistan to do the training missions over there. 

LL: Thank you very much. 

183

Major John Bates

5 March 2007

LL: My name is Laurence Lessard (LL) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major John Bates (JB) on his 

experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF. Today’s 

date is 5 March 2007 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, 

if you feel at any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch 

your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information; 

and if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply 

say you’re not able to answer. To start off with, let’s have a little personal 

background. Where do you call home, how did you get interested in the 

Army and how did you get commissioned? 

JB: I’m from Lexington, Kentucky. My commissioning source was the 

University of Kentucky ROTC. I started out in the Guard and now I work full 

time for the National Guard Bureau in Washington, DC since roughly 2002. All 

my male family members have at some time or another been in the military and I 

pretty much started following in their footsteps. I got a little lost in college and felt 

this was a better direction. I never thought that, 17 years later, I’d still be in doing 

this but the country calls. 

LL: When did you first find out that you were going to deploy to Afghanistan? 

JB: Roughly 60 days prior to the mobilization date. I was executive officer, 

the XO, at the National Guard Bureau to the director of the Army National Guard, 

the three-star general. My son was six months old and my wife and I had no other 

family in the area and I had to train my replacement for the general. 

Then I had to sell my home and move my family, so I think 60 days was about 

right. I moved her back to her family while I was gone. When I found out, it was 

the middle of March 2005. I mobilized the last week of April 2005. 

LL: Once you mobilized, how much pre-deployment training did you go 

through? 

JB: They squeezed 10 days of training into 60 and I’m already on record on 

that one. Things have been changed from that already but it was roughly a 60-

day training cycle, post-mobilization training, at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. It 

was done under the auspices of First Army, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré’s 

group and the training support brigade, the TSB, there at Camp Shelby that didn’t 

have any idea what our mission was or what responsibilities to train, other than 

here are these Combined Forces Land Component Command [CFLCC] guidelines 

of anyone going into theater. So, it was very rudimentary and just an absolutely 

unworthy experience. 
184

LL: Was any of the pre-deployment training worthwhile? 

JB: Yes. Number one, you’re building your group dynamics even though it’s 

not the group you’re going to be working with in theater. There are inherent benefits 

of just wearing the uniform every day. An example of how misleading the training 

was is that you got one day of instruction on the .50 cal but you didn’t get to fire the 

.50 cal and the .50 cal was your mainstay over there for every vehicle, or the 240B 

or what have you. You were required to take eight hours of precision lightweight 

GPS receiver, the PLGR, training, although they issued us defense advanced GPS 

receivers, the DAGRs, which is the new version of the PLGR but would not give 

us training on the DAGR because they didn’t have anyone to train us. It wasn’t part 

of the CFLCC requirement to have DAGR training, although we’re going to send 

you to war with a DAGR.

Another good example of how things were not done correctly is that we were 

issued PAC-4s, the infrared laser and floodlight on the front of your weapon, and 

NVG 7Bs, the really high-speed new ones but when it came to night firing, we 

weren’t allowed to use those optics for night firing and we also went into theater 

without instruction on how to use them. Also they had not been zeroed or even 

familiarized. The first time I used it was in an actual gunfight the day I got into 

Afghanistan. What was tough was that they compressed our 60-day training. It was 

supposed to have been more like 90 to 95 days and so, to use old football acronym, 

we were doing two-a-days during daylight hours where we were on ranges and in 

the evenings we were in class instruction until 2300 to midnight. We’d then get up 

at five o’clock and do it again. 

We spent 14 hours on the range to shoot 40 rounds. Being a major at the 

time and having been in the military for 15 years and there may have been a staff 

sergeant in the organization but everyone was predominantly a sergeant first class 

and higher and a captain and higher. It was really poor training. Several of our 

instructors started the courses off with, “Gentlemen, I realize you’re very senior 

and I apologize but I have to teach this course as if you’re a female truck driver just 

out of basic training without any experience,” let alone several of us had already 

been in a combat zone before.

It was, like I said, very disheartening. I wrote a complete after-action review, 

the AAR, on it and shipped it back to the National Guard Bureau which the deputy 

director himself took around the country and told people was factual. I took the 

training blanket of what we did and didn’t receive and although I’m opinionated 

here because this is my oral history, it was a very factual document and he actually 

called me in theater and thanked me for delivering it

 As a result of that and my future job as the commanding general’s XO, we 

changed the way embedded training teams, the ETTs, were trained. It was brought 
185

to Fort Riley, Kansas and the 1st Infantry Division took over the role of training for 

that because it had been so inadequate. 

LL: Did the pre-deployment training contain any cultural or language pieces? 

JB: Oh yes, well, “This is really for Iraq but Iraq is similar to Afghanistan.” 

That’s how the class would start. Don’t show the bottoms of your feet, don’t shake 

with your left hand. It was irrelevant cultural training. 

We had four days of Dari lessons but we were in Pashto areas. Also, Afghans 

aren’t Arabs. When they talk about the cultural, they should be discussing how the 

Afghan military works. 

They’re used to a Soviet-style doctrine where the NCO corps is not very well 

developed. That type of cultural background, versus not giving them the evil eye 

and not talking to women types of nuances which are not true. 

LL Did you receive any further training once you got into theater? 

JB: Oh yes, sir. I arrived in theater and the first day in Kandahar you’re paired 

up with your organization. I was a company ETT and we were assigned to the 

operational control of Task Force 31 which was a Special Forces [SF] task group for 

the southern area of responsibility or AOR, for Afghanistan. You’re immediately 

paired with an SF A-team that takes you under their wing and they pretty much 

train you as a member almost before you see your infantry company. 

They want to make sure you’re a contributor and not a deficit to them. That’s 

not a training process, though. I mean, they wait to see how you’ll function in 

combat also before you actually earn your keep with them. SF really put us through 

our transition, firing drills, up/down drills, using 60 millimeter mortars, the Gustav, 

the Mk19, the Mk47, the 240B, the squad automatic weapon or SAW, and the .50 

cal. 

We had to go through some more close air support classes and do some onthe-job when we actually get in a troops-in-contact. They’d say, “Here, you take 

the phone on this one and we’ll walk you through it.” So the SF really did a great 

job spinning you up because you’re walking into advanced light infantry scenarios 

or situations and your 60-day train up. When you were doing infantry tactics, they 

wouldn’t allow you to walk in the woods. They were scared you’d get lost. You 

had to do all your movement to contacts in open fields so you wouldn’t get lost. It 

was quite disheartening. 

We also did a lot of shooting from the vehicles, shooting around the vehicles 

which, of course, in the States, you have to stop the vehicle, put it in park and turn 

the vehicle off, everyone gets on line in front of the vehicles. It was very unrealistic 

training. From what I understand it’s a safety issue so you don’t shoot the vehicle 

but what’s bad about that is you’re not practicing like you’re playing the first time 
186

you’re engaged. You’ll get out, you’ll walk in front of the vehicle, you’ll lay down 

to return fire instead of actually learning how to use the vehicle or the tires or the 

engine block, especially when you’re at complete defilade to them and they’re just 

on top of you. The only safe place is trying to squeeze underneath the engine block 

to return fire. 

LL: When you were at Camp Shelby, were you already divided up into ETTs 

or did that happen afterwards? 

JB: We were. Just real quickly, it’s important to understand that Task Force 

Phoenix is the parent organization there in Afghanistan. 

They’re broken up into continuous coverage throughout the rotation of people. 

I was 4.0, that’s usually first, second week of July when the .0s arrive in country. 

We replaced the former .0s. 

Then you have the .25s, the .5s and the .75s. Roughly half the organization 

comes in as .0s and the other three variations are the remaining 50 percent. 

Although you have a large turnover once a year, you still have continuity inside 

those organizations.

So when we formed up at Camp Shelby, the Florida National Guard, the 53d, 

was the headquarters element whose flag we fell under. Each state provided either 

16 or 96 personnel to be part of Task Force Phoenix 4.0 and from there we formed 

up into pseudo teams. As soon as we got there, we assimilated because the 16 guys 

you came with from your unit or your brigade, you’ve known all your life so you 

stay with those. However, when you get into theater, Location A may only need 

two personnel, Location C needs 42, Location D needs six. At that point, we did 

have a command and control structure for training but once we got into theater, 

you may have been planning on being the operations officer, the S3, for a brigade 

or a battalion but when you get there you may find out that you’re a company ETT 

or an assistant logistics officer, the S4. There isn’t any continuity from training to 

actual employment. 

LL: Were you or anybody else in your training group able to use email to talk 

to your counterparts, the people you would be replacing in Afghanistan? 

JB: What was very difficult about that was we didn’t know exactly where we 

were going. There was scuttlebutt but nothing definite. I had direct contact with 

our regional corps advisory group, the RCAG, commander every day. He’s a fullbird colonel and he was able to talk to his counterpart because his counterpart 

was obviously at the rear in Kandahar or at a large facility in Afghanistan but 

you personally don’t know who you’re replacing yet, so it’s very difficult to 

communicate with anyone. 
187

Oregon replaced the 53d, the 41st Brigade Combat Team, and we made that a 

priority. I don’t care if you’re replacing me or not but if you’re coming down here, 

I’m an infantry company ETT and here’s what my life is like. I also got to go spend 

time with them at Camp Shelby before they came to Afghanistan. So, number one, 

you don’t know where you’re going. Number two, if you do know where you’re 

going, your counterpart is on some little forward operating base, the FOB, that only 

has HF or tactical satellite, the TACSAT, burst transmission back to headquarters. 

So, you don’t necessarily have a lot of connectivity in those locations. 

LL: Compared to all the other training you went through at Camp Shelby, how 

valuable was the limited amount of talking that went back and forth between the 

brigade that was in Afghanistan and you who were going to replace them? 

JB: What we did know is that Kandahar Airfield had laundry service, a Pizza 

Hut trailer, we learned what barracks life at that location was like. 

We never saw a map, though, where the FOBs were located because they were 

“sensitive,” so you didn’t know what regions you were going to even if you knew 

what task force or what team you were on. You pretty much just went in blind. It 

would have been a lot better if you had had that information because the way the 

TSB was training us was, “You’re going to go be an advanced individual training 

instructor,” or, “You’re going to go mentor a supply distribution section.” 

Not that you’ll be loading up and moving out every day, movements to contact, 

doing raids and sweeps and all these other things. It would have been a lot more 

beneficial if we could have circumvented the TSB program to make sure we were 

practicing our movements to contact, our hand and arm signals, our shooting skills, 

our individual movements, driving skills and these types of things.

You have your trainer saying, “Oh, no, you might just get a mortar attack 

at night,” which was very disheartening when the day you arrive they call out a 

three-number element and you’re wondering, “What’s a 314?” “It’s an operational 

detachment alpha, the ODA, a Special Forces A-team. You’re assigned. Go. Bye. 

Chief so-and-so will pick you up and take you to your FOB. Your helicopter leaves 

in 20 minutes.” That’s how you find out where you’re going. 

LL: Can you describe the actual movement to Afghanistan? 

JB: It was fairly smooth. We only got four or five days of leave before we left. 

We returned on 4 July, on 5 July we loaded up our equipment, that evening 

we jumped on an airplane, and two days later we got out of that airplane seat, we 

were in Kyrgyzstan a day and then they flew you into Kabul. For this, we got brand 

new 114 up-armored Humvees so we had to drive them down to Kandahar. That 

process went very smoothly. Now you’re in Kandahar within three or four days 

from leaving the United States and you don’t know anything about the world yet, 

although you just made a 500-mile move right down the center of the country. 
188

LL: Can you talk about how you got integrated into your ETT once you got 

there? 

JB: For company level, by concept, it’s one officer and one enlisted. It doesn’t 

quite work out that way, though. The manning levels aren’t always 100 percent. 

They’re influxing more Afghan units in without the ETTs there. I know they’re 

actively working that all the time but the majority of my time in the ETT I was 

by myself. The SF team helps you out greatly when you’re in contact but the rear 

administrative functions, because there is a dual process, there’s the American side 

for all the filing of paperwork and it has to match the Afghan side for requisitions, 

leaves, passes, pay, everything. So, like I said, I spent a few hours at Kandahar. 

We went through field ordering officer and pay agent courses, paying straight 

out to the A-team. Because the way these battalions were set up, your integration 

was with that A-team. 

They had been on the ground about 30 days prior to you, so they really were 

your trainer. That’s your integration process. I’m a major and have been around the 

block but you get to a country and the next thing you know you’ve been shoved 

over with an A-team and they ship you out to a FOB 150 kilometers from home 

and you don’t know who to call.

My battalion commander is back in Kandahar and I don’t know how to get 

hold of him. It took about two months for us because we all got jammed like that 

until the battalion ETT chief, Mike Dyche, told me he’d been trying to contact me 

by email, satellite phone, and everything else. I didn’t have connectivity for email 

capability but every once in awhile I got my Army Knowledge Online, the AKO, 

and we ship our information through AKO which is probably not that secure at 

times.

So, integration was tough. Organization was tough. Theoretically you’d want 

a two-week left seat/right seat ride with someone but with the terrain and the lack 

of infrastructure in Afghanistan my left seat/right seat ride was a three-ring binder 

on my bunk in my tent when I got to my new spot. The guy I replaced had to leave 

early to get to where he was going. It just happened that the A-team had to come 

back for money and I was there that day. If not, I’d been sitting in Kandahar for 

a couple weeks until someone could get me out to my FOB. So, it’s definitely a 

challenge out there. 

LL: Were you paired up with a single Afghan company the whole time or did 

you move around between different Afghan units? 

JB: While I was an ETT, I had one company: 1st Company, 1st Kandak, 1st 

Brigade, 205th Corps. There was mention of me staying with that SF team and 

they’d ship me another company, or perhaps I’d go with my company to a new SF 
189

team whenever we would change areas. What seemed to work the best, though, 

was that it’s easier to learn a new A-team than it is a new company, especially once 

you’ve established a bond and trust with those guys. 

We would stay as much as we could with the company we had. 

LL: How long did you stay with that company? 

JB: Five months or so. I injured my arm and wasn’t able to hold my weapon 

anymore. I needed rest and so I swapped a job back in the rear with another guy. 

He took my company and I took his job so I could go through physical therapy and 

all that so I could use my fingers again. I tore my ligaments in my arm because of 

overuse of that area. 

LL: How did you get along with your counterpart, the commander of the 

Afghan company? 

JB: Captain Doud. Soldiers are soldiers no matter where you go. Although he’s 

the commander, you being the American walking in, you’re really the commander 

also. So everyone is hesitant and withdrawn and waiting to see what kind of guy you 

are. You’re coming in and you don’t want to cut slack at first, so it’s very typical to 

assuming command in an American unit. This guy is more your operations officer 

than your commander. I’d say our first month we probably had eight or 10 good 

firefights and, after that, I didn’t need my interpreter any longer. Although he didn’t 

speak English and I didn’t speak Dari or Pashto, we could communicate very 

quickly in the sand or just listening to him and the first sergeant talking or listening 

to what’s coming over the radio. I knew enough about tone or certain names or the 

situation. You had situational awareness where you understood what’s going on. 

We had a great relationship, one of almost as brothers. Many times both of us 

had to do hard things for each other in certain situations. I only had one lieutenant 

in the company and I felt the same way with him also. The first sergeant and I were 

very close, too. He understood the role of the NCO and it was his unit. After the 

first few weeks of inspecting to ensure he did the tasks that the commander said, I 

was very impressed that they were done well ahead of schedule and way beyond 

the standards I thought were acceptable.

It was a very crack outfit. You heard a lot of war stories about other units, 

how they were lazy and didn’t do anything; they’d run away from the fight, yada 

yada. This company had been together for three years when I got them and they 

were very tight, very organized, very disciplined, and no one messed with the 

first sergeant. If he told a squad leader to take his squad up that mountain now, 

bam! They were gone, up and out. There wasn’t any lip service or anything of 

that nature. This company was probably more disciplined than my National Guard 

company. I’m not saying because it was National Guard, I’m just saying than an 

American company, because they had been fighting straight for three years. 
190

They had been with SEALs, Force Recon, and now with Army SF. They 

understood that failure to do the small jobs meant people died the next day. I was 

very impressed with them. 

LL: You always hear that in the Middle East, the military doesn’t give NCOs 

the same role that we do in the American army. Can you explain how that works? 

How much did you have to work on that? 

JB: I think it has to do more with the Russian influence coupled with a culture 

based on status, meaning that the sheik is more important than anyone else and 

everyone bows and kowtows to him. In the company I was in, the company 

commander, the first sergeant, and the platoon sergeants understood the role of 

the NCO. My squad leaders were getting there, just like in any infantry company. 

They’re obviously not there yet or they’d be platoon sergeants. 

They understood the relationship. Now, the young enlisted men saw the 

commander as something higher than a captain. Not a religious figure but their 

culture is that someone who is in charge or educated or this type of thing is owed 

more respect. Whatever he said or did, they responded to him instantaneously. It 

was a different response than when the first sergeant said it. When the first sergeant 

said it, the squad leaders would say okay and point at their men directing them to 

do things. If the commander said it, though, they all took off running and when 

they went over the hill, then they delegated tasks. You could still see the subservient 

culture towards the officers. Like I said, I didn’t have to teach NCO business to 

these NCOs, and I was amazed by that. If today was weapons cleaning day for the 

crew-served or whatever, I’d come by at around 0800 in the morning and they like 

to get up real early. They’d get up at 0400 and do their prayers before sunrise but 

by 0600, those weapons were immaculate. I’d been warned to make sure I checked 

their magazines because they don’t clean them very well. 

They had already learned that lesson a few months earlier in a firefight when 

their weapons started jamming. So magazines were probably always the first things 

broken down. I was very impressed with that. I was getting to the point where I 

had realized that my NCOs were fully operational, my sergeants first class and 

above. I had three or four very strong squad leaders. I sat down with my platoon 

sergeant and said that for the next few months, this is what we’re concentrating 

on, training these sergeants and these squad and section leaders on how to do your 

job. That’s easy to say, though. It takes you awhile to get used to constant combat 

operations and then realize you have to do some training too. Usually training was 

just mission rehearsal exercises for this compound take down or this village take 

down and then when you get back it’s recoup time. 

You’ve been living off the land for three or four days. They need to clean 

their weapons, get a haircut, and relax for a day before they go back out. By that 
191

time, you’re already spinning up for your next mission again. So once I got to the 

point where I could handle the rotation of the mission thing and got settled and 

understood that, okay, now I’ve evaluated the company, I know where we’re at, I 

know how we react to contact, now let’s see if we can take this a step further and 

teach the NCOs to teach the younger NCOs.

It might be attrition from casualties or attrition from people being AWOL but 

the staff sergeants and sergeants first class had predominantly been mujahedeen or 

had been fighting for quite some time. It was the younger guys, the guys under 24 

years of age, who needed to start to step up. These guys needed to go take more 

responsible jobs. It hadn’t been an issue before because they weren’t promoting 

from within. When a new company would be stood up in Kabul, they would take 

the oldest guy in the unit and make him the first sergeant and the next four oldest 

guys would become the platoon sergeants, so there wasn’t any internal promotion. 

You only promoted inside your little unit. Well, now it’s becoming a more mature 

theater and they’re starting to promote within. Back then they were going for 

quantity versus quality at the beginning of the building of the Afghan National 

Army, the ANA. 

LL: Was all the leadership in your Afghan unit previously experienced in some 

kind of fighting in Afghanistan? 

JB: Yes. I’ll speak to my company and then my battalion. Both officers in my 

company were Soviet-trained in the Soviet Union. One was an AN-32 pilot, the 

big Russian transport plane. The lieutenant was a political officer who had gone to 

Russia and trained for 18 years. My XO, the lieutenant, was Masood’s cousin and 

had also been a company or battalion leader under the Northern Alliance. He had 

been wounded so many times. Several 7.62s all over the body type of thing. The 

company commander’s father was a general who went to the military academy 

at the time, then to Russian Academy. His father was an army general who was 

the commander of the Kandahar region when the Soviets were there. People fail 

to realize that there was a period of time when the Soviets were like us. They 

were ETTs. They weren’t occupiers. Not until later in the 1970s when we started 

getting involved and the Northern Alliance started gaining speed, then it became 

unpopular to be associated with them but he was assassinated in Kandahar, so both 

of them had grown up in the military.

Three of my NCOs had been prior military in the mujahedeen. They had a 

military period, then the military kind of died and they went to the mujahedeen, and 

then the Taliban came in later. It’s still kind of gray what happened in the Taliban

period, and they really didn’t want to talk about that too much. The battalion staff 

was the same way. You didn’t become a battalion or brigade commander because 

you knew somebody. You were a professional military officer prior to the invasion 

of October 2001. 
192

LL: How was your unit equipped? 

JB: we had AK47s, RPGs, PKMs, RPKs, whatever we could get. Our individual 

load-bearing equipment was horrible. It was Chinese-made vests that you couldn’t 

carry water in, you could only carry three magazines and they wouldn’t fit in 

the vest very well anyway. No body armor whatsoever, no Kevlars. Radios were 

somehow purchased, integrated communications, the ICOM radios, little handheld Motorola looking things. I actually had my wife send us Motorolas, the little 

ones you can buy a two-pack for $40, because they actually have a commercial 

encryption. It was a lot better than the ICOM. The ICOM is a shortwave radio that 

we used mostly to listen to the Taliban who were attacking us because that’s what 

they use. 

We had Kamazes and Tatas, equivalent to our family of medium tactical 

vehicles, the FMTVs. They’re Russian-made and very hardy trucks but poor 

maintenance. I had to pay for the maintenance. You had guys assigned as mechanics 

but they’re not necessarily trained. He was a mechanic at home before. 

Then there wasn’t, at this period, a supply procedure, and you were so far 

away from any other unit, battalion, or brigade that you have to buy the tire, the 

alternator, the belts, the exhaust, the lights, whatever, off the economy because 

you’re not going to drive 200 kilometers where there’s just nothing but suicide 

bombers to get a spark plug. So we purchased most of that off the market for our 

wheeled vehicles. 

We had two Ford pickup trucks, Ford Rangers, and all this got better after I 

left. It was already in the pipeline, it just hadn’t gotten to the teams yet. Now they 

have body armor, squad radios and all this. 

They’re not completely functional, though. They have these vests, body armor 

but still nowhere to put their magazines, so you still have that problem. 

Winter clothing was good. We did get winter clothing. It’s a really tough 

concept for them that there’s a right shoe, a left shoe, there are sizes to clothing. 

They are very scavenger-ish to where they will take whatever they can and 

Insha’ Allah if they lose it, if it’s the wrong size or if they got five bottoms and no 

tops. It’s a difficult concept. The first sergeant was really tough on them about that 

which was his business. 

We were buying some really poor equipment. We’d get a shipment of boots 

in and these guys had never had their feet measured so they didn’t know what 

size boot they were. So we tried to start indicating their clothing record in their 

personnel file of what everything is but the first day, halfway through the mission, 

the sole of the boots come completely off and we’re not just talking about one boot, 

we’re talking about 65 percent of the new boots that day that it happened to. 
193

We were buying a lot of Pakistani items poorly-made, which was changed 

shortly after I left. I saw where they were getting really nice shoes after that but 

I was losing soldiers because they were getting foot injuries from poorly-made 

boots.

The weapons themselves were in fairly good shape. The biggest drawback, 

forget the nomenclature but it’s the zeroing device for the AK47. We couldn’t get 

them. It was horrible. You have to use a tool to zero the AK. If you got one, man, 

you wore it around your neck like your dog tags. You wouldn’t let it get out of 

your sight. 

We taught them the concept of their own weapons. When you get up in the 

morning, you grab your weapon, not someone else’s. 

We actually wrote their names on the weapons so the first sergeant could walk 

down the row and see that that was their name on the weapon. That was his idea. 

LL: How were you set up for interpreters? 

JB: I had one interpreter. What was tough was that we were way out in the 

boonies but the interpreters had a requirement that they had to be back every month 

to get their pay. If they didn’t come back, they didn’t get paid. If you weren’t back 

inside a certain window, they said they would hold the money for them and then 

in three months when they do return, they only paid them for two months. It was 

a shady damn business, I’ll tell you. I think I need to start an interpreter business 

over there. Sonny was the guy’s name and he drove around in a great big yellow 

unarmored Hummer H2. I think they went to a more legitimate contract while I was 

there. When they did go to the new contract, it required all the interpreters to go to 

Kabul to get IDs. Well, that’s two weeks at best that you’ve lost your interpreter 

and then when they were in Kabul, if they didn’t have their new ID, they couldn’t 

get in to get their new ID. It was horrible. Things you and I in our society would 

think would be an organizational issue, because of the internal infrastructure in 

the country it’s just mind boggling how getting an ID card means you’re a month 

without an interpreter.

The SF team, though, got to pay their own interpreters. They were subcontracted 

just to them. When my guy had to go, I would use one of theirs. 

LL: How was he in terms of quality? 

JB: I had used interpreters for a few years, so I had a certain standard that he 

hadn’t been raised against. If I say three words and he speaks for 10 minutes, I’d 

tell him he’s screwing up. When he would paraphrase too much or, especially on 

orders, there’s a relationship you have to build with your interpreter, things you 

have to know about each other and how you work and after 30 days I think I was 

in a lot better shape. He spoke Dari and Pashto which, I don’t care who you are, 
194

though they tell you in school or at your mobilization station that Dari and Pashto

are similar, it’s like speaking French versus German. They’re not similar. 

He would have to give orders, depending on who he was talking to, in either 

Dari or Pashto. He was a very smart kid with a college degree. His father was 

a colonel in the Ministry of Defense, the MOD. He was waiting for the aviation 

branch of the army to open up and that’s where he was going. That’s probably 

where he’s at now but he could understand my “Southern-ese” and was very good. 

He carried a weapon. I gave him an extra set of body armor. The company loved 

him because he was one of them. There was never a question of his loyalty or who 

he answered to. He was 100 percent responsive no matter what time you wanted 

him. I was very impressed and glad to have him. I’ve seen others who weren’t. 

LL: Can you talk about the kinds of operations your Afghan unit went on? 

JB: We were an infantry company assigned out of sector of our brigade, 

operationally controlled by an SF A-team, a hunter-killer team was what it was 

called sometimes and also a direct-action team. All over the southern AOR, the five 

or six provinces down there, we could be in any of them at any time. There were 

long helicopter rides or long drives. A lot of times we had time frames we would 

operate in and, because of the intelligence coming in this time frame, we were the 

team on the spot and would action that intelligence. That would range from an air 

assault into a remote region to clear 31 kilometers one morning to raiding towns 

with multiple SF teams and multiple companies. 

We even got to the point where we did battalion missions without any 

problems. The whole battalion belonged to the same SF company A-team, so that 

made command and control very easy. 

We had named operations that lasted anywhere from seven to 10 days, to 

reaction missions that would be one to three days in length. Very rarely would we 

go out to a new area where no one had been just to go. We did do that occasionally 

because I assume we were going to answer someone’s priority intelligence 

requirement on an area to find out what’s going on. 

We did sensitive site exploitation missions. We chased high-value targets 

across the desert. Command and control in that type of environment, you think the 

desert is flat and you can see them but when you get there, it’s not quite that way. 

The wadis and the rivers and once you get in the dry riverbeds, it’s not like you can 

get right out. It was the whole gamut, there was nothing similar all the time. There 

was no “Groundhog Day,” which is what the maneuver companies would say. 

We’d be around the 173d and they’d be complaining about going back to the 

same town again just to walk. We didn’t do those types of things. 
195

LL: I’m going to assume that as a highly-tasked direct-action company, you 

had a lot of contact with guys who’d shoot back? 

JB: Yes, sir. 

LL: Did you have very many casualties or just lots of action? 

JB: I really don’t know how many direct actions we were involved in. A lot of 

them blurred. One of them, my helicopter, the one I jumped off of, the Chinook, 

was still the last shot down helicopter in Afghanistan right now. All five guys and 

I had to go secure the wreckage and man, that turned into a fight. 

They had mortars on us and it was a rough night. We had to abandon our 

original fight, and once a helicopter gets shot down, no more rotary comes and 

it’s 45 minutes. Although he’s only two kilometers away, two kilometers away of 

1,500 feet takes awhile to get there.

Casualties? We did lose a few. It was either dead or barely wounded. My first 

30 days, in the SF company, the B-team that the A-team was assigned to had lost 

five guys, ETTs and SF. I was doing the math very quickly there and I said, “Okay, 

in six months that means there’s none of us left.” I didn’t know what the hell I had 

gotten into. 

They were very good about always knowing where the casualty collection 

point was. If there wasn’t one assigned, because a lot of times you’d just jump out 

of the helicopter and go, they would make one. The 18D, the SF medic, was very 

good. He worked with the ones we had assigned as medics in the company also. 

They had bags, not purchased with Title 22 money but the way we looked at it 

was they could be treating me or they could be treating you, so we had it dispersed. 

We were fortunate in that I didn’t lose as many as other people did but when a 

suicide bomber hits your truck right in the middle of town, a motorcycle guy, when 

there are 50 motorcycles around you, you’re going to have casualties. People are 

going to get hurt. 

They have a completely different concept that was just so foreign to me that I 

couldn’t accept it at first. Combat was foreign to me at first too, though but when 

people got hurt or get killed, it was Insha’ Allah to them, and I don’t mean that 

haphazardly. They mean he was a good man and lived a good life but it was just 

his time. God wanted him back and so now he’s back and we don’t mourn for him. 

That’s how they were. They would speak kindly of him but they would move out 

after the third day. 

They’d have him buried by the morning of the third day according to Muslim 

culture. It’s tough, too, when you can’t get a helicopter in. You can have a riot on 

your hands if you don’t get him buried and there were riots. 
196

LL: Over that particular issue? 

JB: Yes, yes. To the point where President Karzai said he would send his 

helicopters to come get the body. 

LL: Were you ever injured in any of these firefights? 

JB: Not from a gunshot. 

LL: How about shrapnel from mines? 

JB: I lost my hearing for a few days. I tore my arm up just from carrying my 

M4 one-handed all the time. The Army’s rail system is very heavy on the front end. 

One of my ETT teammates worked at Galls and if you wanted to pay the $85 for 

the hard plastic stock that’s as strong as steel, you could but it made that end of 

the weapon like a pound or two lighter. I didn’t realize what that meant until I was 

carrying it for probably six months more than I should have. You always had that 

constant pull forward because the front end of your weapon was so much heavier. I 

made a note to myself the other day, thinking, “Man, I haven’t had pain in this arm 

in a month or two.” That’s the only thing. I had an improvised explosive device, 

the IED, go off right next to the truck and I lost my hearing for a little bit but my 

wife even said that my hearing is better now than it was before. 

LL: Knocked something loose? 

JB: It may have. I don’t know why but there were three days when I couldn’t 

hear a thing. 

LL: Did you ever observe any tribal or sectarian divisions within that unit? 

JB: A lot of people say that and I think personally, and I can only speak for my 

company, the uninformed person thinks it’s a tribal or clan or a Tajik-Uzbek-DariPashto issue but to me it’s, “That guy’s an asshole.” Really. 

We’ve been under a lot of pressure for a long time and this one platoon sergeant 

has worn this one squad leader to death, that he’s been training him and making 

him take care of his squad. Well, he finally wants to take a swing at him. 

They handle it. Let me tell you, NCOs handle it there probably like it was 

in the 40s and 50s in the United States. The first sergeant will tell me it’s not my 

concern and to please walk away, they’re taking care of business right now. You 

saw older guys pick on younger guys and you had to mentor that to tell them we’re 

all in this together. You may pick on him because he’s from the rival town next 

door like we would have basketball or football rivals but here we’re all one person. 

If it did occur, it was not prevalent to me, and I ate, slept and shit with them.

I’ll say that the officer politics may have been not necessarily tribal or anything 

but more of political issues. “I like this kid, I don’t like that kid. I want this guy to 

work for me, I don’t want that guy to work for me.” You can blame it on cultural 
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or tribal differences but to me it seemed like they just didn’t have as tight equal 

opportunity standards as we do, so the commanders could get away with firing 

someone if they didn’t like them or if they screwed up. Of course, the disgruntled 

person would say that the commander was doing it because they’re from different 

ethnic groups but let me tell you, all the way from the brigade commander down 

that I worked with, it was business. There wasn’t any inappropriateness going on. 

Now, above brigade, I think there were misappropriations and things of this nature 

which were taken care of while we were there. I saw it. I didn’t know what I was 

looking at but I knew it didn’t look right and the next thing you knew it had been 

taken care of by Kabul. 

LL: When you injured your arm and had to take another position, could you 

describe how that handoff went and what your duties became then? 

JB: I was bringing my company in. 

We had come off an eight-day mission and I was changing locations from 

Zabol Province to Helmand Province. I was physically moving the company which 

takes several days. I was becoming the brigade S4. The then-current brigade S4 

was an experienced infantryman, Ranger School, Pathfinder, Airborne, Air Assault, 

all the tabs and badges, and he didn’t really want to listen to me when I was telling 

him how the men in my company operate. “Yeah, I got it, I got it.” He was more 

interested in clearing his hand receipt being the brigade S4. I have to state that 

being the brigade S4 meant that you were the brigade supply sergeant. It was just 

you. There wasn’t a supply section, a supply NCO, or anything else. It was just you 

because we weren’t manned very well yet. 

They came in, of course, after I left. It’s a big-boy environment and everyone 

knows it when they go there. People asked me wasn’t I getting intelligence dumps 

every day? “Dude, white Corolla, gonna blow up, bad guys in the area. It’s all the 

same. When you roll the gate, game’s on.” You don’t need to know these things, it’s 

the way it is every day. The transition was fine but it was hard leaving the company. 

There were only about three or four companies at the time that were in direct 

contact every day and I was on one of them. The rest of the guys back in Kandahar 

who’d been there five or six months now, that’s all they knew was Kandahar, the 

airfield and Camp Shirzai where the ANA lived but they didn’t realize what we 

were doing out there because we don’t report through them. 

We’re operationally controlled. Everything goes through the SF. So when 

you call back and ask for 26,000 more AK47 rounds, they wonder what the hell 

you need those for. You know what? If you get out of your bunk, you might see 

what’s going on in the rest of the world. I came back and I was going through the 

first stages of my post-stress. You felt guilty because you weren’t still with your 

company. You felt mad that the brigade commander wouldn’t give you because I 
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knew the company was going to go sit for three weeks to give me time to heal. 

So he made me go see the chaplain. I had cussed some people out and probably 

shouldn’t have. That was a transition back to pseudo-realism instead of big-boy 

rules, back to the flagpole. 

LL: What kinds of duties did you have to pick up once you got back to the 

flagpole? 

JB: I was the brigade S4 and we were transitioning to winter operations 

which meant that the MOD said all Afghan units will return to their corps or 

brigade headquarters where they had these nice warm buildings and mess halls, 

everything’s contracted there and everything’s taken care of. The SF said, “No 

way. If you take my ANA, the Taliban is going to overrun our eight-man position 

that night.” So the ANA had to stay out in the field which they weren’t authorized 

by the MOD. The MOD okayed it but then there weren’t the funds or the ability to 

get them winter food and winter fuel, fuel being wood. In these mountains there 

aren’t any trees and the rivers have already risen at this point. This is the end of 

November. I remember having Thanksgiving at Kandahar, so it was right around 

that time frame. So I was trying to get the winter clothing, the food and, believe it 

or not, hay for the horses, all this to the Afghans. 

We can’t go by convoy anymore because the rivers are too high. So we have 

to go by the ring flights which are US Title 10 dollars and you’re trying to put Title 

22 dollars on those aircraft. 

They said they would take it if there was room. Well, they haven’t been there 

in three weeks, of course there isn’t any room. They’re putting the food in for the 

A-teams. It was a chore. At the same time, we’re transitioning to contract food. 

We used to pay for it, $8.32 per soldier per day which is a lot of money in 

Afghanistan, and now it was going to be $2.10. The contractors were little momand-pop shops in the towns. They wanted to know why they would want to do this 

now for one-fourth of the money. “The Taliban is trying to kill me for feeding them 

as it is and now you’re going to take it away?” I was trying to set that up also. It 

was tough because I knew what it was like not to have the right boots for your men, 

still going on missions, and now it’s getting really damn cold at 6,000 feet and up. 

I think we were at 5,500 feet in Kandahar and that’s a low spot.

I had nine FOBs where I was trying to do this all at once. I don’t even know 

the system. I’ve never been a logistician in my life. I don’t know what a 2032, a 

2011, or whatever those forms were. It was difficult for me because I wasn’t smart 

in logistics but I knew what they needed, knew the existing infrastructure, and I 

was trying to get them everything they needed. Of course they’re just burning me 

up on the phone and the radio asking for their food, ammo, and other supplies. So 

I just went over to the SF compound and told the battalion XO, “Steve, man, I’m 
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in trouble. Help me out. I want you to get those guys on your side of the area of 

operations.” because at that point, I wasn’t any longer part of Task Force 31. I was 

back to ANA but I’m trying to support all their needs. I guess it worked out in the 

end. 

LL: How long were you the brigade S4? 

JB: Only about four or five weeks. 

LL: What did you do after that? 

JB: I got a call from Kabul that said the new commanding general who was 

coming in needed an aide-de-camp/executive officer, and Brigadier General John 

Perryman, Task Force Phoenix commanding general, had offered my services. I 

said, “Hell yeah, anything to get out of this S4 job.” So pretty much overnight I 

had someone sign over my hand receipt and I went to Kabul. I went and sat at the 

airfield and found a plane. I rode with the Canadian minister of defense that day. 

LL: The day-to-day operations you did with that Afghan company were 

obviously different than when you were a general’s aide-de-camp. Could you 

describe what those looked like? 

JB: Major General Robert Durbin was the commanding general of Combined 

Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, the CSTC-A. He was Task Force 

Phoenix’s boss. There are two major general positions in Afghanistan, one being 

Major General Benjamin Freakley, 10th Division, the maneuver commander, and 

the other was Major General Durbin who’s the ANA and the Afghan National 

Police [ANP] person. He also mentored the minister of defense and his general 

staff, the minister of interior and his general staff.

So you have not only the American component of the ETTs, you also have 

the international narcotics law enforcement agency that he mentors, part of the 

Department of State. There was an ETT type of thing, too, with the police that 

provide mentor teams and regional training centers all over Afghanistan to train the 

Afghans and police. So he’s resourcing the training, he’s resourcing the leadership 

and he’s resourcing the equipment which meant donor conferences. 

Germany was the lead nation for the police and the United States was lead 

nation for the military. There was a lot of politicking you had to do with NATO 

elements, the International Security Assistance Force or ISAF, which was really 

interesting and also, keep Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry happy at the same 

time. Day to day, I had a 12-man security detachment with a personal security 

officer who was part of the personal security unit out of the Pentagon. He was a 

bodyguard. 

We had four or five uparmored Suburbans that we traveled to Kabul with. 

We had advance teams, communication teams and those types of things that I 
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was responsible for. Since I was the XO and the aide-de-camp, I had to sit in the 

meetings, take notes, and advise the general on issues and then get back and do the 

aide stuff such as planning the trips and all those types of things. 

We also developed the commander’s information group. It was a room full 

of lieutenant colonels that helped me out a whole lot. They got the general his 

information and his strategic plans teams. It was difficult. It was 0600 to midnight 

every day. I was completely much busier working for the general than I was as an 

infantry company mentor but that’s what the general wanted. He wanted someone 

who had been down there, someone with XO experience, I having been that in DC, 

and then we had to deal with Rumsfeld, Army Materiel Command, Capitol Hill, 

and all these types of things which I had done with the National Guard Bureau. I 

hope I gave him a little bit of resource by my service. Also, he wanted someone to 

say what reports on the ground really meant and I would tell him since I had been 

trigger-pulling for five and a half months. It worked out well. My replacement got 

fired the first week I left. 

LL: Can you talk about some of the more interesting meetings you sat in on, 

some of the major issues that were dealt with? 

JB: The reason I’m pausing here is that I’ve got some interesting ones but I 

don’t know if I want them on record about getting the ministers of defense and 

interior to agree to certain events, war plans or policies. 

We don’t necessarily have to make it their idea but you can’t force-feed them. 

It’s their military, their police. They have to have ownership in the issue. So the way 

you would have to, and I don’t know the correct word to use, maybe “massage” the 

situations or the issues. That was difficult. There was definitely a lot of diplomacy 

that the general had to have to make these things happen. Case in point was the 

eradication last year. It was the first time we eradicated a poppy crop. That was a 

tough one. 

LL: What made the whole eradication issue so difficult? 

JB: Timing. It’s the first of March, last week of February, and now they decide 

they want to eradicate the poppy crop early enough to where the farmer has the 

ability to plant another crop and late enough to where, if you cut this poppy crop, 

they’ll have time to grow poppies again but I don’t think we even scratched the issue 

or what the tactical problem was with the poppy crop. If you noticed, this summer 

in Helmand, it got very hot combat-wise. You had two contributing factors, I think. 

The multiple named missions 10th Mountain was doing from Khowst all the way 

through Uruzgan into northern Helmand, just pushing all the Taliban that way. 

We were disgruntling the whole province of Helmand, at the same time taking 

the farmer’s money. Well, we were really not taking his money, he’s already 
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been given the money. He owes, say, 18 kilos of poppy gum and that drug dealer 

doesn’t care where he gets the poppy gum but, “I gave you $2,000 last winter 

and you owe me 18 kilos and if you can’t give me the poppy gum, then I’ll either 

kill you, kill your wife, kill your kids, or you can pick up this gun and help me 

fight the Americans.” So, I don’t think anyone has ever sat down and analyzed all 

those issues together with the eradication, the named missions, and why Helmand 

exploded. 

They say it’s a reemergence of the Taliban but I completely disagree. It was 

not a reemergence, it was a culmination of events. 

LL: Did you ever have to deal with any issues as far as Afghan-Pakistan 

relations? 

JB: You know, I’ve still got a valid Pakistan visa. I don’t think I should discuss 

that, though. 

LL: Classified? 

JB: I think it probably is. 

LL: Okay. When you were mentoring the Afghan company, what were your 

biggest challenges? 

JB: Getting my guys back from leave. Everyone says they go, they escape 

and they never come back. In the facilities we lived in, I could only keep about 

50 Afghans at a time. On the books I had 125. Twenty two of those 125 we knew 

wouldn’t come back until the crops were in because their families depended on 

them for the crops. 

They then would come back for four or five months in the winter. The 

commander and the first sergeant knew exactly who it was and if they had to go 

get them, they’d go get them but how did I employ those other 50 that I didn’t have 

with me physically? I’d send them back to the battalion and that was tough because 

moving troops around the battlespace in an asymmetric, non-contiguous area was 

very difficult. Up until about 16 October, we didn’t have a suicide bomber problem 

and then overnight, man, we were getting hit with suicide bombers all the time. 

Yesterday I talked to a guy who was in my brigade in Afghanistan. I saw him at the 

airport, he was home on leave, and he says they’ve lost five ETTs this year so far 

of the guys who replaced us, from suicide bombers.

It doesn’t make the news here about Afghanistan. You’ve got to realize that 

the infrastructure throughout all of AO South, there are only two roads. One is the 

Ring Road and one is Route 5 that runs to Pakistan. The soldiers, if they did get 

to go home on leave, they would spend three months worth of pay to get back to 

their home because the majority of the soldiers are from the north. Very few are 

joining the military from the south, and they’re in the south. The realism of it, not 
202

the actual distance, you’re in Florida but you have to get to Minnesota and there 

aren’t any buses. There aren’t any set procedures to get anyone back and forth from 

leave, and oh by the way, if you do just jump on a civilian bus and the Taliban stops 

it up the road, you’ve got the close-cut hair, you look like a soldier and you’re not 

going to let people boss you around like that, you might end up getting killed. That 

was tough.

Getting supplies, the supply system was not established. Just turning in your 

supply requirements required someone to get into a vehicle and drive 90 kilometers 

one way with the form and to get those supplies to you when they did come in, if 

they came in, was difficult. So a lot of things came out of operational funds. I’d 

have $20,000 a month in op funds and I’d use them. If you need something, you 

have to get it. You can’t do your mission without it. If the trucks broke, you’d 

needed to fix them. Even the US was having a very hard time with the number of 

soldiers and vehicles we have there to keep the supply system going, even with the 

Chinook helicopter ring routes, armed convoys up and down with tractor trailers. 

Sustainment is a real issue. The physical infrastructure of the country is not there, 

let alone the internal infrastructure of the ANA that is still developing. 

They don’t have it where you can type on the computer that you want 

something, then it ships UPS and you got it overnight. You’re still doing ditto 

paper, that copying paper between the forms, so that when you write it, the top line 

is in English and the bottom line is in Dari and they write right to left and we write 

left to right. It’s very challenging. 

LL: How about your time as aide-de-camp and XO. What were the biggest 

challenges you had to deal with then? 

JB: Every week we would go somewhere different in the country. 

We would take the minister of defense, the minister of interior, and we would 

take 50 people with us from Kabul, to get Kabul out of Kabul. Does that make 

sense? The biggest problem, and I explained this to the general when I got there, 

although I’m sure he already knew it, was that the ANA did not trust the ANP and 

vice versa. Their whole culture is based on walls. Every compound has a wall 

around it and every house has walls around the house. There is a trust issue inside 

that country, just culturally. That’s why the women wear the veil. They don’t want 

you to see what their wife looks like.

When we would go places, we would make the ANA and the ANP come 

together wherever we were at. If we went to a regional area, like Kandahar, Herat, 

Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, these are regional facilities that have RCAGs, corps, 

ANA elements, regional ANP elements, border police elements, customs police, 

and highway police. You have several different organizations that don’t trust each 

other but they all work for the same person. It’s getting all them to come. I could 
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send an email or pick up the phone, call that RCAG commander and tell him that 

General Durbin will be down there on Tuesday and we’d like to do X, Y and Z. 

Please send me an itinerary at your earliest convenience. Well, it’s hard to do that 

with the border police or the ANP commander and we would work through the 

MOD or the MOI, the Minister of Interior, to make those things happen but to 

bring all those guys into a room was a challenge. 

We made the whole country every four weeks which meant doubling up during 

the week which we would do. Then you had to make them start talking to each 

other, not just come to a room at the same time. You had to have them do combined 

missions together and then you saw things starting to change. The army would 

come through and wipe out the Taliban but the ANP wouldn’t come in behind them 

because they were scared and so the Taliban would fill right back in the void. Well, 

now when the army goes through an area, the police come right behind them and 

set up shop. 

They have a special team now that goes there and stays there for weeks to 

eliminate the void, so you don’t have to keep taking the same towns over and over 

again. That was difficult. General Durbin didn’t have a big staff. When I got there, 

the Office of Security Cooperation-Afghanistan, the OSC-A, had 40 people. I think 

it’s supposed to be like 500 by now but that meant there weren’t all these people to 

do these things for the general. So I was doing it and it was difficult. I had a very, 

very, very outstanding interpreter for the general. He was a medical doctor, school 

trained. I even talked to him last night on email. He would help me out immensely 

and he knew how things worked. I don’t know what’s ever going to happen to him 

but it’d be dangerous for him to stay there if we leave anytime soon. 

LL: How much contact did you have with other coalition forces or NATO 

forces? 

JB: As an ETT we had Romanians and Canadians. I did a mission with 

Canadian SF, Australians, several missions with the British Special Air Service, 

the SAS. In Kabul, for the general, of course we had to work with ISAF at the 

time. The Italians were in charge. The French had just left and the Italians came 

in. Our deputy commanding general, the one-star for Major General Durbin, was a 

Canadian general. Eikenberry’s deputy general was a British officer, so there were 

many meetings that we always dealt with. 

Then you have the German ambassador and really all the ambassadors from 

all the countries that were there. The British ambassador, quite often, the American 

ambassador, obviously, and then they have the equivalents of the Bureau of 

International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the INL, so it was always a 

rainbow event. It was tough watching them drink beer or wine and you had to sit 

there and say, “Boy, I wish I could have one of those.” 
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LL: Did you ever have any cultural misunderstandings with them because 

they’re from another country? 

JB: The Romanians were difficult, and the reason I say that is that whenever 

I’m out the gate on a mission, I have tactical control right there. If I want to go 

around this street, around this village or through this village, I make the call. The 

Romanians don’t operate that way. 

If it’s a company, he has to call back and get permission, even though we see 

the IED in the middle of the road and the police won’t let us go down the road, the 

Romanians have to call back to the battalion to get approval to re-route around that 

road by 150 meters. 

LL: Very top-down oriented? 

JB: Yes, very much so. 

They were taking over Zabol Province and I had had very limited dealings 

with them but they were taking over a province I used to live in. I thought, man, 

that’s not going to work very well if they’re that regimented. I don’t know the 

politics behind it or whether it was just rear echelon guys filling that mission and 

that’s why they had such tight controls but everything I saw about them was them 

needing to be told exactly what to do, versus the French wanting to know what the 

end state was. The Australians wanted to know the end state too and they would 

get to that end state. Don’t tell them what to do but if you tell the Romanians an 

end state, they’ll say, okay but we didn’t tell them they had to drive out the gate, 

for example. 

They still have that Soviet mentality, for lack of a better term. 

LL: was there any contact with the media while you there? 

JB: CNN International did a story with us as an ETT, and then of course, as 

an XO, Fox News and National Public Radio. Pentagon press meetings done by 

satellite at the Pentagon and Al Jazeera also come to mind. 

We did a whole big thing in Qatar where we brought in all the regional 

news outlets from the Middle East to interview us. So, there was quite a bit of 

involvement. A lot of radio and telephone interviews. The reporters would come 

from the States, too, and we’d take them with us on our trips. 

LL: Would you say, in general, that your contact with the media was positive? 

JB: Yes, I think so. I have an IO [information operations] background. I was an 

IO in Bosnia. So I don’t necessarily put up the cross and push people away from 

me. The general is a very dynamic person and able to handle any type of situation 

that the press could put him in. With the foreign press you didn’t know what their 

organizations were, so you don’t have a background of where they’re coming from. 
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You have to be careful with that. If this is a very left-wing liberal, down-with-theUSA type organization, you need to know that beforehand and your public affairs 

officer is not always with you or reachable. You have to be careful with those types 

of things. 

LL: What were your biggest professional lessons learned you took away from 

your time in Afghanistan? 

JB: First as an ETT, the stress, the hardship, the sleep and food deprivation. 

I had lost 36 pounds at one point. The physical endurance taught me a lot about 

myself which I’m glad to have done. Like my brigade commander told me when 

he was pulling me out, “How many firefights do you need to be in to know if you 

can handle a firefight?” That really does make sense. 

We were very careful in not keeping people in the job like I was in too long, 

because they really do burn out. One or two guys we didn’t pull ended up getting 

killed. Living with the Afghans day in and day out and doing those types of 

missions, you need to take care of your people and rotate them. For me, it was 

time. It may have been a few weeks earlier than I would have preferred but I’m 

glad of the job I did as an ETT. I’m glad to have had that opportunity. I learned 

more about myself, what I can go through and how many goats I can eat. It was a 

life event. 

Then the professionalism the general demonstrated and taught me. He would 

always take the opportunity when we were moving in the trucks from point A to 

point B to explain to me what just happened. I’d think I understood what happened 

and he’d ask me, “What just happened?” I would tell him and he would show me 

where I was probably lacking, not understanding the full background of the issue 

of what the second and third order events were of whatever was just discussed. 

His reason was, number one, he was always developing younger officers and for 

me personally so I could assist him better in how to handle the former secretary 

of defense but not just him, people like him. I don’t mean just people of power 

but people of certain personalities, debaters versus listeners. Not sympathy but 

empathy for a person’s position. A lot of these people in Afghanistan do a job 

where people try to kill them or their family when they go home at night. You’re 

asking them to do things that don’t just affect them but it affects their four-year-old 

and their six-year-old too.

How the money actually flows from AMC. I know how Iraq is getting their uparmored Humvees and all that because I got to sit in and watch that happen. How 

the Defense Security Cooperation arena works. That was an eye-opener. I didn’t 

realize how it was done but now I have experience and info and will never use it 

again, more than likely. How to deal with our coalition members, understanding 

their country caveats and I don’t mean just that their rules of engagement are 
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different from ours. It’s also that this general officer can’t make this decision 

because you have to realize his Congress or Parliament has to approve certain 

things and how that’s affected by the time-space continuum that that works in. You 

need an answer tomorrow but they’re on recess for three weeks and how you have 

to look outside your little ball to understand all these things of how to keep up with 

current events all over the world at the same time because it does affect wherever 

you’re at.

It’s a lot of intangible experiences that a professional with experiences that I had 

was exposed to and hopefully I absorbed some of them. People sometimes make 

fun of you because you’re an aide-de-camp or an XO but you have to look past 

that. You’re there for two reasons. One, to serve the general who you’re working 

for at the time and, two, to learn from that experience so when you’re a colonel 

or whatever in your future life, you apply these lessons learned. These things you 

can’t read on the CALL [Center for Army Lessons Learned] or somewhere else, 

that you’ll be able to visualize, direct, and assess before it comes to fruition.

I was just very thankful for that opportunity. It’s difficult for me to understand 

exactly what all those were but it was great that I came here to the Command 

and General Staff College, the CGSC, from Afghanistan after all I was exposed 

to. When they talk about what the Department of State should provide and not 

provide, and my US Embassy badge just expired also. Working inside the embassy 

every other day, I know what the Army thinks right looks like and I have an 

understanding of what State’s perception of an idea is and how you have to mold 

them into thinking together to come up with the right solution. There are a lot of 

moving parts. That’s why I never want to be a general officer because they don’t 

sleep. They can’t. 

LL: When did you leave Afghanistan and how did your final handoff go? 

JB: I had deferred CGSC one year to go to Afghanistan. The information I was 

getting in Afghanistan said I had to be here for some P920 class that was like two 

weeks long or something. I didn’t want to go to that but because I was a National 

Guard officer, even though I’d been on active duty for seven years was apparently 

irrelevant. As it turns out, though, I didn’t have to go but it meant I had to leave like 

three weeks before the 4.0s left, so I had to leave by myself. 

Then you have to backwards plan, someone has to be selected to take your position and then you have to train them. 

Then you have to match the general’s schedule with the selection period and 

you may be doing it by interviewing on the top deck of a C-130 as we’re flying 

to X, Y, or Z. It was that crazy. He made the selection and I had 10 days to train. 

There’s a lot to train when you’re talking about the security, the air movements, 

all the MOD and MOI players and then those trips I was telling you about with 
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the 50-plus Afghans we’d take with us. All the relationships you build with all 

the different ambassadors. To civilians or ambassadors, sometimes when they’re 

talking to me, they’re actually talking to the general. Not that I think I’m a general 

or speak for him but they think that you’re his right-hand man. “If I tell you X, 

he’ll know X in the next five minutes”, those types of things. It takes a lot to 

develop those relationships with all those people and my replacement didn’t have 

the opportunity I did because the general was new when I came in, so he didn’t 

know what right looked like. If I was doing something wrong he didn’t know any 

better but he had molded me the way he wanted and my replacement probably 

didn’t meet the general’s expectations. That hurt me because I didn’t do my job 

right for him. I didn’t serve him by fully training the right person for the right job. 

He hasn’t held it against me, though. Once in Kyrgyzstan I had like three days of 

layover and then came straight home. Other than having to go and waste five days 

at a demobilization station with a bunch of people who didn’t care you were there 

or not, I demobilized through Fort Stewart, Georgia, because Camp Shelby was hit 

pretty hard by the hurricane. 

They weren’t set up to receive us and it was broke. I understand that, three 

weeks later, when the main body came through, it was still very rough on them. 

You know, there’s something definitely wrong with our Cold War mentality of our 

mobilization/demobilization process in the National Guard and the reliance or the 

relationship we have with the Reserves for that is astronomical. The general said 

to me, “If you don’t like it, change it. Embrace the situation, get involved in it and 

change it.” Well, they’re at Riley right now, so I’ve been doing some changing. 

LL: Based on your experience in Afghanistan, if you could make a military 

recommendation to the powers that be, what would that be? 

JB: Twelve months is too long for an ETT to live with the Afghan Army. Six 

months is good. There’s a period in there where you get a superman complex. 

We were not trained to the mental state that you had to be in when you arrived 

in Afghanistan for combat operations. It was game-on with big-boy rules, 24/7 

immediately. There isn’t any adjustment period, there isn’t any transition period 

but it’s immediate. A lot of guys got hurt either in the beginning or at the end. There 

needs to be more discussion about killing, about being wounded and about actions 

on objectives. I’m talking less of the physical issues, more the mental preparation. 

If a guy is going to be going to an SF team as soon as he gets on the ground, 

he needs to be mentally prepared before he gets there. I don’t consider myself a 

brainiac or a coward but it was very tough to go from sea level and 80 degrees to 

6,000 or 7,000 feet and 120 degrees, carrying 88 pounds and operating from Day 

One. 
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Then there is the stress of all that, trying to learn that company, trying to 

keep them alive and trying to fight the fight. It was difficult for me. I’m not an 

infantryman, I’m an artilleryman, and I seriously fell back on the things I learned 

when I was going through Ranger indoctrination in college. I didn’t get to go 

to Ranger School. I finished the Ranger Indoctrination Program and then cadets 

couldn’t go to Ranger School anymore but that’s what I fell back on. 

LL: Family separation? 

JB: That’s a big one. That’s when my son was five months old and had just 

started crawling, and when I came home, he’s got all his teeth and running around 

talking. Now mom is in charge. That was difficult to get over. This was my second 

deployment and we have a strong relationship already. We already went through 

that learning curve of her telling me what’s going on or what’s happening. She 

doesn’t expect me to fix it where I’m at, she’s just informing me. 

We didn’t have to have that conversation anymore like we had on our first 

rotation. I can see where it’s more difficult for younger guys and not just younger 

but someone without as strong a relationship. One of my best friends over there, 

before he got to his FOB, he went to one of those SF teams that took him a couple 

weeks. His mail was already there and so were his divorce papers. He ended up 

getting killed while we were there. I burned up a lot of iridium satellite phone 

minutes talking to him at night, trying to get him through that but you know, all 

that I went through, it was more difficult for my wife staying home with the oneyear-old than it was for me, and I really do mean that. Even though I was working 

16 to 18 hours a day and all that, I had people to lean on, people to talk to. She was 

at her mother’s house and no one else understood what she was going through. 

Especially for Guardsmen, we don’t live on post. 

We have family support groups at the armory but they’re not there Monday, 

Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday or Saturday when that wife has just had it with 

those three kids. It’s not a question that she loves those children, it’s a question of 

her not having had a break yet. Every time I find that someone is getting deployed, 

someone I know, I call her up and say my wife’s going somewhere, why doesn’t 

she go with her and I’ll watch the kids. If they could just have a few hours on 

their own every once in awhile it’d be nice but not a lot of families have that. For 

Guardsmen it’s not 12 months, it’s 15 to 18 months. At the six-month mark, they 

haven’t left the country yet. You’re just praying for that start date with a bootson-ground day so you can start the clock. It is a long time, personally, to put these 

families through that. The type of Guard units I’m always around is the maneuvers, 

those types, that this isn’t their first go-around. Units haven’t deployed but the 

men in the units have deployed. I’ve deployed twice for my brigade. At the end 

of September my brigade is finally being deployed. I told the brigade commander, 
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“Sir, I love you but . . . call me if you need me.” I was home prior to this one for 

14 months, home another 14 months, and then went again. I’ll do it if I’m asked 

to but try not to ask me. I have another baby due in June, so that’s a major reason. 

LL: Do you know what your next assignment is going to be? 

JB: Yes. I’m going to be the operations officer for the Battle Command Training 

Center here at Fort Leavenworth. So although we’ve moved three times in three 

years, we get to spend four years in one town, hopefully four years in one town. It’s 

a National Guard simulation center that works for the Battle Command Training 

Program for division and brigade warfighters. 

LL: Is there anything else about your deployment to Afghanistan you’d like to 

add to this interview? 

JB: Being an ETT was one of the greatest, most fulfilling events I’ve had in 

my military career. To take men you don’t share a common culture or language 

with and become a coherent team, to feel their pain, to feel their joy, to be their 

leader, to be part of their successes and their failures, to just watch them grow, it 

was an enlightening experience as a human being. It doesn’t matter if you’re from 

Afghanistan or Pakistan or anywhere else, human beings are human beings and 

bad people are bad people. The things I and my company were going through, they 

hadn’t seen their families in 30 or 40 months. I would try to get them back for a 

baby’s birth. The same basic wants and desires we have, they also have, and I truly 

feel that I have benefited from knowing those people and doing that job. 

LL: Okay, thank you very much. 

211

Major Stephen Boesen

7 July 2008

SO: My name is Captain Shawn O’Brien (SO) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major Stephen Boesen (SB) on his 

experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF. Today’s 

date is 7 July 2008 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, 

if you feel at any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch 

your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information 

and if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply 

say you’re not able to answer. Can you start by giving some background 

information on yourself? 

SB: I’m a graduate of the ROTC program at the University of Northern Iowa. 

I graduated in 1992 but had been commissioned in 1990. I was one of the last of 

the early commissionees from UNI. I went on active duty as an infantry officer in 

1992. I attended the basic course and Ranger School. My first assignment was in 

Korea where I did my rifle platoon leader time and HHC executive officer time. 

Following that assignment, I did two years at the Old Guard where I was a 

rifle platoon leader and a company XO again. I then went to the advanced course 

and then moved out to Fort Carson where I did time as an assistant operations 

officer at the brigade level and then took two commands. My first was a Bradley 

mechanized infantry company in 1-8 Infantry which was part of 3d Brigade, 4th 

Infantry Division. My next command was an HHC. Following that command, I 

decided to leave the Army for a while.

I spent nine months in the civilian sector and then decided that I was only built 

for soldiering so I came back in. Through the Iowa National Guard I found out 

about an AGR [Active Guard Reserve] opportunity back here and got selected for 

that position. While in the AGR program in Iowa, I served as a battalion officer 

in charge/task force S3 for 1-133 Infantry and I deployed to the Multinational 

Force and Observers, the MFO, peacekeeping operation in the Sinai Peninsula in 

Egypt. When I came back from that, I was selected to be the S3 for the 2d Brigade 

Combat Team, 34th ID. I did that job for three years and was then selected to lead 

an infantry embedded training team, the ETT, to deploy to Afghanistan. 

SO: When did you find out that you were going to be assigned to an ETT? 

SB: I found out around July 2006. That’s when the senior leadership of the 

state approached me. There were three ETTs going out. One was a brigade team, 

one was an infantry team and the other was combat support. Initially they wanted 

me to go be the S3 on the brigade team but after some leadership changes occurred 
212

they came back to me about two months later and asked me to lead the infantry 

team. That was around October 2006. 

SO: How much notice were you given before you deployed? 

SB: I probably had about nine months. We had a good idea it was coming 

down the pike and were able to start preparing for it. I was the full-time guy that 

kind of pulled everything together and did all the preparation and coordination to 

get all three teams out the door. 

SO: When and where was your team actually formed? 

SB: The team was formed in Johnston, Iowa. We did three drills prior to being 

mobilized, going on Title 10, and reporting to Fort Riley. 

SO: Did you have to go through a mobilization station or did that happen at 

Fort Riley? 

SB: That happened at Fort Riley. We jumped onto the whole transition team 

training program that the Army had standardized just before we were selected for 

the mission. We fell in on the Chief of Staff of the Army-directed transition team 

training program at Fort Riley. 

SO: Can you talk about some of the pre-deployment training you went through 

at Fort Riley and how you think it went? 

SB: Some of the pre-deployment training at Fort Riley was very good. Most of 

the transition teams are made up of senior guys who have transitioned into being 

more staff guys and haven’t done platoon-level operations or training in a while. 

We got a pretty heavy dose of range fire and crew-served weapons training. All 

of that stuff was very beneficial for a lot of us because most of us hadn’t touched 

a machine gun since we were at least captains, if not lieutenants. That was one of 

the unique things about this transition team mission. For a field grade officer like 

myself, it really gives you a chance to get back in touch with your warrior skills 

that have gotten pretty dull since you were a lieutenant or a captain. We did a lot of 

weapons training and got certified as combat lifesavers. 

We did some scenario training as well but the problem with that was that they 

didn’t have anybody there with any actual experience in Afghanistan. There was 

one sergeant who wasn’t even in my battalion, but in another class, who actually 

had Afghanistan transition team experience. Everyone else had trained in Iraq and 

very few of them had been on transition teams. The problem at Fort Riley was that 

they were grasping at straws a lot when figuring out which scenarios would be the 

most beneficial for us. 

We did do some key leader engagement training which was beneficial to a 

point but some of it wasn’t really necessary. One of the things they told us was not 
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to look at our interpreter when you’re talking to the guy you’re interacting with. 

In reality, that’s not the case in Afghanistan. When I interacted with the kandak

commanders I mentored, it was more like a three-way conversation. I was talking 

to the ‘terp and the ‘terp was talking to the commander. He would talk back directly 

to the ‘terp and the ‘terp would talk directly to me. There wasn’t a lot of face-toface interaction which was something I didn’t learn about until later on after I’d 

been in theater for a while. 

We did a lot of physical fitness training. Some of it was pretty beneficial. I was 

already in pretty good shape when I got there, but the problem was that we were 

training at sea level for operations that would be occurring well above sea level. 

In Afghanistan, I operated at anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, 

so there was quite the acclimation period we had to go through when we got to 

Afghanistan because there is no way to replicate operating in the mountains in the 

hills at Fort Riley. Overall, though, I thought the training was pretty good.

There was quite a bit of stuff that was hokey and not beneficial. In most cases, 

we were being trained for operations in Iraq rather than Afghanistan. In Iraq you 

have to worry about clearing overpasses but in Afghanistan that’s not an issue. 

There are no overpasses. I only saw two paved roads while I was in country. The 

rest of the time we were bumping around on wagon trails throughout the country. 

There’s a big difference between how you operate in Iraq versus how you operate 

in Afghanistan. I have a brother-in-law who did the military transition team, the 

MiTT, mission over there in 2005 and we’ve since compared notes, so that’s why 

I’m familiar with a lot of things Iraqi even though I haven’t been there yet. 

SO: How big was your ETT? 

SB: We started out with 16 people. Each of the three teams I mentioned earlier 

had 16 personnel on them. Ironically, both the infantry and combat support teams 

didn’t come with medics embedded within the team itself. That was a big deal 

because every MiTT goes out the door with a medic. I’m not sure why all of these 

teams aren’t standardized. Why are MiTTs organized differently than ETTs going 

to Afghanistan? That makes no sense to me. 

SO: When you got into theater, did your 16 people stay together or did they 

have to split up because of the location of some of your companies? 

SB: That brings up another problem we have in Afghanistan. Whereas the 

MiTTs pretty much stay together because they’ve trained as a team at Fort Riley, 

we get split to the four winds. My team was spread out all across the 203d Corps, 

otherwise known as Afghan Regional Security Integration Command-East, the 

ARSIC-East. There’s ARSIC-East, ARSIC-North, ARSIC-West, and ARSICSouth. These commands used to be aligned with the corps. The 205th Corps is 

where most of the bad things happen in Afghanistan but the 203d Corps, where I 
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was, was pretty busy as well. When we flew into country, we got spread to the four 

winds. A good chunk of us got sent to Khowst Province which is right along the 

Pakistan border. Some of my guys were sent to Ghazni Province and to Gardez in 

Paktia Province. We were spread all over the 203d Corps but at least we were still 

in the same corps. 

We trained as a team at Fort Riley and then got split up in the name of continuity 

when we got to Afghanistan. Continuity is virtually non-existent in Afghanistan 

though, and that was a big problem we had to deal with. We’d come in and possibly 

get two days of relief in place or RIP with our counterparts. I was lucky to get two 

days but I moved three times to three different jobs while I was there. Each time I 

moved, I had varying degrees of battle handovers before I assumed the reins. 

SO: Were you given flexibility at Fort Riley to incorporate any other training 

you felt was necessary? 

SB: Not really. The only flexibility we had was on the weekends. We did have 

our weekends free but that was the only chance I had to do any extra training and I 

did that fairly frequently, much to the disdain of the guys on my team. 

We sometimes did additional physical training [PT] like road marches. I always 

gave them Sundays off so they had at least one day to refit. My intent going into 

theater was to make sure these guys weren’t burned out before they even started 

getting into the real show. I saw that happen on a previous mobilization and it’s 

sometimes a problem with National Guard leaders. Early on in the mobilization 

cycle, during the Global War on Terrorism, a lot of the leaders felt like they had 

to occupy every second of the day with something to maximize their time. By the 

time they got ready to rotate into theater where they were really getting shot at, 

guys were mentally and physically exhausted. I endeavored not to do that to my 

guys, so I tried to give them as much time as possible while still trying to make 

sure they were prepared for what we believed was the mission over in theater. 

However, that was a problem because early on there wasn’t a lot of information 

coming out of Afghanistan. 

We didn’t know what we needed to be prepared for or what equipment we 

needed above and beyond Army issue equipment. You always need personal 

comfort items and/or other little things to operate effectively. When I got into 

theater, one of the things I did right away was to sign up to be a mentor on the 

Battle Command Knowledge System, the BCKS, web site run by Fort Riley. A lot 

of people would contact me looking for information on being an ETT. I wound 

up mentoring a lot of ETTs before I even came home. I produced a couple of 

documents to help give them a good feel for what was going on. I did a PowerPoint 

slideshow on TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] and lessons learned. I also 

did a document on key personal equipment to purchase as well as a third document 
215

for recommended items for a go-bag or something to grab if you had to dismount 

out of a vehicle very quickly. Those are the things I tried to do to make things 

better for others. 

SO: Can you talk about some of the cultural and language training you received 

at Fort Riley? Did they have some Afghan nationals come in to give you some 

training or were they all contractors? 

SB: It was a mix of both. It was very similar to what they did for the folks 

going to Iraq. You had the program called Tactical Iraqi which I hear is a pretty 

good program but there wasn’t anything like that for the guys going to Afghanistan. 

We did receive 40 hours of Dari training which was more than adequate. The 

problem was that where I operated at, the primary spoken language was Pashtu. 

Essentially the 40 hours of Dari was useless. I had to very quickly try to learn 

Pashtu as I was operating on the ground out there. I learned just enough to impress 

the Afghans. I knew enough to be able to introduce myself and ask people how 

they were doing. 

They were amazed that I knew that much. I should have known by the time 

I got to Fort Riley, the exact location I would be pinpointed to so I could prepare 

myself in terms of learning the language as well as getting a good picture of how 

the enemy fights and what the terrain is like. It would have been beneficial to know 

where I was going so I could find out what units I’d be working with when I arrived 

in theater and possibly even make contact with them before I got there. I didn’t get 

any of that though because I had no idea where I was going until I got there. 

SO: When did you find out where you were going? 

SB: I found out just before I left. Some people didn’t find out until they got 

into theater. It kind of varied. The fact that I was the team chief helped me a little 

bit because there were only so many jobs I could go into. Some of the folks who 

were more lower-ranking could have gone anywhere. For example, we had a signal 

officer who was training up to be a signal mentor because that’s what he thought 

he was going to do on a brigade team. When he got into theater, he got shot out 

to ARSIC-West and ended up mentoring an infantry company commander. To go 

back to your question about culture and language training, we did receive 40 hours 

of Dari and we did get some key leader engagement training from actual Afghan 

nationals who basically role played as ‘terps or key leaders for us but looking back 

on it now, some of the scenarios they put us through were pretty hokey. 

They tried to set up a scenario of key leader engagements where they built on 

each other. You would meet with a kandak commander and then you’d meet with 

the brigade commander and so on but that’s really not how you do things over 

there. I’m not trying to knock Fort Riley. 
216

They did the best they could but unfortunately, doing a 10-day pre-deployment 

site survey and then coming back thinking you’ve got it all figured out just doesn’t 

pass muster when there’s a whole lot more to peeling the onion of Afghanistan. 

The problem with Afghanistan is that Afghanistan is the shaping operation for 

the theater. It’s a secondary effort and not a lot of attention has been paid to it, 

somewhat rightfully so, because they were focused on Iraq. That’s where the 

decisive operation is. However, now we’re seeing that we probably haven’t paid 

as much attention to it as we should have because Afghanistan is starting to blow 

up in our face. 

SO: When did you actually deploy to the Middle East and how did that 

movement go? 

SB: I deployed around 5 May 2007. The actually deployment itself was fairly 

fluid. Fort Riley had a pretty good system to get us to Forbes Field and get us off 

the ground. The biggest hiccup we had occurred when we got into Kuwait. 

We went to Ali Al Salem and the people there wanted to hold us there for 

two weeks because they said we weren’t validated and that we needed to do an 

additional two weeks of training. Well, we got a couple of the colonels on our team 

involved and they pitched a big enough fit that they let us go after about three days. 

They were going to make us go through Camp Buehring and do the kind of 

train-up the guys get before going into Iraq. That can be attributed to the lack 

of coordination between Fort Riley and theater. If they were doing any talking, 

it wasn’t apparent because they were going to have us revalidate on tasks we’d 

already been validated on at Fort Riley and that was supposedly the whole idea of 

going to Fort Riley in the first place. After we got that ironed out, we rolled into 

Kabul International Airport, got one magazine, and hopped on a five-ton truck. 

We rolled from Kabul International Airport to Camp Phoenix where Task 

Force Phoenix is based. They spent about a day and a half in-processing us. The 

biggest problem we had was getting downrange after we finished our in-processing 

at Camp Phoenix. 

We really felt like bastard children. The 82d Airborne wouldn’t allocate a lot 

of aircraft to us so we had to beg, borrow, or steal to get downrange. The bottom 

line was that it took me about two and a half weeks to get to my first station. If 

Afghanistan is a secondary effort, ETTs are about four rungs below that in terms 

of getting support. The support for an embedded trainer, or a combat advisor as 

Colonel Nagl calls us, is absolutely terrible. 

We went through a counterinsurgency academy there. Unfortunately, we were 

the first class to go through and they basically rehashed all of the COIN theory 

and doctrine we got at Fort Riley which was pretty good to begin with. I didn’t get 
217

much out of that except that it gave me a week to interact with Afghans before I 

went out to my assignment. Each class had half Afghans from the Afghan National 

Army, the ANA, or the Afghan National Police, ANP, and half Coalition. 

SO: Were you able to talk to the team you were going to replace once you got 

into theater? 

SB: I was able to talk to the team chief I was replacing about two or three times 

before I arrived in theater. 

We got linked up too late though and he was out doing operations and couldn’t 

get back to me and answer my requests for information. I didn’t even find out who 

he was until about three weeks before I arrived in theater. The whole sponsorship 

and continuity program for transition teams going to Afghanistan is woefully 

inadequate. 

SO: Once you got there, how did your actual RIP/TOA [relief in place/transfer 

of authority] go? 

SB: It was nonexistent. I had about two days which was just about enough time 

to inventory the equipment I was going to have to sign for as a team chief and ask 

a few questions and then away my counterpart went. I’ve been in the active Army 

and from the experiences I’ve had I expected a much better battle handover and 

the time to do it in. When I RIP’d out in May 2008, I had to fight, kick, and scream 

to get nine days with my counterpart. I put together a comprehensive continuity 

program and we had briefings. 

We were still pressed for time to get through all of that and get them validated on 

some things. Fort Riley does the best they can but they can’t teach you everything 

and they can’t replicate it.

For example, in the up-armored Humvee there is the Bose headset. We didn’t 

have that stuff to play around with at Fort Riley, so we didn’t know we had to be 

prepared to use those things when we got over there. It takes a little bit of doing to 

put that stuff on, figure out how it works, and figure out how it’s integrated with 

everything. If you had the 115 and multiband inter/intra team radios, the MBITRs, 

or the 114, you could end up with anything from Harris 117 radios to the ASIPs. 

That might sound trivial but when you get over there and have to figure out how to 

use all that stuff, it becomes really significant. 

We could have worked that all out at Fort Riley before we left. When I out 

processed Fort Riley, it appeared as if they had improved a lot in that arena. I saw 

a lot of frag-five-equipped up-armored Humvees rolling around so I assume they 

had some of that stuff so the newer transition teams would have an opportunity 

to work out those bugs before they got into theater. This was my first deployment 

and I hadn’t seen any of this equipment before. When I first saw the Bose noise 
218

canceling headset, I tried to put the damn thing on wrong. It was a stupid thing that 

I could have figured out at Fort Riley if I’d been given the chance. 

SO: What type of equipment did you actually fall in on when you got to 

Afghanistan? 

SB: There is a somewhat standardized package for each ETT. Generally 

speaking, every ETT falls in on a certain number of .50 cals, 240s and either 

114 or 115 Humvees. Currently, I think they have the MRAP [mine resistant 

ambush protected] vehicles. I actually fielded two MRAPs two weeks before I 

left country for the new team. As far as theater-provided equipment, things aren’t 

too bad provided the team before you has taken good care of it and they haven’t 

been in contact where their stuff got blown up. For example, the first team I took 

over hadn’t serviced their vehicles in almost a year. In peacetime that would be 

unacceptable and in wartime it’s even worse, particularly in Afghanistan where the 

terrain is just brutal on equipment. One of the first things I had to do when I took 

over was to roll those vehicles to a major CJTF–82 forward operating base to get 

services done. 

SO: You were a team chief for three different teams. Why did you have to 

move so many times? 

SB: After I’d been on the first team for two months, they decided to convert the 

ANA kandak to a commando kandak which would then fall under the mentorship 

of the operational detachment alpha, the ODA, team that was working in the area. 

The entire kandak minus about a company went up to Kabul to be trained as a 

commando kandak and that left me without a job. 

They then moved me to the second kandak which caused me to move from 

Khowst Province up to Paktia where I operated for a couple of months. While I 

was there, I was a logistics support team, LST, chief and was basically supporting 

a Polish operational mentor and liaison team or OMLT. The problem is that there’s 

a language barrier and they have a hard time understanding US Army operations. I 

was there as the LST to bridge that gap in terms of keeping an eye on the equipment 

and basically provide Coalition effects like close air support and MEDEVAC. I did 

that job for about three months but there really didn’t need to be a major in that 

slot. I lobbied for and was able to go back to Khowst Province where I was the 

brigade S3 in operations for two months. I thought I was going to finish my tour 

out in that job but about two months into it I got moved over to Ghazni Province 

to take over a team being run by a captain who wasn’t really managing things 

very well. Plus, the commander of that ARSIC wanted me over there to try and 

get the kandak validated. The CSTC-A [Combined Security Transition CommandAfghanistan] commander, a two-star general, tried to implement some kind of 

validation program in Afghanistan. They’d send teams out to “validate” kandaks
219

for independent operations. I was sent over there because of my experience as a 

team chief and because of my experiences throughout the country. I had basically 

served in each province within the 203d Corps. I was sent over there to fix a 

problem. That’s why I moved so much. 

SO: Since so much of what goes on in Afghanistan is relationship-based, did 

you find it hard to move every couple months and have to build new relationships 

with each new commander? 

SB: Yes. Everything we did as a transition team was relationship-driven, 

everything from getting support from your Coalition buddies to getting the host 

nation army or police to accept you. You really have to have some great people 

skills. The one thing I had going for me was that I moved around within the same 

ANA brigade because I had a good reputation, the Afghans I had worked with 

would talk to the guy I was going to, so they already knew my reputation coming 

in and that helped me quite a bit.

When I finally took my third kandak, I had a pretty good comparison model 

for what right looked like for a kandak. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect 

standards-wise and what I shouldn’t expect because I had seen a couple different 

kandaks do things well or not so well. 

SO: What was the ethnic makeup of your units? 

SB: They’ve done a pretty good job of diversifying the kandaks, so there’s a 

mixture of Pashtu, Tajik, and all sorts of different ethnic tribes. Most of them were 

from Pashtu tribes and they primarily spoke Pashtu. My ‘terps had to speak both 

Dari and Pashtu and all of them did. I had to understand some of the differences 

between operating out in some of the bigger urban areas versus areas where things 

were more conservative.

For example, I had a kandak commander who had a mustache. In some of the 

villages in Paktia Province over in what they call the Khowst-Gardez Pass, where 

back in the day the Soviets got whacked really bad, we’d do a lot of operations 

there to look for weapons and bad guys. When we did key leader engagements 

there, they were more liberal in that area and so the commander was okay just 

having a mustache in that area. Facial hair has a lot to say about how well received 

you are in terms of being wise and all that kind of stuff. Well, when we moved into 

the more western part of Paktia to do the same operation, called KHYBER, the 

commander wouldn’t go talk or do key leader engagements with the locals there. 

They were much more conservative and they expected him to have a full beard 

for him to be accepted as a wise elder. He would instead send his religious and 

cultural affairs, the RCA, officer who had a full beard. Those were some of the 

nuances you had to learn in order to operate in eastern Afghanistan. 
220

SO: Were there any problems with the mix of languages? Were the soldiers 

able to understand and follow orders? 

SB: There weren’t too many problems. There are really only two languages 

spoken over there. There’s Dari and Pashtu. 

They did speak some Urdu which is like an Indian or Paki language. Some of 

them know how to speak that but that’s not their primary language. There wasn’t 

any perceived language barrier from my perspective. The kandak commanders 

always had pretty good authority. They were mostly Russian-trained so they were 

very authoritarian and had very centralized control over what they did. Soldiers 

either did what they were supposed to do or they escaped, meaning they went 

AWOL. 

SO: How would you characterize most of the operations you conducted with 

the Afghans? 

SB: I would characterize them as the best of times and the worst of times. In 

the best of times, the operation would go really well and the Afghans would do 

what they were supposed to do. Sometimes they would not. One of the biggest 

problems I had was dealing with our partnered CJTF-82 units. There is a schism 

in the Army right now on how to conduct counterinsurgency COIN operations. 

Some of the units I worked with in the areas I worked in didn’t seem to understand 

COIN or how to apply the foreign internal defense portion of COIN as laid out in 

FM 3-24. 

They would put an Afghan face on what they did but their idea of doing that 

was to not include the leadership in any preparation for the operation. They’d just 

come up to me as the ETT and say, “I want 20 Afghans and three light tactical 

vehicles, the LTVs, at this time to go do this operation.” They did that instead of 

including the leadership in the planning process so they could pick it up and get 

better at it, so some day we can get out of the country and they can run things 

without us there. 

We were told at Fort Riley that the Afghans were far enough along that they 

should be able to pick it up and at least walk with things if not run with them. We 

should just be standing in the back, leading from the rear and supporting them to 

make sure they stay on azimuth and doing what they should be doing.

Of course there are operational security concerns because there are infiltrators 

in the ranks. There are people who are Taliban sympathizers, if not full-blown 

Taliban. How you work around that is to just bring a small group of leaders into 

the mix to go over some of the specifics of the operation so they could at least plan. 

Until we get over that hump, we will not be able to hand things over to the ANA 

and leave. You can ask any ETT that was over there with me and they’ll back me 
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up about this. Towards the tail end of my tour, things did get better and they started 

to let the Afghans take more of the lead, particularly at the corps level. 

They have a much deeper bench up there and they were able to do 24/7 

operations. They were able to oversee the current fight and do some future planning. 

At the kandak and brigade level though, the staffs weren’t deep enough to be able 

to do that. I did work with one infantry maneuver battalion in Ghazni Province that 

was fantastic. The other two maneuver battalions I worked with were not. Most of 

my time was spent fighting our own US forces to get them to do the right thing in 

terms of how to treat the Afghans, build up their confidence, and get them to lead 

the war fight. 

SO: I think it’s getting better now but those smaller combat units just don’t 

want to give up that power. Isn’t that our only way out of there?

SB: That’s exactly right. It’s a power thing and frankly there were some guys 

that were just out there to make a name for themselves and weren’t willing to let 

the Afghans take the lead. 

We are starting to see the Afghans take the lead now, as are the Iraqis when we 

let them but if I give you a job to do but keep doing it for you, eventually you’re 

going to just take a step back and not do anything. If I force you to do your job, 

you’ll start taking ownership of it. I fought that fight just about the whole time in 

country, until I got to Ghazni. I worked with three different kandak commanders 

and all of them understood COIN just as well, if not better, than I did. One Afghan 

colonel taught me a lot more about COIN than I could ever have learned from FM 

3-24. They understand their people and if we just empower them to do their jobs, 

they’ll do them. 

SO: Did you ever run into any incidences of sniping, improvised explosive 

devices, the IEDs, or complex attacks? 

SB: Yes. I didn’t encounter too much sniping. I was part of a complex attack 

and we also encountered indirect fire. 

They mostly hit fixed sites like FOBs, although there was one time during an 

operation when I stayed in a vehicle patrol base too long. We were doing cordon 

and knock operations out of there, they dialed in on us and we had rockets coming 

in to about 100 meters of my position. It’s always a good thing to have a predesignated rally point. We did see a fair amount of contact. As I was getting ready 

to leave, Ghazni Province was pretty hot. 

SO: Did you take any casualties on your team? 

SB: No. 

SO: As team leader, what areas of responsibility consumed most of your time? 
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SB: There were two things. Dealing with Coalition forces required a lot of 

coordination and fighting with them to get the right thing done. The second thing 

that took up a lot of my time was resolving logistical and support problems for the 

Afghans. The logistics system for the ANA and ANP when I left Afghanistan was 

broke. 

We spent a lot of time doing work arounds so we could keep the kandak

operating. We spent a lot of field ordering officer or FOO money to work around 

the system and keep them going. Some of that’s good and some of it’s bad. At some 

point, you have to give them tough love and say, “If it’s not going to come through 

your system, we’re not going to fund it.” You’re in a quandary as a team chief, 

though. You have to empower them with the tools to continue to do operations so 

they feel as if they’re taking ownership of their area of operations. At the same 

time, you have to force them to use their system.

The problem we ran into was that they’d send up a MOD-14, basically the 

equivalent of a DA Form 2062. They’d send it up through their system and then 

crickets would chirp for months. At some point, we had to step in and go purchase 

the items they needed on the local economy. We never violated any FOO regulations 

and we used the money for its intended purpose which was to support the ANA so 

they could continue to operate. 

SO: How was your ETT’s logistical support? 

SB: Our logistical support was terrible through Task Force Phoenix channels. I 

got very good support from the CJTF-82 units. A lot of the times they had most of 

the assets we needed. Task Force Phoenix had folks that were essentially indifferent 

to supporting us downrange.

For example, we got the Generation-III cold weather gear. The task force 

commander, who was a one-star, and the task force sergeant major were wearing 

that stuff around in September 2007. Most of us down in Khowst Province didn’t 

receive any of it until January. There was no coherent logistical supply system for 

getting it pushed out to the folks who needed it most, those who were out on the 

front lines. They basically took care of themselves first and then everybody else 

got it when they got it. 

We only got it in Khowst Province because we sent a patrol up to Bagram and 

brought it back to ourselves. I will characterize the support I got out of Task Force 

Phoenix as very poor and the support we got from CJTF-82 as pretty good but we 

also had an operational control, the OPCON, relationship with CJTF-82 units. 

SO: Were you living on an Afghan FOB or were you collocated with American 

units? 
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SB: We were generally collocated with Americans but most transition teams in 

Afghanistan live on a US-controlled FOB with our own US security force within 

an Afghan FOB. It’s a small goose egg within a larger goose egg. Every one of 

the FOBs I lived on was like that. I was on one FOB where we didn’t have our 

own security force, so we had to rely completely on the Afghans for our force 

protection. One location was pretty austere and we were basically our own support. 

We were collocated with police mentor teams, the PMTs, and since we lived 

on the same FOB as our kandak, we would provide an internal quick reaction force 

for them. If they were out, we’d jump to their rescue if they needed it and vice 

versa. The maneuver unit in that AO, their Quick Reaction QRF was so slow to 

respond, at least 45 minutes to an hour, that it was almost pointless to have them 

in some cases. 

SO: How were your living conditions? 

SB: Our living conditions at two of the three places I was at were pretty 

adequate. We had KBR [Kellogg, Brown, and root contractor] support and we 

lived in B–huts. 

We had access to electricity and morale, welfare, and recreation, the MWR, 

facilities. That wasn’t too bad but that was a FOB that was built on an $85 million 

Afghan FOB. That money bled over and we had pretty good facilities. Another 

FOB I was at was the ARSIC headquarters, so you know they’re going to be in 

pretty good shape. Another area I was at, I was the FOB commander and we had to 

use Title 10 FOO money to keep the FOB running. We basically put bubble gum 

and bailing wire over things to keep it going. 

We had no non-secure internet protocol router, the NIPR, or SIPR [secure 

internet protocol router] at that FOB. All I had was an Afghan local internet 

connection and I used Army Knowledge Online AKO for everything. I had a heck 

of a time getting my chain of command to understand that I didn’t have SIPR and 

that it was a combat patrol to go way down to the provincial reconstruction team 

[PRT] where the maneuver battalion we worked with stayed to go use their SIPR. 

A lot of times they’d send me stuff on SIPR and I’d have to tell them that if it 

wasn’t super hot, it would have to wait until I went and checked my SIPR for that 

week. 

SO: What areas did you see the Afghans improve the most in? 

SB: I moved around quite a bit and I didn’t see a lot of improvement. When 

I came in, they were already at a certain level of competency which I considered 

to be pretty competent. I didn’t see a ton of improvement while I was there, and 

that’s for varying reasons. The transition teams in Afghanistan are not very well 

supported. I spent a lot of energy fighting with Coalition units to get them to do the 
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right thing and get support for myself and the Afghans. If I had to say anything, 

I would say they improved slightly in logistics but not much and they may have 

gotten better since I left.

In my opinion, we’re just spinning our wheels in Afghanistan and until we 

develop a comprehensive national strategy, we’re not going to be successful there. 

You can see in the news right now how the situation has further deteriorated, 

particularly in ARSIC-South. I think that’s why the administration is considering 

sending additional troops in there. Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq in terms of land 

mass size and in population. Throw in the stark terrain you operate in and we 

cannot dominate that terrain. Until we do our own internal surge in Afghanistan, 

that situation will further deteriorate because the enemy can essentially operate 

out of a safe haven in Pakistan, just like Laos and Cambodia during Vietnam. The 

enemy can cause mischief on the Afghan side and then just run away. That’s why 

we’re spinning our wheels over there, in my opinion. 

SO: How were you set up for interpreter support? Were they mostly local 

nationals or contracted civilians? 

SB: All of the interpreters for transition teams in Afghanistan are contracted 

through a company now called Aegis. The company changed its name three times 

while I was there. 

We had anywhere from five to seven interpreters working for us. At one FOB I 

operated at, I had just one ‘terp for a seven-man team. Once again, that goes back 

to the lack of support I’ve spoken about. By the time I left there, they had four 

‘terps but three of them were brand new and right off the street. Those new ‘terps 

had to be trained on the use of weapons and how to drive, so in a pinch those guys 

could possibly save a US soldier’s life. 

SO: When you were going around and doing cordon and knocks, what kind of 

reception did you get from the local nationals? 

SB: We got a great reception for the most part, except from those who were 

Taliban sympathizers. That is one good thing the ANA has going for it. If you 

were to do approval ratings over there, their approval ratings would be through 

the roof. The people over there love their ANA and they have a very high opinion 

of Coalition soldiers. I worked primarily with US soldiers and they had a great 

opinion of us there. I read somewhere about a poll that was done and the approval 

rate was up over 80 percent for both the ANA and US soldiers. I also saw this when 

I sat down with my kandak commander to do key leader engagements with elders. 

They were always happy to see us there and very much wanted to see their 

army rolling through. In a lot of places, because of the stark terrain and where we 

operated, a lot of times the ANA was the only face of the Karzai government they’d 
225

ever see. They’d see the ANA coming through doing a patrol, doing a humanitarian 

assistance drop or a medical civic assistance program, the MEDCAP. 

SO: Did you have any contact with the media while you were deployed? 

SB: Yes. We had three embedded reporters with us during Operation KHYBER 

for about three days. One was from the Christian Science Monitor. One was from 

the New York Times. I’m not sure where the third guy was from. That was the only 

interaction I had with the media, other than some military reporters. 

SO: Was your experience a positive one? 

SB: I think the New York Times reporter had an agenda but other than that the 

interaction was pretty darn good. 

SO: When did your team actually leave Afghanistan and who replaced you? 

SB: My team left Afghanistan in early May 2008. We were replaced by a 

hodgepodge of folks. It was a mixture of National Guard from Maine, Nebraska, 

and New Jersey. It wasn’t a team that had trained together coherently at Fort Riley. 

Those guys didn’t know they were coming to Ghazni Province until I contacted 

the team chief on AKO just before he got into country and said, “Congratulations, 

you’re replacing me.” 

SO: You said you had to fight for your nine-day handoff. Why do you think 

you had to fight to get that and how did the handoff go? 

SB: I had to fight for it because of the way they rotated units out of the AO. 

The ARSIC commander at the time had a very antiquated idea of how everybody 

should rotate out. He wanted everybody to come through the headquarters, outprocess and then go up to Camp Phoenix and out-process. That was about a fourhour trip away from where I was in Ghazni and it was heading southwest from 

where I was. I’d basically have to go back and then come back the way I just 

went to go out-process up at Camp Phoenix to RIP out. That kind of thing caused 

problems and cut into our time.

A lot of our time lines were dictated by Task Force Phoenix and I’m sure they 

were tied to movement out of theater with aircraft. The bottom line is that the Task 

Force Phoenix commander came out and said there had to be 10 days of RIP unless 

you got approval from him to go less than that. He later rescinded that although, 

because they hadn’t properly planned the RIP and were running out of time. 

They had to get us pushed out there, out-processed and on the plane. I had to 

send a formal request to the ARSIC-East commander to go pick up my transition 

team from Camp Phoenix directly without them having to go through the ARSICEast headquarters to out-process. That would have added another five days because 

of the way movement happened in Afghanistan. That would have killed our RIP. To 

his credit, he did approve my request and I went up and got my guys. The problem 
226

was that the RIP time line was slid to the right because of the aircraft running late 

but the biggest factor I saw was that there wasn’t a commitment by the then Task 

Force Phoenix leadership to give people the time they needed.

Once I got my replacement there, things went really well. I had already put 

together a training schedule for the RIP and we executed it. Some of that included 

going to meet the maneuver battalion commander they’d be working for. I’d already 

done a capabilities brief to that battalion commander since the new transition team 

was running late. CJTF-82 had RIP’d out with CJTF-101, so there was a new 

infantry battalion commander there. I gave him a brief and set the stage so that 

new commander didn’t misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of the new 

ETT or the kandak. 

We also got them close air support training from the ODA team that was over, 

because they did that kind of thing more often than we did and were much more 

proficient at it. 

They also had a tactical air control party, the TACP, to train them. I arranged 

for Task Force Paladin which does a lot of the investigations of IED strikes, to do 

some training with them. I gave them my plan from an operational level on what 

we did and didn’t do but those guys could give them a better once-over-the-world 

view. We also did some one-on-one training, took them out to revalidate their 

weapons zeros and do some familiarization fire on the crew-served weapons. 

They were coming from Fort Riley and had only done that one crew-served 

live-fire exercise. I wanted them to feel very comfortable being able to fire crewserved weapons. We also had the new turrets on there, so we wanted them to feel 

comfortable using the joystick for that. 

We did a lot of things to set them up for success. I thought the RIP went very 

well but I guess you’d have to ask the team chief how well it’s playing out now. 

My intent was for them to come in, go through the RIP and after that week be able 

to hit the ground running and be able to competently operate in the AO. Fort Riley 

just doesn’t completely prepare you to operate in Afghanistan. 

SO: Most of the ETTs are coming out of the National Guard and Reserves and 

fall under active duty units. Did you experience any difficulty because of that? 

SB: Yes. There’s still some Active Component/Reserve Component or AC/RC 

discrimination. They can see that I have a funny-looking patch so I must be either 

a Reservist or a Guardsman. The way I got around that was to be competent in my 

job and to know my business. Because I had prior active duty experience, I could 

talk the talk. As a matter of fact, I ran into three or four peers I had worked with 

while on other assignments, so in a lot of ways it was somewhat of a reunion.

I’m kind of ashamed to say that at almost seven years into this war, there’s still 

some of that going on. There are many prior active duty guys that have gone into 
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the Guard that are just as competent as their active duty counterparts. The only 

thing we get fuzzy on are some of the newer systems because we don’t get the 

time to train on them like the active folks do. I had to get spun up on some of the 

ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] systems because I hadn’t seen 

them in many years, or they were new since I’d been on active duty. You just have 

to ask the right questions and make the commitment to be competent in your job. 

SO: I think you’re right. Things are changing now that the active duty folks 

have had more experience with the National Guard and Reserves. 

SB: I won’t sit here and say that the National Guard is just as competent across 

the board as the active Army. You can’t expect that given the level of training time 

they have. However, with all of these deployments we’ve been on, we’ve certainly 

gotten more competent in our wartime mission. Just like in the active Army, there 

are good soldiers and bad soldiers. I did my best to set them up for success. 

SO: What was the biggest professional lesson you learned while you were in 

Afghanistan? 

SB: There were several. It’s very important to build up your relationships as 

much as you can. I learned a long time ago how important good leadership is. For 

example, I got into some dogfights with my chain of command over end-of-tour 

awards, getting awards in a timely manner.

These guys had gone out and done a great service for their country. They had 

done a lot of work to try and improve the capability of the Afghan security forces, 

they had been shot at and had laid their lives on the line for their country, and they 

were leaving country without an end-of-tour award when the award had already 

been submitted 120 days earlier. That’s inexcusable. I’m still today fighting to get 

a combat infantryman’s badge, the CIB, for one of the active duty captains on my 

team for two months and then RIP’d out. I am still working with ARSIC-East to 

get that award because they had some clerical and administrative errors that caused 

them to issue him a combat action badge, the CAB, instead of a CIB. It’s now on 

its fourth resubmit but I’m going to stay on it for as long as it takes because the guy 

earned it and deserves it.

I’m pretty disappointed in some of the senior leadership of the Army. It’s really 

caused my confidence to be shaken in their ability to properly lead. I had some 

senior leadership at the ARSIC level, who were unfortunately National Guard 

officers, who didn’t understand basic Army operations or basic leadership. 

They made some very poor leadership decisions that unnecessarily put 

soldiers’ lives at risk. When I could, I stood up to them and fought it. As a leader, 

you have to be willing to put your career on the line and stand up to take care 

of your subordinates. Those guys work their butts off for you. There are some 
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junior officers and NCOs just doing wonderful work over there that aren’t properly 

being taken care of. My biggest lessons learned were about relationships, basic 

leadership, and making sure you understand basic Army operations. If you’ve got 

those three things down, you’re fit to be a pretty good leader in this organization. 

SO: Looking back over your 21 years of military experience, what assignment 

or person best prepared you for your position as team leader? 

SB: That one person would be Brigadier General Steve Salazar who was my 

battalion commander at Fort Carson. He commanded 1-8 Infantry and was one of 

the best leaders I’ve ever worked for. He’s now in Iraq. I’ve been fortunate to have 

had great leaders all throughout my career. Lieutenant Colonel Vann Smiley, who 

commanded a Stryker battalion, was another great leader I worked for in Korea. 

He will most likely be a brigade commander.

I was blessed in the active Army with some great leaders and great examples 

of how to do the right thing and how to take care of your people. That’s why I had 

such a burning desire to take care of my guys in Afghanistan. Those guys took 

such good care of me as I was coming up. I was commander of General Salazar’s 

Headquarters Company when he was the battalion commander of 1-8 Infantry and 

he taught me so much about leadership, public affairs, and information operations. 

It really shaped my career and how I approach being an officer. I’m about two 

months away from making lieutenant colonel and if I ever get blessed with leading 

again, I will certainly apply the principles he taught me. 

SO: If you could make one or two recommendations to the Army Chief of 

Staff, Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of the Army based on your experiences in 

Afghanistan, what would they be? 

SB: My first recommendation would be to put together an integrated strategy 

in Afghanistan for success, where we know what the end state is. 

We want to stand up the Afghan security forces over there so they can provide 

security both internally and externally for their people. What I saw in Afghanistan 

was a lack of any kind of strategy. Yes, we have great tactical operations going on 

and we’re taking the fight to the bad guys when they rear their ugly heads. The 

problem I had was that as a team chief, I didn’t know where my piece of the pie fit 

into the overall picture. Why? It’s because nobody at the two-star level ever came 

out and said, “Okay, guys. Here are the benchmarks. By this quarter, this is what 

I’m looking to be achieved.” I didn’t see any evidence of that and I was looking for 

it while I was there. If it does exist, it’s not being effectively communicated down 

to the field grade level and we’re supposed to be the guys executing the grand plan 

at the transition team level. I didn’t see it. I would also recommend that they do a 

better job of placing personnel in Afghanistan. 
229

We’re just throwing people in there. The joke in Afghanistan is that if you have 

a pulse, you’re good enough to be on a transition team. That’s the wrong answer. 

We need to have our best and brightest folks over there. The chief is starting to 

recognize this and you’re now getting key and developmental, the KD, credit for 

being a team chief on either a MiTT or an ETT. The chief is recognizing how 

important the job is but the problem remains that we’re just throwing folks in there 

left and right without looking at their experience levels. I had an infantry officer 

who was leading a combat service support kandak mentoring team. He was a great 

guy but he was an infantry guy, not a logistician. 

We are not doing a good job of putting people in the right jobs. On top of all 

that, continuity has got to get fixed in Afghanistan. We are not allowing enough 

time for the outgoing teams to mentor the incoming teams and get them spun up. 

We’re getting by but if we really want these guys to hit the ground running, 

keep the projects we have and make ground quickly, then we have to have better 

battle handovers. When we cycle in and only have very little battle handovers, you 

end up sitting there for two months with your eyes closed trying to feel your way 

around, figuring out what it is you should be doing. You’re really relying on the 

guy who has already been there for a year to sit you down and walk you through 

things.

I tried to be part of the solution by putting together a fairly comprehensive plan 

to get those guys as spun up as I could in nine days. If I’d had more time, I would 

have done more with them. Like I said earlier, I didn’t see the ANA progress much 

while I was there but that wasn’t because I wasn’t working hard or my guys weren’t 

working hard. It was because we don’t have the proper support or a strategy. It’s 

hard for me at the kandak level to teach logistics to them when the system all 

the way up to the Ministry of Defense is broken. The kandak logistics officer or 

S4, stops having any confidence in his logistical system after he’s submitted that 

MOD-14 form for the tenth time. He’s just going to blow you off because he knows 

he’s just wasting his time. That’s the stuff going on over there right now but I can’t 

fix that as a major. I need a two-star and all the colonels that are running around 

over there to get engaged and fix the problem. 

SO: Is there anything else you’d like to add to this interview? 

SB: I had a lot of high hopes going into Afghanistan on a transition team. I 

felt that with my background as an operations guy, I could go in and have a big 

impact and do good. Unfortunately, I felt kind of bitter leaving country and that 

my mission wasn’t accomplished because the support systems weren’t in place to 

make me successful. I spent too much time fighting with our Coalition partners on 

what our strategy was going to be to improve the Afghan security forces, except for 

that one battalion I worked with in Ghazni and I spent too much time trying to beg, 
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borrow, and steal to keep my team running. Until we fix those systemic problems, 

we’re going to be in Afghanistan for a long time. I’m sad to say that my children 

will probably be doing the same mission I did when they’re old enough, if we 

don’t get our act together. I was very proud to serve over there and do my mission. 

I was proud to serve with some wonderful Americans and receive the support of 

the American people. 

We got outstanding support from the average John Q. Citizen back home who 

really believed in our mission. I try to convey that as I go around and speak to 

local schools and so forth. I try to convey what the mission is over there in order 

to keep public support strong. At some point, though, our citizenry is going to say, 

“We’ve spent enough blood and treasure over there. It’s time to pull out.” It may 

be too soon. That’s why we really have to get our act together. We don’t have an 

infinite amount of time over there. At some point, we’re going to get pulled out so 

we better get our stuff done now. 

SO: Thank you for your time, sir.
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Major John Clark (United Kingdom)

27 February 2007

GK: My name is Major Glenn King (GK) of the New Zealand Army 

and I’m a student at the Command and General Staff College, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. Today I’m interviewing Major John Clark (JC) 

of the British Army, also a CGSC student, in support of the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project for the Combat Studies Institute reference 

his experiences in Afghanistan in early 2006. Today’s date is 27 February 

2007 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at 

any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch your response in 

terms that avoid revealing any classified information and if classification 

requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you’re not able 

to answer. Can you give me some information on where you’re from and 

what you did in the military before you were assigned to Afghanistan? 

JC: I’m a Royal Engineer. At the time I deployed to Afghanistan I was actually 

a squadron commander in 23 Engineer Regiment, the Air Assault, in support of 16 

Air Assault Brigade, the UK. Prior to that, I’d been the executive officer for the 

same unit. Before that, I’d held a variety of posts as an aide-de-camp and other 

engineer posts, mostly in light parachute roles but I also had some experience 

of armored reconnaissance. During my previous service I deployed to Northern 

Ireland, Cyprus, and Afghanistan as part of the UK Operation FINGAL in early 

2002, and to Iraq as part of the initial Operation IRAQI FREEDOM [OIF] in 2003. 

GK: How were you alerted for your mission in Afghanistan and how did you 

and your unit prepare for this mission? 

JC: At the time NATO was expanding and British forces, under a Canadian 

headquarters, were moving into southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 

particular. That mission was given to 16 Air Assault Brigade which I was part of 

and the regiment and my squadron were warned to deploy for operations. In the 

event, it was actually a far smaller grouping that would deploy on that operation. 

In the initial planning stages, in the exercising and training for the operation, I was 

busy preparing my squadron for deployment.

Closer to the time of our deployment, we found out we would also be providing 

the US equivalent of an embedded training team, the ETT. The British form is 

called an operational mentor and liaison team, the OMLT. I was earmarked to be 

the advisor to the infantry kandak, the battalion equivalent, operating under the 

205th Corps, headquartered in Kandahar, in Helmand Province.

I immediately started working on some force generation and procedural issues 

for that. About a month before we deployed, I found out that I was subsequently 

going to attend the US CGSC at Fort Leavenworth in a matter of a few months and 
232

because of that my role was changed again and I became the commander of the 

Afghan National Army Training Team, the ANATT, which was designed to mentor 

the leadership at the noncommissioned officer or NCO school at the KMTC [Kabul 

Military Training Center].

As far as actually preparing my team, I took on a disparate group of individuals 

from across the Army and there were significant force generation issues in trying 

to make sure I had the right people in the right place at the right time. My unit was 

to provide only six of the 22-man team. There were significant issues in generating 

the other people who were pulled from across the Army, getting them into one 

place, training them, and then deploying on the operation. 

GK: In terms of the Afghan training team, can you describe what you 

understood your mission to be? Also, what kind of pre-deployment training did 

you conduct in the UK before you went into theater? 

JC: The mission was very much to mentor rather than train the leadership of the 

NCO school. In essence there was a formed structure within the ANATT or rather 

the NCO school within the KMTC. The team I took out there effectively mirrored 

that structure in terms of rank. At every level we were mentoring our respective 

counterparts within the ANA. In my case, I was mentoring the commanding officer 

of the training team. 

We were there very much as advisors and counselors rather than as trainers 

specifically. It became very clear as soon as we got there that our role should be 

much more mentoring rather than training to enable continuity and also to ensure 

that they could cope when we left. That was the mission as we understood it and it 

expanded slightly as we got into theater.

In terms of the pre-deployment training, historically the mission had been 

conducted by a battalion that had been based in Kabul and they provided several 

functions, among which was the team that ran the training school. I was the first 

person to take a team out there without the battalion support that my predecessors 

had enjoyed. In terms of pre-deployment training, I relied very much on other 

elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade that were deploying to the south of Afghanistan 

with the OMLT. Also in terms of the specific training, I was fortunate enough to go 

out on a reconnaissance to Kabul and was able to speak to the various personalities 

on the team at the time and see what they did.

When I came back, we spent about three weeks preparing as a team. On the 

surface it was sufficient time to complete all of our mandatory requirements for 

deployment on operations and enough time for me to impart the way in which I 

wanted things to be run. I was also able to do some work-up training in terms of 

preparing the team to mentor our counterparts in the ANA. It was tight, though. 

For a group of people who have never met each other before, three weeks is a very 

short time to prepare for a deployment of this type. 
233

GK: What was the structure of your team? Who was your second in command? 

JC: Ironically the generation of the second in command was probably the most 

problematic job I had and it was crucial because I knew I was only going to be out 

there for a few months. I knew I would be headed to Fort Leavenworth and so I 

was quite keen to get somebody in there who was strong enough to run the team in 

the likely event that there would be a period of absence between my leaving and 

the new commander coming in. In essence, I had a second in command who was 

another major and who ended up taking on the team when I left. I had a smattering 

of warrant officers and senior NCOs, a sergeant major, and a quartermaster 

sergeant. I had four warrant officers second class. I had several staff sergeants and 

sergeants. The lowest rank I had was a full corporal. 

They were all very capable trainers in their own right and a lot of them came 

from training backgrounds and were selected for the job for this reason. Despite 

the fact that it was a disparate team, there was a lot of experience from across the 

field army. I had infantry, signals, engineers, logistics, and artillery officers and 

NCOs and it was a good eclectic bunch of people who offered a variety of different 

perspectives. The model we were using was an infantry one so you’d expect it to 

be very much an infantry game but the presence of an all-arms grouping actually 

added a different perspective. 

GK: You mentioned you only had three weeks to do your training. Was there 

anything you felt could have been a risk to your mission and that you would have 

to do on the job to try to catch up? 

JC: On the one hand in terms of force protection, we’d completed our mandatory 

training. I had identified significant force protection issues in theater because 

we had to travel from where we lived to where we worked without designated 

protection. There was quite a high-threat environment at this time in Kabul so we 

had to be able to defend ourselves on the move and when we went on exercises to 

training areas, there were quite a lot of attacks on those training areas. 

We had to be sufficiently trained and capable of defending ourselves but I was 

confident in the skills of the guys. They were all very experienced. If we could 

have done more that would have been great but I was very confident in terms of 

their abilities. In terms of training for the job we were going to do, it was limited 

in the fact that we weren’t infantry in the main and that we couldn’t do too much 

training but I think that actually helped us. If we had had too much time to do 

work-up training and work on our drills and skills, we’d have been at much more 

risk of trying to train the Afghans rather than sitting back in a monitoring role.

So the different knowledge we had actually gave us an advantage because 

we had to sit back and learn from the instructors who were there and also from 

the system that was in place. Our job in the whole build up was made easier by 
234

the fact that this had been a British responsibility for several years. It was a wellestablished system and the whole thing worked. So, I would have liked to have 

done more training but I was confident we had done at least the minimum to be 

safe. I was also cognizant of the fact that it would probably be to our advantage 

in the end. One of the greatest challenges was to try to reign in my very proactive 

NCOs and officers. 

GK: Can you talk about who you were under in terms of command and control? 

What was the command dynamic? 

JC: I was in a unique situation. The team sat in the US chain of command 

as part of the training and advisory group in Task Force Phoenix but in terms of 

administrative support it was directly linked in to the rest of the British forces in 

Kabul. There were British forces in Kabul at the time but they weren’t my direct 

bosses. It was thus quite a different dynamic, certainly in terms of the logistics 

aspects of getting out of theater and parent unit responsibility. 

We were there at the same time that the new Allied Rapid Reaction Corps 

headquarters was taking over and they were the people who became primarily 

responsible for our administration. That was on the British side. 

We were relatively on our own which certainly has its benefits in terms of 

freedom of action but in terms of logistics it didn’t cause us any problems even 

though it could have if we hadn’t had the right balance of personalities. From 

where we sat, it was a US chain of command under Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan, the CFC–A, at the time and then down through Task Force Phoenix

where we were assigned for training.

On the other hand, the actual training and advisory group was based at KMTC 

and that was the organization in which we sat alongside my counterparts from 

the US for the basic and advanced individual training or AIT. The French were 

conducting officer training as well as the US Army and while I was out there the 

Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK, also came over to do some officer training. 

The Canadians had responsibility for combined training and the Romanians and 

Mongolians had the lead for reconnaissance and field artillery respectively. 

GK: You mentioned that your team was really responsible for senior NCO 

training, can you talk about how that actually occurred on the ground in terms of 

the day-to-day running of your program? 

JC: We ran three courses: a junior NCO course to train lance corporals and 

up, a senior sergeant course, and a company quartermaster sergeant/regimental 

sergeant major-level course. 

We spanned the chain of NCO courses. It was a mixture of classroom work and 

field craft out of the back of the camp. It was a combination of the two of those and 
235

a certain amount of written work, bearing in mind the low rate of literacy and more 

than that, the fact that they spoke many different languages. Trying to standardize 

that was very much an issue. One of the main concerns we had was that KMTC 

was the only place the NCO courses were run in Afghanistan, unlike the US and 

the British Armies where we tend to run a lot of courses internally within our 

battalions and brigades.

An idea that was pioneered by my predecessor and that my team took to a 

new level was the concept of a mobile training team, the MTT. While I was there 

I led a team out to Herat in the east of Afghanistan. There were subsequent trips 

planned to the various brigades throughout the country because the ANA brigade 

commanders were very reluctant to release their quality men to go to Kabul when 

there was no guarantee that they’d get them back. Also, the soldiers themselves 

were very reluctant to travel to the capital because of security concerns. 

GK: You mentioned the different students turning up all literate but speaking 

different languages. I assume you had some interpreter support? 

JC: Yes. We had a pool of about 20 interpreters. There was almost one per 

man on our team. In many ways they provided a lot of the continuity for the NCO 

School because many of them had been working there for a while. Often they 

would be out demonstrating AK47 drills on the range when the particular ANA 

instructor didn’t seem capable of doing it. 

They also translated the manuals we were developing into Dari or Pashto. They 

were also very good culturally. They had studied English and a few had traveled 

outside of Afghanistan. They were a very good bridge between the cultures. 

GK: How was the relationship between your team and the interpreters, living 

and working so closely together? Did you form a tight-knit group? 

JC: Yes. We spent a lot of time traveling around together, so not only do you 

get the military aspects of it and the knowledge they bring from having served 

there for a long time but also the cultural aspects. 

They were particularly helpful in pointing out the rights and wrongs, the whys 

and wherefores. Despite the fact that we had a pool, the guys on the team would 

generally pick one particular guy who they were comfortable with to come out 

with them and they wound up building very strong relationships. 

GK: You mentioned the MiTT going to Herat. Can you talk about how that 

was facilitated and how it tied in with the Afghan brigade as well as the Coalition 

forces operating in that area? 

JC: It was really facilitated by the US ETT that was in Herat. They had a 

liaison officer in Kabul with whom we would meet. They really were the facilitators 

and were keen to get it going for obvious reasons. The ANA brigade was hugely 

enthusiastic about us coming and no door was closed to us. 
236

We were very well received. We did a detailed reconnaissance over there. Like 

I said before, the ANA commander was very welcoming. The US commander of 

the ETT was also extremely helpful in facilitating it. The main issue we had was 

with training areas. Lots of new ANA barracks were built on old sites and the 

outlying areas were littered with unexploded ordnance from various campaigns. 

It was very difficult to find clear training areas particularly for live firing which is 

what we wanted to build the troops up to by the end. 

GK: When you went out as an MiTT, did you go with an already defined set 

of competencies that you were going to train to or did you arrive, assess what was 

lacking, and then design the training appropriately? 

JC: In essence we endeavored to take the same courses we were running 

in Kabul and run them wherever the team deployed to. For example when the 

MiTT deployed to Herat, where we normally would have been running two junior 

NCO courses in Kabul, we programmed just to run one and all the manpower and 

resources that would have gone to the other course was lifted directly to Herat to 

run the training over there. 

GK: Let’s talk about training Afghan soldiers. They have a different culture 

than the US Army or British Army. What did you find when you had to deal with the 

indigenous military in terms of adapting your training regime from a Westernized 

approach to an appropriate approach for the theater? 

JC: I think there are two issues to touch on. The first thing is that we were part 

of a US team and within that coalition there were French, Canadians, Romanians, 

Mongolians, and British. As part of this team we had internal issues in terms of 

making sure that what we were teaching was consistent throughout all the different 

branches of training. Things had mainly been set up with US doctrine since they 

had the lead and were doing the brunt of the training but nonetheless it clearly had 

to be adapted to Afghan culture and techniques.

One member of my team was tasked specifically with making sure that what 

we were teaching was consistent with everybody else. There was a Training and 

Doctrine Command [TRADOC] branch set up within the training and advisory 

group headquarters to ensure just that. 

We wanted to ensure that somebody wouldn’t go through basic training or 

advanced training and then come to us and we’d be teaching something completely 

different that they’d have to relearn. Similarly, we didn’t want the officers learning 

tactics that their soldiers and NCOs had no idea about.

The second major problem we had to overcome was the fact that historically 

within the ANA the NCO corps had been very weak in contrast to all the Western 

armies, where our NCO corps are generally very strong and often are given 
237

responsibility for low-level training and are not afraid to take a lead, in many ways 

mentoring their junior officers. In Afghanistan, though, there was an issue in the 

1970s when the NCOs lost confidence in their officers and there was what can be 

regarded as a coup, albeit a failed one. From that moment on, there was something 

of a purge and NCOs were generally sidelined. Those who were kept in for show’s 

sake were really just the tea boys for the officers. We had to overcome that. 

We had to culturally convince the officers that the NCOs were worth having, 

that they had a valuable role to play and that they could actually help them with a 

lot of their work. They weren’t just there to carry their weapons or make their tea. 

We also had to convince the NCOs who had been downtrodden for so long 

to stand up and take responsibility for themselves and perform the functions that 

NCOs perform in our armies. In addition, digging right down into the culture you 

find various differences. There was a problem both in designing the training and 

in terms of the way we mentored. One of the most difficult things as a commander 

was to force my team to stand back and not get too involved in the training. I 

couldn’t let them upstage the ANA instructors by telling them that something 

wasn’t correct, because that was a big issue in terms of face saving. In general 

terms, the way they conduct training is very different from ours. 

We tend to be proactive in Western militaries and if we see something that isn’t 

right our first instinct is to go fix it ourselves. That’s what I geared a lot of our predeployment training towards - teaching our guys to hold off and let the Afghans do 

it. Talk to them quietly in an area away from the troops but don’t get involved in 

the specifics of what they’re doing because it’s their business and when we’re gone 

they’re going to need to get on with it.

In terms of what we were teaching them, they were using different weapons 

systems from what we use so that took a bit of training. Their small group tactics 

were different as well. All of that said, I think we were all very impressed by their 

enthusiasm, guile, and resourcefulness. A lot of the individual drills we wouldn’t 

recognize as being classically suited to a massed army but they were certainly 

very effective in their own way. A lot of the soldiers we were training were former 

mujahedeen who were very used to fighting using fairly unconventional methods. 

It was just a case of taking the great spirit they had and ensuring some sort of unity 

demanded by the design for the ANA. 

GK: The makeup of the ANA is diverse in terms of the tribal backgrounds. 

How did that work? 

JC: This was one of the first times that all these people really came together in 

this kind of group. Regardless of the political issues of where these people were 

deployed, it was still often difficult because bear in mind that despite tribal or 

familial affiliations, there might still be people within the same tribe or family 
238

who don’t get along anyway. Socially the common groups used to hang together in 

the barracks or when they went home since they were traveling to the same areas 

but at work they generally tended to mix very well and there wasn’t a particular issue. The main problem was one of language whereby people just couldn’t 

communicate with each other. 

GK: You mentioned that a large part of your job was mentoring the battalion 

commander. Can you talk about that role and your relationship with him? 

JC: The colonel I was mentoring was fairly new in the job and his predecessor 

had just been sacked a few weeks before I arrived in theater because of corruption. 

He had been trying to steal some cooking oil from the chow hall and had been 

caught by the camp commandant. Thievery at lower levels was commonplace and 

there were several instances of soldiers taking ammunition from ranges and selling 

it at markets downtown. When his predecessor had been sacked for a very similar 

offense, the new commander had some challenges in establishing his credibility 

throughout the school. He was a man of great integrity, though. He knew what he 

wanted to do and how he was going to get there. A lot of my business with him was 

conducted over a cup of chai in his office which is where we generally spent most 

of our time. Unlike many of the other commanders over there, he wanted to go out 

and watch the training and not just hang out in his office.

The main difference between the ANA and Western armies is the formalization 

and practice of doctrine and discipline. While the concepts were there, the procedures 

were not necessarily laid out. In terms of the way he was communicating with his 

subordinates, it took a bit longer than usual because it wasn’t instinctive for them 

to know how he expected them to behave. I was very impressed by his presence, 

his enthusiasm, and his understanding of what we were trying to achieve. He was 

very keen that it was his show and that we were there to help him out. That was just 

perfect because that’s exactly what we wanted. 

In the lower levels of command there were instances where a lot of instructors 

would try to turn lessons over to British instructors because they knew it would be 

easier for them and they wouldn’t have to do it but the battalion commander was 

very keen on recognizing his responsibility and taking on his role. He was certainly 

one of the few people who would challenge up the ANA chain of command. There 

was a general reluctance throughout the ANA to do that because of authoritarian 

reasons. 

GK: As far as working with the commander, did you go over there and try to 

add extra tools to his kit bag or did you just take what he had and try to refine them? 

JC: Given that I was only there for a short period of time, I only did the latter. 

I tried to refine the processes he had in place. Having said that, though, I did do 

quite a bit of work on the curriculum at the lower levels to make sure the NCOs 
239

were learning the right stuff. As far as the commander was concerned, it was more 

a case of honing his management skills of the school. I would point out what was 

deemed acceptable or not in our army and not that it had to be applicable to him 

but it was a guideline as to what he should and shouldn’t expect. In many ways I 

was a sounding board so he could ask questions. He was a lieutenant colonel and 

had been in the army for 30 years so he knew what he was talking about. I did 

what I could, bearing in mind that we were introducing his people and his school 

to methods and techniques they hadn’t heard of before. 

GK: When the Afghan soldiers turned up, did they come equipped with their 

own personal weapons and uniforms or did they have to be provided by your 

training team? 

JC: They were provided for from a central issuing facility which was a US-led 

function within the KMTC. That was another huge drain on time and resources. 

Accountability was not something that was particularly inherent in Afghan forces 

historically. 

They took what they could get away with. There were a lot of instances of 

people being issued a whole roster of kit, “losing” it the following week and selling 

it on the market. That was a big issue and a big headache for the US quartermasters 

who were running the facility. It also highlighted another issue, because when 

an instance like that happened they would often come to us and ask us to get 

them another kit. We’d respond by telling them to speak to their own Afghan 

quartermaster and make sure he could get them the kit because it wasn’t our job. 

I was very keen to press the fact to them that we weren’t there to do that sort of 

thing. There were instances where there were financial things or the allocation of 

pistols which were generally beyond the pay scale of the other members of the 

team that we occasionally got involved with but in general terms it was critical that 

they learned to go through their own chain of command. 

GK: What was the duration, for example, of the senior sergeant course versus 

the junior NCO course? Were they roughly the same? 

JC: The courses were rewritten significantly, mostly by my predecessor, and 

there were two New Zealand senior NCOs on the team who provided a great 

measure of continuity in this area. 

They offset the rotations of the British which was excellent. One of them ran 

the standardization of doctrine and the other ran the senior sergeant course. 

They brought a lot of experience with them. In essence, the courses were 

standardized to all be six weeks in length during the time I was there. 

GK: I presume that after leaving the course a number of students went back to 

their units and then took part in combat operations in Afghanistan. Did you receive 
240

any feedback from those Afghan units or any validation that you were actually 

teaching them good stuff and that they were putting it to good use? 

JC: I didn’t get any feedback but it was something I was keen to do. There was 

a system I had put in place but had yet to receive any of the fruits from because I 

was only out there for a short time. 

We were in a lucky position because, having come from 16 Brigade which 

was in the south with the ANA 205th Corps, we trained up all the NCOs who were 

going to work down in Kandahar. The OMLT that would be working with the 

soldiers from 205th Corps in Helmand Province came to KMTC for the last couple 

of weeks and saw them complete their training. They were also able to see the 

various strengths and weaknesses of the commanders, so they would know what 

they were dealing with when they went to the field. 

We had systems in place so when they got to southern Afghanistan they would 

be able to report back to us on the quality of training. I left theater about a week 

after they deployed down south although and so I did not receive any detailed 

feedback. In general terms I know that they were involved in combat operations a 

couple weeks after leaving KMTC and they performed very well. 

GK: Did you share a common lessons learned summary with other Coalition 

forces conducting NCO training that you could use to improve your training? 

JC: Yes. I used to send my team out to watch other training, particularly 

when they were following up the NCO training and the officer training. When the 

officers, senior NCOs and junior NCOs came out of their training they would do a 

combined arms training exercise under the Canadians. I was quite keen to get my 

team out to see all these things. I wanted my team to take lessons back so we could 

look at ways to improve our training. As far as the overall aspects went, it was very 

much a US TRADOC-led activity but we wanted our own eyes on what was going 

on as well. Apart from the nations doing junior officer and NCO training, there 

were other countries such as the Mongolians in this case who were teaching field 

artillery which wasn’t necessarily relevant to what we were doing. 

GK: What benefits did you see your team getting from working with the 

Afghans? 

JC: I think in the contemporary operating environment that we’re in today, 

whereby we’re often going into alien cultures and regions, the importance of 

understanding that there’s more than one way of doing particular things is a good 

lesson to learn in life. In terms of the military, too, it’s good to broaden horizons. 

As NCOs and officers we’re used to finding a problem and dealing with it in 

the way we’re used to and coming up with a very good solution but actually that’s 

not always the best way to do things. As Lawrence of Arabia once said, “better 
241

[they] do it tolerably well than that you do it perfectly. It is their war and you are to 

help them, not to win it for them.” I think the guys learned patience, they learned 

about the Afghan culture and how it works and that there are other ways of doing 

things and that in this particular environment it’s important in the long term to 

stand back and let the Afghans deal with things. 

GK: Was your team living with the Afghans or were you staying in another 

location? 

JC: We were staying in another location and traveling in every day. When 

we deployed to the field, we’d go with them but between courses we’d be living 

separately in a different barracks. 

GK: What challenges did that present for your team? Being in Kabul there 

were obviously threats all around you. What did your team do to negate those 

threats? 

JC: The main force protection issue we had was in terms of getting back and 

forth to work down the Jalalabad Road. That was a particularly treacherous route 

and it has most of the military installations in Kabul on it. So it was a high-threat 

area. 

We had to do a lot of defensive driving. The other issue was that we had to 

have some way to identify who the quick reaction forces were that were available 

to come and help us if we ever were in trouble. 

We needed to know what radio frequency they were on and that was a very 

important aspect of our travels. We mitigated that with comprehensive briefings in 

the evenings and before people went out. 

GK: What advice would you offer an officer who is about to deploy to do a 

mission similar to yours? 

JC: Always bear in mind the reason for you being there. In the short term 

it’s very easy and innate as Western officers to go in, sort things out, put our own 

procedures in place that we’re comfortable with and get out in good order. Looking 

at the long term, though, it’s essential that you train the trainers rather than train 

the soldiers or recruits coming through. I could offer advice as to what I thought 

was or wasn’t right but I had to always remember that I couldn’t do it for them. It 

was never going to be perfect and it probably won’t ever be the way I’d envisioned 

it but it was a way that they were comfortable with and when we’re gone they 

can stick with. I was only there for a few months but normally it is a six-month 

rotation for the British and having that kind of continuity to get them through is 

another very important point. I would advise anybody going to do this job that 

the value of the personal relationship is very strong in the Afghan culture. It’s 

also just as important that, as a nation mentoring the school, the ideas of one team 
242

don’t deviate greatly from the next. You’re going to have to accept imperfections 

from the systems that the team which has gone before you has come up with, so 

you don’t try to radically change the system in the space of six months and then 

your successor comes in and changes things again. That’s certainly not in the best 

interest of the people you’re there to help. 

GK: Was it articulated to you what the end state of this training was going to 

be? 

JC: The only thing we knew was that it was supposed to be self-sustaining. The 

end state for the British mission was to make sure the ANA was capable of training 

its own NCOs. That’s what I was working towards but that was part of the whole 

broader context. This is a fairly enduring commitment and I suspect this type of 

support will be there long after offensive operations have ceased in Afghanistan 

such as in the same way we still see a lot of training teams deploying to Iraq now. 

It’s a very visible demonstration of a nation’s commitment to the country. What’s 

more, in terms of the effect it delivers, the fact that you’re building for the future 

is arguably far more enduring than an offensive operation. 

GK: Have you heard anything about how the training is going over in 

Afghanistan in terms of what you set up? 

JC: I spoke to the officer in charge who took over the team for me on a fairly 

regular basis until he left theater and it was progressing very much along the path 

I’d set us on. 

We were putting out a good number of teams into the provinces and generating 

a huge number of NCOs to the delight of the various corps and brigade commanders 

in the field. In terms of the metrics of the numbers passing through KMTC, they’ve 

increased significantly. Those are all positive steps in the right direction. I don’t 

have any measure to qualify any assertion as to the improvement of the individual 

coming out the other end but I do know from speaking to some of the British 

working down south with the ANA that the NCOs are doing a good job. 

GK: Are there any other points you’d like to add? 

JC: No, thank you. 

GK: Thank you for your time. 
243

Major Thomas Clinton Jr. (USMC)

12 March 2007

CH: My name is Major Conrad Harvey (CH) and it is Monday, 12 March 

2007. I’m with the Operational Leadership Experience Project at the 

Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing 

Major Thomas Edward Clinton Jr. (TC). Before we begin, if you feel at 

any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch your response in 

terms that avoid revealing any classified information and if classification 

requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you’re not able to 

answer. Can you go ahead and give me some of your service background? 

TC: I was commissioned in ’93 in the United States Marine Corps through the 

Platoon Leader’s Course. I went to 1st Battalion, 9th Marines at the 1st Marine 

Division. I served as a platoon commander in a rifle company and a Dragon’s 

platoon commander in a weapons company. I served as a company executive officer, 

the XO, and also as a rifle company commander and then I went on to Guantanamo 

Bay in Cuba and was part of Marines Barracks, Guantanamo Bay for two years as 

a guard officer. I was the XO [executive officer] of Rifle Company Windward and 

then I was the commander of Headquarters Company at Guantanamo Bay.

I went to Amphibious Warfare School for a year which is a Marine Corps 

career-level course and then went on to command two companies in 2d Battalion, 

7th Marines, one as a headquarters company commander and then later as a rifle 

company commander.

I transferred to The Basic School in 2003 where I was head of the maneuver 

section which teaches all the tactics to brand new lieutenants coming into the 

Marine Corps. I was then a company commander and did an advisory tour for 

approximately six months with the Afghan National Army, the ANA. I returned to 

the States and then transferred to be a student here at the Army’s Command and 

General Staff College or CGSC. 

CH: Can you go ahead and tell me about your experiences in the Global War 

on Terrorism, the GWOT, since 9/11? 

TC: I have two experiences with the 7th Marine Regiment and then, more 

importantly, I did the advisory duty which was termed as embedded trainers to 

the ANA. That was a program that started at the end of the Taliban’s rule after the 

Army’s Special Forces, the SF, had basically ejected the Taliban from Kabul and 3d 

Special Forces Group, I believe it was, immediately started to stand up the ANA, 

the initial battalion. Something that was kind of unique was that the battalion I was 

with, the 1st Battalion of the 3d Brigade, was considered a commando battalion. 
244

They were stood up by 3d Group and then when 3d Group was taken away 

to hunt down Taliban, the Army National Guard, the Marine Corps and some 

regular Army, I guess, came in and assumed the mission of training and advising 

the fledgling ANA. 1-3 Commando was the only one that had Marines at the time. 

They only had Marine advisors. 

CH: Did you get any special training prior to that assignment? 

TC: Unfortunately, no. The Marine Corps, in my opinion, did not learn its 

lessons well from Vietnam. At the time, it wasn’t considered a dangerous billet. 

It was considered that you’re going to go there and be almost like in a School of 

Infantry environment where you’re going to train new recruits. Of the initial teams 

that went over, we were the third iteration. The first team that went over just did 

training and assist. The second team that went over, halfway through the tour, went 

into combat operations with them. 

They were authorized Title 10 to go on patrols and do combat operations. By 

the time we got there in April 2004, we were in full-on combat operations. The 1-3 

guys were in combat operations and they were pretty well versed in what they were 

doing. So that’s the kind of thing we fell into. The Marine Corps had an element at 

the time that was doing some training and the training we got was advise and assist 

type stuff but they were focused more on peacetime training. 

They had been sending guys to Georgia in the central Asia area, sending guys 

to Africa, and were assisting different forces. This was kind of like what the Marine 

Corps did during the small wars. 

They did a lot of police training, checkpoint training, and that type of thing in 

small units, probably no bigger than a platoon but this was the first time since the 

end of the Vietnam War in ’72 that you had Marine advisors accompanying forces 

in combat operations in a strictly advise and assist role. That’s one of the things 

that’s the hardest to break Marines of and even the chain of command you were 

working for at Army, Marine Corps, and SF level.

Guys did not realize that, at the end of the day, advisors are not commanding. 

Advisors are not in control unless all hell breaks loose but never once did I have 

to take control of a situation other than to facilitate maybe air support or medical 

evacuation or my guys would facilitate air support for MEDEVAC. Only in those 

rare cases did we have to take control of a platoon, a company, or a battalion. 

That was a hard thing to deal with because a lot of people didn’t realize that 

it was their army and their forces and you had no constitutional authority to tell 

them what to do. There were a lot of commanders who were talking to me as if I 

was the commander of that unit. I just told them that what they want to do is what 

they want to do. So our training was known as SCET which stands for Security 
245

Cooperation Education and Training. It used to be called special coalition warfare 

which I was referring to earlier.

The Marine Corps was sending guys to South America and Georgia and were 

helping a lot of these police agencies and governments deal with drugs and things 

like that but it was strictly in a peacetime role. So this SCET itself, at the time, 

really didn’t have any cadre to train, didn’t have any funding to train, didn’t have 

a program of instruction, and there weren’t any standards. As Marines have done 

throughout the ages, they’ve taken bits and pieces of things and adapted them but 

I can speak for the team prior to us and the team after us that all the training was 

generated from initiative within the unit itself. 

We had a 13-man detachment, all senior enlisted and officers. We had one 

sergeant who eventually made staff sergeant while we were over there. So we did a 

lot of convoy-type training, reflexive shooting, went over the basics, taught classes 

to each other such as patrolling, offense, defense, basic squad/ platoon stuff. A lot 

of medical stuff we did on our own. 

We did a lot of communications training to make sure we were up to speed 

on the radios and stuff which, if you’ll remind me later, I’ll talk about because 

the gear we fell in on was atrocious. When we got over there, the gear that the 

unit had was strictly for self-defense. There were some pistols, a couple carbines 

but there weren’t any tactical satellite, the TACSAT, radios or machine guns or 

light machine guns or any of that stuff you would think you would need to protect 

yourself in an environment like Afghanistan. At any given moment you could find 

yourself in the middle of the Wild West. Guys would say that the Taliban were 

shooting at us. Well, how the hell do you know it’s the Taliban? It could just be 

some pissed off local, for all you know. That’s how “wild” the outer land is but 

that’s the training we had. 

CH: Can you walk me through the process of getting into country and getting 

yourselves oriented? 

TC: We got into country and the whole time we’re being told by the Marine 

Corps side of the house that we’re not going to be in combat operations, we’re not 

doing any of that stuff. We’re not allowed to do that. 

We’re just going there for six months of training and then coming back. 

Fifteen days after we arrive in country, my guys are with companies in combat 

operations as a part of Task Force-31 which was an SF task force operating out of 

Kandahar. So there went the “strictly training” thing. Fifteen days into it, my guys 

were coming under fire from whatever the action was such as ambushes, raids, 

anything like that. So we spent about three months in Kandahar. That was a wacky 

relationship. 
246

We were attached to Task Force Phoenix which was a multinational coalition 

joint task force. At the time, it was commanded by a command element out of 

the National Guard from South Carolina, and then halfway through our tour they 

went home and a unit from Illinois came in. That was really difficult because in 

the National Guard group that was commanding and running, you had British, 

Germans, and Canadians. We even had Mongolians teaching artillery to the 

Afghans. So you had this big coalition of guys.

The French were there teaching the officer corps and the British were teaching 

the NCO corps which makes for some interesting encounters but you had all these 

guys training and that’s what they came to do was to strictly train. At some point, 

somebody decided the Afghan Army had to get out of the training mode and go for 

what it’s built for which is to fight the enemies of the national government.

So they were initially attached to SF units and the advisors who were National 

Guard, Army, or Marine Corps would take these guys down to wherever they were 

going to operate in, hand them over to the SF guys, and they would take them out 

on training missions which is a weird thing. As a side note, I did not see at any time 

an SF unit engaged in training the national army. SF had their own little militia 

groups which were their indigenous forces that they were using, much like they 

used them in Vietnam. 

They weren’t training these guys to take over. They were training them to 

assist in hunting down and killing members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. When 

we got there, we were allowed to go on missions with them. Here’s the chain of 

command. Each team was made up of a Marine captain and two staff sergeants, 

or a gunnery sergeant and a staff sergeant, and they would go with each of the 

companies. So you had one Marine captain who was advising and assisting the 

Afghan company commander. Oh by the way, that company is attached to an SF 

operational detachment alpha, the ODA, which has its own captain and chain 

of command. So you have these two units working together. Technically the SF 

battalion has TACON [tactical control] over the Afghan battalion but you’re on 

loan from Task Force Phoenix and this is where the problems started. 

We would come under fire, especially with the second iteration of command 

from Task Force Phoenix. Task Force Phoenix was trying to tell us what we could 

and couldn’t do tactically, even though we were tactically under the control of 

the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the CJSOTF, which was 

commanded I think, by Colonel Pat Higgins at the time, in 3d Group. So you had 

that going on. It was a weird combination. 

Then in my case, I’m at a firebase on the border with two of our Afghan 

companies and the battalion staff, and I got SF captains who are in this weird relationship with me. I outrank them but they have tactical control of the area and I’m 
247

just there to advise and assist. They technically couldn’t tell me what to do because 

I outranked them but at the same time they had tactical control of what was going 

on, so it was a weird mix of what was going on but we made it work. We had really 

professional officers and staff NCOs on the Army side but it was a weird situation 

to go into.

Technically if it had been Vietnam, I would have been out there with the 

battalion and my guys and no SF or anything. Unfortunately, we were tied to SF 

because they controlled the areas of operation, the AOs, and they also backed us 

up because they had the ammunition and some of the weapons that we ended up 

having to borrow from them, so that made it difficult. What really happened was 

that Task Force Phoenix never accepted the fact, in my opinion, that we had gone 

into combat operations. Training was over, or as one of my gunnery sergeants who 

was wounded, but not seriously while advising said, “Sir, preseason is over. 

We’re in the season and points are going up on the board. Unfortunately, Task 

Force Phoenix still thinks they’re at training camp but actually we’re already three 

games into the season and we’re not doing well.” However, we did three months in 

Kandahar and did quite well. We didn’t lose anybody, although we did have some 

minor wounded. No Americans from our side were wounded. 

CH: Could you describe your AO, generally the working environment and 

your relations with the Afghans? 

TC: Kandahar was a funny region and that, to me, is what you would call a 

classic counterinsurgency war. You knew the enemy was out there but nobody was 

giving them up. I probably talked to 10 or 15 Taliban on a weekly basis but I just 

didn’t know it. They might have been Taliban because it was safer for them to 

be Taliban than it was to be a member of the Coalition but the ANA commander, 

Colonel Mohammed Esok, was pretty professional as far as Afghans go. You have 

to accept the fact that Afghans are not Americans. Afghans do what they do to 

survive. There are a lot of rumors of Afghan commanders being drug dealers, gun 

runners, having their own militias but at the end of the day as an advisor, you 

have to count on them to protect you. In some cases there are only two or three 

Americans with that Afghan unit at a time. We had guys saying, “Oh, that guy’s 

dishonest. He’s selling drugs and he’s shaking down the locals.” Do you know 

what? That’s the way of life there. 

They are not Arabs. Don’t ever call Afghans that or they’ll cut your throat. 

I had one guy yell at one of my guys because he called him an Arab and he was 

pretty pissed about it. It’s a very martial culture. 

They believe in the gun and the knife but at the same time. They’re not 

Americans and that means they don’t do long-range patrols and they’re not good 

at tactical discipline for long periods of time. They just don’t function that way. 
248

They don’t do well being away from their families. If you’re taking a battalion 

that’s been mustered in Kabul from the outlying areas and you go down south, 

there’s no real phone system, there’s no mail system, there’s no internet for them to 

use, and so keeping in contact with their families is very difficult and very trying. 

When we go on a deployment for seven months to a year, we don’t think much 

about it but to them, it’s a very debilitating thing. In fact, they thought very highly 

of us, the way we were spending all this time away from our families to help them. 

The ones who really did care were constantly saying thank you. You always knew 

they really liked you because they would ask you all kinds of in depth questions 

about your family. Some of the guys were suspicious when they were trying to 

find out about our families but they really care because that’s how their culture 

functions. If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t ask you anything, which goes back to 

the training. 

We got the hand-wave cultural stuff and the history and everything, and 90 

percent of it was bullshit. We came back and actually fed a bunch of stuff back into 

the Marine Corps intelligence activity, telling them which of the cultural training 

was BS and which only applies to specific regions. “This only applies if you’re 

in Herat on a Tuesday.” There were all these Western visions, just like Iraq and 

everywhere else I’ve been in the Middle East. The US has got it wrong. They think 

they know what the culture is because some Brit or American wrote it. 

CH: Can you give me some examples? 

TC: First of all, not all Afghans are devout Muslims. They’re just like any 

other religion in America. You have ultra extreme Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, 

and then you have other guys who say they were raised a certain religion but don’t 

go to church anymore. They don’t stop and pray five times a day. If they were on 

mission, they didn’t stop and pray. 

They were patrolling; they were serious. So Islam is not as strict as you 

think it is. Amongst the extremists it is but within the ANA very rarely did I see 

anybody young praying. The only time they would go to mosque is if they were 

back in garrison and the battalion commander, who is also the spiritual leader of 

the unit, made everybody go but other than that, very rarely did I see any of our 

guys praying. I saw little groups here and there but not everybody was this ultra 

extremist Islamic person.

It’s a good thing to rally to if they’re in trouble, though. There’s another thing I 

like to call the “myth of the mujahedeen,” or the “myth of the muj’.” The Afghans 

are tough fighters. Some of them will break and run but I never saw it. In fact, I 

saw guys stand there when they should have taken cover get hit but the “myth of 

the muj’” is that we think they’re so fierce because they threw the Soviets out of 

Afghanistan. The Soviets, for a lack of a better word, screwed them up royally when 
249

the Spetsnaz got into that war, just talk to someone like my battalion commander 

who was 17 and is Tajik. He fought in the mountains with Ahmed Shah Masood. 

He was the real deal. This guy could barely walk from his injuries but in a lot of 

these cases, a lot of these guys were wiped out.

The thing I call the myth of the muj’ is that they only fought when it was 

convenient for them. They would come down from the hills, a bunch of guys 

mustered, maybe smoke a couple hookah pipes, and go down and assault a column 

of 100 tanks and trucks being driven by a bunch of conscript Afghans and Soviets. 

Then they would disappear for a month and not come back. On the other side, you 

had the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the DRA, which we would like to 

say were all these dummies who didn’t know what they were doing but there were 

some Soviet-trained Afghan officers who I would fight by their side today. 

They were extremely well versed in what they did and knew what they were 

doing but it was interesting dynamics. You’d take these muj’ who are a loose 

collection of guys, stick them together with Soviet guys and Soviet discipline 

which as you know of the old Soviet Army—you don’t go on a head call or eat 

chow unless you’re told to. So you mix this group of guys together and it makes 

this weird dynamic. 

They’re not these freedom fighters who would stand until the last man. 

I mean, they’ll break and run if it means they can live to fight another day. So 

there’s a lot of myth about what they can and cannot do but it’s funny, you have 

Soviet influence, you got muj’, cultural influence, and now you’re trying to slap 

decentralized training and command philosophy and Western philosophy on top 

of this menagerie of guys with different backgrounds. Oh, and let’s throw in the 

tribal too, because you got Tajik, Pashto, Hazara, all these weird groups. It’s a 

wacky dynamic. A lot of times, you spent a lot of your time trying to read the 

terrain. Some companies had a Hazara first sergeant or a Tajik first sergeant and 

the commanding officer was Pashto and those two guys hated each other. The 

Tajiks are a very militant and proud people. I would liken the Tajiks to the Apaches. 

They’re a warrior culture unto themselves. The Pashtos are a little slick. 

They’re always looking for an angle. Not that the Tajiks aren’t but the Tajiks would 

rather throw down with you in a knife fight. When it came down to it, the CIA 

would rather use Tajiks than Pashtos because Tajiks would stand and fight. Pashto

units were cowards. Not all, of course but the guys who would break and run were 

Pashto. One of my company advisors, a guy named Captain Pat Fay, likened it 

to being as if we were in the Godfather movie constantly. You always felt like 

you were in that mafia atmosphere where everybody is smiling and hugging and 

everyone is a comrade but you just never know when one guy is going to turn 

against another guy. There was a lot of infighting among the company commanders 

for positioning with the battalion commander.
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When I was a battalion advisor, I had company commanders constantly talking 

to me trying to position themselves. They figured if they couldn’t get to the battalion 

commander that day, they would come seek me out and try to position themselves, 

hoping I would say something positive. The staff was like that too, and I dealt with 

the staff mostly but they would constantly be trying to pimp me, asking me what I 

thought the battalion commander was going to say about things, “Can you mention 

this to him? I would very much like to be promoted.”

My battalion commander was the same way. Towards the end I had some issues 

with him. The Afghan upper echelon is very political. One day he said to me, 

“Major Clinton, I just got a letter from Major Bourne.” Bourne was my predecessor. 

I asked him what happened. The commander said, “He’s congratulating me on 

making full colonel.” I said, “Really? When did that happen?” He wanted to know 

from me why I hadn’t told him he had been selected for colonel. “Man, this is the 

first time I’ve heard about it.” Then what I like to call my “street sense” clicked 

in and I asked him for the letter that he had in his hands. He quickly changed the 

subject to something else. There was no letter. He was pimping me to see if I could 

find out something because the promotion period was coming up. I wasn’t really 

involved in that. 

We had to recommend officers for promotion but once again, officers you 

recommended for promotion, we’re basing that on American standards, whereas 

the Afghan Ministry of Defense and the brigade and the corps headquarters were 

basing promotions on, “Who will best support me?” That’s not too dissimilar from 

the way the South Vietnamese military worked in the 1960s. Guys were promoted, 

selected, and put into certain billets because of their political affiliation but that’s a 

little bit on the Afghan culture. 

CH: So how was training the ANA? 

TC: A lot of the training we did was at the forward operating bases, the FOBs. 

Believe it or not, a lot of them are very good shots with AK47s and even better 

shots with an M4 rifle and an M16.

They understand the basics. They’re willing to learn, they’re really sponges, 

especially the senior enlisted and the junior enlisted. I’ve trained with and trained 

the Jordanians and trained with the Saudis. I’ve trained with the Eritreans and the 

Kuwaitis too, and everything is Insha’Allah [God willing] and there wasn’t a lot of 

that amongst the ANA. If we said we were training this day, we were training that 

day. Now getting them to set the training up themselves was the hard part. 

We were at the point where we were trying to break them off the nipple with 

SF, and rightly so. They did everything for them. They facilitated the training and 

gave it to them. The Marine detachment who took over from the SF did the same 

thing. The guys before us were trying to wean them off and get them to plan their 
251

own training. That’s when we ran into some problems. The logistics officer, the 

S4, couldn’t do anything. He was really frozen by his personality in which he was 

a lazy bastard, and I truly believe he was. Another reason he couldn’t do anything 

was reinforced by the fact that he could not request anything from brigade because 

in order for him to request something from brigade, he would have to have his 

battalion commander’s permission, then the battalion commander had to go get the 

brigade commander’s permission to do this, and only then the S4 could send it up. 

It was a pain and it was crazy. It just didn’t function. My guys went nuts and after 

awhile I just learned to accept it as how they do business, though.

The battalion commander, when they finally got an arms room, could not go 

down. We as company commanders and battalion commanders, the units could go 

down and draw their weapons as long as the armory was open and do whatever 

training but there was only one key to the arms room and the brigade commander 

had it. Nobody else could draw and you had to have special permission to take 

weapons out of the arms room. The way I got around that is we stacked arms and 

we had fire watch in the barracks. I was done with that. 

There’s a lot of ammunition hoarding amongst the highers and I truly believe 

that’s not their fault. They’re culturally waiting for the next civil war. Hoarding 

was rampant throughout the ANA and getting them to plan was very hard too. 

I know the brigade staff tried to get them to do brigade planning. Another thing 

about Afghan culture is that when they’re given the opportunity to stand up and 

talk to a group of people, standby because they’ll go on for hours. It’s their chance 

to run their mouth formally. There’s a reason why at the shura that only the old 

men speak. It’s because they’re short and to the point whereas the young guys 

haven’t learned that yet.

Training them at the company, platoon and squad levels was relatively easy 

compared to training staff functioning. They’re very good and picked up company, 

platoon, and squad level tactics, techniques, and procedures, the TTPs of attack, 

defense, and patrol. 

They had been doing it for a while, and we constantly remediated. I think that 

was the only hard part; they couldn’t understand: “We did it right once, why do we 

have to continue to do it?” Well, because you get rusty and you have to continue to 

remediate and you have new guys coming in and there’s different configurations. 

Training brigade and battalion staff was hard. We didn’t do a lot of it, and if we did, 

it would have never been reinforced. 

We went to Kandahar, worked for CJSOTF and then came back to Kabul and 

went back onto Phoenix, did some training and they took leave. Then we went 

back to CJSOTF, this time on the border. CJSOTF would take these guys, just 

break them up into companies and then let them function as a battalion. Everybody 
252

is yelling, not at me personally but they’re asking why these guys can’t function 

as a battalion. Well, you’re never going to let them function as a battalion. You’re 

basically training little mercenary companies for the SF to back up their militia. 

Some of my guys ran into trouble with that. Some of the SF guys believed that the 

militia was in control of an area and that was it and the militia was shaking down the 

locals for cash. One of our Afghan company commanders, who I think was a very 

righteous guy and really believed in the cause, had issues with that and threatened 

to kill the militia commander. The SF guys had the balls to say something to one 

of my captains, saying it was bullshit and that this was the militia’s area. I had to 

point out to the SF captain that the only legitimate army in Afghanistan is the ANA

and the militias were only to be used in FOB defense. The militias were being used 

in offensive actions and from my understanding when I got into country, they were 

not supposed to be used for offensive actions but they were doing it.

That’s the other broken thing which might have changed. Of course it’s been 

three years now but you had two armies. You had the legitimate ANA which was 

trying very hard to build up. The guys don’t get paid much, there’s no pension 

at the time, there’s no incentive other than you get three hots with a cot and roof 

over your head and if they deployed down to Kandahar or the border, they got deployment pay. Well, the militia is getting paid 10 times what an Afghan soldier was 

getting paid and I can’t remember the figures off my head. I’d have to look them 

up. So what’s the incentive to join the ANA? So in a way, the SF effort was really 

shooting the national army effort in the foot, in my opinion. I just don’t understand 

why SF wasn’t strictly in the advise, assist, and train mode like they were supposed 

to be doing.

Now, granted, I know there had to be some SF to hunt down and kill guys but 

whom better to do it with than the locals? Going back to this whole weird chain of 

command thing, you just didn’t know where you stood half the time. It was a weird 

dynamic having been in the Marine Corps for, at that point, several years. There’s 

no manual that showed me how to function this way. It was really frustrating how 

jacked up it was. 

We didn’t have proper equipment. I had made several requests up the chain to 

the point where I became such a nuisance with everybody that Lieutenant General 

Wallace Gregson, who was the US Marine Corps Central Command [MARCENT] 

commander, sent his deputy out to find out what was going on. He flew out and was 

the first officer above the rank of major who had ever come out and seen us in the 

five months we had been there. 

We were kind of out of sight and out of mind. When the National Guard 

command changed over, the general in charge made a decree that no Afghan unit 

will operate in anything smaller than a company. Well, every day my guys are 
253

sending out squad-sized to platoon-sized patrols like you would do with any Army 

or Marine company in your sector. You have to keep pressure on the enemy and 

you need to know what’s out there. You’re doing stability operations. You’re walking through the same village every day, you’re shaking hands, you’re getting to 

know your environment, you get to kind of pick out who’s squirrelly and maybe 

spend enough time with the village elders smoking the peace pipe, drinking chai

tea and smoking their crappy cigarettes. Then you get to know them much like 

we’re learning now. You get to know them and after awhile you’ve known this guy 

for two months, he’s the guy who’s going to show up or one day pull you aside and 

say, “There are some guys in town who don’t belong here.” He’ll give you a heads 

up. My beef is that they told us we couldn’t operate with less than a company. 

That’s BS! You can’t tell me that. First of all, you can’t tell me that. I’m TACON’d 

to the CJSOTF. 

They said they had already talked with SF who said they would not employ us 

that way. I told them that’s not the way you function in a combat environment. You 

can’t do company-sized patrols every day. Iit’s just physically impossible. Plus, 

you don’t need a company full of Afghans charging through a village every day. 

They made silly decrees and it was all based on the fact that they never came 

out and saw what the common operational environment was out there. Their whole 

time was spent inside the Kabul region, going from Bagram to Kabul, maybe flying 

down to Kandahar, maybe going out to Herat on a windshield tour but the higher 

command never came out and saw what the hell was going on. That was the same, 

I think, for a lot of the Army National Guard and Army guys who were doing it. It 

goes back to my thing that they never wanted to accept the fact that we had trained 

in the Continental United States, the CONUS, to train Afghans and that was it. 

They never considered us going into combat operations, so when the situation 

changed they continued to do what they trained to do. It’s a shame because there 

are some great American advisors in those other units who were doing a great job 

kicking ass and taking names. 

They were just wearing an Army uniform or a National Guard uniform but they 

were all being crippled, in my opinion, by the total incompetence and ineptitude 

of the chain of command to realize what was going on. The sad thing is that they 

finally stopped harassing me after an ambush in which two SF soldiers were 

unfortunately killed. My gunny was severely wounded, I had 18 Afghans wounded 

and two of our interpreters were shot up, not to mention we lost several vehicles. 

Then, and only then, did they realize, “Holy shit!” The first thing anybody 

really cared about was whether or not they were wearing their body armor and 

how come we were driving around in pickup trucks. Well, because that’s the only 

thing we had. 
254

CH: You were saying that there were some equipment issues and you wanted 

me to remind you about those. 

TC: Okay, yeah, that plays into it. When we started off, we had an iridium 

phone and everybody had a nine millimeter pistol and an M4 carbine. 

We had no night vision equipment, no aiming lights or anything like that. We 

had the iridium phone and seven PRC-119s. 

We had no TACSAT and the iridium phone was only to be used in case of 

emergency and there was only one. We had five companies in the battalion so you 

do the math. That was our link to the outside world and it was a shame because 

we did two separate 18-hour convoys from Kabul to Kandahar with no remain 

overnight site or anything. It was a straight shot of 18 hours of driving, and we were 

all done on our iridium phone. That would be like driving from Massachusetts to 

Florida and not talking to anybody until you get down to Florida. It was disgusting. 

Looking back on it now, I’m so glad nobody ambushed us because it would have 

been days until somebody figured out what happened to us.

The only thing that gave us security was that we had over 500 Afghans who 

were well armed. They had old Soviet stuff. They had recoilless rifles, machine 

guns, RPKs, RPGs, AK74s, AK47s – you name it but for the advisors, we had very 

little in the way of equipment. 

We had no up-armored Humvees. The Humvee we did have was the hangar 

queen that one of the Marine Expeditionary Units had left behind from 2001. We 

found out the hard way that when you put armor on it and it’s not designed to carry 

all that weight, it overheats the engine and destroys it, especially in the 100-degree 

heat of Kandahar. 

We found out that pickup trucks were the best thing to use because they 

could be fixed on the local economy and, believe it or not, they could take a lot 

of punishment and you could put six Afghan soldiers in the back of a little Toyota 

HiLux pickup. 

We also got pretty good at rigging radios and stuff in those things to be able to 

talk. I mean, it looked like Road Warrior. 

We actually had an old Soviet 12.7 millimeter machine gun off of a tank 

or something mounted in the back of one of our vehicles but that’s the type of 

equipment we had. It wasn’t until the end and the team that replaced us that we got 

the multiband inter/intra team radios, the MBITRs, and headsets. 

We had a hard time when we went in country trying to find Small Arms 

Protective Insert, the SAPI, plates for our Kevlar helmets. Nobody wanted to give 

us SAPI plates because there was so much worry about losing control of the item. 

So we didn’t have a lot of that stuff. 
255

We had very poor medical equipment. Thanks to 1st Battalion, 3d Special 

Forces Group’s doctors, they gave us more than we could ever imagine. They gave 

us everything from IV kits, tourniquets, to anything you needed, you name it. We 

found out the hard way that the stuff you crush up, the clotting agent, doesn’t work. 

It causes guys to go into shock, or if you don’t wash it out and you leave it there, 

it burns. 

We had a lot of equipment issues. I think the Marine gods were probably 

smiling and laughing at us but we were doing what Marines have probably done 

throughout the centuries, which is begging, borrowing, or stealing from anywhere 

we could. We borrowed shit from the New Zealand SF guys. 

We had nothing but ball ammunition. When I got to Kandahar, we came out of 

there with grenades, anti-tank rockets. Somebody asked me why I needed antitank 

rockets and I said because the Taliban still had tanks in some places and BMPs dug 

in to some of their strongholds. Not to mention an AT4 does a good job on a truck 

with a bunch of bad guys in it. So we had a lot of equipment issues but I think that’s 

been overcome now.

The teams that followed us, in fact there are two Marine teams in country 

now, have pretty good equipment. They have the MBITRs and they have armored 

Humvees but at that time it was taking awhile for the idea to materialize that we’ve 

gone from training to combat operations. 

We made the mindset change but a lot of other people didn’t and it took 

awhile. It was hard because administratively we belonged to the Marine Corps but 

tactically, from time to time, we belonged to CJSOTF. Operationally we belonged 

to CJSOTF and sometimes we belonged to Task Force Phoenix. Plus, my team was 

assembled from across the Marine Corps training command, so you had guys from 

Parris Island, the Schools of Infantry from the West Coast and the East Coast, you 

had guys from the Drill Instructor School, guys from Quantico who taught in the 

schools, guys all over the training commands across the United States were coming 

together. So all their commands either did or did not send them with equipment. 

That was another weird thing. 

We had a guy show up with no desert utilities and he had to go and buy 

desert utilities. This was interesting. The ANA wears the old Marine Corps/Army 

woodland uniforms and SF guys wear a variety of things but their militia wore 

the same uniforms as they did. My big thing was why were we wearing desert 

uniforms when we should be wearing what the ANA is wearing? Marine Corps 

advisors in Vietnam adopted the same dress as the Vietnamese battalions because 

they didn’t want to stick out but the typical Marine Corps or Army straight-leg guys 

were saying, “Oh no. That’s not an issued uniform. You can’t wear that.” However, 

they weren’t the guy walking around as the only guy wearing desert utilities with 
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a radio on his back and a map on a patrol alongside the battalion commander. Who 

do you think the Taliban or al-Qaeda is going to shoot first? They are going to hit 

the guy with the radio. They knew. Hit the guy with the radio, the American.

One time we were ambushed and the first things they attacked were the .50 

cals on the vehicles and they shot at all the Americans. They knew if they could 

take us out that the Afghans would be in trouble. Luckily they weren’t very good 

shots. 

CH: What are some of the TTPs that you came away with? 

TC: If you’re going to be an advisor, you’re not making a US soldier or a US 

Marine out of them. You’re making them a good soldier, a good fighter who can do 

the basics. You could try to impart some of your ethos and stuff on them but you 

have to do it within their culture. So remember, they’re not Americans. There are 

some cultural things where you just have to look the other way. 

We have things we call redlines. We knew the battalion commander and some 

of the company commanders were skimming money. They were taking money 

from their soldiers as tribute. Can I prove it? Not really but did the soldiers really 

complain? No but our thing was that if the soldiers started complaining, we would 

probably look into it.

Physical abuse was a redline. We did not tolerate physical abuse. That was 

difficult because a lot of these DRA [the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] 

guys were taught that way. That’s how the Soviets disciplined their soldiers, 

through physical abuse. We didn’t tolerate that.

You have to accept the fact that, much like Arabs, they won’t tell you the truth. 

They’re going to avoid it to save face. I always tried to make it sound like it’s their 

idea and I always praised them. Your best Marine or soldier is not always your 

best advisor. You have to have patience. You have to be willing, and this is going 

to sound weird, to be humiliated but not to the point where it’s going to scar your 

reputation. 

CH: Could you give an example of that? 

TC: Sure. At the time, we paid the battalion. We would go down to Task Force 

Phoenix which was in Kabul and we would get the money. It was like in the old 

days of the Corps and the Army. You were the paymaster but the deal was that their 

personnel officer, the S1, maintained accountability. So just like the old days, if 

you weren’t there on a day, if you decided to have an unauthorized absence, you 

didn’t get paid for that day. So say you were there for all 30 days, you were paid 

for all 30 days. I think they were always trying to manipulate the system to see if 

they could get more money out of us but what happened was that they were slow. 

The only way you could get the money was after they verified who was who and 
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they were all there. There was some certification process that I can’t remember 

off the top of my head. The paymasters would deal out the Afghan money to us 

and then we would take it back and pay them. Well, they were late in doing it 

which delayed them going on leave because they have to go on leave. There are no 

banking systems so they have to take the money home.

Well, the battalion commander was fuming and it was completely his staff’s 

fault. They blew it out their ass. He came in and told us he was in trouble and I 

knew it because the battalion was pissed. The troops were getting restless, you 

could see it. The battalion commander was on the hot plate. He told me I had to 

tell the battalion that they were not going to get paid today and I bit my tongue 

and it was the best thing I ever did, and this is why. I went out there in front of the 

whole battalion and told them through the translator that it was my fault and my 

fault alone. I accepted the responsibility. If they were going to be mad at anybody, 

they could be pissed at me. I told them I apologized and basically threw myself on 

my sword.

From that day on, I had the battalion commander in the palm of my hand 

because he knew I was willing to take a shot to the face for him. I don’t know if he 

was testing me or not but I’ve thought about this over the years and talked to my 

wife and some other people about it and actually talked to my brother about it too. 

He’s a Marine himself. I really think he was testing me to see if I was going to stick 

up for him. After that, I had a bodyguard assigned to me and I had my own radio 

operator and this was after three months into it. 

We had a good relationship. So what I’m saying is that you got to be willing 

to put up with some BS to make some strides. Don’t put your values aside, don’t 

go native but there are some things you have to learn and sometimes you smash 

into them. Another thing we didn’t tolerate was that one of my captains caught a 

company commander taking money off of a dead Afghan soldier, and we crucified 

him. Not literally but he was done. He’s lucky the first sergeant didn’t drag him 

off and shoot him in the bushes. He was pilfering money off a dead soldier. He 

claimed he was going to send it to the guy’s family. I asked him how, there wasn’t 

any mail system.

Some other things are to have utmost patience and remember you are never 

in command. You are an American first and never do anything to compromise 

your principles as an American Soldier or Marine. Don’t ever do that but at the 

same time, you have to be willing to take some body blows. You have to humble 

yourself. You need to know your stuff because they expect you to know it. Just like 

your Marines or soldiers expect you to know your job. You better know your stuff 

and then some because they’re really looking to you to learn. Another TTP is to get 

used to drinking tea, get used to smoking, get used to sitting around and shooting 
258

ragtime, because that’s how they do business. Having worked in the Middle East 

quite a bit and in Afghanistan, talk about your family and bring pictures of your 

kids. Not your wife but your kids. In fact Colonel Esok has several pictures of my 

kids that he kept in his office, and as of a year ago I know they’re still there because 

the other advisor had seen them but that’s a sign of kinship and clanship among the 

Tajiks at least, I believe. 

They are a very family oriented people. The family is everything to them. The 

one truism is to not ever talk about wives. Colonel Esok is a little bit westernized 

in that he had been trained in Britain. He was taken out during the war and trained 

there, so he would make some jokes about being careful or else my first wife would 

have my ass but I never joked to him about his wife. I just never did it. He would 

make some jokes but nothing bad. You must know your stuff, the culture and then 

don’t be wedded to what you have been told culture wise. Don’t be afraid to ask 

about something being true or not. 

CH: What about the religious aspects? 

TC: My Afghan commander, Colonel Esok, was a strict Muslim but he never 

pushed Islam on anybody else unless you were an Afghan. He wasn’t any different 

than any nun or priest when I was growing up. Colonel Esok was very concerned 

about my spiritual wellbeing, though. He would ask me if I had prayed today to 

God. Muslims, at least this brand of Islam, recognize Jesus as a prophet. Don’t 

bring up religion with them but if they bring it up talk to them about it. I asked all 

kinds of questions. In fact, if you want to learn more about Islam, talk to a Muslim 

about Islam.

Some of the Americans got upset with me. They wanted to know why I was 

talking about Islam. They’d ask me what I did today and I told them I had spent 

six hours in a philosophical discussion about Islam and Christianity with Colonel 

Esok. They couldn’t believe I had done that but I explained that he’s the one who 

brought it up. I’ll tell you what, I learned a lot talking to him.

Make every effort to learn the language. We worked with our interpreters at 

night to learn the language, and don’t be shy to use it. They’ll laugh and make fun 

of you as you pronounce words wrong but they’ll help you. Every little bit helps 

because it shows you give a shit.

Just like with your Soldiers and Marines, don’t become wedded to those guys or 

don’t become friendly with them. Be cordial but with Afghans, especially, because 

they don’t understand. If you show the enlisted guys any amount of attention or 

stuff like that, that’s bad news if you’re going to Afghanistan. I would not do that.

You have to remember too that a lot of these guys don’t read or write. They 

really don’t know anything about current events outside what they’re told. Some of 
259

them are farm boys. Some of the city guys do know. You have to remember that a 

lot of these guys grew up in Pakistan, so their vision of the world is limited.

Unfortunately, six months is not long enough. We should have been there a 

year, living with that battalion. That’s what the Marines and Army did in Vietnam. 

They stayed for a year. Not a full year but sometimes longer than six months.

Also, use common sense. If it feels wrong and smells wrong, it is wrong but 

you definitely have to put a cultural filter to everything you’re doing. You know 

the old saying, “Think before you open your mouth”? You really have to think and 

then think like an Afghan or an Iraqi or a Saudi. How is that going to be viewed 

when you open your mouth? If you’re a field grade officer, they recognize the rank 

structure. If you’re senior enlisted like a gunny or a first sergeant or a sergeant first 

class, they recognize us. So when you open your mouth, you’re speaking with the 

authority of the US military. Don’t promise stuff you can’t deliver. I got boxed into 

a lot of stuff. 

They try to shame you but so what? You don’t know how many times my 

battalion commander would get upset with me, “You promised me.” I said, “I 

didn’t promise you anything. I said I’d look into it but I don’t have the money to 

pay for this.”

Afghans think that anybody who raises their voice and yells is a crazy person. 

So yelling and screaming like we’re used to in order to get a point across doesn’t 

do anything and you immediately lose credibility. Instead, don’t show up to a 

meeting. That sends a better message. On several occasions I would show up late 

to prove a point. Afghans think they’re pretty good about keeping time but they’re 

not. It depends on how they’re feeling that day. I was punctual when I wanted to be 

punctual and there were other times when I wanted to prove a point. Like Colonel 

Esok wanted to talk me because he had gone out and spent some money thinking I 

was going to back pay him. He went out and bought some equipment off the black 

market because they were so badly supplied. We had to buy socks and things like 

that because getting something from supply system was like getting blood out 

of a stone. After I told him not to buy it yet because I didn’t have the money, he 

went out and bought these ICOM radios, these little handheld radios, anyway. He 

was buying them from a buddy of his and he was getting a kickback from us. So 

say they were 50 bucks a piece. They were probably 20 bucks a piece and he was 

getting 30 and they probably stole them from somebody else but I got wise to that 

early on. It goes back to what we were talking about. You’re living in almost a 

mafia-type society. That’s what I can remember off the top of my head. 

CH: What about any operational TTPs? 

TC: We did classic counterinsurgency of patrols and looking through the 

villages. Another TTP is that if you’re working with indigenous forces, sending 
260

them into the village and let them do the talking. Make it look like you’re almost 

serving them, that you’re just another trooper or Marine with the unit. That helps 

out a lot. Kids like to talk to Americans but be careful about talking and giving 

stuff to kids because the enemy will target them and do horrible, horrible things to 

children. So be careful with what you do with children. A lot of guys like to give 

them candy and stuff and we stopped them right away from doing that because 

it’s dangerous. Any time a US unit rolled through, some of the kids were throwing 

themselves at the front of the vehicles to get you to stop because they were trying to 

get something from you. I never saw it but there were reports of Taliban mutilating 

and killing children because they took candy from Americans. I believe it, I just 

never saw it. So you have to be careful of that but always put an indigenous face 

on it.

My thing was to play up to their national pride, speaking specifically about 

Afghanistan. They are a nation unlike the Iraqis. They want to have a central 

government and they want to believe they’re a world player but they don’t want the 

central government telling them what to do even though they want all the benefits, 

just like Americans. “I don’t want to pay taxes but I want nice roads, cops, firemen, 

and Social Security.” 

They’re no different than Americans. They want roads, schools, water, wells, 

all this stuff. Wait until they try to institute a DMV over there. I mean, everybody 

has a vehicle. Compared to them, the Afghans think Americans have money 

coming out of their butts. I gave a class once on the American Revolution 101. I 

talked about taxation and all this stuff. When I started talking about the taxation 

piece with England, they asked what taxes were. I started explaining that it was 

much like your warlords who used to tax people. “Oh no, that’s just stealing.” Then 

I had to explain the whole tax thing. The officers were enthralled because they 

didn’t have any concept of taxes. There’s no real concept of a central government 

that has all this overarching power from Asadabad to Herat in the west down to 

Kalat and Kandahar in the south and Spin Boldak and Mazar-e-Sharif to the north. 

They have no concept of a government agency that taxes and does all that stuff, so 

that’s an education.

So when you thought all the mathematics and history you had in college and 

high school didn’t count, I’ll tell you what, I was on Google making sure that what 

I was saying was right when I had the chance to teach them about America. 

That’s how you get guys to talk about their government and how they think 

things are going. They’ll open up then. From an advisor’s standpoint, be yourself 

and be personable.

If you’re going there to get a combat tour, thinking you’re going to get yours 

and win a medal, you’re in the wrong business. I can count on both hands how 
261

many times I was shot at, and most of them were not firefights. Those things were 

like gunfights at the OK Corral and there’s like five or six guys at the most. I 

watched a guy step out who literally tried to spray a platoon of Afghan soldiers and 

they let him have it. 

CH: This was good. It was good information. 

TC: There are some things I haven’t thought about in a long time. 

CH: Well, thanks for sharing it, though. I appreciate it. Thanks on behalf of the 

Combat Studies Institute for getting this information down. 

TC: Thank you. 

263

Major Hurel Johnson

17 September 2007

LL: My name is Laurence Lessard (LL) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major Hurel Johnson (HJ) on his 

experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF. Today’s 

date is 17 September 2007 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we 

begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch 

your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information and 

if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply say 

you’re not able to answer. When did you first find out that you would be 

deploying to the Middle East? 

HJ: Around July 2003. 

LL: When were you told that you would actually be deploying? 

HJ: Late September, early October. 

LL: How did this come down? Was it an individual tasker or was a whole unit 

going? 

HJ: This was an individual tasker. A list went around our division, the 75th 

Division, and at that time, I was a Headquarters and Headquarters Company or 

HHC commander and I volunteered to be put on the list. 

LL: So it wasn’t one of those cases where, “We’re looking for a volunteer and 

it’s you”? 

HJ: No. 

LL: What were you actually volunteering for? 

HJ: It was an embedded trainer position. 

LL: Did you know where that position was going to go? 

HJ: All I knew is that it was an embedded trainer in Afghanistan. I don’t know 

when I first realized that I would be with Task Force Phoenix. 

LL: Can you talk about some of your pre-deployment training and preparation? 

HJ: At that time, we were already mobilized. I was an HHC commander and 

we were getting ready to do a post-mobilization mission. 

We’re a training support division so that’s what we did. In terms of training 

for going to Afghanistan, the only training I got was at the CONUS Replacement 

Center, the CRC, at Fort Benning, Georgia. All the training I got related to Afghanistan was done there. 
264

LL: How long was that? 

HJ: It was about a week. 

LL: What did it actually consist of? 

HJ: We had small arms qualification, an in-country brief on the Middle Eastern 

culture, medical preparations, and that was about it. 

LL: In retrospect, what kind of training do you wish you’d had? 

HJ: I wish I had had more cultural training and that I understood more about 

the area I was going into. In fact, I felt so strongly about that, that when I came 

back and rejoined the post-mobilization training mission that my unit had, I made 

a point to give the types of briefings I would have liked to have gotten.

It would have also been helpful if the CRC had gone over some of the tactics, 

techniques, and procedures that were being used in the area. When I say culture, 

that includes the people, the society, the Afghan National Army-ANA, that I would 

be working with and training, maybe some recommended readings I could have 

done there while at the CRC on the mujahedeen and everything that had taken 

place. I could have done that at home because I didn’t actually leave the country 

until January 2004. I had a couple months I could have used to study up on the 

area. 

LL: Why was there a delay between when you were told you were going and 

your actual deployment date? 

HJ: I think it had to do with when the job was becoming available. It worked 

out perfectly, though. It gave me time to really finalize things at home, to turn over 

the unit to another commander, and I was able to spend Christmas with my family. 

LL: When did you first meet the other members of your embedded training 

team [ETT]? 

HJ: At CRC, there were people going to different locations. Some were going 

to Iraq, some were going to Afghanistan. I met most of my team members, though, 

when I got to Bagram, Afghanistan and they came and picked me up. There was 

one other gentleman at CRC with me but he went to train the Afghan National 

Police. I saw him later on while we were there but he was on a separate mission. 

LL: Can you talk about the actual movement over there? How easy or difficult 

was it? 

HJ: It was just long. I flew from Fort Benning to Baltimore. We had a fairly 

long layover there and then we flew on to Germany. From Germany, we flew into 

Bagram. It took a long time but it was nice because it was on a commercial plane 

for the most part. 
265

LL: When you got there, was your ETT already put together with the exception 

of you? 

HJ: The team was already together. I was coming in to replace a Lieutenant 

Colonel David Eyre, who at that time was an Army Reservist out of Colorado. He 

was the team leader and I took his position. 

LL: Were you a major at the time? 

HJ: Yes. I was a fairly new major. 

LL: How did the handoff go? 

HJ: It went very well. We had about a two-month overlap before he left, so I 

was very fortunate. I observed him for several weeks and then we switched seats. 

He watched me and let me do it while he focused on other things like getting ready 

to leave. 

LL: Where was your team located? 

HJ: Camp Policharki which was east of Kabul. 

LL: How were you set up for interpreter support? 

HJ: I had a dedicated interpreter who worked for Lieutenant Colonel Eyre 

and then became my interpreter. He was very helpful. Different interpreters had 

different skill sets and when you’re talking about what we did which was to 

mentor the garrison and all the technical terms that are associated with that, that 

consistency was very helpful for us, too. 

LL: How many people were on your team and how many interpreters did you 

have? 

HJ: We had five members on the team, including me. When we got our MPRI 

[contract company] support, they brought in logistics personnel and operations 

personnel that we didn’t have, so that really freed me up to focus on the garrison 

ANA commander, the colonel. We grew to about seven personnel after that. 

LL: Were you partnered with a garrison unit, an operating unit, or something 

else? 

HJ: It was the garrison for Camp Policharki. The garrison commander had an 

operations section. There was an engineering section. There was a directorate of 

public works or DPW section which we were trying to get stood up, and security. 

It was the standard staff complement. 

LL: Who did you spend most of your time mentoring? 

HJ: Before MPRI arrived, most of my time was spent with the commander. We 

spent a lot of time working logistical issues and trying to keep that up and going. 

What kept driving us was, when the soldiers graduated from the kandak and they 
266

would be stationed at Camp Policharki, we were trying to make sure the buildings 

were ready and they had uniforms. 

We had construction going on. Most of my time was spent doing those kinds 

of things. Major Shauer [ph] had his hands full with making sure the buildings 

were on schedule. He worked with the Corps of Engineers on that. We probably 

did them a disservice. 

LL: The Afghan commander? 

HJ: No, the other staff directorate. I wasn’t able to spend time with them and 

I could tell that they were hungry. When MPRI hit the ground and that operations 

officer had a dedicated person who could work with him every single day, I could 

tell they were happy. I wish I could have done more for them but I couldn’t. It was 

challenging. 

LL: How would you describe the relationship between you, the rest of your 

team and the Afghans? 

HJ: It was very good. I recall no problems with the team. 

They realized we were genuine in our efforts to try and help. I think they 

realized that when we said we would try to do something, most of the time we 

were able to deliver. We had enough cool points with them that they realized if we 

couldn’t get them something it must be out of our control. We managed that by not 

promising things we knew we couldn’t get for them. Overall, it was very good and 

they were very hospitable to us. 

LL: Can you talk some more about the logistical issues you said you had? 

HJ: One of the big things was vehicles. For the longest time, all the kandaks and 

everyone else could get vehicles but the garrison could not do anything in terms of 

getting vehicles prior to us getting there. When I first got there, I was immediately 

able to get one vehicle for them. It was just a chore to get more vehicles.

Uniforms and equipment were also challenging to get. I think that process 

got streamlined but it was difficult at first. I think it was because they weren’t the 

priority. The line units were the priority and that happens in our Army as well, so 

that’s not entirely surprising. I think some of our processes, too, may not have been 

formalized in terms of how to go about doing things.

You look at the transitions between the units that come in. The 45th had their 

way and then the 76th out of Indiana coming in behind them had their way as well. 

There were differences in processes and procedures. Getting qualified personnel 

in and training them on what needs to be done so they can get to the point where 

they have some autonomy and they’re able to do some predicting on what the 

requirements are that are coming downstream. Uniforms and clothing were always 

big issues.
267

Pay was also a big issue. I acted as the pay agent for them. I also acted as the 

field ordering officer for them so I worked on going out and getting resources for 

them that way, too. 

LL: What about the support that you as an ETT got? Was it a mirror of your 

Afghan counterparts or was it easier for you to get what you needed? 

HJ: I didn’t have any difficulties getting things for our team. I can’t think of 

anything major that I really needed when I got there. I needed a weapon and they 

got me a weapon. Most of my time was spent just trying to get things for them. 

LL: Did you have any opportunities to get out and meet any Afghan civilians? 

HJ: Yes. I got invited to a couple of weddings. I actually never went to one 

because something always seemed to come up. Different members of the team 

would go, though. I heard they were really interesting in how they segregated 

everybody. I’d go to picnics and things like that. When I went to the Ministry of 

Defense, I’d meet people there as well. When we did the mission in Herat, we 

met some pretty high profile Afghan leadership and dignitaries there. They were 

always very hospitable. 

LL: Did the whole team go to Herat or was that just you? 

HJ: The US team went but not the MPRI contingent. They stayed back at 

Camp Policharki and continued to train the garrison. The Herat mission was part of 

the Herat governmental transition team, the GTT. This was when President Karzai 

was replacing the governor there, Ishmael Khan. 

We were part of that team to go down there and facilitate that transition. 

At that time, I was the chief of staff for the group. Colonel Robert Hipwell, the 

CAG [Corps Advisory Group] commander, had asked me to be his chief of staff 

which was another lieutenant colonel billet. The previous chief was a lieutenant 

colonel, part of the 45th, and when he left, he asked me to take the job and I did. 

Our operations officer, the G3 trainer at the time, Major Bobby Simmons, also a 

Reservist, he went as well. 

LL: What kinds of challenges did you have to deal with in regard to assisting 

with this governmental transition? 

HJ: One of the ANA brigades was down there. The Central Corps commander, 

General Moeen, who was being mentored by Colonel Hipwell, went there. He was 

the ranking military official there for the Afghans. When I took that job, I became 

the chief of staff mentor but he didn’t go. Because of the relationship between 

General Moeen and Colonel Hipwell, I ended up facilitating the meetings that 

would take place. 

We’re talking high level meetings. I often think about that experience and how 

I was performing at a level that I don’t think I will ever perform at back home in 
268

the US. That was one of the beauties of the tour over there. There was the ANA 

there. 

We had our active duty forces from 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry there led by 

Lieutenant Colonel Mike McMahon who was actually killed sometime later in 

a helicopter crash. Their equivalent of our CIA and FBI was working with the 

human intelligence or HUMINT teams from our side and just trying to facilitate 

all that was a challenge. The challenges associated with getting the disarmament, 

demobilization and reintegration [DDR] process going over in that part of the 

country. You probably heard about the massive riot that broke out the day after 

Ishmael Khan was replaced. I was caught in the middle of that. Things started out 

to be a simple recon of the area in which Lieutenant Colonel McMahon offered 

General Moeen an aerial recon of the area so he could see how the city was doing. 

The riots broke out while we were on that recon and then we had to go and help 

people in the UN get out. Trying to facilitate at that level and make the meetings 

meaningful was a challenge. 

LL: Did that mean you were trying to figure out an agenda for all these high 

notables to deal with or were you just trying to get everyone in the same place at 

the same time? 

HJ: I was just trying to get everybody talking. General Moeen knew what he 

wanted to talk about. I had to set up the structure so the talks could facilitate. I had 

to work on identifying who would talk and what they would talk about. I had to 

make sure everyone had the opportunity to talk and to facilitate it in a structured 

manner was the key. 

LL: In mentoring the Afghans, did you find anything they were culturally 

resistant to? 

HJ: One thing that comes to mind is the treatment of the enlisted soldiers and 

how they deal with them. We wanted them to treat them with more respect and 

to get comfortable with giving them more meaningful responsibility. They had a 

habit of treating them like gofers, not as an integral part of their organization. 

They can be trusted with significant amounts of responsibility and if that 

happened, the organization could do limitless things. That was one thing I 

remember dealing with. 

LL: I’ve heard that one of the challenges working with the ANA was developing 

NCOs and actually getting the officers to use them. What was your experience with 

that? 

HJ: We figured it was a carryover from the Russian regime because that’s how 

they treated their enlisted soldiers. That was a challenge to try and break them of 

that. 
269

LL: Did you ever run across any situations where there was some kind of tribal 

or sectarian feud that acted as an obstacle to what you were trying to get done with 

the staff you were mentoring? 

HJ: I wouldn’t say it was tribal. It was almost like a form of racism in the sense 

that a person would be marginalized just because he was a Tajik or an Uzbek. I 

remember on more than one occasion telling them that I was the last person they 

really wanted to present something like that to. I used as much leverage as I could 

to make them see that that was wrong. 

LL: Was it a matter of certain groups getting shortchanged or were they simply 

not being given an opportunity to do what they could? 

HJ: Both. They weren’t given opportunities or assignments because someone 

thought that another person from another ethnic group would be smarter. 

LL: Was it mostly a matter of Pashtos pointing the finger at Uzbeks or somebody 

else or was it just a matter of who you happened to be talking to at the time? 

HJ: Who I was talking to at the time. It was interesting. 

LL: Do you think you made any headway in changing attitudes as far as that 

went? 

HJ: I hope so. 

LL: Aside from dealing with all the logistical issues, what would you say were 

the biggest challenges you had to deal with while you were in Afghanistan? 

HJ: I had to deal with people on our side who, I perceived, didn’t care about the 

mission they were doing. I explain that as being the difference between someone 

who volunteers to go there versus someone who was involuntarily called up. I’m 

not going to divulge names but there was more than one person I had to deal with 

who, I felt, were doing more harm than good. 

LL: Was that on your team or someone external to your team? 

HJ: One was part of my team, or was supposed to be. I experienced this at 

different levels. I remember talking to Colonel Hipwell and sharing it with him on 

a ride to the battle update brief. 

LL: How did you deal with it? 

HJ: I did the best I could. If there was another way to get what I needed without 

having to deal with that person, I maximized that avenue. 

LL: Did you find that that attitude was equally distributed between Reserve, 

National Guard, and Active components? 

HJ: The difference was whether they had volunteered or didn’t volunteer. I 

think there’s some definite merit to that. Think about it. If you’ve been pulled out 
270

away from your family and your job and sent to do something you may not believe 

in, it’s almost understandable. One of these guys was a Guardsman and one was a 

Reservist. 

LL: Did you have any interaction with other US services? 

HJ: Yes. We worked with the Navy Seabee construction teams. They were part 

of the construction effort and the building up of the base. 

We worked with the Marine Corps, too. We actually had a Marine colonel on 

our staff. In fact, I was replaced by a Marine colonel. Ain’t that something? I was 

a major, doing the job of a lieutenant and I was replaced by a colonel. 

LL: Did you have positive interactions with them? 

HJ: Yes. There were no problems. 

LL: Did you have any opportunity to work with other Coalition forces? 

HJ: Yes. I was involved with the International Security Assistance Force. At 

one point General Moeen wanted the garrison to secure the base, as well as a buffer 

of about two miles. The problem with that was that ISAF was out there patrolling 

the area so things had to be coordinated with them. There was this one particular 

Danish officer I ended up working with quite a bit in order to work out rules of 

engagement, the ROE, issues. That was the bump in the road. 

They wanted us to be with the ANA but, at that time, my MPRI staff hadn’t 

been fully onboard. So to take us out on patrols meant we weren’t training the 

garrison leadership. That was an issue, as were the ROE. They were different. 

Their ROE said to shoot only if they were shot at and ours stated that we can shoot 

if we felt threatened. That made them very uncomfortable. They were responsible 

for the area, so essentially it was their turf. I really gained an appreciation for the 

ROE after that. 

We did do a couple patrols and the ANA performed admirably. The Danish guy 

was a Reservist as well. 

LL: Did you have any media contact while you were there? 

HJ: No. I never did any interviews. 

LL: Did you have any contact with non-governmental organizations, the 

NGOs, or maybe with the UN? 

HJ: Other than getting them out of the building that was burning in Herat, we 

didn’t have any other interaction with them. Their compound was down the road 

and we passed by it every day but in terms of working with them, not at that time. 

LL: Looking back on your deployment, what would you say was your biggest 

accomplishment and what was the one thing you felt was left undone? 
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HJ: Vehicles were still an issue for them. 

We were trying to establish a central warehouse for them, kind of like a central 

issue facility for the garrison. I wish I could have seen that project through. I don’t 

know where they are with that now but hopefully it’s completed. I still keep in 

contact with the MPRI team leader but he’s been moved to a position of greater 

responsibility now. 

LL: What about your biggest accomplishment? 

HJ: Getting them to where they were when we left. It wasn’t easy. I think they 

were able to start planning and thinking more at the organizational level by the 

time we left. 

They had made major headway. Their success with the Russians was based on 

small-unit tactics. Now we were trying to pull them together and get them to think 

at the organizational level. That’s no small undertaking. It involves a very different 

skill set. 

We also brought in all new people, some who had previous military experience 

but many who did not. 

LL: When did you deploy back to the States? 

HJ: December 2004. 

LL: Did the whole team go back together? 

HJ: I had come in as an individual so, when I left, it was just Colonel Hipwell 

and me. I could have left earlier but I stayed until that time. I fell in on the middle 

of the 45th Separate Infantry Brigade out of Oklahoma. By July, the 76th Infantry 

Brigade had come in and taken over. Anybody leaving outside of that window 

would be just the individuals. 

LL: How was the handoff with your replacement? 

HJ: When I left, I was the chief of staff/executive officer. We had a 

deputy commander who was a lieutenant colonel and essentially took over my 

responsibilities. He came in with the 76th so, to my knowledge, I don’t think the 

XO position was replaced. There wasn’t any replacement identified so he just 

assumed responsibility. 

LL: So there wasn’t any formal left seat/right seat ride with him? 

HJ: No. 

LL: What were the biggest professional lessons learned that you took away 

from this deployment? 

HJ: As an embedded advisor, the biggest lesson was to understand not only 

what you do in terms of your processes and procedures but also why you do them. 
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You need to understand the spirit and intent of why the system is set up the way 

that it is. If you understand that, you can try and get it across to your trainees from 

different approaches versus just saying, “This is how you do it. Just do it this 

way.” Versus being able to say, “This is how we do it and this is why we do it that 

way. These are the problems we saw and these are the lessons we learned.” I communicated this to soldiers I briefed to give them an idea of what they were getting 

into before they went over there. I got a lot of positive feedback from them that it 

was very helpful. For what we’re doing now as advisors and trainers, that’s what 

we have to know and understand if we’re going to be effective. 

LL: Based on your deployment to Afghanistan, if you could make one 

recommendation to the Army in order to make things run better, what would you 

tell them to do? 

HJ: I often wonder sometimes in terms of using personnel and the assets we 

have available if we have soldiers doing things they’re not accustomed to doing. 

We have platoon leaders and captains acting as mayors or governors of the small 

areas they have and literally controlling that area. I will submit that many do not 

have the experience to effectively do that. They’re doing great but think if we had 

the experience and really understood all the nuances associated with building an 

area and understanding the economics, the cultural issues, and the second and third 

order effects of what we do.

I wonder if the Army is really maximizing the capabilities of the Reserves and 

National Guard and what they bring to the table. I wonder if active duty equates 

capacity with rank. In the National Guard and Reserves, you have guys who may 

be enlisted, junior NCOs, or junior officers who are also division directors, elected 

officials in their areas, owners of their own companies and so they understand 

economics and business. I often wonder if the Army has really tapped into that. 

I have my reasons to believe that they have not because we had at least one 

distinguished visitor here to speak to us. 

We have this database where we have to input all our civilian education 

and experience. I told him, “We have reservists and guardsmen who are elected 

officials. We have junior officers who have to act as mayors. Is this database being 

utilized to identify these personnel and put them in key roles?” The answer we got 

was, “No, it’s not being used that way.” He said I was right. He then recalled an 

experience where the guy flipping his slides was a junior NCO and he asked him 

what he did on the civilian side and the gentleman said he was the chief justice for 

his state. Here he was flipping slides! I wonder how often that happens.

Are we identifying these people and really trying to identify the capacity of 

individuals versus their ranks? I know rank is important. I’ve been in the military for 20 years. I know the structure is important but, in this environment we’re 
273

operating in now, I wonder if we’re really getting the full capacity out of the people 

we have. 

We see the State Department is unable to be there for various reasons. We’re 

collecting all this information but not using it properly. I also really think there’s 

a cultural thing here in the US and if we’re going to continue to be engaged in 

these types of endeavors, we need to do a better job of making sure that people are 

more sensitive to different cultures. See that they understand them and are making 

a concerted effort to understand and grow our knowledge of the different cultures 

and the history behind why certain things are the way they are.It’s not enough to 

just learn to speak the language. We need to understand the history of the areas as 

well and why the hatred is the way it is.

Education is important. Support to the families is important, too. For the last 

five years, my wife has essentially had to put her life on hold. I always wonder if 

there’s some way to transfer the benefits to them, where they can use some of our 

benefits if we’re not utilizing them. They’re an integral part of the mental stability 

of the soldier who’s deployed. If he’s not worried about home because his wife 

has everything in check, he’s able to focus on his mission. We had a soldier in 

Afghanistan, on the base, who shot himself deliberately so he could try to go home. 

There were other issues as well but the bottom line was that he was having major 

problems at home and wanted to get home and deal with them. That affected his 

ability to stay focused on the mission. 

LL: Given that you were an individual volunteer from a Reserve unit, what 

kinds of challenges did you have to deal with in terms of family separation and the 

family readiness group, the FRG, or lack thereof? 

HJ: I’m a geographical bachelor here for the Command and General Staff 

College and this has been harder on my family than my actual deployment. She 

was committed to that, though. 

We talked about it. I remember being in the colonel’s office, he was going to 

approve me to volunteer, and he had her on the phone saying, “Are you sure? Are 

you cool with this?” and she said yes so he signed the request. She wasn’t all that 

happy about me coming here, though. My wife has said she isn’t being contacted 

enough by the FRG. I think overall she’s okay. For the tour to Afghanistan, I don’t 

think there was a problem but for this one, since I’m stateside, the feeling is that 

it’s not that big of a deal. 

LL: Is there anything else about your deployment to Afghanistan that you’d 

like to add to this interview? 
274

HJ: It was a great experience. I learned a lot and got to perform at levels I don’t 

think I’ll ever get to perform at again, in the near future at least. I believe in that 

mission and we need to continue to help. There are some good people over there. 

LL: Thank you for your time.
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Major Rich Lencz

5 September 2008

BH: My name is Major Brad Helton (BH) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major Rich Lencz (RL) on his 

experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF from 24 

January 2007 until 27 January 2008. Today’s date is 5 September 2008 

and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any 

time we’re entering classified territory, please couch your response in 

terms that avoid revealing any classified information and if classification 

requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you’re not able 

to answer. Let’s start with some background information. Where did you 

grow up? How did you receive your commission? What jobs have you 

held during your military career? 

RL: I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I went to the United States 

Military Academy and graduated in 1997. I was branched as Infantry. I went to 

all the usual infantry schools of Airborne School, Air Assault School, and Ranger 

School.

After I did all of those at Fort Benning, I moved on to Fort Hood where I was 

a platoon leader with Bravo 1-22 Infantry. After 18 months in that job, I became 

the company executive officer, the XO, for Charlie Company 1-22. They were both 

mech companies.

After that, I went to the Captains Career Course and the Combined Arms 

Service and Staff School, the CAS3, here at Fort Leavenworth. I moved on to be 

the assistant operations officer or S3 for 2-9 Infantry for about eight months and 

then I took command of Bravo 2-9 Infantry. I was the company commander there 

for about 14 months and then I took command of Headquarters and Headquarters 

Company, 2-9. I was the company commander for HHC for about a year. 2-9 was 

also a mechanized infantry battalion.

After that command, I went to Fort Stewart and was an observer-controller 

team chief and assisted the National Guard in getting ready for deployments. After 

a year in that job, I moved up to be the S3 for the battalion and continued to assist 

National Guard units in getting ready for deployments, mostly to Iraq. I then got 

orders that said I was going to be on a military transition team, the MiTT, in the 

summer of 2006. I was told that I had two weeks to report if I was going to Iraq or I 

had two months to report if I was going to go to Fort Riley and be on an embedded 

training team, ETT, in Afghanistan. Of course I chose Afghanistan so I could get 

my wife settled somewhere else. We had three months of train up at Fort Riley. 

While I was there, I was part of a 16-man team and we were preparing ourselves 
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to be advisors for an Afghan National Army on the ANA brigade staff. By the time 

we got over there, though, we were sliced and diced down to about 10 men and we 

were sent down to advise a battalion. The train up at Fort Riley consisted of basic 

individual soldier skills as well as a review of some collective infantry tasks. 

We got into country on 25 January 2007 and we stayed there until 26 January 

2008. I stayed my whole year at Forward Operating Base Bermel in Paktika 

Province, Afghanistan. It’s on the southeastern border with Pakistan. When I first 

got there, we replaced Marines who had been working with the 1st Battalion, 2d 

Brigade, 203d Corps. The Marines had been there for about three months but the 

Marines were trying to consolidate all their guys into one area up north at Paktia 

Province, so we took their place down there. January was a good time to take over 

because Taliban and al-Qaeda incidents were at a minimum because of the snow 

in the mountain passes which separate Pakistan from Afghanistan. There are very 

few passable passes during the winter and those lead straight into villages of about 

1,000 people. All the small goat paths that the Taliban and al-Qaeda use were 

snowed in, so we were able to get a good two week handover with the Marines. 

We got to see the whole area of operations, the AO, and all the different villages 

we’d be patrolling. We had a chance to experience what it was like to patrol in the 

mountains and to be a mile and a half up in the air while carrying a full pack. There 

was the battalion from the ANA as well as an outpost of about 10 Afghan National 

Police, the ANP, at FOB Bermel. There were also two US companies from the 10th 

Mountain Division and halfway through my rotation, the 173d sent two companies 

to replace them.

I went on about three or four patrols a week but the battalion was out patrolling 

every day. The average patrol consisted of passing out humanitarian assistance 

products to villagers or going down to their combat outpost in the vicinity of the 

village of Shkin which was one of two major crossing points in the Bermel Valley 

area. The ANA had a company down there and we had to go there weekly to 

resupply them with fresh food. Because FOB Bermel was a half day’s drive from 

the nearest ANA sister battalion, they would drive to brigade once a week to get 

their own supplies and that would take a full day. In order to get to brigade, they 

had to drive a route that was heavy with improvised explosive devices [IEDs], set 

by local smugglers and other criminals that were in cahoots with the Taliban. 

We started doing patrols with just four ETTs and we divided into two ETTs per 

Humvee. The ANA had 40 to 50 men divided into eight Ford Rangers. That’s how 

we’d leave the FOB. When we got to where we were going to conduct the patrols, 

we’d walk the mountains on foot or we’d stop at a village, cordon it off, go in and 

talk with the village elders. After the ANA’s patrol leader was done talking to the 

village elder, he’d have the village elder assist him in passing out the humanitarian 

assistance.
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While I was there, we had three major operations that were aimed at clearing 

al-Qaeda and the Taliban out of the Bermel Valley. The first operation was called 

CATAMOUNT FURY and it occurred in the early spring. That was followed up 

with a late spring, early summer operation called CATAMOUNT FURY SURGE. 

These operations were foot patrols behind the villages of Malikshay and Mangratay 

[ph] in the mountains that separate Pakistan from Afghanistan. 

We’d patrol up to the vicinity of the internationally recognized boundary 

looking for any personnel that shouldn’t have been there or any supply caches. The 

year earlier when 10th Mountain had first gotten there and 1-22 was with them, 

they’d had great success with these types of patrols. The Taliban had learned from 

that, and they stopped creating large caches in the mountains on the Afghan side 

of the border. They realized it was only a three-hour walk from the border to the 

small villages, so they stopped caching them on the Afghan side and our operations 

didn’t yield much at all.

The third operation was conducted by the 173d in the fall and it lasted about 

a week. This operation actually established contact with some Taliban members 

as they were falling back because they were able to get behind them before they 

dropped their weapons. The enemy only sustained minimal casualties. I think 

it was something like three killed and five captured. The more important thing 

was that we created a buffer around the southern village of Mangratay [ph] so the 

Americans could establish their own combat outpost. That was the area where we 

were receiving rocket fire on a daily basis. The enemy had started to get fairly 

accurate and rockets were landing inside FOB Bermel which is only about 300 

meters by 300 meters large. Luckily, there were only a few casualties. The ANA 

suffered a few casualties that were evacuated but they returned to duty a week later. 

The rounds that landed on the American side of the FOB didn’t hit any soldiers.

After that combat outpost was put out there, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were no 

longer capable of conducting rocket attacks on the FOB, not even inaccurate fires. 

Everything just stopped because they couldn’t get to their positions any more due 

to the combat outpost we put in place. The failure in that was that there was a lack 

of coordination in developing and planning for that combat outpost. Whenever we 

build anything or do any patrols over there, we want the ANA to work together 

with the American Army.

1st Battalion, 2d Brigade was a very competent ANA unit. They were one of 

the first units stood up in the 203d Corps. The 203d Corps came down and said that 

the first company in that battalion was the best company he had in his corps. Their 

battalion commander was a very strong leader but he got injured in an ambush in 

the vicinity of Malikshay during the summer. After that, morale plummeted. He 

was a very strong, forceful leader who really looked after his soldiers. He knew 

what he was there to do. He was there to kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
278

When he got injured, his XO took over but he wasn’t as strong as he was. He 

spent most of his time sitting around in his room when he was at FOB Bermel. 

When he did conduct business, he’d do it out of his room. As his advisor, it was 

very frustrating to work with him and to watch the performance of the battalion 

slide down.

The chief of staff of the Ministry of Defense came down to FOB Bermel soon 

after the battalion commander was wounded and the soldiers in the battalion were 

begging him to let them rotate out of there to somewhere quieter. The weird thing 

about Afghanistan is that there were guys who went over there as ANA advisors 

who didn’t see any kind of fire for their entire year there. 

They spent all their time training up in the northwest. Down in Paktika Province 

and Helmand though, you were going to see some kind of enemy contact weekly, 

if not daily. I’d say we had some kind of contact in the form of IEDs, direct fire, 

or rocket attacks at least twice a week. The men in 1st Battalion, 2d Brigade knew 

there were quieter areas where they could be stationed. 

They were told they were only going to have to be down there for six months. 

By the time they were finally replaced, though, it had been a year and a half. 2d 

Battalion, 2d Brigade rotated in with them and they didn’t have anywhere near the 

reputation that 1-2 did. After working with them for a short time, we discovered 

why. The battalion commander had just gotten to the battalion a month before they 

came to us. Their leadership had been completely corrupt and, because of that, all 

the soldiers were abusing drugs. 

We wound up sending away a very effective battalion when 1-2 left and in 

return got a weak battalion. In between this shifting of battalions, the head American 

company commander, Captain Kristol [ph] came up with the plan for the operation 

to create that buffer zone around Mangratay [ph]. He got his battalion’s approval 

to set up that combat outpost there. He thought that the ANA were going to send a 

platoon out there with his platoon. I spoke with the 2-2 battalion commander and 

said, “This is a very good opportunity for your guys to get out there.” He said, “I 

can’t send a platoon out there because of my lack of manpower.” He was correct. 

He had about two thirds the manpower of 1-2. 1-2 had about 300 men at any one 

time and 2-2 only had 200 men.

The list of AWOLs before the new battalion commander showed up was at 

zero because all the company commanders were taking that money and putting it 

in their pockets. They were saying the soldiers were there and they would receive 

their money. The reason this new battalion commander was put in charge of 2-2 

was because he had a reputation of being able to weed out corruption and the first 

thing he did was make the company commanders put everyone’s name on the 

AWOL ranks. By the time I left three months later, he was finally getting the extra 
279

100 to 200 soldiers that he needed to replace those AWOL soldiers. Before that, 

he was down to just 200 men. Fifty of them were at the combat outpost around 

the village of Shkin. That left him just 150 guys to conduct daily operations out 

of FOB Bermel. Out of those 150 guys, he also had to make sure that all of them 

got their two months of leave. He would lose about 20 percent of them to leave, so 

that left him with about 120 soldiers to work with. He had to guard the FOB with 

at least a full company and a bunch of those guys were just headquarters guys, like 

cooks, maintainers, and medics. They weren’t infantrymen.

He really only had about 80 guys available for patrolling when you whittled it 

all down. Every day he’d send out a 40-man patrol. If they got into a nasty contact, 

he only had 40 guys left to go help them out. He told the American company 

commander no. I tried talking to him about possibly sending a squad, because this 

was going to be a good public relations campaign. I told him it would be great because we had set up a combat outpost at what was a village that was pro-Taliban

by intimidation, not because they wanted to be. Now, that combat outpost is being 

occupied by ANA forces and American forces. Unfortunately, that fell completely 

flat because the Americans didn’t coordinate with the 2-2 commander. I had to tell 

the Americans that 2-2 wouldn’t be able to permanently occupy it anyway, unless 

he got permission from his corps. I told him that he needed to talk to his battalion 

commander who needed to talk to his brigade commander because brigades work 

with ANA corps. Somewhere along the way, the ball was dropped and things 

weren’t worked out. This turned out to be a source of great tension between the 

173d and the ANA because the 173d companies thought the ANA were signed up 

to do it but the reality was that no one had ever told the ANA that.

As the ETT, you would think someone would have let us know. I wound up 

contacting my brigade ETT and told them what was going on and they said, “No 

one has talked to the brigade staff about this at all.” That’s kind of normal standard 

procedure over there.

The brigade staff usually brings together the forces that are in the less hostile 

areas, i.e. that weren’t on the border with Pakistan. They’d go into one of the two 

areas that were on the border with Pakistan and do maneuver operations. 

They just let the 1st Battalion do whatever they did in that area. They were 

really hands off and didn’t really support them at all. When 2-2 took over for 1-2, 

it was the same thing. “Do what you want to down there. It’s your area. Play nice 

with the Americans. When it’s not physically possible to do so, then don’t.”

The other thing that caused a lot of tension was the fact that the capabilities 

of the ANA aren’t nearly the same as those of the American Army. When the 

Americans go out, we have a coordinated fire plan to go with our maneuver plan. 

We have mortars, artillery, attack, lift, and evacuation helicopters. We plan all that 

in order to support a maneuver platoon as they go out to patrol the hills around.
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When the ANA go out on patrol, all they have is 60-millimeter mortars or 

82-millimeter mortars. That’s it. It’s not like they have anyone acting as their 

forward observer either. They do everything by line of sight. If they can see you 

with their mortars, they’re going to kill you in three rounds. If they can’t see who 

they’re shooting at, though, they just lob rounds out there and hope for the best. 

When the Americans go out to patrol, they’re riding in up-armored Humvees 

or they fly in by helicopter and they know they have lots of fire support. They have 

greater protection against IEDs than the ANA soldiers riding in Ford Rangers. 

When I went to visit my grandparents in Missouri as a kid, they would just throw 

six of us cousins in the back of a Ranger. You’re not even allowed to do that in 

America anymore but that’s how they do it. The ANA squat on some makeshift 

bench seats and roll out that way. If they hit an IED, they lose everybody in the 

truck. It was fortunate that while I was there they only rolled over one IED and 

it was the smallest IED in recorded history of Afghanistan. It blew out a tire and 

caused a couple scrapes on a couple guys but the vehicle was still functioning and 

we didn’t have to MEDEVAC everyone. That IED was about the size of a cigarette 

pack stuffed with plastic explosive. Usually the IED is filled with dynamite or 

plastic explosives and it’s about a foot by a foot by a foot in density and then it’s 

wrapped up with little BBs so it can have a claymore effect and injure more people. 

BH: Did you do any cross-border operations? 

RL: No. We weren’t allowed to cross the border. On one of the first patrols we 

did with 1-2, they identified an illegal border crossing but it turned out to be nothing. 

It was just a family doing an illegal crossing. The ANA checked everything out and 

didn’t find anything illegal or any explosives and so they let them go. Because we 

had gotten so close to the border, though, we did have to do a small investigation 

to make sure that the international border was respected.

At times, the ANA did get into cross-border shootouts with the Frontier Border 

Brigade from Pakistan. That unit was known to be corrupt and to be supporters 

of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Shkin area where our combat outpost was. 

They did have a couple shootouts with them across the border with direct fires and 

mortars. There were a couple times when they did shoot it out with them because 

Pakistan was putting up pickets of where they planned to put up a fence to separate 

Afghanistan from Pakistan. The only problem was that Pakistan was on Afghan 

soil. The actual border control points that Pakistan has are actually in Afghanistan. 

They did a land grab back in the days when the warlords were fighting with each 

other and the Taliban couldn’t stop them, and they stole a bunch of land around 

Shkin because it’s a very healthy and robust market area. They grabbed that 

territory and now don’t want to give it back. It’s a source of contention between 

the Afghanistan government and the Pakistan government and especially between 
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the soldiers. Afghan soldiers are very proud to be Afghans. The same goes for the 

Pakistan soldiers. So every once in a while they butt heads. 

BH: How would you assess the effectiveness of the operations the ANA 

participated in? 

RL: The ANA from 1st Battalion worked with the 10th Mountain to do the 

CATAMOUNT FURY and CATAMOUNT FURY SURGE missions and they 

executed them well. The Americans were prepared to support the Afghans because 

in the past the Afghans hadn’t come out prepared to support themselves with food 

and water beyond one day. 

They were quite surprised when the ETTs were telling them not to give them 

anything because the ANA had enough food to support themselves for three days. 

The 1st Battalion had worked with some Marine and some Special Forces units on 

how to conduct tactical operations and they were proficient at squad-and platoonsize maneuvers. What they weren’t proficient in was planning and resourcing their 

own logistics which was something we worked with them on. By the time they 

were leaving us, their logistics officer, the S4, was capable of planning for how 

many meals they needed to take with them depending on how many days they 

were going out and how many men they were taking with them. 

We were not capable of convincing them to use their own water, however, because they thought their water was contaminated. They wouldn’t drink the water 

unless it was boiled. To work around this, we’d have the S4 count how many people 

were going out, how many days they were going to be out and calculate how many 

bottles of water a soldier should drink each day while climbing mountains. He 

would then work with the XO of the company from the 10th Mountain Division 

or the 173d to get the correct number of bottles of water. Now they were capable 

of supplying themselves for their own missions. Instead of being out on a mission, 

coming down from a mountain, looking at 10th Mountain and saying, “We need 

food and water.” All the while leaving the area completely unsecured. They made 

that step forward while we were there and it was very effective. 

What wasn’t effective was intelligence. CATAMOUNT FURY occurred too 

soon. The snow caps still hadn’t melted. They were melting as we got out there. 

We got out there before the Taliban did. When it came to FURY SURGE, we 

didn’t establish contact. We went to the areas that they had used in the past. We did 

that because the enemy was not a learning enemy. In the past, they had resupplied 

the same caves with their ammunition, rockets, RPGs, small arms, and mortars 

if they had them. They’d store them in the same caves and they’d done that for a 

couple years in a row. Because of that, we went back to the same areas but this 

time we came up dry. I think the enemy had finally learned. They may have been 

hit over the head a couple times but they figured out that they couldn’t go back to 

the same spot every time. 
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BH: Did you find out where they did store their stuff? 

RL: No. We weren’t able to find any large caches. I think they had gotten smart 

and kept things on the Pakistan side of the border which was only a three-hour 

camel walk. 

They figured out that either we were on the goat trails in the morning or we 

weren’t going to be there at all. They could tell if it was clear to come or not as 

soon as the sun came up. Even if we did try to go in that general direction, they’d 

see us coming and immediately send out information, duck down, and head more 

north or south instead of east or west to move away from where we were patrolling. 

BH: What drugs were the soldiers from 2-2 using? 

RL: Within the first week of being there, I established a good rapport with an 

NCO in HHC and he told me that about 70 percent of all the soldiers in 2-2 were 

using hashish. 1-2 wasn’t all that innocent in this either. At least 25 percent of their 

soldiers were using as well. The real difference was that 2-2 was basically high all 

the time whereas 1-2 would only get high on their free time. When they found out 

they weren’t going out on patrol that day, they’d go hide somewhere and get high. 

2-2 didn’t care. It didn’t matter if it was a patrol day, a quick reaction force day or 

not, the soldiers who were getting high got high all the time. 

2-2 was heavily populated with Hazaras which are from a different portion 

of the northwest end where most of the 1-2 kids had come from. They were away 

from their families, aside from the cousins they had in the battalion with them. 

Their mothers pampered them, just like American mothers do, and the soldiers 

missed their families very much. 

They did drugs to alleviate the pain. 1-2 had great leadership and that kept 

them focused on conducting the mission. The soldiers could take one look at their 

battalion commander and know he wasn’t corrupt. With 2-2, though, before they 

changed out battalion commanders and got the new guy in, they had a battalion 

commander who was sexually molesting the soldiers. That got around and all the 

soldiers knew that you didn’t want to get called into the battalion commander’s 

headquarters because they knew what would happen if he thought you were cute. 

They also knew that the officers weren’t putting anyone on AWOL status so they 

could pocket the money. 

They also knew that the battalion commander had an illegal taxation going on 

in the village they were located in and that was the reason the brigade commander 

replaced him. It’s very difficult to get someone fired or thrown in jail for corruption 

in Afghanistan because it’s a very tribal system. Everyone’s related to someone 

in power. It could be through the Ministry of Defense, through the Ministry of 

Interior, or Karzai’s cabinet. Everyone is connected to someone. So, if you try 
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and report that a battalion commander is a child molesting bastard and we want to 

throw him in jail, the head of his tribe, who is well connected, will say, “No way 

because I know about your brother who’s doing similar things in a different area.” 

Everyone has dirt on everyone so no one can get punished but at least they could 

still get removed which was a good thing for 2-2. 

BH: What would you consider your greatest success and your greatest failure? 

RL: My greatest success as an ETT was assisting 1-2 in developing their 

logistics capability. We were not only able to teach that S4 how to count water 

bottles and meals, we also taught the mechanics how to fill out forms to request 

supplies from the 203d Corps. That was important because 203d Corps kept all 

the vehicle spare parts. We also created a system in which the mechanics could go 

get those spare parts. In the three months we had with 2-2, we taught them how 

to count heads and water bottles. You really have a parabolic curve of success 

in Afghanistan. While what we did was only considered a small success on that 

curve, we were able to set the conditions for the next group that replaced us. They 

would see that the Afghans could fight as fire teams, as squads, and platoons in a 

direct firefight. 

They could bring their own supplies at the company level. The company XOs 

and company supply sergeants were now working with the S4 so they could have 

supplies in the field. Now that they were at that level, the new ETT coming in could 

teach them how to coordinate their artillery with the two artillery pieces they have. 

They could teach their platoon leaders and squad leaders how to call for mortar 

rounds and adjust fire. If that new ETT could accomplish that, it would be another 

small step on that parabolic curve. My greatest personal failure was not getting 

the operations staff to use maps to help them in planning operations. The majors, 

lieutenant colonels, and captains don’t want to admit that they don’t know how to 

read maps. What we hoped to do was teach their lieutenants who came straight out 

of the officer basic course how to read maps and you hope the captain watching over 

your shoulder making sure you’re doing a good job is really learning something 

as well. I wasn’t able to get their operations staff to draw graphics on where 

everyone was expected. I worked with the S3 or the assistant S3 and occasionally 

the battalion commander for six months telling them, “You’ve been in that area 

12 times in this last year. You don’t have to drive down there first. You’ve already 

been there.” We weren’t able to get them to do any forward planning.

Someone listening to this might be thinking, “Why is he saying that training 

the ANA to supply themselves and read maps is his greatest success and failure?” 

I’m saying it because that’s what we were there to do. We weren’t there to drag 

them along into a fight, even though we went on patrols with them. We were there 

to help them become able to patrol without us. These are all steps to becoming an 
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independent unit. That’s the reason when you ask me about my biggest success and 

failure, I talk about the training of the ANA. 

BH: How were your relationships with the American brigades? 

RL: They were bad. The 10th Mountain company had heavy casualties. Just 

about every soldier in his company got wounded. I think maybe only four guys 

weren’t wounded while they were there at FOB Bermel and only one guy died. 

There were guys who were patched up, sent away, brought back and got patched 

up again. When I arrived, they’d already been in country for nine months and they 

were tired of getting wounded.

FOB Bermel was named after a small bazaar that was 100 meters away from 

the FOB. They came in, created the FOB and fought the enemy out of the bazaar. 

They fought them out of the hills within one kilometer. They fought them out of 

the villages about one kilometer and they fought them into the hills towards the 

Pakistan border. 

They were tired of getting wounded and they wanted the ANA to take over 

and fight for their country. 1st Battalion, 2d Brigade was expected to walk the hills 

while 10th Mountain sat in their Humvees, so there was some animosity there.

While 10th Mountain was willing to support us with maintenance, food, and 

water, we didn’t fall under their chain of command. We were an additional agitation 

that they had that they had no control over. The Marines don’t really play nicely 

with the US Army anyway, so we kind of inherited a bad relationship there. Things 

got a little bit better while we were there but it still wasn’t a great relationship. 

When the 173d came in, things started off okay. 1st Battalion was showing them 

that they were competent and the 173d said they would walk the mountains with 

them. The relationship was good until 1st Battalion wanted to do a major combat 

operation around Malikshay before the battalion commander got injured and 

the 173d didn’t think they were ready to do it yet. 1-2 was requesting additional 

forces from the 173d’s battalion that were in different sectors conducting other 

operations. The ANA got frustrated that the Americans weren’t ready to do that 

big operation in the area. The relationship with the 173d was really ruined on 16 

July when Colonel Habibullah was ambushed. That ambush was the best ambush 

the enemy had done to date. The ANA had 12 wounded and somehow Colonel 

Habibullah miraculously survived. His Humvee was in the lead of the convoy and 

they were traveling with Alpha Troop from the 91st CAV which was attached to 

the 173d. The ANA was first because they knew the area and they were followed 

by Alpha Troop.

When we got to the vicinity of Malikshay, the lead vehicle in the convoy made 

a wrong turn and Colonel Habibullah was furious at them, so he took the lead 

with his Humvee. He had just gotten one of the new light armored Humvees that 
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our scouts used to use in mech warfare before we started the rotations to Iraq and 

Afghanistan. They were pretty good against 5.56 and 7.62 but nothing bigger than 

that. He was feeling invincible because he had a guy on top with a machine gun 

and he was riding in an American Humvee with light armor. He went out and took 

the lead and as we were turning north from and one of the soldiers from the ANA

battalion was goofing around in the back of a Ranger and fired off his RPG. 

We all jumped out and formed a perimeter thinking we were about to get 

ambushed but nothing happens. The enemy maintained their discipline and stayed 

in their high positions for their ambush which was only another 300 meters north. 

After we figured out what happened, Colonel Habibullah was steaming mad. If he 

had not been injured that day, that soldier would have gotten seriously reprimanded 

for embarrassing him like that in front of the Americans. The Afghans don’t like 

to be embarrassed in front of the Americans. Anyway, we jumped back into our 

vehicles, drove into the ambush and the colonel takes three RPG rounds into his 

Humvee. One went through the engine block, one at the crevice of his door and 

frame and one through the trunk. The one that hit his door frame peppered his face 

and chest with small fragments and he got a major wound down in his large belly. 

After that, an intense firefight ensued that lasted for about 15 minutes before we 

were able to beat the enemy back. 

We took about 12 ANA casualties. Alpha Troop assisted us in beating the enemy 

back and they followed them but wasn’t able to kill them. The first thing that really 

upset the ANA was that no artillery rounds were fired because the ambush was too 

close. I was right there with them so I couldn’t call in artillery. 

Helicopters had just flown over the area and said things were all clear and 

then flew out of our AO. By the time the helicopters came back into the AO, they 

couldn’t get permission to fire into the caves where the enemy was probably hiding. 

Alpha Troop followed the tracks of vehicles to the north and search the village but 

find nothing.

The ANA was upset that the Americans didn’t call in any indirect fire or 

helicopter attacks. The XO took over for Colonel Habibullah. This was the XO 

who didn’t like to leave his room or go out on missions. The Americans wanted 

to go out and conduct missions and he would say, “Fine. You guys go out. I’m not 

going out.” That’s when things just got weird. There was a 180-degree change. 

When Colonel Habibullah was in charge, he would jump at the chance to go on 

missions. He would say, “How many men do you want? Do you want a company 

or a platoon? You got it.” If the Americans asked for a platoon, he would give them 

a company. The Americans would either say, “No, I don’t need that many.” Or they 

would say, “Gee, thanks. We’ll take it.”
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When the XO took over, he wouldn’t send soldiers out like that anymore. As 

ETTs trying to foster relationships with the battalion, we’d let the Americans walk 

away and not pressure the ANA in front of them. That would have damaged our 

relationship with the battalion commander and S3 but that infuriated the 173d. 

Then 1st Battalion changed out, 2d Battalion came in and was a wreck 

compared to 1st Battalion. I had guys who would go down to FOB Shkin and work 

with the Special Forces. 

They’d come back to FOB Bermel and ask why we couldn’t do the same things 

at Bermel that they were doing at Shkin. It was simply because we had a different 

chain of command. My guys were wearing civilian clothes like they were Special 

Forces, until I found out about it and corrected it. We had to put out to everyone, 

“What you do with the Special Forces, you do with them. When you get back here, 

you’re normal again.” They all got the picture.

My lowest-ranking officers were captains and they’d constantly go on missions 

with platoon leaders. The lieutenants wouldn’t take the time to explain the mission 

properly and the details wouldn’t get fleshed out, so my captains would have the 

ANA go to where they thought the platoon leader wanted to go to but it wasn’t 

right. 

They’d stand there and look at each other and if they were the same rank, 

they’d probably be yelling at each other but I had a captain out there so they were 

respectful. The thing about my captains was that they weren’t infantry. I had one 

field artillery captain but the others were intelligence, logistics, and signal guys 

who were out there conducting infantry patrols. It wasn’t as if they could receive 

a mission from an infantry platoon leader and ask the appropriate questions before 

they went out. They would receive the mission and be like, “Okay, let’s move out.” 

That created even more tension.

I was gone for a month and that’s when things went to hell in a hand basket. As 

far as I’m concerned, when my boss gives me an order that’s legal and moral, I do 

it. I don’t care how stupid it is. You get a lot of stupid orders but you follow through 

because of discipline. When your commander tells you to wear your flak vest and 

helmet at all times during certain conditions, you say, “Okay, boss. No problem.” 

All my non-infantry captains and NCOs would say, “That’s really stupid. There 

will only be one chance in one hundred million that we’re going to need to wear 

that stuff.” They would question everything and when you tell people that the 

answer to their question is discipline, they don’t like that. They’ll do it but until 

you tell them to do it and you catch them, they hadn’t been doing it.

During my time as an ETT, we had three different bosses. My boss at that time 

was a very grating personality when it came to working with outside people, and 

he usually had me work with the American company. I was able to go with the flow 
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and make things work well. My boss was very much one of those guys who would 

tell you if something was stupid. That just grated the American companies when he 

told them one of their plans for a mission was stupid and he wasn’t going to tell the 

ANA to support it. Some other incidents occurred and when I got back from leave, 

I was told that I was now going to be in charge of the team. I was the third guy to 

do so because my boss at the time was a senior major from the adjutant corps. He 

talked to our boss and got me to be in charge because it just didn’t make any sense 

to have an adjutant guy in charge. I was only going to take over when 2-2 came up 

so 1-2 would only see him as the guy in charge.

2-2 showed up three days after I got back from leave. One day after that, 

Task Force Phoenix which was my senior headquarters in Afghanistan, sent the 

command sergeant major and deputy commander down to investigate what we 

were doing. I was like, “What’s going on? No one above brigade has ever come 

down here at all until today. Now all of a sudden you’re bringing a laundry list of 

things that you say I’m ate-up on?” I went down the list and said, “Not true, not 

true, fixed it, fixed it.” There was one thing that we didn’t do. When we were 20 

meters from the gate, we didn’t ground guide to the gate. I admitted to it and the 

sergeant major was like, “Even the commanding general ground guides his vehicle 

when he’s on the FOB, so ground guide your vehicles.” I said, “Okay.” Every time 

we went to another FOB in Task Force Phoenix after that, I had to deal with my 

guys pointing out how there were people not ground guiding their vehicles. I just 

told them to shut up. 

BH: Do you have anything else you’d like to add to this interview? 

RL: When it comes to training the ANA, Special Forces does an excellent job 

training sergeants to lead soldiers and training soldiers to be soldiers. Unfortunately, 

they don’t share what they’re doing with the ETTs. They worked in their own little 

microcosm. 

We had a group right down the road and they would say, “Send us six guys 

and we’ll square them away.” And they would. They would send back some 

phenomenal soldiers and leaders. I would say that the Army needs to find out how 

they train those guys and send that information out to the ETTs. That would allow 

the ETTs to do a better job training squad leaders and individual soldiers. 

BH: Thank you very much for your time.

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Major Christopher Plummer

6 June 2006

JE: My name is Lieutenant Colonel James Evenson (JE), United States 

Marine Corps Reserve, a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff 

College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major Christopher 

Plummer (CP), United States Army, also a CGSC student, in support of the 

Combat Studies Institute’s Operational Leadership Experiences Project. 

We’re referencing Major Plummer’s experience in Operation ENDURING 

FREEDOM or OEF in Afghanistan. Today’s date 6 June 2006 and this is 

an unclassified interview. Before we begin, Major Plummer, if you feel at 

any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch your response in 

terms that avoid revealing any classified information and if classification 

requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you’re not able to 

answer. Major Plummer, I’d like to begin with some questions about your 

background. Could you please state your full name and branch? 

CP: Christopher Plummer, US Army, Infantry. 

JE: And could you give me a brief career chronology that brought you up to the 

point of training to go to Afghanistan? 

CP: I entered the service in 1984 and served as a paratrooper in the 82d Airborne 

Division and as a drill sergeant and then separated service to seek a college degree 

and a commission. I graduated from college and received a commission in 1993. I 

then attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course and after completion was assigned 

to Korea, serving as a platoon leader, company executive officer-XO, scout platoon 

leader and then headquarters and headquarters company XO. From 1996 to 1997, I 

completed the Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, followed by Combined 

Arms and Services Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. From 1998 to 2001, I went to 

Alaska where I was a brigade plans officer in the 172d Separate Infantry Brigade or 

SIB, a battalion logistics officer or S4, in 2-1 Infantry, rifle company commander in 

21 Infantry, and then commandant of the Northern Warfare Training Center. From 

2002 to 2004, I was an Active Component/Reserve Component or ACRC team 

chief, assistant operations officer, and operations officer or S3, in Indiana, when I 

received orders to go to Afghanistan. 

JE: Was that the unit you were with as you trained for OEF? 

CP: Right, the 1st Battalion, 335th Infantry, Indianapolis, Indiana which was 

an ACRC slot but this was not the unit I trained up with for my deployment to 

Afghanistan. 
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JE: Could you please describe your experiences in training prior to deployment? 

CP: I was given orders as an individual filler to replace someone in Afghanistan, 

so they cut the orders and sent me to the CONUS Replacement Center, the CRC, at 

Fort Benning, Georgia, where we trained for two weeks on what was supposed to 

be theater specific training to get a soldier ready for deployment. 

JE: Could you describe some of that training? 

CP: It was real basic kinds of training such as first aid, nuclear, biological and 

chemical, weapons familiarization and weapons qualification on the 9-millimeter 

Beretta. 

We also received some operational security classes, theater-specific training, 

security briefs, convoy security classes, and just basic standard pre-deployment 

stuff. It wasn’t really the kind of training I was expecting. It seemed like a check 

the block with no real meat to the training. Some of the lesson plans seemed to be 

training outlines for units going to Bosnia or Kosovo. It was poorly run, poorly 

organized, and in my opinion a waste of time. 

JE: Could you describe the circumstances around your deployment order? How 

much time did you have prior to your order? Were there any special preparations 

you made besides the training? 

CP: I received about 30 or 40 days notice. In November or early December, I 

found out I was going. By January 2nd, I was at the CRC conducting the train up. 

By the end of January 2005, I was already in Afghanistan. It went very quickly. 

As far as special preparations, the normal stuff to make sure my will was in order, 

power of attorney, make sure the family was set in case the worst case scenario 

came to pass, and just getting all my personal things in order. 

JE: Did you have any idea what your mission would be as an individual filler? 

CP: Yes. I was told by Human Resources Command that my mission was to 

serve as a provincial reconstruction team or PRT leader which means they place 

me in a province somewhere in Afghanistan and I help rebuild the infrastructure, 

fight the insurgency, and get the local police and military up and running. 

JE: When did you actually leave the US to go to Afghanistan? 

CP: It was the end of January, around the 20th. 

JE: Could you describe your experiences going to Afghanistan? 

CP: I was surprised to find out that it takes a long time to get in theater. You 

get on a civilian contracted jet in Atlanta, you fly for hours into Germany and, 

from Germany you flew on another civilian contracted jet which took us into 

Turkey. From Turkey, we switched to military air, the C-130, which was supposed 

to take us straight into Afghanistan but we were weathered out because of bad 
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weather reported in Bagram. The aircraft turned around and ended up landing in 

Uzbekistan where we stayed for a couple more days, then we attempted it again 

and after multiple stops along the way finally landed in Bagram. So it took about 

seven days to get in country. 

JE: Was Bagram your final destination? 

CP: No. Bagram is where everybody initially enters Afghanistan and where 

they scan your ID card so they know you’re in a combat zone, so you can begin 

picking up imminent danger pay and separation pay. 

Then from there, you contact your unit, they form a convoy and they come and 

get you. I had about an hour or so drive to get to Kabul Compound Camp Eggers 

where I was to be stationed. 

JE: Who came to get you? 

CP: Some guys from the Office of OSC–A [Security Cooperation-Afghanistan] 

soldiers already assigned to my unit. 

JE: What gear did you take with you when you went to Afghanistan? 

CP: Well, you go to the central issue facility at Fort Benning and they issue 

you four full duffle bags of stuff, of which I might add, you only use about half 

of one duffle bag for the entire year you’re in country and they’re very heavy, so 

heavy that when I put them on the cart on the airport, it folded the front wheel of 

the cart under. It literally collapsed one of those five dollar carts. A lot of it had 

nothing to do with Afghanistan. It wasn’t theater specific gear. I would be issued 

the correct gear in country through the rapid fielding initiative or RFI, three more 

duffle bags to contend with. 

JE: So your unit brought you back to where? 

CP: Kabul Compound. It’s named Camp Eggers for a soldier who was killed 

in action over there. I was then sent over to personnel shop where I was supposed 

to get the assignment to my PRT, somewhere in the country. 

JE: Did that actually occur? 

CP: No. They said, “Nobody comes here and does the job they were assigned 

to do. You’re going to be doing stuff well above your pay grade. 

We don’t know what it is right now but come back tomorrow, get your 

equipment all squared away, and we’ll tell you where we’re going to put you 

tomorrow. There are several slots that need to be filled here at Kabul Compound, 

so we don’t want to send you out into the country. We want to keep you right here.” 

I was not too happy about this but there was little I could do. 
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They had another job in mind for me. Little did I know it would take me all 

over the country in some of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. 

JE: What specific duty position did you finally get assigned to? 

CP: About two days later, I was finally assigned to OSC-A’s Training and 

Fielding section. 

JE: Did your prior training help you in this role? 

CP: Training and Fielding was kind of a good job for me because I’d been a 

trainer most of my career in the Army. I’d been a drill sergeant, and I had just come 

out of an ACRC slot where we were training the National Guard and Reserve for 

Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. So the training aspect of the job I didn’t 

have a problem with and the fielding of the Afghan National Army, the ANA, 

seemed like pretty interesting work. So I wasn’t altogether unhappy with the 

assignment, except for the fact that I’d be stuck at Camp Eggers, kind of where the 

flagpole is. I wanted to get out into some of the provinces which I ended up doing 

anyway. It was a very difficult, complex, and at times a very dangerous job. 

JE: Did you replace someone in this role? 

CP: The guy I replaced had already left and I don’t recall his name. I only 

heard it once or twice but he was long gone when I arrived. 

JE: Any turnover? 

CP: No, no turnover whatsoever. I was working for the training and fielding 

officer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Pettigrew. I would eventually take his job and 

so I was his assistant when I first arrived. 

JE: Was Training and fielding the mission of the entire unit or was it just your 

area? 

CP: No, Training and fielding is one of many sections under OSC-A. You’ve 

got other sections such as Training and Education which deals with professional 

schools for the Afghan Army for example and it’s their version of CGSC, West 

Point, officer training, and all that and then Training and Fielding which is specific 

to building the ANA included rifle marksmanship training, maneuver training, 

combat service support, and logistical support training. 

Then there’s fielding which is once the Afghan battalions are trained, we put 

them in-country by basically putting good guys where there are bad guys. 

JE: What was your area of operations, the AO, like in Afghanistan? 

CP: As the training and fielding officer, I had the entire country of Afghanistan 

as something to manage, so my AO was literally the whole country. It all depended 

on the needs of the specific mission where we were sent to in Afghanistan. 
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We would do a lot of reconnaissance. We would go into an area and figure 

out where we needed to put newly trained Afghan infantry battalions, or combat 

support and combat service support battalions. 

We would look into billeting for them such as what forward operating base, 

the FOB, they were going into, did we need to build a FOB, the logistical support 

pieces, how they were going to get around, feed themselves and things of that 

nature. 

JE: Can you tell me about some of the soldiers of the ANA you trained? What 

were they like? 

CP: It’s a mixed bag. Afghanistan has multiple languages and dialects 

depending what area of the country the soldiers were recruited from but with 

no formal education system in the country a lot of the soldiers in their army are 

illiterate. 

We would have to have multiple translators with us on missions just to 

communicate in the provinces. Many ethnic groups exist in the country including 

Dari, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Nuristani. Most are Sunnis and Shi’a

Muslims and it’s just a mixed bag. As I mentioned before, most of them can’t read 

or write, so it’s very difficult to train them using just translators. 

We tried using some sort of board with pictures on it but it was very difficult, 

so we had to teach a lot using hands on. Often times we couldn’t communicate 

with them at all because even if we had two or three translators, they might not 

speak those languages either. So it was very difficult but the soldier coming in was 

recruited, not forced, to join the newly formed ANA.

To recruit new soldiers we sent out a recruiting assistance team or RAT. They 

go out and recruit just as we do here in the US. Of course, this is a very high 

risk job because they’re going into provinces where there aren’t any good guys 

and they’re trying to recruit the Afghan populace to join the army but they would 

recruit them and when they arrived for training we would ethnically balance the 

platoons and then they would go into a 12-week training cycle and eventually join 

the ANA. 

JE: How was the morale of these platoons? 

CP: Generally speaking, it was pretty good. 

They all wanted to be Ahmed Shah Masood. He was their hero. He was the 

guy who threw the Russians out of Afghanistan and was later killed by the Taliban. 

So they very much want to be heroes, want to be fighters. The only time we had a 

motivation or morale issue with them was when we didn’t feed them or pay them 

in a timely fashion. Both are very difficult to do there because the logistical support 

systems are just too immature to support the new army. 
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We’re working on it but often times it’s very difficult to get them all fed or paid 

on a daily basis. 

JE: Can you describe some of the challenges around getting supplies? 

CP: The issue is that logistical support is 90 percent originating from the 

US/Coalition forces. The Afghans don’t take into account any of the logistical 

support required to do anything. If you give them a mission, they’ll pick up their 

weapon and they’ll go. There’s no real planning involved, no logistical support 

considerations. 

They really don’t have the transportation assets anyway and they were mostly 

using our food sources but now we’re trying to get them to contract local food 

sources and get it to their soldiers, get their cooks to cook it and distribute it in their 

FOBs or bases. So feeding, fueling, ammunition, and just about everything is all 

still deeply rooted in US support. Hopefully that’s getting better but when I left in 

November, it was still very immature. 

JE: How about their equipment? 

CP: Their equipment is a challenge too. They’ve got some very old, very beat 

up AK47s. Not only that, but there was a shortage of magazines, cleaning kits, 

sight adjustment tools, blank adapters, blanks, and personal equipment. You name 

it and there was shortage as far as the ANA was concerned. It created a lot of 

challenges for us to try to make up the equipment shortage. 

JE: Could you describe some of the things you did to fill those gaps? 

CP: There was a donation program. We tried to get some of the old Soviet-bloc 

nations to donate this shortage of stuff. That happened with some success but, in a 

lot of cases, we just ordered it but it took a long time to arrive. The sight adjustment 

tools were a critical shortage because the army couldn’t shoot. In a lot of cases we 

would have them fabricated off post so they could adjust the sights on their AK47s 

and then continue to practice shooting. 

JE: Were all the Afghan soldiers based at Camp Eggers with you? 

CP: No. Camp Eggers is a US base. The place they would train at is called the 

Kabul Military Training Center, the KMTC, and that was about a 20-minute drive 

down Jalalabad Road which is a very high-risk road to travel. KMTC is run by 

Task Force Phoenix which is a National Guard run training center that trains up the 

ANA. Their higher headquarters is OSC-A. 

JE: Let’s talk about some of the terrain involved going between the two bases. 

What was it like? 

CP: Well, Jalalabad Road is not bad. There are thousands of pot holes, it’s in 

very bad shape but you’re not out in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan. It’s 
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a very dangerous road that has experienced its fair share of improvised explosive 

devices, the IEDs, direct fire as well as rocket attacks. There are certainly bad guys 

operating between Kabul Compound and the KMTC. Suicide bombers have been 

used as well against the KMTC. All these enemy activities took place while I was 

there, so as far as enemy activity is concerned it’s a bad road to drive on. 

JE: Did you actually go out into the mountainous regions? 

CP: Oh yeah, on many missions. 

JE: Could you describe some of those missions? Was that in support of the 

training of the ANA? 

CP: No. The fielding piece, I would just go to the KMTC and observe 

training, quality control/quality assurance. That’s where we found out about the 

marksmanship which we’ll talk about later. The fielding piece is what took me out 

into the provinces and that’s where, as these ANA battalions graduated, we wanted 

to move them. Where there are bad guys, we would put more good guys. 

We would go downrange and talk with the Special Forces, the SF, guys on the 

ground or the Combined Joint Task Force-76, the CJTF-76, guys which was the 

173d Airborne Brigade with some attachment battalions from the 82d Airborne. 

We would talk with them about enemy in the area, where they pictured these 

battalions going. Sometimes they’d break them down into companies and then we 

had to ensure that when the ANA battalion showed up on the ground, they had a 

place to live, they had food, fuel, ammunition, training areas, etc. 

JE: Were these places always mountainous or were there other regions as well? 

CP: It just depended. We did missions in both mountainous areas in Jalalabad 

heading east of Kabul and some missions in flat desert areas when we went from 

Herat in the west to Qalat in the east and southeast to Kandahar. We went all over 

the country. 

JE: Did you have the right gear for the different types of terrain you were 

dealing with? 

CP: Yes but it’s real hard in Afghanistan because you might find yourself in the 

desert of 110, 120, maybe 140 degrees one day and then the next day you’re in a 

mountainous region where there’s snow caps on the mountains, so it’s very difficult. 

You just have to tailor your load and be prepared to execute the mission you’re 

given and make sure you have the proper equipment. Did I have the equipment I 

needed? Yeah, I had the equipment. As a matter of fact, I had too much equipment. 

Out of the four duffle bags I was issued at Fort Benning and the additional two 

issued by RFI in Afghanistan, I actually used about one duffle bag worth of stuff. 
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JE: As far as the training and the fielding activities, the training was done near 

Camp Eggers near Kabul and then the fielding was done throughout Afghanistan 

in the various provinces, correct? 

CP: Yes. The training was done at the KMTC which was 20 minutes away 

from Camp Eggers. Task Force Phoenix runs that. 

Then fielding is anywhere in the country they need ANA forces. We used a 

fielding plan which would tell us, as each battalion came out of KMTC, where 

they’re were going. 

JE: What kind of sustainment training did these units get once they were 

fielded? 

CP: Once they were fielded, very little sustainment training because there was 

a shortage of ammunition. Of course they also had the shortage of equipment, 

so once they fired and qualified at the KMTC, there was very little sustainment 

training. 

They went right into combat operations which was a big mistake for a couple 

reasons. One is that they weren’t properly trained and also, and this is a mistake 

I think needs to be addressed, we left some ANA units in combat operations for a 

year and a half without replacement. That only creates causalities, deaths, absences 

without leave, and there aren’t any replacements for these soldiers in these units. 

Some of these battalions are now well below 50 percent strength. 

JE: How effective was the training provided by the United States? 

CP: When I arrived in January of 2005, the first thing I wanted to do was make 

an assessment of the training. I got a little bit of resistance for that for one reason. 

They wanted boots on the ground with rifles as quickly as possible. It didn’t come 

across to me that they really cared about the quality of training. So after a lot of 

resistance, I got to go down and watch the training at the KMTC and, of course, 

it was no surprise to anybody that I came back with a report which said that these 

guys couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn at 10 meters. 

They were just going through the motions. Out of the 800 I saw try to qualify, 

only 80 actually qualified. In spite of that, they never re-fired the failures. They 

went right into the field, deployed and went into combat operations. The training 

was dismal to say the least and that’s just in marksmanship, never mind the combat 

support and combat service support aspects of training the army. Those were just 

as bad or worse. 

JE: Can you tell me about your boss there in Afghanistan? Who was your 

reporting senior? 
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CP: My direct line supervisor was Lieutenant Colonel Michael Pettigrew and 

then my senior rater was Colonel Ken Lissner, who was a Marine Corps colonel. 

He was outstanding. Those were my two bosses. Lieutenant Colonel Pettigrew 

eventually left in June and then I took over his job as training and fielding officer, 

reporting directly to Colonel Lissner. 

JE: What was his formal job? 

CP: Colonel Lissner was the chief of operations training director under OSC-A. 

JE: What was the relationship of that unit to CJTF-76? 

CP: Good question. CJTF-76 is the fighter. They’re actually fighting and 

prosecuting the war. OSC-A looks at the training, fielding, and education pieces 

throughout the Army but they work together or in conjunction with CJTF-76. 

OSC-A is trying to build up the Afghan Army, the police, and the infrastructure 

to support the Army and things of that nature but we definitely work together 

hand in hand. Often CJTF-76 would provide OSC-A the helicopters needed to fly 

downrange to do missions because they would get those graduating ANA battalions 

which they really wanted, putting more good guys where there were bad guys. 

JE: How did you get your feedback from CJTF-76? 

CP: I’m assuming you mean about the condition of the ANA. 

JE: Yes, that’s correct. 

CP: It came through the embedded training teams, the ETTs, there. They’re 

called ETTs in Afghanistan and military transition teams or MiTTs in Iraq. Don’t 

ask me why but the ETTs which were often National Guardsmen or they may have 

been active duty guys embedded with the ANA, they would report to either CJTF76 or Task Force Phoenix which was their higher headquarters. 

We would get the feedback from them. That’s when we found out how 

woefully they were trained and about their poor marksmanship. The other thing 

that bothered me was the fact that the Afghan Army hadn’t really moved above 

squad-level operations. The war ended in 2002, I’m there in 2005, and they’re still 

operating at squad level. We were pushing very hard to move up to platoon and 

then company while I was there. 

JE: Were there any other changes you made as a result of feedback from CJTF76? 

CP: The biggest thing I attacked was the marksmanship. I went after that 

with full guns, trying to get that squared away and again, we had many bridges to 

cross there, trying to find the sight adjustment tools, blank adapters, and increase 

the training of the Afghan Army. I think we had 16 or 17 hours of basic rifle 

marksmanship training and they reduced it to three hours before a soldier went out 
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and zeroed and qualified. We had to bump that back up. We also had to reconfigure 

how they zeroed and qualified. 

They were using a Soviet-style zero and qualified at 100 meters. Well, at 100 

meters, they were never hitting the target. There wasn’t any way they could zero. 

Not only that, there weren’t any sight adjustment tools. It was all a big paper tiger. 

We moved the targets up to 25 meters, got them sight adjustment tools and, lo 

and behold, they could see where the rounds were going. We began zeroing and 

then we moved the targets back out to 100 meters and qualified. So, the biggest 

impact I think I had on the Afghan Army was probably the marksmanship piece 

and then the fielding piece of making sure we put the right guys in the right places 

and assisting in all that. 

JE: Okay, we’re going to shift gears a little bit and talk about the enemy. Tell 

me your assessment of the enemy you faced in Afghanistan. 

CP: A lot of people think the insurgency going on right now is made of up 

primarily Afghanis but this is not true. The insurgency is primarily people from 

other Middle Eastern countries. They come from Syria, Pakistan, Iran or Saudi 

Arabia. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t Afghanis who are insurgents. There are. 

By day, they’re fully supportive of us and our mission and by night they become 

insurgents with sympathetic ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda but the majority we 

ran into, either killed or captured, were from other countries. 

JE: How dangerous were they? 

CP: They’re extremely dangerous. They’re not very skillful with their 

individual weapons, they don’t shoot well, and they’re not equipped well but they 

are absolutely 100 percent dedicated to closing with and killing US or Coalition 

forces. Now, that’s not to say they want to die themselves. I did not find that to be 

the case. Although we had our fair share of suicide bombers, a lot of these fighters 

are fair weather fighters. They’ll only fight during bright, clear, sunny days. 

They definitely go into “survive” mode when it’s cold or wet but they seem to 

want to hit and run, live, and hit again another day. I didn’t find them to be decisive 

in terms of, “I’m going to go after these guys and, if I die doing it, that’s okay.” 

JE: So was he very adaptive in his approach? 

CP: Extremely adaptive, using the tools on the ground. When the Russians 

left in 1989, they left thousands of caches of mortar rounds, grenades, AK47s, 

mines, 107-mm rockets, so an insurgent need not even come across the border with 

anything. He can find what he needs there and then rig it. In a couple caches, we 

found them rigging artillery shells for IEDs. 
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They used pressure activated mines or command detonated mines or whatever 

they found, they adapted it and as we introduced things like jammers, they would 

use different frequency settings on cell phones or other means to detonate them. 

They were extremely adaptive, which is the same thing we’re running into 

in Iraq, a very smart enemy. This is not a dumb or by rote enemy. They definitely 

adapted to the situation. 

JE: How would you describe the performance of the ANA during the time you 

were there with this enemy? 

CP: The soldiers in the Afghan Army, like I said earlier, all want to be Massoud, 

so they will fight. It is not true to say the Afghan soldier won’t fight. 

They don’t shoot well and they weren’t trained well and the US is partly to 

blame for this. They will definitely go after the enemy. So, once we got their skills 

honed on the marksmanship piece, my understanding from the guys there now 

is that they’re doing a lot better downrange. Despite the many challenges and 

shortcomings, they were not afraid of combat. I thought they were very good. 

JE: Did your unit experience any casualties? 

CP: Yes. We were conducting a reconnaissance mission in the Logar Desert 

about 40 kilometers south of Kabul, again with the fielding mission of trying to 

put good guys where there are bad guys. There weren’t any good guys in that area 

and we wanted to put in a battalion of Afghan Army soldiers in so they could start 

working that province. 

We were traveling in a three-vehicle unarmored SUV convoy. The second 

vehicle was hit with either a command detonated or pressure detonated mine. 

There were four casualties, initially two litter-urgent and two KIA. We tried to 

revive them but within minutes all four were KIA. 

JE: Were there any other casualties suffered by the US unit you were with? 

CP: Those were the only casualties from OSC-A/Task Force Phoenix while 

I was there. There had been other guys that had been wounded in the personnel 

security detachments and the RAT or rocket-propelled grenades, the RPGs, going 

over the hood and stuff like that but specific to my office, that was the only incident 

resulting in casualties. 

JE: Did that instance result in a firefight or any other follow-on operations? 

CP: No, nothing after the initial explosion, although we expected some sort 

of follow-on attack. The four guys that were killed, although OSC-A was running 

the mission, they were all from Task Force Phoenix because Task Force Phoenix is 

responsible for training the Afghan Army. So when I say they’re from my office, 

they were tagging along on the reconnaissance because once we decide this is 
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where the Afghan battalion is going. They would be responsible for setting up the 

infrastructure, training ranges, and facilities to support the Afghan battalions. It 

was four National Guardsmen from the 151st Infantry Regiment, Indiana Army 

National Guard. We worked with them often, attended several meetings a week 

with them. We were their higher headquarters. They were part of our operation and 

we were part of theirs. 

JE: What was the culture like in your AO? 

CP: The cultural challenges are many. It’s quite simply a differing cultural 

mindset. It’s the vast difference between a US mindset and that of a Muslim. Theirs 

is a culture of dishonesty and corruption that seems prevalent in Muslim cultures 

going back thousands of years. Most Muslims believe everything is “Allah’s will” 

so you don’t see a real sense of urgency in anything there. This mindset invades 

the military too and a lot of military officers are corrupt and lie often to save face. 

Also, knowledge is power so if an officer knows something he will not share the 

information with anyone. It’s very difficult to operate at times but, as time passes, 

this will get better as our cultures learn more about each other. 

JE: Were there any memorable experiences with the Afghan people? 

CP: Yes. I had to eat a goat that was undercooked on a mission once to please 

the village elder. I got dysentery really fast, literally within a couple hours. You’re 

supposed to eat the food offered you. You’re supposed to accept it because it’s an 

honor for him to present you food. It shows his power, strength, wealth, and all that 

but I’ll tell you that I don’t recommend it. It can make you very sick, very quickly. 

JE: How did that fit into the scheme of what you were doing with the ANA? 

CP: Well, again, we’re trying to win the hearts and minds. 

We landed there in a very remote area of Afghanistan and were trying to find 

out about enemy activity in the area and also the possibility of moving some Afghan 

military into the province which is a whole Afghan Army battalion, that’s going to 

impact somebody living there pretty significantly. So I really wasn’t planning to 

eat or stay long but the translator recommended that I do so. It would be an honor 

to the village elder and it would help our cause but this is the same elder who didn’t 

know he was even in Afghanistan, so I don’t know how much mileage I got out 

of it. 

JE: Did you have a dedicated translator? 

CP: We had a translator pool. You would get a mission and then you would go 

to the translators and say, “Hey, I need a translator or two translators.” 

We had translators who could speak Dari, Pashto, and Tajik. There were 

multiple languages. The most common language was Dari or Pashto. I didn’t have 
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the same translators on every mission. The missions were very high risk. I had one 

of our translators with me when those four guys were killed. Our vehicle rolled 

over the device first and then the vehicle behind us got hit. The translators were 

taking the same risk we were but without body armor, helmets, or weapons. They 

are a brave, brave bunch of guys. 

JE: Who provided your security on these operations? 

CP: Before the incident of March 26th which resulted in the four KIAs, we did 

it ourselves. I thought that was a big flaw in the way we operated. First, we were 

driving around in unarmored vehicles and secondly, we would just grab whoever 

was available. I always grabbed any Marines available. One thing is for certain, 

Marines all shoot well.

The Marines we had were really great guys. They would provide our security, 

along with whoever else was available. This is not the way to operate, though. 

Now, after March 26th, we put together a much more robust security package 

where we would pull from units that had armored up Humvees and additional 

security personnel. So then we had .50 cals, Mk-19s, M240s, SAWs [squad 

automatic weapons], grenades, AT4s, plus we put devices in the package to jam 

the enemy from using remote detonated IEDs. You saw us, as an organization, 

learning how to properly secure only after taking casualties, when we should have 

done it right the first time. 

JE: Did you get a lot of logistics support from the government of Afghanistan? 

CP: Not really. Again, they didn’t have a lot of money. They were trying to put 

together their government, had just completed their regional elections. They were 

trying to put together those packages but as I mentioned before, most of the money 

was provided by the US and oftentimes, they couldn’t even completely pay their 

army, so we would have to throw in $20 million here or there to pay the army. This 

is not a lot of logistical support. 

JE: Let’s keep talking about the Afghan people. How supportive were they of 

your mission? You described the one circumstance out in the province there with 

the elder. How about the population in general as you drove through some of those 

smaller towns and didn’t stop? 

CP: It’s really hard to say. Sometimes they would give you the finger, their 

version of it. Sometimes they would throw rocks at you and other times they would 

run up to you happy and excited to see you there. 

They were in most cases very welcoming, very open and very interested in 

what you had on you for equipment. They always wanted some food or handouts 

and stuff and would follow you around. So it depended on the area or the province. 

The biggest support we received was from the ANA and the Ministry of Defense, 

the MOD, but outside of that in the population, it was a mixed bag.
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If we did an operation in a certain area, where we would do snatch missions, 

this was done by the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the CJSOTF. 

They would grab guys that were clearly insurgents in the area. You would see the 

population very angry and they would riot and throw rocks but then two or three 

days later and there was nothing. So, it’s very hard to say. It’s a big case where, 

by day, they’re supportive and by night, you probably have guys that are wearing 

two hats. 

JE: Could you describe some of your successes for your deployment in 

Afghanistan? 

CP: Well, the biggest one is the marksmanship, and the other piece is getting 

the guys downrange and making sure they had a place to live and the logistical 

support necessary to survive. There was a point in time where an Afghan infantry 

battalion would graduate and they’d just send them to the desert and there was just 

nothing out there, “Here’s your area. See you, wouldn’t want to be you.” 

We matured from that and got a lot better because that was an absolute disaster. 

If any success, it’s the marksmanship program and then the fielding of putting the 

right guys in the right place, setting them up for success, and ensuring the training 

and logistical support. 

JE: How long were you on the ground in Afghanistan? 

CP: I was there for eleven months from January 2005 to November 2005.

JE: You mentioned the Marines. Were you exposed to other US conventional 

forces? 

CP: Yes, I dealt with CJTF-76 which was the 173d Airborne, the 82d Airborne 

and the CJSOTF which were the SF guys. I dealt with them a lot and then other 

government agencies, the OGAs, which ties in to some national assets deployed 

over there that I really can’t discuss. 

JE: How about Coalition forces? 

CP: Let’s see, you have French, German, British, Korean, Italian, and many 

others. 

We dealt with the Coalition a lot. In my office, I had a French Foreign Legion 

guy. I had a German and a Brit. The Coalition is a tricky one to work with depending 

on where they came from.

A lot of these Coalition forces that go there don’t have the rules of engagement, 

the ROE, which supports a counterinsurgency operation. They’re there for nation 

building and specifically to stay behind a FOB and train the ANA or the police. Or 

perhaps they’re there to donate money and build something or be part of the school 

system. Everyone wanted to play and there were political overtones to this but the 
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difficulty is we were teaching basic training, basic rifle marksmanship, and basic 

soldier skills with the Afghans. 

We had the British teaching the Afghan Army noncommissioned officers or 

NCOs, and the French were teaching the Afghan Army officers. When you put all 

three packages together, it doesn’t work. Although our doctrines might be similar 

in some cases, in other cases they’re absolutely not. So, when we sent this Afghan 

infantry battalion down to the 173d Airborne, to CJTF-76, they had to fix all that 

confusing doctrinal mess. You can’t use a British model for NCO leadership and 

a French model for officers and then we’re trying to teach the basic training skills 

to the ANA. 

We’ve already turned over much of the basic and advanced individual training 

to the ANA with our supervision. You’ve also got the Germans teaching driver’s 

training and the Italians teaching engineering but like I said, meshing all that 

together, trying to use all the battle operating systems, and trying to understand 

how that all works and in unified doctrine is just not workable. Working with the 

Coalition was an interesting exercise in understanding how other countries operate.

I understand Canada, who’s taking over one of the ugliest areas in Afghanistan, 

has now taken on our ROE which is a huge success story because before they 

were very limited in what they could and couldn’t do. They’re moving in the right 

direction, at least Canada is. In my opinion, though, everybody should have the 

same ROE as the US so they can all assist in the counterinsurgency fight. 

JE: How did you overcome the differences this entailed? 

CP: Patience. Having multiple Coalition partners complicates and slows down 

the process of doing anything. Everyone has to weigh in on a decision. If you 

want to make a change at the KMTC, not only do you have to talk to Task Force 

Phoenix which is National Guard, you have to talk to the French, the British, and 

the Afghans. Everybody has to come to some sort of consensus because one change 

is going to impact the others. So it was extremely painful and laborious and was 

just a complexity that was not needed. My recommendation for the future is that it 

doesn’t matter whose doctrine you adopt of French, German, British or American 

but just pick one. Call it a NATO standard doctrine, streamline it, and everybody 

follows the same one. That would be my recommendation. It doesn’t have to be 

ours. Sadly it seemed the French, Germans, British, and Americans did not agree 

on much of anything. 

JE: Would you have a memorandum of understanding, or a handshake control, 

as General Anthony Zinni would say? 

CP: You would actually have both. It’s definitely documented when you make 

any change but everything impacts everything else. By the time we got something 
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agreed upon and done, three months had passed. By then sometimes the problem 

didn’t even matter anymore. You don’t have that kind of time whereas if we had just 

one standard, boom, make the change, that would be it, and it would be executed. 

JE: Across these Coalition forces, was there unity of command? 

CP: There should have been a unity of command but there wasn’t. For 

instance, Canada was taking orders directly from Ontario. They were not listening 

to Combined Forces Command, the CFC. They were not interested in listening 

to General Karl Eikenberry or anyone from OSC-A, in spite of the fact that we 

were their higher headquarters. If we told them to change something because they 

were doing something that wasn’t following along with our intent or goal for the 

ANA, they wouldn’t listen to us. They would call Ontario for guidance. Ontario, 

not being in Afghanistan, is going to give bad guidance. That’s just an example of 

what we were running into with the British, French, Germans, and Canadians on a 

daily basis. It was very painful. It really doesn’t work as it is now. 

They’re fighting through it and it’s slow and it’s moving forward but at a 

snail’s pace. 

JE: Did you experience any other US agencies in OEF, like the US Agency for 

International Development, the USAID? 

CP: I ran into them. Here’s my problem with these non-governmental 

organizations, the NGOs, or these agencies that are supposed to come from the 

State Department or other countries that are building a nation. They’re building the 

schools, building the infrastructures and things like that but they weren’t out in the 

provinces where they needed to be. 

They were more than happy to be at Kabul Compound. They were more than 

happy to be in a FOB that was safe. They were more than happy to be in an area 

that had low enemy activity but out where they needed to be, out in the PRTs, out 

in the provinces, out in the towns and cities that were desperate for electricity and 

water and basic infrastructure, they could not be found. So the US military had to 

shoulder 90 percent of the burden. 

We are not trained in how to build a banking system, put together an 

infrastructure, and get the water and sewage going and all that stuff. Now in the 

United States Army, not only are we fighting the insurgency but we’re also trying 

to do infrastructure and building a nation. 

JE: I’d like to separate some of the US agencies from some of the NGOs you 

mentioned. Were the US agencies such as the Department of State or any others 

present? If so, what were they contributing? 

CP: I didn’t really have any dealings directly with the Department of State 

people. They were there. They were running around the Kabul Compound and 

stuff. I didn’t see anybody downrange which was the point I was making. 
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JE: As to the NGOs, were they ever involved in your operations of fielding the 

ANA? 

CP: Like I said, they were real easy to find at Kabul Compound which is not 

where they needed to be. Where we needed them to be was downrange. So, the 

answer is yes and no. Yes, they were there but no, they were not where they needed 

to be. I needed them, and so did CJTF-76, downrange to help build these provinces 

back up and help build the roads and schools and all that stuff. The answer is yes 

and no. I wanted them there but they weren’t there. They feared injury or death, so 

they were very reluctant to go downrange. 

JE: Did they have their own logistical support? Could they have gone where 

you wanted them on their own? 

CP: That was one of their complaints. They felt the security wasn’t such that 

they could operate without getting injured or killed. Now, CJTF-76 was more 

than willing to provide that security once they got down there. They were just 

so desperate for these guys. It wouldn’t have been a problem but a lot of the 

organizations felt it was just too risky but sending them there for a year to hang 

around Kabul Compound did nothing. That’s not where they needed to be. 

JE: What were some of the lessons you learned in OEF? 

CP: We’re still operating there without armored up vehicles. I was very surprised 

to find out that most of OSC-A and CFC were driving around in unarmored civilian 

SUVs. Of course, it cost us dearly on one of our missions. It cost us those four 

KIAs.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t have had casualties on the incident of March 

26th if we were riding in armored up Humvees. The explosion was so powerful, 

it shattered their weapons. We probably still would have had KIAs but probably 

not all of them. So, I was very disturbed to see that. I was also disappointed about 

the coalition piece, the fact that it’s not meshing. It’s really not working and then 

most of all, I was disturbed about the general leadership. By that I mean that we’re 

seeing a time in the US Army where things are a little bit backwards. 

You’ve got generals showing up wearing one, two, or three stars who haven’t 

had any real combat experience. They’re showing up in a combat zone for the first 

time and they’re learning combat from the guys who are sergeants, lieutenants, 

captains, and majors but those general officers make the overall decisions, so a lot 

of their policies do not make sense. For example, “Don’t enter my FOB or base 

locked and loaded with the weapon on safe. All must lock and clear, and get rid of 

the magazine.” What was this, in a combat zone?

We were even told once when you go outside the wire to place the magazine in 

but don’t lock and load unless you are in contact. Huh? It was foolish policies and 
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guidance like that from garrison-minded leaders with little to no understanding of 

what a combat zone is. We fought foolish stuff like that constantly. I thought the 

general leadership was very poor there. 

JE: Could we spend a few more moments on that one incident? 

CP: Sure. 

JE: Could you describe, after the vehicle was hit, some of the events that took 

place and how those events changed the way you operated? 

CP: We were simply not operating like we should have been with these 

unarmored civilian SUVs roaming around in a combat zone. It’s just a matter of 

time before luck will run out. You see this in history a lot. You take casualties, you 

learn from it, and then you do the right thing. The people doing the right things 

would leave, new people would come in, they would start doing the wrong thing 

again, and then they would take casualties. It’s a vicious cycle. It had a profound 

impact on all of us.

The biggest piece was that we had gone in that area the same way before, so 

that’s probably strike one. The other piece is that we were driving around that area 

over and over. Everybody could see we were there. You’re not fooling anyone 

when you’re in a convoy of three SUVs, whether they’re civilian models or not. 

The enemy knows those are Americans because only Americans drive around in 

three-vehicle convoys.

When we went down the road and the second vehicle got hit, of course we 

were all in shock, thought we might be in a minefield, and then saw the casualties. 

The first thing we were thinking was to treat the casualties. That’s not what you’re 

supposed to do. Step one is to secure yourself. Now, luckily, we had the Marines 

with us and they started pulling security. Lieutenant Colonel Pettigrew and I 

immediately tried to treat the casualties. All of them succumbed to their wounds. 

We called the medical evacuation, the MEDEVAC, and told them two litterurgent and two KIA. MEDEVAC took 45 minutes to get there. I don’t know why 

it took them so long but it really pissed me off. If these guys had been litter-urgent 

and we’d been able to resuscitate them and at least keep a heartbeat and breathing, 

trying to maintain CPR for 45 minutes would have been impossible. 

When the MEDEVAC bird got there, they didn’t have any body bags, so we 

had guys that were in pieces and they threw down an Army blanket. That’s another 

lesson learned that I had to beat those guys up on. I flew back with them on a 

40-minute flight with four KIA stacked like chord wood on the flight deck, landed 

in Bagram, unloaded the KIAs and we eventually made it back via UH-60 to Kabul 

Compound. I vowed never to go on a combat mission like that again. 
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That’s why I told all my bosses that I’ll handle security from now on, I got it. 

You tell me what and when the next mission is and I’ll put together the security 

package, to include convoy briefings which were never done. I wasn’t in charge 

of this mission where these four guys got killed. I was just a guy on it that was 

driving but when I took over the security package, we were able to drive eight 

hours down a road that had been hit with IEDs 30 times in the last 10 days or so, 

and we were fine. We went all the way from Kabul Compound which is up north, 

down to Kandahar which is in the south and then back again in an eight-vehicle 

convoy. So, it worked out pretty well. 

JE: Did the leadership you mentioned earlier make any changes after that 

incident? 

CP: They actually resisted change. I could not believe it. After four KIA, I got 

resistance about armored up Humvees and IED jammers on the next mission. I 

cannot tell you why, except that they wanted to go on the next mission as quickly 

as possible and didn’t want to waste time, in their words, putting together a proper 

security package but I didn’t relent. I stayed on it and we put together a good 

package but after that I did most every mission by air, big sky with little bullet by 

Blackhawks with an Apache. I did 99 percent of it by air because ground was just 

too dangerous. 

JE: You mentioned the aircraft. What was your preferred approach for going 

out into the provinces? 

CP: Two Blackhawks and one AH-64 Apache. I would get with CJTF-76 and 

say, “Hey man, it benefits you, it benefits me. I’m trying to put Afghan Army 

guys where your bad guys are. Give me some air.” CJTF-76 was great and they 

were commanded by General Jason Kamiya, who was a two-star with combat 

experience. There’s a big difference between him and some of the leadership at 

CFC but I called them up and said, “Here’s the mission. I need air.” They would 

give me two Blackhawks and an Apache, and I got that consistently. 

Then I was able to go to Qalat, a very high risk, Kandahar, a very high risk, 

Paktika Province, a very high risk and all the way to the border of Pakistan where 

the enemy was infiltrating through Pakistan into Afghanistan. That package was 

the preferred method. If I had to drive, they would meet us on a helicopter landing 

zone, fly away, and we would drive an armored Humvee a very short distance to do 

what we needed to do, maybe overnight, and then fly back the next day. 

JE: So when did you depart Afghanistan? 

CP: I left in November of 2005 to come here to CGSC. I was supposed to stay 

until January of 2006 but because CGSC took priority, they pulled me out and sent 

me home so I could pack up the family and come to Leavenworth. 
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JE: In Afghanistan, was there a relief for you? 

CP: No. When I left there wasn’t any replacement, just like when I arrived. 

JE: With the colonel gone and you gone, who picked up your responsibilities? 

CP: There was a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps that we had relied 

on heavily for a month or so there. We gave him the bulk of the responsibilities 

for just holding the line, so to speak, and maintaining the fielding plan and the 

training. He was a great trainer. He had to work on the fielding piece and get a 

better understanding which he was working on. We just told him to hold the line 

until a guy arrived in January, who was supposed to be my replacement to take 

over the training and fielding full time. 

He had help. Colonel Lissner was still there and some others were still there so 

he wasn’t by himself but it was a huge job. If you wanted to do it right, you needed 

a lieutenant colonel, a major, and maybe a captain to really do the training and 

fielding right. So, we were undermanned and under correct strength. 

JE: Is there anything you would have done differently? 

CP: The mission dictated what we did or didn’t do. I just regret those four 

casualties because that could have been done differently. Not to say they all would 

have survived. I still think we’d have gone down that same road and I still think 

a vehicle would have been hit. An Afghan had jumped on a motorcycle and raced 

away right after it happened which led us to believe that it was command detonated 

but either way, I think we’d have taken some casualties. 

JE: Could you describe your departure from Afghanistan? 

CP: You have a lot to do. You have to pack up all your stuff and you have to 

get out of there. The thing I focused on the most was the gunnery sergeant, getting 

him as up to speed as soon as possible. I spent a couple weeks with him, going 

everywhere, making sure he was up to speed in what needed to be done as to where 

he was going along with the documentation and the fielding plan and all that.

I started mailing some stuff home and, of course, packing. Now I had seven 

duffle bags worth of stuff, because when you get there, you get the RFI equipment. 

You get the new helmet, the new boots, the new goggles, etc. You arrive with four 

duffle bags and leave with seven. It was very painful to pack up and get out of there 

as far as equipment goes with unneeded and unused equipment to drag back and 

forth into and out of theater. 

JE: When did you and your seven duffle bags arrive back in the US? 

CP: We got on the plane in Bagram and we went to Turkey. From there we 

went to Germany, and then from Germany to Baltimore and, of course, you’re 

dragging these bags everywhere you go. It’s just a nightmare and they’re all 80 to 
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90 pound bags. Then finally back to Fort Benning, to the CRC to turn in all that 

stuff, and then head home. It was a long and painful process. 

JE: Were you back in the States in November? 

CP: I got back around the 15th of November. 

JE: Are there any other memorable moments about your deployment that 

you’d like to share? 

CP: We’ve got some very good people trying to do great things over there. 

Here’s a good observation. The Army spends too much time in theater and the 

Marine Corps, Air Force, and the Navy personnel spend too little time there. One 

universal six-month tour is about right. When I arrived there, Marines were only 

there three or four months. While I was there, it was extended to six months but 

when I arrived, they were still on three and four month long tours. For the Air 

Force, it was a three-month tour. I went through four Air Force guys, trying to do 

the training and education job in 11 months. That’s ridiculous. You don’t learn 

your job in three months, especially in a combat zone.

It’s very difficult to get around, it’s very dangerous and, in a lot of cases, an 

Air Force guy would leave before another guy would replace him, so there wasn’t 

any transition. The same thing happened with the Marines and this is unacceptable. 

Army guys are there a whole year and you have everyone else leaving after three 

or four months. My opinion is that it’s a six-month tour for everybody, all armed 

services, in and out. A year is too long. While I was there, I experienced multiple 

rocket attacks, mortar attacks, direct fire, and the IED incident resulting in four 

KIAs and I wasn’t even in an infantry unit deployed downrange. By the eightmonth mark, I was already a bit frayed and was still doing high-risk missions. The 

missions don’t go away regardless of what you’ve been through or seen. You have 

to drive on anyway whether you think you’re going to survive or not. That’s what I 

would share is a six-month rotation for everybody, six months, six and out. 

JE: So getting back to the US with your deployment now over. Has your family 

been back in Indiana? 

CP: Yes, they stayed in Indiana. When branch called me and said I was going 

to be an individual filler, I said, “The only stipulation is that I don’t want to move 

my family to some unit, be an individual replacement to that unit and have to do all 

that. I want to leave them right where they are.” They didn’t even raise an eyebrow. 

They said, “Fine.” 

JE: I’d like to ask you a couple questions about the family with regards to the 

deployment. I’m trying to get the whole picture here. Did your wife and children 

have anything like a family readiness group, the FRG, to support them while they 

were in Indiana? 
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CP: Not really. An ACRC unit is not deployable, so although she knew some 

of the wives and stuff like that, there really wasn’t a support group. So, the answer 

is no. 

JE: Did you have family in the area that helped? 

CP: My wife’s mother and father lived about five hours away, so as often as 

they could, they would come down and help her out. Three kids and a mom doing 

that all by herself, that’s worse than a combat zone! 

JE: Are there any recommendations you can make for other individual fillers 

or individual mobilization augmentees that might be helpful for people to know? 

CP: What you need to know as an individual filler is that you’re probably 

not going to do the job you were told you were going to do when you get there. 

For example, one of my other duties besides training and fielding was mentoring 

the MOD. I’m a major, okay, and I was mentoring four full-bird ANA colonels, 

and one brigadier general. I inherited all of that. I went to their weekly training 

meetings, the training meeting for the entire ANA. Sometimes I was the only US 

Army representative there. So now I had to talk intelligently about USAID, State 

Department stuff, military affairs, legal issues, logistical support issues. Not only 

was this stuff way above my pay grade but above my competence and ability too. 

I’m not a logistician, I’m not a cop, and I can’t tell you about State Department 

stuff. The advice is just “be” ready to do just about anything. 

JE: Well, I don’t have any more questions. Is there anything else you’d like to 

share? 

CP: No sir. 

JE: Thank you very much, major.
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Major Douglas Ross

23 June 2008

BH: This is the oral history interview for the Combat Studies Institute 

by Major Brad Helton (BH) of Major Doug Ross (DR) who is with the 

Kentucky Army National Guard. The date of the interview is 23 June 

2008. The interview is about his experiences as an embedded transition 

team chief in Afghanistan in the 2006 time frame, approximately. With 

that, we’ll begin. Would you please give me your full name, age, source 

of commission, hometown, branch, and summary of previous assignments 

and operational experiences prior to your deployment to Afghanistan? 

DR: My name is Douglas Marshall Ross and I’m 43 years old. Today’s my 

birthday. I was born 23 June 1965. I was commissioned through ROTC from 

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I was born and raised in Lexington, 

Kentucky. My previous assignments have been all primarily with 1st Battalion, 

623d Field Artillery-MLRS with the Kentucky National Guard. I’ve held positions 

from executive officer, the XO, to battery commander and intelligence officer or 

S2. I was the S2 when I was mobilized for this mission. 

BH: Had you deployed prior to going to Afghanistan? 

DR: No, the 623d was mobilized for OIF [Operation IRAQI FREEDOM]. 

We were slated to go through Turkey. That obviously did not occur, so we were 

demobilized. I was mobilized for Phoenix 4.0 in March 2005. 

BH: You said you’re Field Artillery? 

DR: Correct. 

BH: How were you selected to be an ETT [embedded training team] chief? 

DR: My battalion had been selected for a security force mission. The 

organization for the security force mission required us to combine our four batteries 

into two companies. 

We took all the lieutenants and two captains to lead the security force. Another 

unit had a rear operations center mission and they took about four officers for a 

liaison officer, the LNO, position. That left anywhere from five to eight officers in 

the rear for rear detachment. When our brigade headquarters came down with this 

tasking, we were all selected to go to Afghanistan as ETTs. 

BH: What training did you have before the deployment? 

DR: Kentucky has a 10-day annual training event that they make all their 

deployed soldiers go through. It focuses primarily on small weapons tactics and it 

was pretty good. 
312

Then we went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi for two months of train-up that 

basically broke us down into two or three groups based upon what your assignment 

was going to be. If you were going to be a headquarters unit, you received a little 

more additional cultural training. If you were just going to be an infantry team 

leader, you received primarily infantry tactics which was unfortunate because they 

were the ones who probably needed all the cultural stuff to begin with. I’ll say 

that a lot of the cultural training was pretty good. Some of the actual certification 

training was weak. That was it, just those two months. 

BH: You met your entire team at this training? 

DR: Yes. I was actually assigned to the brigade headquarters but reassigned 

to the 4th Kandak when I arrived in theater but everybody who was on my team 

was in the building next to me. I had served with most of them during my artillery 

career. I knew everybody. 

BH: When did you deploy and to which unit were you assigned to advise? 

DR: We flew out on 5 July 2005 and returned around 9 July 2006. When I arrived 

in country, I was assigned to Regional Command-South, the RC-South, which was 

the Kandahar region, and supported the 205th Corps. My unit assignment was with 

the 4th Kandak. The way the organization is for the Afghan Army is they have five 

kandaks. A kandak is basically a battalion. Three of them are infantry. The fourth 

kandak is a combat support unit. The fifth kandak is a combat service support unit. 

So in your three infantry kandaks, you have your three infantry companies and a 

headquarters company. In your combat support or your fourth kandak, you have 

an artillery company, an engineer company, a recon company, and a headquarters 

company. Then in the fifth kandak, you have transportation, maintenance, medical, 

and obviously a headquarters. So I was assigned to the 4th Kandak as the artillery 

mentor.

Everybody wore two or three hats. My team chief was Major Blake Settle and 

our executive officer was Major Shawn Flaugher. I was the operations officer or 

S3, and the artillery mentor. Then we had Major Mike Benton, who was the supply 

officer or S4 and the headquarters company mentor. Captain Dexter Bird from 

the Individual Ready Reserve out of the California National Guard was the recon 

company mentor. An Air Force first lieutenant was assigned to us in Afghanistan. 

His name was Woodrow Bell. 

We had some enlisted guys, too. There was Sergeant First Class Timothy 

McClish, Sergeant First Class Scott Stephens, First Sergeant Daniel Holleran and 

Master Sergeant Phil Pyzyna. 

BH: What does kandak stand for? 

DR: It’s the Afghan name for a battalion, or a unit about that size. 
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BH: So you were the S3 mentor and the artillery mentor to the 4th Kandak? 

DR: Correct. The 205th Corps had a 1st and 2d Brigade and right as I was 

leaving country, the 3d Brigade was stood up. I had the 1st Brigade and we were 

based out of Camp Shir Zai, and it was right outside of Kandahar Airfield. The 2d 

Brigade was based out of Qalat which was just a little northeast of Kandahar on 

Route 1. 

BH: How long had the 4th Kandak been in existence? 

DR: I think we were the third rotation that worked with this kandak, so they 

were fairly experienced. A lot of their enlistments were expiring as we were rotating 

out, so I guess it was about the third year. 

BH: Where was the 4th Kandak headquartered again? 

DR: They were headquartered out of Shir Zai which is in Kandahar. 

BH: What was their primary mission? What had they been typically involved 

in doing? 

DR: The missions obviously evolved as the year went on. The three infantry 

kandaks were farmed out to all the Special Forces [SF] units. All the Special Forces 

A-teams had a company from each kandak that they would take out on missions so 

as to put an Afghan face on all their missions. The 5th Kandak was primarily for 

garrison-area stuff, other than running resupply convoys they didn’t have much to 

do out in the field. For the 4th Kandak, we would have our engineers married up 

with Task Force Pacemaker, I forgot where they’re out of. It’s an engineering unit. 

They helped build the Tarin Kowt Road. 

We had the artillery unit. We didn’t have any D-30s which is the Afghan 

artillery piece, until real late, probably around May or June 2006 is when we 

received those. We married them up with the Gun Devils artillery unit. I think this 

is the 3d Battalion, 319th Field Artillery out of the 82d Airborne. We’d go out on 

missions with them. 

We’d provide outer security and then when the operations tempo slowed 

down, we would conduct training missions with the Afghan National Army, the 

ANA, soldiers and let them learn their duty positions. That paid off pretty well 

when we got our actual equipment. The crews had a pretty good understanding of 

what they had to do. The recon company would typically go out with Gun Devil 

infantry units. Their area of operations, the AO, was around the Kandahar-Panjway 

area. They would conduct missions and our artillery unit would go out with a 

Gun Devil artillery battery and our recon company would go out with one of the 

infantry companies. 
314

BH: So before the field artillery company received their D-30s, what did they 

have? 

DR: They just had standard infantry equipment. 

BH: What kinds of missions were they generally engaged in? 

DR: In the Gun Devils, Lieutenant Ges was the battalion commander. They 

would set up missions where they would send out one company to try to stir 

up some contact and then they would send out the other two or three infantry 

companies to set up blocking positions or to exploit any kind of intelligence they 

were able to gather.

The artillery battery would set out in a supporting position. The artillery unit 

that I mentored would go out with the Gun Devils artillery battery and typically set 

up outer security. Once things were going kind of slow, we’d train them to shoot 

rounds into the mountain or something like that. Basically, we were just supporting 

infantry units as they were going out to exploit any kind of intelligence they had. 

BH: How would you evaluate the unit? Obviously it’s a field artillery unit not 

really doing a field artillery mission yet but how confident were they? 

DR: I would say they were fairly confident. The battery commander was kind 

of weak. The Afghan mentality is that if you’re a commander, you stay back in 

the rear in the office and you send your lieutenants out on these missions. That 

was a big challenge, getting the battery commander to go out on missions but the 

lieutenants were fairly good, fairly straightforward, and fairly knowledgeable. 

They were good to work with. The battery commander was eventually 

promoted, so one of the lieutenants became the battery commander and then it was 

hard to get him to go out into the field. You know, that’s a lieutenant’s job. The 

enlisted guys were fairly good also. 

They were artillery and because they didn’t have a habitual relationship with 

one of the SF units. They would often get tagged with a lot of the ash and trash 

missions, like checkpoints in the city or providing security for a VIP who came 

into the area. 

BH: What was the typical soldier’s motivation to be in that organization? 

DR: That’s a good question. It’s hard to really understand a different culture at 

times. It was good because they seemed to be maybe ethical but they were more 

understanding of doing things the right way than a lot of the other Afghan units 

tended to be. I’ll probably have examples of that as we move on.

Obviously they wanted pay and I think they were looking for adventure. When 

we started talking to them about reenlisting, we didn’t get a good feel for it. I 

don’t know how much of the unit turned over after we left. I think a lot of them 
315

just signed up right when the ANA was formed. I think a lot of them weren’t too 

happy with the assignments they had but they were pretty disciplined and pretty 

motivated. I don’t know if that answers your question but I don’t really know the 

answer either. 

BH: So you’re assigned to RC-South and within the 205th Corps. Then below 

that you had the 1st Brigade and the 2d Brigade, and you were in the 4th Kandak

of the 1st Brigade? 

DR: Correct. 

BH: Then your brigade team chief was Colonel West? 

DR: Billy Jack West, yes. 

BH: Leading up to Operation RIVER DANCE, what types of operations were 

you engaged in that were relevant to it or set up the operation? 

DR: The big difference between RIVER DANCE and all the other operations 

that I did was that RIVER DANCE had zero Coalition support. Typically I would 

go over to the Gun Devils, get a briefing on what the operation was, and I would 

sanitize it for a briefing to the ANA. 

We’d have the ANA ready, we’d show up at the right start point and the right 

start time and we’d go out on missions. So my only responsibility was really to 

take care of the ANA. I didn’t have to worry about tactical control, the TACON, 

or anything like that. The only time I might have had something that was kind 

of similar was for the parliamentary elections which I think were in September 

2005. I had to take the 4th Kandak down to Spin Boldak to provide security for the 

election. I was put under the tactical control of the French unit out of Spin Boldak 

but I didn’t get very much support out of them. I had to drive a few issues myself 

but as a general rule most of the missions prior to RIVER DANCE, the Coalition 

forces drove everything and I was there to support them.

RIVER DANCE was the other way around. We were out there on our own 

with very little support or knowledge by the Coalition forces in the area. 

BH: When did you first hear about Operation RIVER DANCE? 

DR: Around 8 March I heard of it. I was in a brigade staff meeting when 

Colonel West mentioned that Lieutenant Colonel Hayter, the brigade S3, wasn’t 

there. There was a poppy eradication mission and people could probably expect 

taskings for that mission. That was about all I heard. On 9 March, I actually 

received a briefing and was basically told I was going to take 100 of my ANA to 

Lashkar Gah as a reserve force. Lieutenant Colonel Hayter had come back at that 

time and he said that we would just put the reserve force at the airfield at Lashkar 

Gah and that I would report to the operations center which was at the governor’s 
316

compound for Helmand Province at Lashkar Gah. He also said I could stay at the 

provincial reconstruction team, the PRT, which was at Lashkar Gah which later I 

found out was not true. I was not welcome there. Around 10 March, I found that I 

could only take 70 troops, mostly from the headquarters company. 

Then on that day I was told I was going to be taking 20 soldiers and the 

leadership from the 2d Kandak on this mission. The ETT chief of the 2d Kandak

was on leave, so they put me in charge of his kandak leadership and my 70 troops. 

I had a total of about 95 troops when we left Shir Zai. We departed on 11 March 

for Lashkar Gah and arrived on that day. 

BH: So you went there thinking you were going to be a reserve force? 

DR: Correct. 

BH: Then what happened? 

DR: On 13 March, I met a Mr. Fitzgerald, who was a Department of State 

representative there. I received a call from a Captain Christianson, I think is his 

name, who said that I was expected at the operations center at a certain time. I 

showed up there and met Mr. Fitzgerald who gave me a quick briefing on the 

overall operation about poppy eradication. It was all primarily focused on the 

south part of the Helmand River. At the time, I heard there was an ETT-ANA team 

out of Herat working their way from the south to the north and they were under 

quite a bit of contact. 

We also had another unit down there that was led by Lieutenant Jean Luc 

Houlne from the Kentucky National Guard and his company was out of the 2d 

Kandak. I’m not sure if he left the day before I did or the day after I did. I think it 

was the day after. I think they stopped at Lashkar Gah overnight and then the next 

morning got up and went on down south to their position. That was the first time, 

on 13 March, in which I was briefed on any kind of operational aspect of RIVER 

DANCE. 

BH: What was the general concept that they briefed you on? 

DR: Basically I was briefed that the ANA were providing security and 

DynCorp was eradicating all the poppies. They had tractors with blades on them 

and they would drive through the fields and cut down all the poppies. I went to 

those briefings for two or three days until I had a little bit of a falling out with Mr. 

Fitzgerald but they were reporting that they were cutting hectares of poppy every 

day but when I talked to Lieutenant Houlne, he said no, they were only cutting a 

couple strips out of each field. It’s not like they were really cutting much. So, he 

questioned the report on how much they were cutting. That was the first inkling I 

got that they really weren’t cutting much. 
317

BH: What kinds of preparation were you involved in and how did you prepare 

your detachment for the mission? 

DR: We went out on missions quite a bit, so we had the standard mission prep 

but the biggest challenge was arranging food. We had to go draw money to make 

sure the Afghans were fed and, of course, by this time the Afghan Army had taken 

over its own food supply. We had to make sure they drew the right amount of food 

and stuff like that. There was quite a bit of coordination as far as making sure they 

had the money and we had backup money. 

BH: Was that to live off the land or were you getting external supplies through 

a logistics system? 

DR: Well, we drew as much as we could but then we took money so we could 

buy off the local market. That was not uncommon. Sometimes you’d have to go 

buy a couple of goats to feed the men. 

BH: What kind of transportation did you have? 

DR: Let me back up here. One of the other things we had to do when we 

were prepping since we didn’t have enough ETTs to go on the mission was that 

typically you’re supposed to have a minimum of two US vehicles and they prefer 

four. At the time, though, just Major Benton and I were the only ones available. 

When we rolled out there the first day we had our 100 ANA but there was just one 

up-armored Humvee. I was driving and Major Benton was in the turret with a .50 

cal. When we were going through the planning process, our recon unit was on a 

mission with Task Force Orion which was the Canadian forces. Task Force Orion

had just taken over authority for RC-South and the recon and artillery companies 

were on a mission up near the Belly Button. 

We had to get the ETTs pulled off the mission. We left recon and artillery 

with the Canadian forces and one of our American soldiers up there. We brought 

Captain Dexter Bird, Sergeant First Class Timothy C. McLish, and Lieutenant 

Woodrow Bell back. Those three came down from the Belly Button on a resupply 

convoy, immediately restocked their stuff, and caught a convoy out to Lashkar Gah. 

They joined us probably about four or five days after we got there, so my guess is 

around 15 or 18 March. All we had in my unit were two uparmored Humvees, five 

Americans, and about 95 to 100 ANA. 

BH: How were they transported? 

DR: The ANA had Ford Ranger pickup trucks and we had a couple of Kamazes

and a fuel truck. I’m not sure if we had a water truck. I don’t think we did. Kamazes

are old Russian trucks similar to our deuce-and-a-half. That’s about all we had. 
318

BH: Were there any heavy weapons, mortars, anything like that? 

DR: The infantry 2-1 Infantry Kandak had brought over a couple of machine 

guns that the ANA had and I forget what those were but they were the standard 

issue for an infantry kandak. The 4th Kandak, my soldiers, had only AK47s. Then 

the Americans had a 240B on one vehicle and a .50 cal on the other one, and the .50 

cal really didn’t seem to work that much. That’s about all we had as far as heavy 

weapons. 

BH: So on 13 March these other Americans came down on the resupply? Then 

how long before you kicked off? 

DR: While we were in Lashkar Gah, we did run a resupply mission down 

to Lieutenant Houlne’s location. Lieutenant Houlne’s team had just pulled into 

DynCorp’s FOB East. They had pretty good cooks there, actually. We ran some 

water and some ammo to Lieutenant Houlne. We went down there for one day and 

came back the next. 

Then on 1 April, we received orders to go to Gereshk, so we went up there that 

day and slept at FOB Price. On 2 April, we had conflicting orders. The ANA said 

they were supposed to go up to either Qal’eh-ye Gaz, Kariz-koka [ph], or Musa 

Qal’eh. It’s opposite of the Helmand river to the village of Sangin which is where 

FOB Wolf was located. I had orders that we were going to move up to FOB Wolf/

FOB Robinson, whatever the name was. It got renamed to FOB Robinson. We 

were going to go up there and relieve the Tennessee unit at that location. It took us 

a while to work that out but we eventually went with the ANA direction and on 2 

April we pulled up across from Sangin to Musa Qal’eh. 

BH: What was higher telling you about the mission? Obviously the eradication 

of the poppies but what kind of end-state was desired? 

DR: I probably had two or three chains of command at this point. Obviously 

my chain of command was Colonel West, who was my 1st Brigade commander, but 

I also worked through RIVER DANCE-6. At the beginning of the operation, that 

was Major Vernon Van Dyne and then he got pulled off to go to another mission 

and then Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph took over toward the end. So, I reported 

through them. We also had Mr. Fitzgerald, who was the Department of State 

representative and he had a small staff of some full-bird colonels and some senior 

enlisted guys. I kind of reported through them also. I often got conflicting direction 

from RIVER DANCE-6 and Mr. Fitzgerald. However, Mr. Fitzgerald was returned 

to the States and one of the full-bird colonels took over. The communication 

dropped off significantly then and I think he just went through RIVER DANCE-6. 

I rarely received any kind of guidance or direction other than to support the ANA 

on poppy eradication. 
319

BH: What was their mission? How much of it, on paper anyway, were they 

supposed to eradicate? 

DR: I never saw anything. I know Mr. Fitzgerald kind of had a tactical 

operations center or TOC set up. He was a retired colonel and was kind of abusive 

to his staff. Once I left Lashkar Gah, I never saw anything. Everything was verbal. 

BH: So no objective really but just to support the eradication? 

DR: Right. Now when I arrived at Musa Qal’eh, I found out that I had 100 

Afghan National Police and 100 Afghan Border Police there waiting for us. So 

now I had a force of about 300. Some tractors showed up too but it was nothing 

like Houlne was experiencing down in the south. There, DynCorp was supposedly 

doing the eradication. Here, this was all native Afghan. 

BH: About how many tractors would you say? 

DR: I’d have to take a guess but probably 10, maybe 15 at the most. 

BH: Let’s talk about operation execution now. When did the operation begin 

and how did it proceed? 

DR: This was still just a continuation of what we had been doing. Once 

we moved up to Musa Qal’eh, then it obviously changed. There was very little 

interaction from RIVER DANCE-6. Most of our communication was through 

Blue Force Tracker and cell phones. 

We had trouble getting cell phone connections up there in that remote area. 

It was the border police chief, the Afghan National Police chief, and my kandak

commander, and they basically came up with a plan where the ANA would provide 

outer security and the ANP and the border police would go into the town to provide 

security there. Then the tractors would go eradicate the poppies.

The next day, we went down and we provided security and the ANP and the 

border police went and did what they were supposed to do. Again, we started 

seeing that very little of the fields were being cut. It was just one or two swathes of 

some of the fields. A lot of the fields were not being touched. On 4 April, the ANA 

kandak commander came to me and said that the ANP were giving the farmers the 

option of paying money to prevent their fields from being plowed and I wrote in 

my notebook that I had serious ethical issues with this. Apparently they were under 

direction from the governor to only cut 50 percent of each field. He didn’t want to 

devastate every farmer. 

They understood that the farmers needed that money. However, they would 

shake down these farmers and say if you paid them 10,000 Afghanis, they would 

bypass a field. The big issue I had with that is that my presence and the ANA’s 

presence gave legitimacy to the illegal operation. Basically, we’re sitting here 

saying that we’re trying to establish a government of the people and it’s an ethical 
320

government, we’re trying to train the ANA to be ethical and build trust with 

the local populace. Well, if somebody’s in there fleecing the people and we’re 

providing security, then we’re sending the wrong message. On 5 April, the ANA 

kandak commander managed to get control of cutting for the day and a significant 

amount of poppy was cut, a lot more. They were afraid to go over the 50 percent 

but every field was cut 50 percent, of what I saw. 

BH: That’s the 5th Kandak commander? 

DR: This was the 2d Kandak commander. 

Then on 6 April, we found out who was doing the actual money-taking. We 

found out that it was the security commander for the governor of Helmand Province. 

His name was Abdul Rahman. He would hold these town meetings and he would 

tell each farmer to pay 10,000 rupees or Afghanis to have the field bypassed. I 

think a rupee is Pakistan’s money. From what I understand, they basically said if 

you shoot at any of us, then we’ll destroy all the fields. If you don’t pay us money, 

we’ll cut down 50 percent of your field, and if you pay us money, we’ll bypass 

your field. 

BH: That was the security commander for the governor of the province? 

DR: Correct. 

BH: Abdul Rahman. How much were they asking? 

DR: 10,000 rupees or Afghanis. My interpreter kept saying rupees but the 

currency there was Afghani. I’m not sure if they were demanding rupees, what 

the exchange rate was or if everybody in Helmand Province used rupees instead 

of Afghanis. On 7 April, the kandak commander and I met with the local villagers. 

He called it a jirga. I don’t know if that’s the right word. 

We told them not to pay the money to have their field bypassed and that 

growing poppies is wrong and it’s not good. He talked about the religious aspect 

of it and how it wasn’t good for the country. They shouldn’t be growing poppies 

because it’s a bad product. 

We also discussed about them not allowing foreign fighters to come in to fight 

the ANA because the ANA is Afghan and they’re all trying to build a country 

together. There had been a rash of troops in contact and IEDs up in that valley. 

We’ll probably need to talk about that in a little bit.

So we had discussed why they shouldn’t be shooting at Americans and 

Afghanis but the emphasis of the whole meeting was, again, talking about how 

they shouldn’t grow the poppies and how they shouldn’t pay the money. I would 

say there were about 45 males and this was still around Musa Qal’eh. It’s also 

called Qal’eh-ye Gaz. Half my Afghans called it Qal’eh-ye Gaz, the other called it 
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Musa Qal’eh. To give you a little bit of tactical understanding of what was going 

on at the time, across the river they had built a brand new FOB called FOB Wolf 

and later they renamed it FOB Robinson. It was located at Sangin. As soon as they 

built that FOB, they were under attack almost nightly. 

They would either receive small arms fire or mortar attacks. We sent a supply 

convoy up there. Colonel West actually led it. They hit an IED that killed a lot of 

Afghan soldiers and knocked over an excavator which is a piece of engineering 

equipment we were sending up there to help build the FOB up. That area was very 

hot. They were under constant attack on the east side. 

We were on the other side of the river and it was kind of odd because we 

weren’t having any kind of contact whatsoever. We would sit there on the ridgeline 

and you could look over at the FOB and you see them under attack, you could 

see convoys going up and down the road and the convoys hitting IEDs. You’d 

see vehicles burning but nothing happened to us on our side of the river which I 

thought was very odd. Everything was in that context. 

We thought we were going to be attacked at any time and we always had to 

keep that in mind because it was just two up-armored Humvees and 300 Afghans, 

and out of those 300 Afghans, I only trusted about 100. 

BH: The ones you brought with you? 

DR: Right. 

BH: About how much prior to this had that convoy been ambushed? 

DR: The convoy was ambushed when I was in Lashkar Gah. 

BH: So this was only a few days before you got down there? 

DR: Correct. The other thing is that when we showed up at Musa Qal’eh on 

2 April, that night a Predator mistook our position for a sudden massing of troops 

along the ridgeline across from Sangin, and they were asking for permission to 

engage us in some form or another. Luckily my team chief, Major Blake Settle, 

was at the FOB with the engineers helping them build the FOB. He was aware of 

our location because I kept him abreast of what we were doing. He was able to 

help prevent a friendly fire incident. They were convinced we were anti-Coalition 

forces massing and getting ready to cross the river to attack the FOB. 

They called us up and asked us to put infrared, the IR, chemlights all up and 

down the ridgeline where the ANA were. I told them I’m not driving around in the 

middle of the night to ANP and border police positions putting out IR chemlights. 

Each Humvee was marked with an IR strobe. 
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BH: When you secured an area, how big of an area approximately, did your 

300 soldiers secure? 

DR: Again, everybody kind of bedded down with their own units. The border 

police were in one location, the ANP in another location, and the ANA were in our 

location. We had set up a fairly large perimeter. Within the ANA, I had first dibs, 

so we usually took the highest and best defensive position but it just depended on 

the location for the night. 

BH: During the day, during operations, how did they employ? 

DR: That’s where I had to change things. The first few days, we went down 

into the area with the Afghans to witness the cutting and everything that was going 

on. 

Then after I found out that the Afghans were fleecing the locals, we tried to 

talk to the locals to see if we could stop it. That was part of the meeting on 7 

April but the very next day, they bypassed some fields and only cut a couple of 

swathes of a couple other fields and that was it. It was obvious that what we were 

doing wasn’t having an effect. The Afghans were still paying the money. At that 

time, I had to reevaluate what kind of impact we could have. The concerns I had 

included taking care of the ANA. That was my job to mentor the ANA and take 

care of them. Secondly, I didn’t have any kind of combat power. It was two uparmored Humvees and if anybody got hurt or anything got damaged, there was 

nothing we could do. I had to be careful about any kind of direct contact. Then 

the third aspect was, again, I started feeling like my presence, the presence of the 

American vehicles and even the ANA provided legitimacy to the fleecing of the 

local populace. Even though I didn’t agree with poppy growing, to go in there and 

tell everybody they have to pay 10,000 Afghanis to not have their fields cut, I just 

felt like it undermined the government.

What I decided to do is, on the Helmand River on the west side, there is a 

cliff that’s probably anywhere from 30 to 50 feet high. It’s got paths that go down 

so you can climb down the cliff to get down to the villages. Then along the top 

of what I’ll call a ridgeline, the Russians had built defensive positions, primarily 

trenches, where they could take cover or whatever and overlook all the villages in 

Helmand Province. 

We made the conscious decision that we would maintain contact with the ANA 

and pull back a little bit into the desert where we wouldn’t provide an American 

presence but we’re still in contact with the ANA. We could provide any kind of 

support that the ANA needed. That way, our presence wouldn’t provide any kind of 

endorsement of what was going on. So, that’s basically how we ended up dealing 

with it. 
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BH: When you say “we,” you’re talking about your team? 

DR: Yes, my team. 

BH: So you focused on mentoring the ANA but minimized American visibility? 

DR: Right. I felt that was the best way to provide support and help provide 

security for my ANA which I was more concerned about than the ANP or the border 

police. I could still accomplish my mission and minimize my visible presence. I 

was just afraid that we were providing the wrong message. I don’t think there was 

an information operations plan but I assumed that sending this message was not 

in it. 

BH: So basically the operations kept going the way they had been going. You 

just reduced the American presence to make sure there was as little legitimizing 

as possible? 

DR: Right. Obviously as we gathered this intel, I floated it up the chain of 

command to RIVER DANCE but primarily up through Colonel West because I 

knew the brigade headquarters had more established intel procedures. Someone 

was reporting that we’re cutting all these fields and the fields weren’t being cut. 

I’ve got pictures to show it. 

Then the security commander was fleecing the local populace which I didn’t 

really agree with so I was recommending that we ENDEX and pull us all back. 

Talking to my friend, Major John Bates, I think the intel reports did get up pretty 

high about the governor and the security commander basically taking these payoffs 

but until we got ENDEX’d, my job was to support the ANA. I thought the best way 

to deal with that was to just minimize the American presence. 

BH: What about the ANA commander? How did he respond? 

DR: He was the same way. 

BH: What was his name? 

DR: I don’t remember because I didn’t habitually work with him. 

BH: So he wasn’t from the 4th Kandak? 

DR: No, he was the 2d Kandak commander. I think his name is Shiren Shah. 

BH: The ANA were not looking to line their pockets, just the ones from 

Kandahar? 

DR: Yeah. I’ll back up a little bit and say that when I was working and doing 

these missions with the Gun Devils, they would do these things called village 

engagements. They would send a company commander to go talk to the village 

elder or village chief. I was with them on a couple of these village engagements. 
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They’d pull in all loaded for bear and they’d say they wanted to talk to the 

village elder or village chief. So the locals would go bring some guy out and the 

commander would tell him, “We’re here in the area and if you have any information, 

we’d appreciate it. We’re here to help you out, just let us know.” Then he’d turn 

around, get in his vehicle and drive off. 

BH: That’s the Gun Devils, the American officer? 

DR: Right. It was a nuisance to them. 

BH: It was a nuisance to the villagers or to the Gun Devils? 

DR: The Gun Devils. Towards the end of the Gun Devils’ rotation, though, we 

were sitting in position and they asked me to go to a village engagement. Since I 

worked with Afghan soldiers all the time, I was able to sit down with a lot of these 

villagers. You pass out a couple phone cards, you’d take pictures of people and 

you could gather some decent intelligence that you could pass on but through all 

those discussions, I found out that when people came across checkpoints that were 

manned by the ANA, they weren’t very fearful because the ANA as a general rule 

were pretty respectful of the people but when they came to checkpoints that were 

manned by the ANP, they were a little fearful because the ANP usually made them 

pay to get through the checkpoint or they would steal something out of the vehicle.

Now with the ANA, you generally had an ETT with them. They worked with 

them constantly and the ETTs would never allow that stuff to happen. The ANP 

would be trained at a central location but then they’d go out in the boonies by 

themselves and nobody would know if they stole money from the local populace 

or not. 

BH: They didn’t have any kind of team with them? 

DR: Correct. That’s another thing. The 2d Kandak commander was very 

concerned that the ANP were also stealing stuff from the locals when they’re 

down there providing security, so he implemented a rule where the ANA were 

not allowed to go into the villages. They provided for security but they weren’t 

allowed to go into the villages. He didn’t want them stealing from the locals too. 

BH: Where were the national police usually deployed? 

DR: They were at every intersection and just wherever they decided to set up 

a checkpoint. 

BH: So they were usually for traffic control and not beat cops? 

DR: Right. 
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BH: Did the border police and the ANP have a different mission? 

DR: Yes. The border police were primarily in Spin Boldak and Zaranj. They 

were basically responsible for manning the Afghanistan borders with Pakistan and 

Iran. 

BH: Were they about the same way as the ANP? 

DR: Yeah, I think so. They tended to have a little bit nicer uniforms but, yeah, 

they were about the same. 

BH: You elevated this. What was the response from higher? 

DR: As I kept contacting Colonel West and RIVER DANCE-6, they said they 

had passed the information up but they were still under orders to continue with 

the mission, which we did. I think that originally the mission was supposed to go 

through the end of April. I think the mission really ended around 20 or 21 April. 

So we managed to end it a couple weeks early. Maybe it was supposed to go until 

around the end of April or the first part of May. I was told it was to go until the end 

of the month or maybe a little past that. 

BH: Was there any kind of new accountability measures implemented from 

higher? 

DR: Not that I’m aware of. 

BH: Anything else you want to add? 

DR: I’ll just keep going down the time line a little bit.

I had a vehicle break down and we had to tow it to Gereshk and get it repaired. 

On 16 April, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph, who was RIVER DANCE-6 at that 

time, requested after-action report comments which I provided to him. The general 

gist of those was that US and ANA presence added legitimacy to the shakedown, 

there was no information operations campaign in the north, and maybe one percent 

of the poppy had been cut. 

Then on 17 April, I talked to some local villages who were complaining about 

paying off the ANP so I sent that spot report up. Around 19 April, the ANP and the 

border police started abandoning the mission. Every day we would get up, we’d 

look over and there’d be a couple less ANP and border police vehicles. They were 

basically abandoning the mission and things were really starting to wind down. 

BH: Which day was this? 

DR: It was around 19 April. We were working from Musa Qal’eh south down 

toward Route 1 at Gereshk. 

We were starting to work our way back up toward Sangin. Around 17 or 19 

April. We had reached Route 1, crossed over the river and started working our way 

back up north towards FOB Wolf. 
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Then on 20 April, Lieutenant Houlne moved from the south up to Gereshk and 

on 21 April, he with his group and my group got orders to return to base. That was 

about it. 

BH: Now that you’ve had a chance to reflect on the situation, I think it’s kind 

of representative of a lot of things that our leaders are facing right now as far as a 

lot of problems that don’t have nice, neat solutions. Everything doesn’t add up and 

whatnot. What are your thoughts on this experience? 

DR: In hindsight from an operational perspective, if that’s the right level, I 

don’t think there was really any kind of information operations plan. 

They should’ve gone in and told the local populace that next year we’re going 

to come in and cut down all of your poppy. Don’t grow it because we’re going to 

cut it down. We could’ve also tried to provide other opportunities for them. That 

might’ve reduced some of the conflict they had down in the south and might’ve 

eased some of the tensions. 

Then the other thing is that if we’re going to do an operation like this, we have 

to understand what the local government might do to exploit it and be very knowledgeable of that. From a tactical perspective, having two up-armored Humvees in 

the middle of the hottest area of Afghanistan is crazy. I felt like I was hanging out 

there. I went back to FOB Wolf like a month later and probably got in the biggest 

firefight that I’d ever been in. It wasn’t too far from where I was when I was there 

for poppy eradication. Why we weren’t attacked I have no idea. 

We just didn’t have enough forces for that type of mission. We had a tight-knit 

team that managed to pull it off. I’m still amazed we got through with nobody 

getting hurt. 

BH: Who was really pushing this? 

DR: I really don’t know. When I first got there down to Lashkar Gah, it looked 

like Mr. Fitzgerald was pulling a lot of strings and I don’t know if people were 

under tactical control to him or what. It quickly digressed to RIVER DANCE-6, 

who was really the guy in TACON until I got sent up north. Once I got sent up 

north, he just basically turned into a logistics guy. 

We called up our logistics requirements. What was crazy was that when I 

was up near Musa Qal’eh, maybe a little bit further south, the colonel who had 

replaced Mr. Fitzgerald, came with his staff to our location in a pickup truck and 

an up-armored Humvee. They didn’t have any long-range communications as far 

as tactical satellite, the TACSAT, or Blue Force Tracker or anything like that. 

They came to our location and, of course, they got mad at us because we hadn’t 

shaved because we were trying to save our water. We were in the fourth week of a 

six-week mission. So they came up there and yelled at us for not being in proper 
327

uniform and stuff like that. Then they gave us some more water and they left but as 

far as supplies, we really didn’t get that much once we moved up north. 

BH: I guess unless you have anything else to add, we can close it out. 

DR: The ANA were aware of the corruption and they were not happy about it. 

The kandak commander made sure his troops weren’t put into a position where they 

could take advantage, seeing what the ANP were doing and trying to do likewise. 

The kandak commander and I talked with some of the local villagers trying to stop 

the villagers from paying the money. That wasn’t successful, though, so I sent the 

intelligence up and tried to get the mission ended but until we could, the only thing 

I could really do was support the ANA and reduce the American presence. That’s 

probably it in a nutshell. I know it’s not the most exciting thing but, believe me, my 

hair turned white by the end of this operation. 

I’d also like to add that Major Benton and Captain Bird were great sounding 

boards during this time. I don’t want to downplay their contribution. It was a team 

effort. 

BH: Okay, well, thank you very much for participating in this interview.

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Major John Tabb

27 May 2008

MD: My name is Major Marty Deckard (MD) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major John Tabb (JT) on his 

experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM or OEF. Today’s 

date is 27 May 2008 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, 

if you feel at any time that we’re entering classified territory, please couch 

your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information 

and if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply 

say you’re not able to answer. Can you start by giving some background 

information on yourself of where you are from, where did you get your 

commission, and what jobs have you held while in the military? 

JT: My source of commission was Reserve Officer Training out of the 

University of Montana. I was prior service having enlisted in 1987 out of Miami, 

Florida. I did a four-year enlistment as an armor crewman [19K]. I served with 

the 2d Armored Division-Forward in Germany for two years and then with the 1st 

Infantry Division during DESERT STORM where I was a tanker.

I got out and went to college. I did National Guard while I was doing that and 

achieved the rank of sergeant. In 1996, I received my commission as an Armor 

officer. I went to Fort Hood for my first assignment where I was a platoon leader 

and a company executive officer. I did a six-month rotation to Bosnia for Operation 

JOINT FORGE in 1998-1999. After that, I went to Fort Knox for the career course. 

Following that, I went to Fort Lewis where I commanded Alpha Company 1-33 

Armor and Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 2-14 CAV when we transferred 

to Stryker Brigade.

From there I went to Fort Bragg where I was on an ACRC [Active Component/

Reserve Component] team as an observer-controller/trainer, and then served as the 

battalion operations officer, the S3, in 1st Battalion, 312th TSB.

I then went to Los Angeles and was a recruiting company commander for 

almost two years. Following that, I was assigned to a military transition team or 

MiTT mission in Afghanistan. 

MD: When did you find out you were going to be assigned to a MiTT? 

JT: I found out in the summer of 2006. 

MD: Did you volunteer for it? 

JT: I was coming up on 24 months in Los Angeles, branch told me about the 

position and I volunteered for it. 
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MD: What position where you assigned to? 

JT: I was templated to be team chief of a reconnaissance, surveillance, and 

target acquisition or RSTA team. That was a program though, that had not actually 

been given an authorization, so when we got to Fort Riley for training we were 

no longer a RSTA. They turned the RSTA mission to a border mission. So all the 

RSTA teams which were larger than the infantry embedded training teams, the 

ETTs, because it’s a 19-man team, were allocated against border training missions 

in country. 

MD: When did you report to Fort Riley for training? 

JT: I got to Fort Riley at the beginning of October 2006. 

MD: When you reported, did you have all your team members present? 

JT: I started out with a full set of 19 guys. As the training went on, I lost four of 

those and I deployed into country minus four guys. Replacements trickled in later 

on but most of those went to other teams. 

MD: Do you recall your class number? 

JT: Class 12. 

MD: What can you say about the training you received at Fort Riley? 

JT: It was a relatively new program. We were the third or fourth class through 

and the first ones at Funston with the new facility. The training was really geared 

towards people going to Iraq. Most of the program of instruction was based on that 

and we didn’t get a lot of specific Afghanistan training.

The language training was deficient. We had a couple evenings spent in front 

of a computer for our language training. There was very little dedicated cultural or 

language training. It felt like an add-on. 

We got more than sufficient small arms training and basic survivability stuff 

but how to do MiTT and cultural and language training was severely lacking. Every 

class we got appeared to be an Iraqi brief that somebody had tacked Afghanistan 

onto. 

MD: What part of the training did you find most useful? 

JT: I would say the most useful part of the training was when we actually went 

out and did lanes. We got to work with Afghan soldiers and police that they had 

brought in, a company of each. We went out and did cordon and searches. I didn’t 

realize the value of that training until we got into country and were doing almost 

the exact same thing. It was very valuable. 
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MD: Which part of the training did you find not useful at all, besides the 

language training? 

JT: A lot of the training we got was geared towards team members who had 

very little Army training. We had Navy and Air Force guys in our class and those 

guys needed ground-up marksmanship, so we spent a lot of time on things we 

really didn’t need training on. We could have just had a refresher course and been 

done. 

We needed more training than we got on electronic warfare countermeasures 

stuff. We got it all on the fly when we got into country. 

MD: When did you deploy and how was your movement into country? 

JT: We flew in early January from Fort Riley and headed to Ali Al Salem, 

Kuwait. We stayed there for a couple days and then went to Camp Phoenix. We 

stayed there for about a week because of weather delays. 

We then went through the Phoenix Academy which was really a waste and 

then headed to Herat and Camp Stone which is the base for all security assistance 

missions in western Afghanistan. For the first four months when I was border 

police, I was at Herat. 

MD: Did you receive any foreign weapons training at any point in your 

training? 

JT: We got a very brief block of instruction from civilian contractors on the AK. 

We got to fire the AK and RPK. We could have used more training, though. What 

we could have used was basic rifle marksmanship for the AK47 for an extended 

period where we all qualified and then could get a good block of maintenance 

instruction. What we got was one day. 

MD: Can you talk some more about the training you received when you got 

in Kuwait? 

JT: We didn’t receive any training in Kuwait. All we did there was 

administrative stuff. When we got to the Phoenix Academy, we received a lot of 

force protection training and some rules of engagement training specific to, the 

Task Force, Phoenix. Phoenix is a National Guard brigade rotation, so it changes 

and is tailored to whatever they want. As a result, you don’t get much of a tool 

bag to take downrange. You just get training on the things that would get you in 

trouble. 

MD: Did you find most of the training at the Phoenix Academy and Camp 

Phoenix still geared towards Iraq? 

JT: No, the instruction they were giving there was Afghanistan-specific. The 

Iraq-centric stuff was purely Fort Riley. 
332

MD: Where is Camp Phoenix? 

JT: It’s in Kabul. 

MD: Was there any contractor support as far as instructors for the training you 

received at Camp Phoenix? 

JT: The training we received at Camp Phoenix was all done by National Guard 

members. There is also a counterinsurgency academy at Camp Phoenix that I 

didn’t go to. The feedback I heard from that was mixed. Some guys got a lot out 

of it but others who’d already been deployed didn’t get much. A portion of that 

training was done by contractors. 

MD: I was on a transition team and went through the Phoenix Academy in Taji, 

Iraq. We received training on communications gear, improvised explosive device 

countermeasures and things like that. Did you get any of that training? 

JT: No. All our electronic countermeasure training and commo was done at 

Fort Riley. 

MD: Did any part of your training cover the organization of the border forces 

in Afghanistan? 

JT: No. There was no discussion of the organizations in country. Everything 

Afghanistan-focused was, “You’ll find out when you get there.” There was very 

little communication with downrange. I didn’t get the sense that the cadre was 

getting on the secure internet protocol router and getting the stuff we needed. We 

didn’t get any of that specific stuff until we got to Camp Stone and the actual chain 

of command for western Afghanistan told us what we’d be dealing with. 

MD: At what point in the process did you find out exactly where you would 

be going? 

JT: When I arrived at Camp Phoenix, I went to the mess hall and it just so 

happened by chance that my commander, a National Guard colonel, was visiting 

Camp Phoenix. He came over and said, “Are you guys coming to my area of 

operations?” We said, “Yes.” He handed us a sheet of paper that had our names 

assigned to specific billets. 

We knew what corps area we were going to and we knew generally what type 

of team we’d been earmarked for. The big unknown was whether we’d be working 

with the police or the army. The straight infantry ETTs were trained to go advise 

the Afghan National Army, the ANA, but half of those guys went to advise the 

Afghan National Police, the ANP. You just didn’t know until the last minute. 

MD: Were you replacing a team already on the ground or were you forming a 

new team? 
333

JT: I was forming a new team with the border police. There were two individuals 

who had been covering down on the border mission but the biggest piece of the 

border advisory mission at that point was done by DynCorp. They were extremely 

limited though, and couldn’t do anything tactical with them. They would visit the 

brigade headquarters and would give some rudimentary police training but there 

was no one going on missions with them or advising the commander full time. So, 

I stood up the border police team for all intents and purposes. 

MD: When did you receive your equipment? 

JT: As soon as we got to Camp Stone, we got our equipment. We took some 

individual equipment, a computer and a few other things from Fort Riley. When 

we got to Camp Phoenix, my team was broken apart. I took eight guys with me to 

work with the border police and the rest of them were divvied out throughout the 

corps area which caused us to reshuffle some equipment. 

MD: Was there any equipment you picked up in Afghanistan that you didn’t 

receive training on? 

JT: We were given a brief at Fort Riley about the different types that are in 

use but we didn’t get any specific training on the use of the ACORN. There were 

certain things on our version of the 114 that we drew that we hadn’t trained on. The 

armor package had heavier doors and the turret with the glass window which only 

enhanced what we had used before so that wasn’t a problem. 

We could have used more Mk-19 training because I ended up getting two of 

them and we relied on them heavily. 

MD: What was the makeup of your team? 

JT: About two thirds of the guys I took with me were captains. The majority of 

them were pre-command armor and infantry officers. I was allowed to pick who I 

wanted to take with me and I took the guys who had combat experience. That was 

the criteria to keep from hurting anyone’s feelings. Every one of them had a combat 

tour but they had all just finished the career course. My NCOs were guys coming 

from Fort Benning or Fort Knox who they had pulled out of the schoolhouse. 

MD: Did most of your NCOs have combat experience as well? 

JT: There were fewer of them. All the NCOs I brought with me were combat 

vets but a lot of my drill sergeants had spent upwards of four or five years at 

Benning or Knox, so they’d kind of been out of the fight. 

MD: What was the occupational specialty makeup of your NCOs? 

JT: I brought three NCOs on my eight-man team. Two of them were 19Ks, 

armor crewman, and one was an infantryman, 11B. 
334

MD: Is it safe to say that once you got your final group of guys and moved 

into your area, that you weren’t getting intelligence reports or reports about what 

operations were like in that area? 

JT: We got very little intelligence. The intelligence officer, the S2, out of Camp 

Stone relied on indigenous intelligence. They would get it from NDS which are the 

secret police in Afghanistan, and from the International Security Assistance Force, 

the ISAF. 

We were in Regional Command-West, the RC-West, and that area was under 

Italian and Spanish ISAF control. There wasn’t any US combative command 

presence at all. We fell under an Italian chain of command. The US S2 intelligence 

was part of the Regional Security Command, the RSC, and they got their stuff from 

the Italians which wasn’t that great. 

MD: Can you go into more detail about the chain of command as far as logistics 

support and command and control? 

JT: Our headquarters was the RSC and that acronym seemed to change every 

week. Before the Italians took over in that area, that headquarters controlled all 

of the MiTT advising for the entire RC-West. When the Italians took over, pieces 

of it kept getting handed over to them. The same was true with the Spanish and 

a couple other nationalities. The US headquarters was shrinking. At Camp Stone, 

there was a colonel who was the commander of the RSC. He had administrative 

responsibilities for all the teams, both army and police. Under him were two 

organizations. There was the Regional Security Assistance Command, the RSAC, 

which covered the army, and the Regional Police Advisory Command, the RPAC, 

which covered the police.

The border police roughly fit under the RPAC. Those guys had a mixed bag of 

civilian contractors that do advising, like DynCorp and Blackwater. Logistics was 

handled by a forward logistics element, the FLE, that they send to bring logistics 

packages or LOGPACs out to the remote sites. When I was with the border police, 

I was located at Camp Stone and logistics were all handed there where we had 

KBR contractor running everything. When I was with the ETT in Farah Province, 

we had our logistics pushed to us by the FLE. 

MD: How were your living conditions at Camp Stone? 

JT: At Camp Stone we had super B-huts. They were brand new. Camp Stone 

has been there for quite a while and is well established. There’s a large mess hall 

and the camp was expanding the whole time we were there. 

We were a short distance away from a provincial reconstruction team, the PRT, 

in downtown Herat which was solely Italian owned. 
335

We were also right next to the Herat International Airport which has a large 

forward support battalion or FSB which the Italians also run. They’re well 

established there. 

MD: How was maintenance support? 

JT: Maintenance was done by the green-suiters mostly. They were building a 

10-bay maintenance facility but were working out of a smaller one prior to that. 

The maintenance support was pretty good. Our operational readiness rate was 

about 90 percent the entire time we were there. 

MD: How was the equipment that you fell in on? 

JT: Our stuff was in pretty good shape because it had been pulled away for the 

border police and hadn’t been used much, so the mileage was low. We had new 

114s.

The biggest deficiency we had was that we didn’t have our full complement of 

crew-served weapons at the time. I had to push hard to get them because the border 

police weren’t fully stood up yet, so other units on the camp kind of took weapons 

away. We had to go through and look under bunks to see if people who never left 

the forward operating base were hoarding .50 cals. We were rolling out all the time 

and having to stick SAWs [squad automatic weapons] in the turrets because we 

didn’t have .50s or 240s. 

MD: How far away was Camp Stone from the battalion headquarters of the 

border police? 

JT: It was about 25 miles. It was on the other side of Herat. It’s about 80 miles 

east of the border. Herat is sort of centrally located on the 1,400 kilometer span of 

border with Iran and Turkmenistan. From 6th Brigade you can shoot straight out to 

the border on the only highway that the Iranians built, ironically, up to the border 

and then you can move laterally along the border north or south. 

MD: How many transition teams were housed at Camp Stone? 

JT: There were transition teams that served as the ANA core that were based at 

Camp Stone. Everything from brigade on up was done by the Italians and Spanish 

and they never left the FOB. They did all their advising from there. 

There was one ETT that was US-advised initially but then transitioned to the 

Italians on the camp. The Herat police team was there as well. So overall, there were 

three US ETTs that actually operated out of there. The rest were all international. 

MD: Can you talk about your Afghan counterpart within the border police? 

JT: When I got there, it was commanded by General Ayub, who was assassinated 

shortly after I arrived. He was hit by an IED on the Airport Road. 
336

He was replaced by Colonel Rahmatullah who was flown in from Kabul. He 

was a very incompetent guy and an alcoholic. He had a lot of problems but I 

worked hard to develop a rapport with him. Previous advisors to the border police 

had been very hands-off, especially DynCorp, so I really ramped up the involvement with them. I started involving the ODA [operational detachment alpha] that 

was on Camp Stone with border interdiction and drug interdiction missions and 

we went on every one of those missions as well which was a complete paradigm 

shift for them. That close cooperation helped Colonel Rahmatullah a lot. It gave 

him a lot of confidence and took him from being an incompetent, uninvolved, and 

disinterested commander to being a guy who actually felt like he could make a 

difference. 

MD: What was the unit designation for the Afghan Border Police? 

JT: They were the 6th Afghan Border Police Brigade. They had responsibility 

for the entire Iranian border down to Nimruz Province in the south, all the way up 

to the Turkmenistan border in the north. 

MD: Given that you were working with the brigade headquarters, did you have 

any subordinate transition teams under you? 

JT: No. For whatever the reason, they don’t have coverage on the elements 

lower than brigade for the border police. That was unfortunate because they were 

so spread out that there was no way I could visit any one battalion more than once 

on my entire tour. The closest battalion we had was in a place called Tora Gundy on 

the Turkmenistan border and we only saw them three times, and that was frequent. 

MD: Can you talk more about the makeup of the brigade? How many 

subordinate battalions were there? 

JT: There were three battalions-kandaks. There was one in Tora Gundy in the 

north, one in Islam-Qala on the Iranian border, and one further south at Khalikah 

[ph] also on the Iranian border. They have headquarters which in all three cases 

was a dilapidated building. There weren’t any companies per se under them. 

They had some border checkpoints that they had responsibility for and within 

those areas there would be two larger headquarters checkpoints but they were 

glorified checkpoints. I guess you could call them a company but they didn’t refer 

to them as a company. Between them, very spread out, were shacks that were 

completely unequipped and usually not manned. 

MD: How was the brigade that you advised in terms of equipment? 

JT: They were pretty well-equipped with weapons and uniforms, especially 

at the brigade level. If you went to the brigade headquarters, you’d see that they 

had everything but if you went to the actual checkpoints on the border, you saw 

that things weren’t getting down to them. It seems to be kind of an Afghan-ism 
337

that they hoard resources, so they had CONEX trailers that were full of brand new 

AMD-65s and AK47s that never got out because they didn’t want to give them out. 

There were pistols and uniforms that never got sent out either, so we worked very 

hard to empty out those CONEXs and get them pushed down. 

MD: What were the major challenges that the brigade faced? 

JT: Getting logistics down to the checkpoints such as fuel, water, and 

ammunition. A lot of their weapons were broken and they had a very strange bias 

against the AMD-65 which is the Hungarian-made AK which we gave them. Most 

of the border police would prefer to have a broken Russian one than to take the 

AMD-65. They wanted to say they jammed all the time. We demonstrated to them 

again and again that with proper maintenance they’d be fine but they didn’t believe 

us.

The biggest problem was that there was no way to get fuel to them. The larger 

checkpoints had a truck and an above-ground tank that they would periodically fill 

for them. The way the Afghans are, they sell that fuel almost immediately and then 

call us saying they’re out of fuel. Those guys would just not do their jobs because 

of that and there was no way to police it either because getting down there was 

almost impossible. 

MD: At the time you started advising the brigade, was there a formal system 

to train border policemen or were they just hired off relationships and knowing 

somebody? 

JT: The border police were one of the few organizations that had remained 

intact, unlike the army and the police. There were a lot of guys who had been 

career border police officers. In terms of junior personnel, I think in that area they 

just asked for volunteers. They were sent up to Herat where they would receive 

some rudimentary training and equipment and then get sent back down. 

MD: What areas of responsibility consumed most of your time? 

JT: Most of my time was spent engaging the commander. I went out to see him 

at a minimum of three times a week but it usually ended up being more than that. 

The other piece was interfacing with the agencies in the area that influenced border 

stuff. I spent a lot of time with the State Department representative at the PRT who 

was very experienced with the border mission. He was very useful and he could 

get us help from higher echelons to influence things. I did a lot of networking with 

all the associated agencies, both multinational and interagency. 

MD: What were some of your most difficult challenges to overcome? 

JT: Trying to eliminate corruption and mismanagement in the brigade and 

trying to work with DynCorp to push their involvement was challenging. In my 

opinion, DynCorp was sucking up money and not contributing much to the fight. 
338

A lot of that was because of their limitations. They couldn’t leave the FOBs. There 

was also an illegal fuel-siphoning operation going on at the border which was 

our biggest continuing problem. Iranian trucks would cross the border, they’d be 

pulled over and all the fuel would be siphoned out of their tanks, and they’d leave 

them with just enough to get them to the next gas station. The fuel was pumped 

into big in-ground tanks where it would be sold off as a gas station basically right 

there. This operation had been going on for a long time but no one was doing 

anything about it. The one time they did try to crack down, one of the DynCorp 

guys got IED’d. So, there was a major backlash. That involved a lot of different 

agencies, so that was another big challenge. 

MD: I take it the corruption was pretty rampant and frequent? 

JT: Yes. For every 100 pounds of opium they would confiscate, probably a 

third of it was taken off the top and sold. 

MD: How were you set up for interpreter support? 

JT: We had three interpreters that we shared with others. They weren’t terribly 

proficient. They were locals from the area. I didn’t realize how bad we had it, 

though, until I went to the ETT side and had a great set of eight interpreters who 

lived with us on the FOB and were awesome. 

MD: What were some of your successes while training the border police? 

JT: The biggest success was pushing them to become more active on the border 

and we did that purely by example. We were anxious and active in getting up to the 

border and involving the ODA.

No one had ever approached the Special Forces that were there at the camp 

about involving the border police in any of their operations. They were flabbergasted 

that they were approached at all and were very happy to be involved. We turned the 

border police into a very active agent of interdiction on the border and they hadn’t 

been that way before. 

MD: Was there any American or Coalition presence at headquarters higher 

than the brigade within the border police? 

JT: The headquarters for the brigade was in Kabul and they were heavily 

covered down on there. The closer you got towards the border, the less coverage 

there was.

The only direct mentor coverage below brigade was DynCorp. They had a 

small FOB set up right on the border that acted as a regional training facility. 

They did very little. They had representatives who were purely customs-focused, 

so they would go up to the customs house and mentor them on the conduct of that. 

We really didn’t participate much in that. I kept our focus strictly on policing the 

border rather than customs. 
339

MD: How was coordination with the level above brigade in trying to get 

logistics and equipment? 

JT: It was difficult because they were in Kabul. My only interface was the RSC. 

It was hard to get things communicated to them. It took me a while to even get a 

point of contact in the main national border police organization. The other problem 

was that there were two stovepipes of information with DynCorp on one side and 

the military on the other side and we weren’t always seeing eye-to-eye. That’s part 

of the reason I involved State so they could push the influence of DynCorp down 

a bit and increase the green-suit piece. 

MD: Do you think the mission of training the border police was identified but 

wasn’t really resourced? 

JT: Yes. Four months into things, we were taking a tour of the border with the 

brigade commander and things were going great. Next thing I knew, I got a call 

over the radio that said we were disbanded and they had another mission for us. It 

was the lowest priority. When I got there, I was told that the police were the high 

priority.

Something happened with the rotation of the South Carolina National Guard 

brigade that was coming in. They were going to be undermanned so they decided 

to reallocate resources to the places they thought were the priority and assume risk 

elsewhere. The border police was where they did that. 

MD: Did the border police advising mission go away nationwide? 

JT: I’m not sure. I know one of my friends in the east worked with the border 

police the entire time. 

They disbanded us but a month later they stood it up again. It’s possible that 

my friend had a bump where they said, “We’re not going to do it anymore but 

stand fast.” In my case, they had a position open immediately on the ETT because 

that team chief had been relieved so I had to get down there quickly. Had that not 

happened, I might have stayed with the border police and once they figured out 

what they were going to do, I could have taken it over again but it didn’t happen 

for me that way. 

MD: Can you talk about what you were feeling when you realized you were 

leaving the border police and the guys you had been working with for those four 

months? 

JT: I was initially very frustrated because I had put a lot of work into it. 

They were also going to split my team up again and I’d only be able to take 

four guys from my original team with me which is always emotionally difficult. I 

was excited to be getting away from the flagpole and I was excited to be doing the 

ETT mission but initially I was very frustrated. 
340

MD: What were some of the challenges you faced moving from the border 

mission to the ETT mission? 

JT: We took over the ETT that had Farah which is the southernmost province 

in Regional Command West. It borders Helmand. Well, Musa Qal’eh is a wadi 

where the biggest insurgent problem in Helmand is, is right on the other side of the 

mountains from Farah, so we got everything they did but the Italian command of 

RC-West really wanted to believe the west was quiet. When we got there they said, 

“You’re lucky you’re going out there because there’s nothing going on in the 207th 

Corps area.” When we got there, they told us, “As long as you don’t go down south 

to Farah, you’ll be okay. Down there, it’s crazy.” 

Then I found out we were headed down there. The previous team chief’s 

vehicle had been struck by an IED and it kind of rattled his cage, so they moved 

him out. Insurgent activity down there was going through the roof when I got there. 

We lived on a small FOB that was secured and manned by the ANA. There was a 

quick reaction force or QRF company that was our security. 

We were collocated with an operational detachment alpha and there was also 

a detachment of Romanian Special Forces with us. Right across from our HESCO 

wall was the provincial reconstruction team, the PRT, which was run by a US Navy 

commander. That was it though for US presence in the area, the US PRT, the ODA, 

and us. 

We had a dirt airstrip right next to us. The kandak was the first kandak of the 

207th Corps and was the oldest kandak in the west. At one point, it had been the 

only one to cover the entire western part of the country. As the 207th Corps grew, it 

continued to get pushed to where things were the hottest because they had the most 

experience. It had a company with us and the rest of the kandak was downtown in 

an old army facility that had been there forever. 

We had to split our time between those two places and drive through the city 

of Farah to get to the kandak headquarters. It was commanded by Colonel Jabar 

who was the best Afghan officer I’ve ever dealt with. He had corruption issues but 

no more than anyone else over there had. He and I established outstanding rapport 

from the go. 

MD: You mentioned earlier that your team was split and you only took four 

guys with you. Which four guys did you take with you and what equipment did 

you bring? 

JT: I fell in on what remained of the team. When I got there, there were 12 guys 

left behind from the old team. I brought my four guys with me and, as time went 

on, we had a rotation and half the team was rotated out and some South Carolina 

Guard guys came in. The four guys I brought with me were my three best captains 

and one NCO.
341

The captains on the team we fell in on were pretty squared away. They were 

all Iraq vets and were extremely seasoned from the four months they had been in 

Farah. They had been part of my class at Fort Riley but they had gone to Farah 

right away so they had a lot of experience in the area. I had a superb team once 

everything settled down.

Discipline in the camp wasn’t great. There were some guys who were going 

a little too native, too SF as far as grooming and such. We squared that away and 

kept things rational. By the time I left, I had a team of 21 guys. 

We had no KBR support on the camp. All our life support was done with our 

mission-related funds. We had generator power but we had to buy our fuel on the 

economy. Our food was provided by the PRT but it was cooked by a local that we 

hired to be our cook. Our mess hall was a screened-in porch. As time went on, the 

guys from Camp Stone sent me a mechanic and a dedicated US cook, so by the 

time I left I had a 21-man team that was able to cover all the life support issues. 

MD: Where did the personnel you didn’t take end up? 

JT: Some of them went to another ETT in Shindand to our north and the rest 

stayed at Camp Stone and filled in various jobs. 

MD: Do you think it would have been better to take your full team over? 

JT: It would have been better with the border police to have my full team. 

When I went to the ETT, I was glad they split me because I needed those guys who 

had been there for a while. That continuity was essential. The operational tempo 

was extremely high where we were and if we were all starting from scratch, it 

would have been a very difficult transition. 

MD: What unit did you end of advising? 

JT: I advised the 1st Kandak of the 1st Brigade, 207th Corps. 

MD: How did your initial meeting go with the commander? 

JT: It went very well. They had done a good job at our camp of setting up a 

receiving area in our operations center and they were in the habit of meeting with 

the kandak commander every day. Every morning he would come in at 0800 and 

we’d drink chai. 

We had a little team of eight interpreters who’d been there for a long time. They 

spoke superb English and had a great understanding of how the kandak operated. 

They were just great. It was easy to get settled into the battle rhythm that had been 

established by the team before us. 

MD: What was the focus of the advisory operations that you were conducting? 

JT: I tried to initially focus on the military decision making process, the 

MDMP, for the battalion staff. As many have though, we found that the Afghans 
342

don’t really embrace the traditional US deliberate MDMP, so we tailored it and 

compressed it down to where they could use it. 

They had a pretty good operations officer, the S3, and a great operations 

sergeant major whom actually became pretty critical to things. We were able to 

do rudimentary mission analysis, intelligence preparation of the battlefield or IPB 

to produce an order. That was my focus, as well as my staff advisors’ focus. My 

company advisors were focused on individual soldier skills. The operational tempo 

was such that we couldn’t do a training cycle prior to a mission because missions 

were ongoing. 

We tried to do the red, amber, green thing which was mandated up through 

Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, the CSTC–A, but there 

was no way to do that because they had to man their garrison facilities at all times 

and they had missions going hither and yon. Farah is the third largest province in 

the country and they had one kandak covering down on the entire province. The 

other two largest provinces either have no enemy activity to speak of or they have a 

US or British ETT-size element operating in them. We had a very unique condition 

in that the kandak was having to do it all with nothing. 

MD: What were some of the strengths and weaknesses of the kandak? 

JT: It differed depending on the company. Some companies were better than 

others. There was more corruption in some areas than in others. There were two 

extremely strong companies in the Weapons Company and the 3d Company. They 

had strong company commanders which was the key. They were very experienced 

in combat operations, so their reaction to contact and their ability to conduct a 

cordon and search were great from the beginning. Soldiers were very courageous 

and very thorough. 

They were a “T” at traffic control points and vehicle searches. The other 

companies had morale problems which kept them from being particularly effective 

in those areas. They didn’t have confidence in their commanders and subsequently 

they weren’t inclined to react properly. 

MD: Can you compare and contrast the border police and the ANA you worked 

with? 

JT: The border police were decentralized. The only maneuver element that the 

brigade commander had at his disposal was a QRF that he maintained which had 

about 50 guys. Those guys were well-trained and very effective, especially when 

they started working with the SF but they certainly weren’t the brigade. 

We hadn’t really met the vast majority of the brigade, let alone been able to 

assess their capabilities. The entire kandak pretty much had it together. It was uneven 

but by the second half of my tour, they could conduct kandak-level operations reli-
343

ably under their own planning. It took a lot of coaching but they were able to do 

it. The border police could never have done a brigade-size operation. They just 

weren’t set up for that. 

MD: Did you conduct any combat operations with your Afghani counterparts? 

JT: Yes. We had numerous complex ambushes. We did three major cordon and 

search operations that interdicted IED manufacturing facilities. We had one very 

large complex ambush in a particular valley. 

We had sent a team up to investigate a district center that had been overrun. 

It turned into a running ambush with about 400 insurgents that had moved from 

Helmand into Farah. We lost 24 ANA during that battle. 

MD: What were some of the challenges that the ANA faced? 

JT: Like everyone else, they were challenged with logistics. The kandak didn’t 

coordinate food and water very well. When I got there, they were relying on the 

ETTs to provide that stuff for them in the field. At the time, my captains were in 

platoon leader mode. If there was a mission that had a start point, then by God they 

were going to make it go off on time. I had to tell them, “Let the Afghans miss their 

SP. Let them fall on their faces because they didn’t plan properly.” That was a very 

hard point to get across, especially when the ODA wanted to go on a mission and 

they saw us as the Afghans’ babysitters. 

We said, “If they don’t have water or fuel, don’t go.” They were selling fuel 

like crazy. We finally gave them a finite amount and said, “When that runs out, 

you’re done.” It was hard to get it across to my guys that we weren’t responsible. 

The Afghans were. We could help them and coach them to manage it but we 

weren’t allocating it to them. That was the biggest paradigm shift I had to change 

but it paid off in the end. 

MD: Was your Afghan counterpart receptive to your suggestions and 

recommendations? 

JT: To my face he was. I know it caused him problems but he never told me 

about it. I convinced him through the rapport we built that everything I was doing 

was in their best interest. I don’t think he ever thought I had an ulterior motive, so 

he knew it was the right thing but it was causing him pain. The pain it was causing 

him, he didn’t discuss, because it usually had to do with corruption. 

MD: Were there any instances where your chain of command and the Afghan 

chain of command were trying to do different things at the same time and, as a 

result, caused some friction within the ANA? 

JT: It was mainly the corruption thing. The commander would pretty much 

agree with whatever I’d say, and it was a challenge for me to pull out of him what 
344

he wanted to do. Most of the time he was like, “I’m with you, boss.” There was 

what was going on at the surface and what was going on below. I relied on the 

interpreters to hear what was going on around the area so I was always informed 

on the corruption issues, like who was thinking about killing who because they 

were stealing something. 

MD: How much interaction did you have with the Afghan local population? 

JT: I had a lot. Because there wasn’t any combatant command in the area, there 

was no senior security representative for the province. The PRT commander who 

could have filled that role was a ship driver though, and didn’t have a clue. He was 

more than willing to let me be the security representative. I started to go to every 

provincial security council meeting with him every Saturday. My counterpart went 

as well but the decisions for any kind of security operation were usually made 

by me. The governor and the PRT commander would defer to me to make the 

decisions. I would go out on the key leader engagements and I would help foster 

CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Program] projects. I wasn’t directly 

involved but I was there as the security guy. RC-West was very anxious to get into 

the build phase of the operations before we were even done with the clear phase, so 

I would go along to be the voice of reality. When a humanitarian operation would 

move into a village and say they wanted to start doing a specific thing, I would 

speak up and say, “We haven’t even stopped them from IED’ing this route. We 

need to step back and establish a garrison here with the army or the police.”

The biggest problem I had in the province was the lack of police. The police 

were virtually non-existent. The police general in the area was horribly corrupt and 

didn’t care. He certainly wasn’t going to stick his neck out for anything. The ANA 

had to do the job the police should have been doing and there were only 400 of 

them for the whole province. 

We figured out that the only way to secure a district long enough to do any 

kind of CERP project was to put a fixed facility up with a company-size element 

to conduct patrols in the area. That’s the only way we could keep the insurgents’ 

heads down long enough to start doing “build” stuff. We’d build these facilities 

and HESCO walls which I helped to plan but we started running out of companies. 

We’d stick a company out there with the plan being that the police would relieve 

them in a month but that would never happen because they would never bring in 

any more police. 

We were manning two of those which left just one company in reserve. That 

started to change with the implementation of a new program called the Focus 

District Development Program. They bring in additional Afghan National Police, 

the ANP, give them training, keep a police mentor team at the district level which is 

something they’d never done before, and eventually leave a garrison with actually 
345

trained and equipped police. That was being done one district at a time though, and 

in my opinion they need to surge on that. 

MD: How do you think the locals viewed the ANA? 

JT: The ANA was the most reputable organization in the country. I think the 

locals had a lot of respect for them in contrast to the police who were hated and 

thought of as thieves. 

The ANA were respected. The town of Farah was experiencing a lot of 

economic prosperity so they liked the police presence and wanted to see more of it. 

The further out you got into the tribal areas though, they had a history of defiance. 

MD: How do you think the locals viewed the American presence and in 

particular your team? 

JT: I think it was almost in hand with the ANA. When they saw us with the 

ANA, they felt proud that we were working with them. I think we worked hard on 

making the impression that it wasn’t a US operation with Afghans in support. We 

worked hard on staying in the background. However, out in the tribal areas, we 

were considered occupiers so they didn’t support us. 

MD: Did you ever run into any situations where there was some kind of tribal 

animosity? 

JT: The tribes that dominate the agricultural areas outside of the city of Farah 

were tribes that were based out of Helmand, mainly the Barekzai and Noorzai

Tribes. They were very hostile and very Taliban supportive. Those tribes fought 

amongst themselves, too, and the thing they fought over was the drug trade. 

Farah is the second largest opium producer in the country and a vast amount of 

opium comes out of there. Enemy activity was pretty much synched to the poppy 

schedule. During the cultivation time, there wasn’t much going on. During the 

harvest, things started to ramp up in an effort to disrupt our ability to interdict 

them. Once the proceeds of the harvest started to roll in, we started to get hit a lot 

because the insurgency was then flush with money. The tribes would fight over 

who owned the most poppy and things like that.

Another interesting thing was that the police vacuum was being filled by tribes 

that were being contracted by the government to provide security. These guys, who 

were historically highway robbers, were getting paid to be police. They were now 

getting paid to police the same stretch of Highway 1 that they’d used to rob people 

on but now instead of robbing them . . . well, they were still robbing but now they 

were providing security, too. 

They were very unreliable and very shady characters but they went to the 

provincial security council meetings with us. They would even start knocking each 
346

other off. A guy you were working with one minute as a de facto police chief would 

be dead the next because they would attack him. 

MD: The way you were set up as an ETT, being out there in austere conditions 

and having the freedom to operate and advise how you wanted to, versus how it is 

in Iraq, where you’re under the control of an American brigade combat team, how 

was your logistics support? Can you talk through that? How much funding were 

you given and what were the challenges of being self sustainment? 

JT: Our monthly budget was $25,000 and we spent about $2,500 of that on 

life support issues. Our generators broke down all the time. They were Afghan 

generators, Chinese-made, and they were unreliable. In the summer when 

they would get a lot of surge put on them, they would die. There were certain 

uncomfortable things we had to do because we had to do our own support but the 

freedom we had made it worthwhile. In our nasty little FOB, we had beautiful 

internet because we had a VSAT satellite communications. 

We were in a Russian compound with hardstand buildings that were very 

comfortable with air conditioners, when the generators were running. As soon 

as the generators died though, it would immediately turn awful. We got very 

good at going out and getting that generator running again. It would have been 

more comfortable to be on a FOB with KBR support but it was better to have the 

autonomy and freedom that we had. 

MD: Did you have any casualties on your teams? 

JT: Yes. I had one soldier lose his leg from an AK round during an ambush. 

Then I had another soldier who left my team to join the team just north of us in 

Shindand who was shot by a sniper and died. 

MD: What kinds of challenges did you face as far as family readiness and 

family support? 

JT: Family readiness was pretty much non-existent. We were allowed to 

pre-position our families anywhere we wanted and I brought my wife to Fort 

Leavenworth which worked out fine for us. I don’t think any kind of family 

readiness group or FRG stuff could have made it any better. The families were 

spread out all over the place and there wasn’t any cohesion. When the teams are put 

together at Fort Riley, everybody now knows that the chances of staying together 

are pretty slim. I worked to have a little internal FRG but it didn’t work because 

my team was broken up. The frustration level is very high among the families 

because the expectation level gets built up. Fort Riley put together this website 

that was supposed to be a virtual FRG but I don’t think it ever really worked out. 

Towards the end when we started to redeploy, there was very little information for 

our families as far as when we were coming in. Expectations were set very high 

and I think they would have done better just not to put out anything. 
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MD: Did the fact that your team members had the ability to reach-back and 

talk to family members make a difference? 

JT: Yes. That was huge. Most guys were talking by video teleconference on 

Skype with their wives every day. The operational tempo was such that we’d go 

on a three or four day-long mission where we were getting shot at, so when we 

got back I’d give my guys a good robust break. Some of my guys would go into 

their hooch, fire up the computer, and talk to the wife. For 24 hours, they’d pretty 

much stay there, almost in the same room. That reach-back was essential. When 

the generator went down and we’d lose satellite, it became a major hardship. 

MD: What were the challenges involved with getting the personal effects of 

the casualty you had out of the country? 

JT: It wasn’t as bad as it may seem. 

We were reliant on the Italian Army for combat support and they were 

unreliable. They used Chinooks and Super Pumas and they would only fly under 

certain conditions and they wouldn’t fly into a continuing firefight. As a result, we 

had to do a lot of non-standard casualty evacuation. In the case of our soldier, we 

had to throw him in the back of a Humvee and drive him back to the PRT which 

luckily was on paved road about 50 miles from where we were. It became a real 

problem for the Afghans. The Italians would not fly for Afghans. 

We got to the point where we had to lie to them and in the nine-line order we’d 

cut out the part about who would be in the bird. While I was there, we lost 50 ANA 

soldiers and that was very hard to have them see what we could expect in terms of 

support as opposed to what they could expect.

The same thing goes for close air support, the CAS. There was no airfield 

nearby, other than Italian, so we couldn’t get attack aviation. The only CAS we 

could get were fast movers from Kandahar with F-15s and B-1s and we could only 

get those through the ODA’s joint tactical air controller, the JTAC. If they weren’t 

with us, we had no way to get CAS that would drop anything. Without a JTAC, 

they’ll fly and pop chaff all day long but they won’t drop anything. When they 

were around, it was great and we dropped a lot of ordnance. Otherwise, our support 

was pretty limited. 

MD: Did you have any contact with the media while you were over there? 

JT: No. 

MD: Did you have any other contact with other services, aside from the 

commander of the PRT? 

JT: The Air Force and Navy were everywhere. The PRTs were a mix as was 

Camp Stone. More often than not, we were dealing with an Air Force or a Navy 
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guy for logistics. We dealt with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, 

quite a bit and the CIA in some instances. 

MD: Were there any challenges in dealing with the other services? 

JT: No. They did a good job. 

MD: What were some of the challenges in dealing with the Italians and the 

Spanish, aside from the support issues you spoke about? Was there a language 

barrier? 

JT: Most of the Italians and Spanish were English speakers. I found them to be 

good people when I dealt with them. The biggest problem was that their national 

caveats prevented them from participating in kinetic operations. As a result, they 

only committed to RC-West under the assumption that there wouldn’t be any 

kinetic operations. 

They wanted to be in denial and leave it to what US units remained in the area 

but there weren’t any combat units left. All of RC-West didn’t have as much as 

one company of anything other than security forces, so it fell to us and the ODA 

to do it all. It was frustrating because the Italians would plan operations that were 

complete eyewash. 

They would go do a drive-by of a place and call it a clearing operation. Then 

when I would call foul on that, I would get into it with the Italian brigadier general 

who was running things. Whenever US leadership would come in, General McNeill 

or General Rodriguez of Task Force 82, I would brief them up on what was really 

happening and that caused all sorts of problems because that wasn’t what was 

being fed to them by ISAF. 

MD: When did you finally leave Afghanistan? 

JT: In late January 2008. 

MD: Were you replaced by another team? 

JT: Yes. This is a very good news story. The previous September, we had a predeployment site survey that came from Fort Riley. There were three majors, two of 

whom were Intermediate Level Education grads, came out to visit my sight. I was 

told by my commander that one of the three was going to be replacing me. 

They were all studs and I got to pick which one stayed. The guy that ended up 

replacing me is a great guy. He had two Iraq tours and was perfect. The transition 

went perfectly. Half of my team for the majority of the time I was in Farah was 

National Guard. 

They brought unique skill sets and were just superb for that mission. There’s a 

lot of criticism out there about the National Guard but they are ideally suited for the 

military transition team mission, in my opinion. They were very motivated as far 
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as combat operations were concerned. They were very disciplined and extremely 

skillful. I had a civilian construction contractor who was a huge value because 

there was all sorts of building going on in our area. My sergeant major was the 

police chief of a county in South Carolina and that paid huge dividends in dealing 

with the police on all levels. 

MD: Was this the first combat experience for the National Guard members 

who came in? 

JT: It was for some of them. About half of those guys had been to Iraq at least 

once. 

MD: Were the Afghan officers seasoned combat veterans as well? 

JT: Most of them were. 

MD: Did you ever run into any instances where they viewed your team 

members as inexperienced when it came to combat since they had been fighting 

longer than we have? 

JT: Generally speaking, they knew that most of my team was made up of 

combat vets. They knew what the patch meant on the right sleeve. I never got the 

impression that they disdained us in any way. After a few operations, they lost any 

fear they may have had about us not performing. 

MD: Can you use general terms to describe some of the improvements you 

saw in the ANA from when you first got there to when you left? 

JT: There was almost a complete turnaround on their reliance on the ETT for 

support. When I got there, they were almost completely reliant on logistics for 

every mission. When I left, they were completely weaned off that. 

They also went from being barely able to plan and conduct a company-level 

operation to being able to conduct a full battalion cordon and search with an actual 

orders process and rehearsals which they had never done before. Before it was 

just, “Hey you, let’s go.” Every operation we did with them we put them through 

the drill, even when it was painful. All this was done with the SF involved because 

they were truly their operational partners. The thing I wanted to push was that the 

kandak was a partner kandak with the ODA and I stressed that there were two 

maneuver elements in every operation. There was the ODA and the ANA. We were 

not a maneuver element. We were supposed to be invisible. Now, they didn’t want 

to believe that. They wanted to make us the command element but we wanted them 

to view us as transparent.

Also, the ODA really wanted us to handle the Afghans. After a while, I had 

to tell the ODA to take care of things themselves. They were the guys who were 

supposed to be so great at foreign internal defense or FID. We told them to go do 
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their jobs but they didn’t want to. My experience with SF was that they wanted to 

be door-kickers. They didn’t want to do FID but we forced them to do that. 

MD: When you left, what areas did you feel the ANA still needed more work 

on? 

JT: I just wanted them to continue moving in the same direction we had been 

moving in. Corruption is a way of life over there and for a lot of those guys, it’s 

the only real income stream they have. It’s sort of the same thing as with the poppy 

industry. You can’t just take it away. As long as it wasn’t affecting operations, I left 

it alone. The guy who followed me in there had the same attitude. 

We were unable to bring them much further along in training because of the 

operational tempo. We didn’t have a chance to stop. I got to the point where my 

training assessments were being done based on combat operations. We would go 

on a mission and I would decide, “Well, it looked like a cordon and search. It 

was really a mixture of things. I’ll get out the military training plan for that and 

evaluate how they did for that mission.” That model I gave was actually taken on 

by CSTC-A for their template rather than the US model of red, amber, green and 

training standards. 

MD: What previous assignment that you had best prepared you for your job 

as team leader? 

JT: Company command prepared me. I never deployed as a company 

commander but the ability to lead officers and deal with outside agencies came 

from company command. 

MD: Did you say that some of your captains were post-command captains? 

JT: No. They were all pre-command captains. 

MD: Do you think it would have made a difference to have one or two postcommand captains? 

JT: Yes. They would have been better prepared and would have had a better 

understanding of how a company operates. 

MD: What are some ways the Army could change the transition team mission 

to make it better? 

JT: I think we’re spread too thin. In order to have max effectiveness, you need 

to be down at the district level in the case of the ANP. For the border police, you 

need to be at the battalion level. 

We needed to have a 12-man team at all three battalions for the brigade, not 

just at the brigade headquarters. We weren’t having nearly the effect we needed 

to have as far as that was concerned. The configuration of the teams needs to be 

changed, too. You need to have a JTAC in an ETT. 
351

We lucked out because we had an ODA and we had a good relationship with 

them but there were plenty of teams that didn’t have that. As anyone who’s been 

there or to Iraq knows, you’re not going to get CAS unless you have a JTAC. 

We didn’t have a medic so we were reliant on the Italians for that. So, I think 

they need to change the configuration of the teams and have more teams. 

MD: Is there any additional training you would add to the program of instruction 

for training based on your experiences? 

JT: In a perfect world, you would have quite a bit of time with an Afghan or 

Iraqi unit doing mission rehearsal exercises. That was the best part of what we did 

at Fort Riley but it was only one day. You could even do that in country. I could see 

going to Kabul or Bagram and building a training facility where you could actually 

go out with your team and do missions. 

We need more cultural training. We needed an Afghan to tell us what was 

important to an Afghan. As far as language is concerned, it’s either all or nothing. 

You either send your leaders to a Defense Language Institute-style immersion 

training or don’t bother. Most of us were decent at flipping out the card and getting 

the basic conversation stuff but don’t waste my time with a big block of instruction 

that’s intended to teach me the language. I’m not going to internalize it. I think 

everybody ought to go to DLI. There ought to be time allocated to do that. 

Then you have a regional focus identifier slapped on your officer record brief 

and that’s where you’d go all the time. 

MD: How much of your time, either training the border police or the ANA, 

was taken up by trying to figure out how the organization was formed and what 

their organization was? Do you think that was something they should have covered 

more in training? 

JT: We got a quick briefing on how they were organized but nothing specific. I 

think that’s one of those things they could have given us at Fort Riley. Tashkeel [ph] 

is the Afghan word for MTOE [modified table of organization and equipment]. We 

could have gotten a copy of the tashkeel for our unit while we were at Fort Riley. 

They knew well enough in advance what core area each team would be going to 

and generally who they’d be covering down on. They could have gotten us a copy 

of that and it would have helped a lot. 

MD: Do you think if a slot opened up for another transition team that you 

would take it? 

JT: No, but mainly because I want to do something different. It’s hit or miss. I 

really lucked out. A lot of the guys I’ve talked to weren’t so lucky. The experience 

between Iraq and eastern Afghanistan, where you’re in a BCT area of operations, 

and what I did was night and day. Those guys really had their hands tied behind 
352

their backs and were treated like “also-rans”. Where I was, I was the only show in 

town, so I had complete autonomy. I think if I did it again, I’d go to Iraq this time 

and things would be completely different. So no, I wouldn’t want to do it again. 

Would I want to do it somewhere further down the line in my career as a lieutenant 

colonel? Sure, I think it’s a very satisfying mission. 

MD: What are some of the biggest professional lessons learned that you took 

away from your time in Afghanistan? 

JT: I learned the importance of interagency cooperation. Over there, you can’t 

keep things just Army. It’s important to expand the areas that you interface with 

all the possible agencies that can provide services for you. You have to be a good 

resource manager for your counterpart. That’s something that doesn’t just apply 

to the MiTT thing. If I go into theater as an S3 or an executive officer, I’ll know 

who to plug into to get my unit everything it needs. It’s also important to build 

rapport with your counterpart. A lot of guys come in with a set mindset of how 

they’re going to operate and they’re really uncomfortable completely immersing 

themselves with their counterpart. I really worked hard to develop a very strong 

rapport. You will come to crisis moments with your counterpart and if you don’t 

have perfect rapport with them, your credibility will be lost and they won’t talk 

to you anymore. In their culture, you don’t have a big knockdown/ drag-out fight. 

They just stop talking to you. Because we had such a good rapport, when the 

horrible things happened he still trusted me. He knew that no matter what I was 

doing, it was in his best interest to listen to me even if it bugged him. 

MD: What’s some advice you’d have for a brand new captain or major who’s 

coming into the transition team mission? 

JT: Make autonomy of the unit your number one priority. Look at what they’re 

doing and their level of training but make everything you do be a step towards 

disconnecting from them. Don’t abandon them and realize that pushing them is 

going to be a painful process. You can make them very happy and facilitate their 

ability to conduct combat operations by giving them all the stuff that they need but 

it’s never going to make them a better unit. I would sit down with my counterpart 

once a week and ask him, “Where do you see your army in 10 years or 20 years?” 

When I first got there, his response was, “In 10 years, I expect the US Army to still 

be here and I expect you guys to continue to provide all the support. That makes 

us happy. Life was good right after the war started and you guys were giving us 

everything.” By the end, I got him to the point where he could see things from my 

perspective which was 10 years from now we should be gone and the ANA should 

be standing on its feet. You should always have that in the back of your mind. 
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MD: Can you talk about how your redeployment activities went and if there’s 

anything that should be changed? 

JT: We probably spent too little time at Fort Riley on redeployment. We had 

three days and we didn’t even bother to inventory at the central issue facility. 

We didn’t have a problem with it at the time because we wanted to hit the road 

but there were people who needed some counseling and who needed some help 

with readjustment. I think marriage counseling should be automatic for guys who 

are redeploying. I think that would eliminate the stigma associated with marriage 

counseling and would allow people to confront things right away instead of allowing them to fester. It wasn’t something that was immediately apparent to me 

but after a while I was like, “We should have taken some more time to do this the 

right way.” 

MD: Is there anything else about your time in Afghanistan that you’d like to 

add to this interview? 

JT: There is movement in some of the branches to make it full Key and 

Developmental. There are pros and cons to that. A pro would be that if you’re 

a team chief, you’re getting a big dose of critical field grade-level experience. I 

think it’s fair to say that a guy who has been through that should get full KD credit, 

as long as it doesn’t disadvantage him professionally. Unfortunately, the culture 

hasn’t shifted yet and it’s still being looked at as lesser than a brigade or battalion 

S3 or XO slot. I think some branches will use it as a way to disqualify some guys 

for those jobs. I’m concerned that future boards will look upon it as lesser and 

there will be negative drawbacks but I definitely think that it’s worthy of being 

treated as full KD and it’s a tremendous professional development experience. 

MD: Thank you for your time.

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Major William Woodring

12 December 2006

LL: My name is Laurence Lessard (LL) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major William Woodring (WW) 

on his experiences in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM 

or OEF. Today’s date is 12 December 2006 and this is an unclassified 

interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information and if classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Let’s start with a little 

bit of background. Where are you from, how did you get commissioned, 

and what units have you served with? 

WW: I’m from Maryland. I was interested in the Army all through high school 

and was actually in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program. There was 

a colonel there who really pushed me to look into joining the military which I did. 

I applied for scholarships for ROTC, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. I 

got accepted to a lot of colleges on ROTC scholarships and was then offered an 

opportunity to go to either West Point or the Air Force Academy through their 

junior preparatory school program. I took the West Point option. I went to the prep 

school in 1981, completed that and went on to West Point. I got my commission 

in 1986 and headed to Germany. I was there through the fall of the Berlin Wall 

and the first Gulf War. I didn’t get to go to that but I got sent back to Fort Sill, 

Oklahoma. The war was over and they had a big drawdown in the Army. 

They were offering a lot of money to get out of the Army. I took the money 

and ran and ended up going to Alaska. I was there for 15 years. I was a civilian 

for five years. People knew I had been in the military and talked me into getting 

into the National Guard in Alaska. In 1996 I joined the Alaska National Guard 

and was pretty much the traditional Guardsman doing the weekend thing and the 

two weeks a year. Then 9/11 happened, though, and that changed everything. I 

was called up to do Operation NOBLE EAGLE and was put in charge of all of 

the tier-two airports in Alaska. I was very honored to be involved with that. From 

that point, things just snowballed and I was pretty much on active duty more than 

I was a civilian. My state got tapped to ask for volunteers to go to either Iraq or 

Afghanistan and I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. 

LL: Let’s concentrate on your deployment to Afghanistan. Were you assigned 

or did they ask for volunteers? 

WW: It was a little bit of both. Each state was tasked to supply 16-man teams 

on a voluntary basis. If they couldn’t come up with names, they were going to ask 
356

people to go. My state couldn’t come up with the 16 names. They only came up 

with eight. I was the senior man on our team from Alaska. My state got pressured 

to bring more but they just couldn’t do it with all the other deployments we had. 

The team of eight was a sergeant major, me, and a bunch of enlisted guys. 

We went to Fort Hood, Texas, in February 2005. We did six weeks of training 

there as part of the embedded team training program and then we were sent off 

with 300 other people from National Guard and Reserve units to go be Task Force 

Phoenix 3.5 and we were sent to Kabul. 

LL: Can you describe the training you did at Fort Hood? 

WW: The training could have been a lot better. The trainers had never been 

overseas so they really didn’t know what they were doing. They had no background 

in what they were training us on. They just were going by what they thought we 

needed to learn. They had a checklist and we needed to pass certain gates. They 

tried to have cultural awareness training which didn’t even come close to what the 

reality ended up being. 

We were basically punching gates to get through our six weeks of training and 

get out of there. I wish we had had better focus on what we really needed to do. 

I don’t think that what we trained on had anything to do with what we ended up 

doing in country. We didn’t train on how to be trainers. It was more basic survival 

skills for us and reacquainting us with the military, tactics, driving, and survival. 

We got our shots. It wasn’t geared towards being an embedded trainer at all and I 

think we suffered for it. 

LL: Did you have a good idea of what you were supposed to be doing when 

you got to Afghanistan? 

WW: We knew we’d be working at brigade, battalion, and company levels, 

either as personnel officers, logistics officers, or company mentors. There would be 

two people at the company level and then we’d cover all the major staff functions 

at the battalion and brigade level. We really weren’t sure how involved we were 

going to be or how involved we were going to have to be. 

We didn’t know if we were going to be there to lead them or to just be advisors. 

There were a lot of unknowns and the people training us didn’t have any idea 

either. We’d go through our briefings and they’d keep referring to Iraq instead of 

Afghanistan. That really bothered us because we felt we weren’t as important as 

we were being told we were. 

LL: Once you did get to Afghanistan, what were your unit’s responsibilities? 

WW: A week before we left, they broke all our teams up and reorganized us. 

They got information back from Afghanistan that they needed bodies to fill in slots 

throughout the country. 
357

They came up with a new wish list for how many bodies they needed to send 

throughout the whole country of Afghanistan. So, the team I had been training with 

for five weeks was broken up. I was put with a whole new team that I had never 

worked with. I didn’t even know who these people were. I’d never even seen them 

during training and thus had no idea what their capabilities were. I never even got 

to meet all of them until we arrived in country.

When I got there, I was told I would be the brigade operations officer, the S3. 

There were some people already in place who we were supposed to join up with, 

whom I didn’t know and had never met and I was told at Camp Phoenix that they 

had seven vehicles ready for my team and we were to head to Mazar-e-Sharif. We 

went through some indoctrination for about a week in Kabul and then I was told to 

get my folks together and head to Mazar-e-Sharif. 

We had to scrounge for everything we needed to get because we didn’t have 

any support from Task Force Phoenix. After that, I made my way up to Mazare-Sharif after a 22-hour drive through February snowstorms. It was very nerve 

wracking since I’d never been up there before and didn’t have any intelligence on 

the enemy situation. I actually think we were pretty foolhardy to make that trip. 

The roads out there are nothing like the roads here. If something were to happen to 

us, if we had had an accident or there was an avalanche or something, we probably 

wouldn’t have made it. 

LL: Was it just you going there as opposed to the whole team? 

WW: No, it was me and the new team that I had. There were seven of us. We 

brought a bunch of extra guys as well because we had to bring all seven of those 

Humvees with us. We got some additional guys to support us because we needed at 

least four guys per vehicle. Out of all of us, only one guy, a lieutenant, had been up 

there before and he and I were in the lead vehicle with the other Humvees behind 

us. He sort of knew where we were going and I definitely didn’t know, so we were 

kind of just driving and hoping we’d get there. 

LL: Did you have a handoff with somebody else or were you the first one into 

your position? 

WW: Regional Command-North, the RC-North, of the 209th Corps was just 

being built at the time. The actual permanent camp wasn’t completed yet. They 

had a bunch of temporary buildings. There was a group of Americans there with 

a colonel, a couple lieutenant colonels, and a couple majors. They were the first 

group there and they were charged with setting up the camp. 

They were understaffed and only had about 20 people with them. My group 

brought it up to about 50 people so we were actually supplementing that group. 

They were probably at 50 percent strength and we were trying to get them up to 

about 75 or 100 percent strength. Their mission at that point was to get the camp 

open.
358

The Afghan National Army, the ANA, was just starting to arrive. They had 

been positioned out in separate satellite camps and they were just arriving to the 

new camp. They were settling into billets and getting the equipment they needed. 

LL: Did you function as the S3 or did you work with the S3? 

WW: There was a corps-level staff, brigade-level staffs, and battalion-level 

staffs. I was the brigade-level S3/intelligence officer, the S2. I was supporting the 

ANA S2 and S3 and also supporting the US S2 and S3 functions and there was no 

way I could do all four jobs. I would really recommend that we have two staffs in 

the future. As the brigade S3, I could have been focusing on the ANA brigade S3 

and then had a captain as my assistant who would just worry about US operations. 

We couldn’t do one without the other. It was really hard to focus on both jobs 

when I was wearing four different hats. The embedded training teams, the ETTs, 

were very under strength and we should have had a better division of effort on 

what we were going to do instead of trying to do everything. 

LL: What types of operations did you do during your year there? 

WW: The 1st and 2d ANA Battalions were the first two battalions in the whole 

ANA. They had been around for three years already. Their leadership had been 

in position for a while and they were trained pretty well. Since the camp wasn’t 

ready to support them yet, we sent 1st Battalion out to the Sheberghan area which 

is toward the west of Afghanistan. The 2d Battalion was already out in the Kunduz 

area where they took over the old airfield. 

They had teams with them and they had been doing missions for the Ministry 

of Defense, the MOD, who would call them up and send them out. The corps was 

supposed to have five battalions but when we got there, there were really only 

two and they had been deployed out so they weren’t even around where we were. 

They were out doing security missions in their areas which covered about three 

provinces. Our job was to make sure we could bring them back in as well as bring 

three more battalions on line. 

LL: How did that progress over the year? 

WW: It was chaos. Around June at about my four or five month mark, we got 

our third battalion and we had to figure out how to get them from Kabul to Mazare-Sharif which was not easy. We ended up renting buses. There were just a lot of 

logistics involved. 

We also had to figure out how to get them weapons and how we were going 

to support them, take care of them, feed them, get them firewood, etc. It took us 

about six months to get them on line and figure out how to support them. When 

we got them on line, we started doing missions. The elections were coming up in 

September and that became our primary focus.
359

Our mission was to secure the entire nine provinces in the north. We divided 

it up to three provinces per battalion. Their mission was to secure each of those 

provinces for the elections. The 4th and 5th ANA Battalions were the combat 

support, the CS, and combat service support or CSS battalions. 

We really had limited time to invest in them, as our primary mission was 

getting the infantry units up to speed. The CS and CSS units had no equipment 

and no training and we didn’t have the ability to train them very well. They were 

basically supplemental infantry. In order for them to be self-sufficient, we really 

needed a lot more CS and CSS support for them which we didn’t have. 

LL: Knowing the operations that you carried out in Afghanistan, what kind of 

training do you wish you’d had instead of what you actually got? 

WW: I wish we’d had a lot more cultural awareness training. We should have 

known how to interact with the ANA better so we could understand how to get 

them to work with us. I had a good relationship with my guy but there were others 

who totally didn’t get along with their counterparts so nothing got done. I think 

a lot of it was that we had to let them do their own thing instead of making them 

another American Army. That was hard to do, though, because there were certain 

issues like corruption which was an issue almost daily. How much do we allow or 

not allow? I would be very upset because we’d bring them brand new vehicles and 

they’d wreck them the next day or they’d steal gasoline.

As to policy, we should have never given them all these toys. We should have 

kept it under our control and let them prove to us that they could manage it. We just 

handed them all these goodies and said, “Have fun.” That was a big mistake. We 

should have kept control of everything and let them sign things out from us until 

we had a plan to let them take it over piecemeal instead of all at once.

Another thing was, mission, we should have had a better plan. We should have 

known what it was we wanted to accomplish during our year we were there and 

how we were going to go about getting it done. It seemed like we didn’t get a lot 

of guidance from our higher headquarters. 

We were really out on our own and I felt like they were struggling just as much 

as we were to figure out what we were going to do. It would have been nice to 

know what they expected of us. We got some very general guidance but we didn’t 

really have a plan to get there. We had to figure that out on our own, and that was 

a difficult thing to do. 

LL: How much support did you get from your higher headquarters and how 

much did you get from the Afghan MOD? 

WW: During my time, we were under two different units. We were under the 

76th Infantry Brigade from Indiana and the 53d Infantry Brigade from Florida. 
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They were both very different. The 76th was ready to go home when I showed up. 

They were packing their bags already and the support we got from them was not 

what I would have hoped for.

The 53d came in around July and because they were new, they were very eager 

to support everybody in the field. We inundated them with our wants and desires 

so they were much more in tune to what we wanted them to do and they tried to 

support us a lot better. 

We didn’t even have computers when I got there. Basic things that we wanted 

we had to go downtown and buy. A lot of that was contentious because they’d 

expect things from us and communicate with us over e-mail. Well, we didn’t even 

have computers to respond. How we were going to do anything? We were relying 

just on cell phones to communicate. We were pretty far out in the weeds. 

We couldn’t even get generators to work. There was no maintenance. I don’t 

think they appreciated what it was like outside the wire from Camp Phoenix and 

Kabul to where we were. When the 53d came in, we made them understand what 

our situation was and we got a lot more support from them during the second half 

of our tour. 

LL: Was there anything in particular that you were lacking or that was really 

difficult to come by? 

WW: Basic office supplies were hard to get. Things we take for granted here 

is a luxury over there. 

Then we’d actually turn around and give computers to the ANA which I 

thought was just amazing. They had no idea what to do with them. Then we’d give 

them printers and they had no way of getting printer cartridges. 

They were just as frustrated as we were. The ANA would get all this equipment 

but there was no plan in place to support it once it was fielded. The first week 

they’d get a computer, they’d destroy it because they didn’t know how to use it. 

Those kinds of things happened all the time. Somebody had a good idea and by 

the time it got down to where we were, it turned into a bad idea. Personally I could 

never get razor blades. I was always trying to find them. 

LL: How much contact did you have with the local Afghan population? 

WW: We’d go out on missions and if we were downtown, we’d talk to the 

locals but not a lot. If we had a meeting with the governor or the police chief or the 

school, then we’d interact with the locals.

A lot of young kids would come up to us and talk to us so they could practice 

their English. They would say they wanted to join the Army or they’d ask us 

questions about the United States. That’s pretty much all the interaction we had. 
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We didn’t want to get too far out there and become a target. Most of our interaction 

was official business. 

LL: Did you have any translator support while you were there? 

WW: Yes. We had five translators for our group. We had them but there 

weren’t enough for everybody who needed them. Many times I had to borrow 

other people’s translators and vice versa. They were available but not as much as 

we needed. We relied on them for everything. When you don’t have one, it’s kind 

of hard to communicate and do anything. We got by with what we had but we 

probably could have used more. 

LL: How would you rate the translator support you did have, from one to 10? 

WW: I’d probably say a five or six. 

They were good conversantly but there were times when things just didn’t 

get translated properly. I would be talking with my counterpart and I would say, 

“I agree with him.” and the translator would translate that to say, “I’m angry with 

him.” One word can really change an entire conversation. I could see by the Afghan 

colonel’s face that something was wrong but I didn’t know why.

Another example was the words “tourist” and “terrorist.” They got confused all 

the time. People don’t understand how one word can change a whole conversation. 

We’d have meetings with the Afghan generals and a lot would be lost in translation. 

We usually would have two translators there so we could make sure we didn’t 

miss anything. The translating was shaky at best and don’t ask them to write 

anything down in English. It wouldn’t happen. 

LL: What kinds of cultural challenges did you face in your job? 

WW: There were all kinds of challenges, just understanding the whole lifestyle 

of the Afghans. 

We had a saying, “Man love Thursdays.” When you’re a newbie you have 

no idea what they’re talking about. It takes a while to figure it out. You’d see 

Afghans holding hands, you’re unsure of what’s going on and you’re afraid to ask 

somebody. After a while you start picking up on things. The Afghans are allowed 

to have two wives and homosexuality, it happens and you have to just understand 

it. If you’re a homophobic person, you’re really going to be upset by it. You really 

have to put your feelings aside and understand that this is not your country. You 

have to accept what they do and don’t interject your personal feelings about their 

culture. Looking at women is forbidden. Even if a young 17-year-old stares at a 

woman he can be killed for that. 

We weren’t taught any of that, though, in any of our training. You need to 

understand that people might hit on you. People will skim money off the top for 
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their own use and you need to know that that happens and what’s appropriate and 

what’s not. They didn’t talk about any of those issues in our cultural training. 

We just got hit with it full force when we got there. Luckily we had other people 

who had been there longer to tell us what was going on. That’s what saved us. The 

six-month transition we had went a long way to our success in being culturally 

aware. That was one of the good things of having the overlap we had. There are a 

lot of cultural issues that you just don’t know about until you get there. 

LL: Was there any instance where you ran into some kind of cultural divide 

which stopped you from doing what you needed to do? 

WW: I think a lot of it was that they depended on us to supply them with 

everything. 

We’d pay the ANA and provide them food and everything. They became too 

reliant on us and they would start almost harassing us to take care of things. They 

thought money was the answer to all of their problems. When there was a problem, 

they’d come to us and tell us to go fix it with money. Some people got very irritated 

by it. I was asked almost daily to go buy something for them. It got to the point 

where a lot of the guys got very frustrated and they let their frustrations show and 

wouldn’t help their counterpart anymore. 

They just got tired of hearing it. That was the bigger issue. We had the money 

and they wanted things. They’re very poor and they saw that we had all this money 

which seemed to never end. That got to be problematic at certain times. 

They would make excuses as to why they couldn’t do things because they had 

no money and they had a lack of a conception of time. Time to Americans is very 

important. Time over there though, means nothing. We’re trying to force them to 

do things on our time which to them, they don’t understand. A lot of them don’t 

have watches and can’t even tell time. We’re trying to force them to leave for a 

mission at a certain time and they can’t understand why. “Why do we have to leave 

at that time?” To them, it’s not important.

Trying to get them to understand our standards was a real challenge. A lot 

of guys got frustrated because they felt that the Afghans should be doing things 

our way. I never felt that way. Living in Alaska, I was used to dealing with the 

Eskimos. To me, working with the Eskimos was like working with the Afghans. I 

had no problem, to tell you the truth. 

LL: Did you experience any tribal or sectarian divides? 

WW: Yes. Where we were up north, there were the Hazaras, the Tajiks and the 

Uzbeks. 
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They definitely didn’t like the Pashtos, who are the southern group. They don’t 

even speak the same language. I know we tried to integrate the army into one 

Afghan Army but if you had a mixed unit where one group was a majority, that 

group would dominate the unit. Whether or not their leaders were in charge, they 

wouldn’t do anything until that tribal group leader said it was okay. A lot of times 

they didn’t even speak the same language.

Putting an Uzbek in charge of Pashtos didn’t work and there were minor 

instances where they would rebel or revolt against that leader, or they would only 

follow their group leader within the unit. We probably had more shootings amongst 

the groups internally than against the enemy. It was a big problem and it probably 

doesn’t get the attention that it should. Maybe there isn’t a good solution for it but 

there were a lot of tensions there. I know there was a big shootout in Kabul over a 

racial incident. 

LL: How did you find the overall conditions in Afghanistan? 

WW: It was rough. I was lucky in that our base had hot water, showers, and 

toilets.

When we first got there, we didn’t have any contractor support so we had to 

cook for ourselves. We all got sick and were miserable for the first six months. We 

were eating rice and chicken wings every day. We finally built a hard dining facility 

and we finally got contractors up there. Chow got much better but it seemed we 

spent the first six months sick. When you’re sick, you’re miserable and it’s hard 

to do your job. A lot of times when we went out to the field we had to eat with the 

Afghans or eat MREs. There was no support.

The guys who went out on missions really had it tough. Being the brigade S3, 

I went out but not as often as them. My facilities were somewhat better but they 

still didn’t nearly compare to what the guys in Kabul had. 

LL: Did you find things to be better or worse than you expected? 

WW: Much worse, especially in terms of our support. When we were out there, 

I expected that while we were out there we’d be supported by the United States 

Army. Instead, it felt like we were 200 miles away from everybody else and pretty 

much on our own. That was a concern. If something were to happen to us, I don’t 

know if we would have been able to save anybody. 

We were in the NATO area up north with the Germans and the British so we 

relied on them. My concern was that if someone was in a car accident or had gotten 

shot, I don’t know how fast we could have helped them or gotten them out of a bad 

situation. I think in terms of that aspect of it, I was very concerned all the time.

Other support was there but we had to go beg, borrow, and beat people up 

to get radios, mechanics, tires, or parts. The logistics end was the worst of it. We 

knew we’d be on our own but we figured we’d have some logistical support. 
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LL: What would you say were your biggest challenges while you were there? 

WW: The biggest challenge was trying to understand what it was we wanted 

to do there and how we were going to get it done. It seemed like there was no clear 

focus on that. 

We were just on our own. I’m not a Special Forces guy. I’m a National Guard 

guy. So I felt kind of behind the power curve in terms of what we were supposed 

to be getting done with the ANA. I wish I’d had more training going over there. I 

don’t know how effective I was while I was there. We just lived day by day and did 

missions seven days a week. We didn’t have any place to train. 

They didn’t have any ammunition. There were issues that came up all the time 

that really prevented us from doing what we want to do. I wished we’d had more 

thought in the back end before we deployed so we could have gone out there with a 

real plan in hand to be able to really help them out. It’s that balancing act between 

letting them do what they want to do and us stepping in and forcing it to happen. 

That was also another point of contention. How involved do we get or not get? 

When you’re dealing with two different armies, you’re going to face challenges. 

LL: Was everybody you worked with US Army or were there other US services 

involved? 

WW: It was a very fluid situation. When we got there, it was just US Army. 

Halfway through, the Navy came up and started working on the logistical end of 

things. They weren’t ETTs per se but they came up and handled our logistics. That 

was our recommendation to the new group. 

We needed more bodies to do the US stuff because we just couldn’t do both. 

We did a lot with the Dutch, the Germans, and the British. I went a long way to get 

training teams up to Mazar-e-Sharif. 

We told Kabul they had to send teams up to us so we could train our battalions. 

We got that to work and we ran a Primary Leadership Development Course for our 

Afghans. We had the Brits come up and do that. The Germans were doing missions 

and the Dutch did a six-week training plan. As the battalions were trained up, they’d 

go out and work with the Dutch to go through a six-week training assessment. 

We did a lot of good things. A lot of it was personality driven. For example, 

we’d support the British and let them stay on our compound. In return, they’d train 

our guys. There were a lot of handshake deals to get things done. They relied on us 

and we relied on them because we didn’t have anybody else to help us out. It was 

a win-win situation.

A lot of times there were differences of opinion on things like interacting with 

the locals and stuff like that but when it came to training the ANA, the Coalition 

really came together. The group I worked with had to pull off the elections as well 

as train the ANA and we made it work. 
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LL: How easy was it to work with the Coalition forces? Were some easier to 

work with than others? Was it all personality driven? 

WW: It depended on the subject. If we were talking about the elections, for 

example, there was a lot of contention. 

They had different rules of engagement, the ROE, than we had. We’d have 

meetings with our Coalition partners and have to go over what would happen 

if, say, an ANA soldier got injured. The Germans wouldn’t be able to medically 

evacuate him out. If something were to happen to a US soldier, they would be 

able to help, though. We had to get clear on when they could help and when they 

couldn’t. 

We’d go through a long laundry list of circumstances of what they were going 

to do and what they weren’t going to do. I remember the British got attacked at 

Sheberghan and they asked us to go help them but if we got attacked they couldn’t 

help us. There were a lot of issues like that but we made it work. 

We had weekly discussions with everybody and made sure everybody was on 

the same sheet of music. In that environment, you had to have a lot of meetings 

with people. We’d go and see the British and have meetings with them but we 

never brought our ANA with us. A lot of meetings were going on to make stuff 

happen and there were a lot of situational decisions that were made but we all 

agreed that we wanted successful elections and so we had to work out how we 

wanted to do that. 

LL: In working with the other Coalition forces, did you find that the restrictions 

imposed from above dictated how you could relate to one another as opposed to 

personalities? 

WW: It was a little bit of both. I got along with everybody I met. They all 

wanted to be successful and a lot of it was that if something really bad happened, 

they’d be there to help. I think when they realized that someone’s life was on the 

line, they’d come to help. They might not be technically allowed by their caveats 

but if a US soldier was injured and needed to get to a hospital, they’d do it.

For the most part, a lot of the soldiers didn’t personally agree with their own 

ROE but they had to follow them. On the side, though, they said if we needed 

them, they’d be there. There were a lot of handshakes and verbal understandings. 

The Germans had these two helicopters that we relied on but they couldn’t fly at 

night. At least we understood that stuff before we got into a bad situation. We were 

honest with each other about what we were going to do and not do at the companygrade level. I don’t know what the colonels talked about. 
366

LL: Did you have any contact with the media? 

WW: No. 

LL: Was there any contact with non-governmental organizations, the NGOs? 

WW: No. There weren’t any up where we were. There weren’t as many 

problems up there so there wasn’t as much of a need for them like there was down 

in Kabul. Our area was fairly quiet. I did see that the US Agency for International 

Development, the USAID, was doing some projects but I didn’t see anybody else.

The British were more involved in that than I was. They had a provincial 

reconstruction team, the PRT, out there. We weren’t a PRT so I don’t know how 

many NGOs they were dealing with. 

LL: Reflecting back on your year in Afghanistan, what would you say were the 

biggest lessons you learned and brought back with you? 

WW: Try to know what you’re going to do before you get there. You need to 

read up on what you’ll be doing. If you’re going to be a logistician, an S1, or an 

S3, try to be as tactically proficient as possible. You need to understand that a lot of 

what you’ll be doing will be based on interpersonal relations. I would say that 90 

percent of what got done was because of interpersonal relations. It wasn’t a matter 

of being the smartest guy but it was a matter of how you got along with your peers 

and getting the mission done.

There were guys who were brilliant but they didn’t get along with people. 

They sat in the corner and didn’t get much done. There were other guys, though, 

who weren’t the sharpest pencils in the box but they were team players and willing 

to gel with other people and make things happen. You’re living with these guys for 

a year so you have to get along with them. 

LL: Did you have a family readiness group, the FRG? 

WW: Yes. 

LL: How did that work out for you? 

WW: They were actually pretty good. They sent out letters monthly. They had 

meetings and kept our spouses informed. I think the National Guard has a pretty 

good FRG program. I didn’t hear any complaints about that. 

LL: How did you deal with family separation? 

WW: It was hard. I think a year is too long to be overseas. I think nine months 

is optimal. About that time you’re pretty burned out. Your want-to-go-home factor 

goes way up around that time and you start being a lot more cautious and less 

involved in your job. 
367

We did have computers so I spent a lot of time e-mailing my family, so I was 

thankful for that. The phones didn’t work well so I was glad we had e-mail. That 

was one of the only nice benefits we had out there. If we hadn’t had that, it would 

have been hard. The snail mail was nice to get also. 

LL: If you could make recommendations to the Chief of Staff of the Army or 

the Secretary of Defense, what would you say? 

WW: The mentorship and advisory role is a good mission but it really needs to 

be done differently. The teams are way too small. There were supposed to be two 

people per company but if somebody was sick or on leave we’d have to borrow 

people from other places. The teams needed to be about twice as big as they 

were. If you’re going to support an Afghan battalion, you should probably have 

a company of regular US soldiers to reinforce them in case something happens. 

There should also be a US-only leadership structure in place to handle just US 

issues like logistics and maintaining your support. That would allow the training 

teams to go out and focus on the mission with the Afghans. 

We try to do it on the cheap, and instead of taking us three years it’s going to 

take us eight or 10 years. We’re doing it slowly and we’re not doing it with the 

right mix of personnel, equipment, and logistics. I can wear four hats or two hats 

but how much do you think you’re going to get out of me if I’m wearing four hats 

versus focusing on the job you want me to do? It’s a good mission but they need to 

look at it realistically and revamp how it’s presented and operated. 

LL: Do you know what your next assignment will be? 

WW: No. I know I got a call from Washington, DC to go work at the National 

Guard Bureau or the Pentagon. They won’t tell me what they want me to do. 

LL: Is there anything else you’d like to add about your time in Afghanistan? 

WW: I think the leadership needs to get more down into the weeds and talk to 

the soldiers. The soldiers know what’s going on and what needs to be done to win. 

I’ve sat in on a lot of briefings where the general would show up for 15 minutes 

and get a canned PowerPoint slide presentation from a colonel. That’s all he’d see 

and off he’d go.

I think the generals need to get down and talk to the sergeants and the privates 

and find out what’s really happening. They should base their decisions more on 

what’s going on at the tip of the spear in reality instead of getting what the colonels 

think the generals want to hear. I saw a lot of generals over there but I only saw 

them very fleetingly and nobody ever talked to me. I don’t know what they’re 

getting on those trips when they see those colonels but it would be nice to know 

that they’re getting accurate and relevant information that they could go back and 

make decisions from instead of a 15-minute PowerPoint slideshow. 
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LL: Would you consider your year in Afghanistan a positive experience? 

WW: Yes. It was probably one of the better assignments I’ve had. I have no 

regrets about doing it. I had a great time over there. I thought I was doing something 

productive. I worked with a good guy, Colonel Latif [ph] from the ANA. I knew 

he was an honest man so that made a big difference versus some of the other guys 

who had to work with crooks which made for a long year. I enjoyed my time there 

and I’d do it again if I needed to. 

LL: Do you think things improved or got worse while you were there? 

WW: They definitely improved. 

We went from nothing to standing up a whole brigade. You don’t really see 

it until after you leave and you look back at how far you’ve come. A lot of things 

could have been done a lot better. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a decision maker in 

terms of how we got vehicles and things like that. Overall, I think we try to rush 

things too fast in terms of trying to get them up to speed. We had a goal of trying 

to get them to be a 70,000-man army. Well, you just can’t make an army that fast. 

We need to be more patient and methodical in how we do that. A lot of people 

are impatient to make things happen but you simply can’t put the cart before the 

horse. Overall, we made good progress. I’m not sure what happened after we left 

but I know the ANA was better off when I left than when I got there. 

LL: Thank you very much for your time.
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Command Sergeant Major Jeff Janke

16 February 2007

LL: My name is Laurence Lessard (LL) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Command Sergeant Major Jeff 

Janke (JJ) on his experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM 

or OEF. Today’s date is 16 February 2007 and this is an unclassified 

interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information and if classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Let’s start with some 

personal background. Where are you from and how did you get interested 

in the Army? 

JJ: I read a lot of books about World War II when I was in school. I found it 

entertaining. I looked into joining the military when I was getting ready to graduate 

from high school. My parents really didn’t want me to. They wanted me to go to 

college. So, I went to college and the second weekend I was there, I was walking 

around town to see what was there and I saw a National Guard armory. I went and 

checked it out a few weeks later because I wanted to see what the military was 

like. I joined up and went to infantry school. I continued my college education and 

stayed in the Guard for almost 30 years. I didn’t expect to stay in that long but I 

did. 

LL: When did you enlist? 

JJ: 23 I enlisted in October 1977. 

LL: Since you had a college degree, did it ever occur to you to get commissioned? 

JJ: Oh, yes. I was asked about that a number of times but to do the job right 

it requires quite a bit of time, especially as an officer, and I didn’t think I had that 

time or wanted to commit the time to it. Knowing what I know now, I may have 

done it differently but it’s worked out okay. 

LL: Have you been with the same National Guard unit your entire career? 

JJ: I’ve been in the Wisconsin Guard the whole time but not the same exact 

unit. I was in the same battalion for the first 20 years. Then I went to an aviation 

battalion for five years and now I’ve been in an artillery brigade for the last four 

years. I did a bit of moving around. 

LL: When did you first find out that you would be deploying? 

JJ: It was in the wind around the summer of 2005. We were looking for a 

mission for the brigade headquarters. The Task Force Phoenix mission came 
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up and we were vying for the spot that the 41st is doing right now, the Phoenix

headquarters group. We thought we were going to be that but then that changed, we 

started looking for something else and the state got a requirement to put together 

a team. They went ahead and started getting volunteers for that. I didn’t volunteer 

initially because I thought we might pick up something else. 

Then the colonel called me about six weeks before we left. He said we were 

going to go over as trainers. We knew a little bit about that mission because some 

previous Wisconsin Guard guys had been on it. He said, “Will you go?” I said, 

“Sure, I’ll go.” 

LL: When was this? 

JJ: This was in November 2005. 

LL: What was your position at that time? 

JJ: I was the command sergeant major for the 57th Field Artillery Brigade, out 

of Milwaukee. 

LL: Was this deployment just for the brigade headquarters? 

JJ: Once the State did the team, they were looking for volunteers throughout 

the state. Half of us came out of the 57th. We had two battalions in the 57th, one of 

them had been mobilized in chunks to Iraq and we were suspecting that the other 

one was going to be mobilized as well but not the brigade headquarters. 

We didn’t see anything on the horizon for the headquarters, so we decided that 

this was our turn and we took it. We didn’t mobilize as a regular unit identification 

code, the UIC, unit. They made one up for us after we came together. 

LL: Were you mobilized under Title 10? 

JJ: Yes. 

LL: Given the relatively short amount of time between actually forming this 

unit and deploying, how much pre-deployment training were you able to do? 

JJ: We did one weekend’s worth. The first weekend of December 2005 which 

was our regular drill date anyway, we took a day to go to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, 

and the whole team assembled there. Half of them were there for the whole 

weekend going through familiarization training with each other. 

We went up for one day of that. The next day, one of the members of the 

previous team came down to Milwaukee and gave us a brief. The day before, two 

other members of the previous team had given a briefing to the whole group. Half 

the group had known since October that they were going to go. When they did a 

second call to fill the group, that’s when we jumped in. We just had the December 

drill before we left. 
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LL: Was there any particular focus to it or was it more of a broad, general 

training? 

JJ: I’d say it was focused. We tried to get all our stateside business taken care 

of. Any of your family business or civilian matters, have those set so you could 

go away for a year and everything would be okay. We also had soldier readiness 

processing before that. It was a one-day thing at the headquarters. 

We went through the process there making sure all our pay information was 

correct and that our dependents were all taken care of. We did wills and powers of 

attorney. That was pretty good. That was the thing to focus on. 

We just got all that out of the way so we didn’t have to deal with it when we 

were on the other side of the world and in different time zones. Some of the group 

did some of the military common task training or CTT and the colonel pretty much 

emphasized that we’d have time for that after we mobilize which we did. He said 

to spend our time doing the things we could only do here and now. Once you start 

thinking about it, there were a few things we had to get done. 

LL: Once you were mobilized, what kind of training did you do in preparation 

for Afghanistan? 

JJ: We had four days at home station and that was pretty much administrative. 

We got some equipment taken care of and hand receipts. 

Then we went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. We were there for 45 days. We 

went through rifle marksmanship and individual weapons qualifications for the 

rifle and the pistol. We did iron sights with the rifle as well as close combat optics. 

We did a day of foreign weapons training. We did a day of the mandatory 

CTT tasks they had. There were quite a few of them. There were folks from MPRI 

contract company there who had us do some battle studies. It was interesting but 

it wasn’t time well spent. We never used it later on. We could have done things 

differently. We shouldn’t have spent a whole week on that. 

We did combat lifesaver training for about two weeks at night and that was 

good training. Everybody thought it was some of the best stuff we could have 

done, and it was. We did some small-unit tactical training. We spent about a week 

on that.

They wanted to do some life on the forward operating base or FOB training, 

they abbreviated it and that was fine. We really didn’t need it and they didn’t 

replicate it very well there anyway. 

We did some land navigation and a lot of basic soldier skills. Depending upon 

your background, this was either time well spent or just plain time spent. 
372

The 57th is a field artillery unit. We go to the field quite a bit. You tend to use 

those skills enough to stay reasonably current on them, if not pretty adept at them, 

so I don’t know if it was really necessary. It doesn’t hurt as long as you don’t get 

into where you’re pencil whipping it. 

We did some driving skills with the up-armored Humvees but not much of that 

and not enough. It wasn’t great, though, because it didn’t replicate the roads in 

Afghanistan. The roads over there are rougher than hell. They just are. You have to 

get used to that and understand the maintenance you’ll need to do on your vehicle.

The training really had an Iraqi focus to it because most of the trainers had either 

learned about Iraq or had been to Iraq. None of them had been to Afghanistan. I’ve 

never been to Iraq but from talking to people who’ve been to both, Afghanistan is 

not Iraq. 

We spent some time working with interpreters. They were Iraqis. We did some 

cultural training, some language training. Overall, to prepare we did a lot of basic 

soldier skills stuff. 

LL: Was there anything besides the combat lifesaver training that you felt was 

very valuable and you wish you’d had more of? 

JJ: I think their training on weapons was pretty good for the individual weapons. 

They broke us out into different groups and you had to pick people to do the 

crew-served weapons such as the Mk-19, M240, and M2. Everybody really needs 

to know that because at any given time anybody may have to get up in the hatch 

and handle that thing. Everybody should at least rotate through that position or at 

least work on the maintenance of the weapons. That could have been better. As for 

the foreign weapons training, I never taught anyone over there on foreign weapons. 

I mean, I knew enough. I could pull apart an AK which is pretty simple but I think 

they could have spent more time on the RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. 

They probably should have spent some time on the specialties but you don’t 

know exactly what you’re going to be doing when you go in there. For example, if 

they had better visibility on that to say, “Okay, you’re going to be teaching mortars. 

How many of you know mortars? This is what their mortars look like. Here are 

some live rounds. Here are the firing tables for them. This is all the equipment 

you’ll need. We’re going to go out today and spend the day on them.” Some of 

that would have been good, because you don’t want to walk in there and kind of 

fumble your way through it in front of the Afghan National Army, the ANA, while 

you’re trying to teach them. They’re not dumb. They’ll know if you’ve never done 

this before. 

Then you’ll have to come back and build back your credibility, whereas at 

least if you have some familiarity with it you could be able to make things happen. 
373

They only had two or three up-armored Humvees. We had some classes in a 

classroom situation that were, again, very Iraq-geared. They needed to address 

how you do things in Afghanistan. 

We had convoy training as well, and what you do in Iraq isn’t what you should 

be doing in Afghanistan. When you’re hit, you want to get out of the kill zone. You 

don’t all hop out and return fire. The country is just one big ambush site and it can 

happen just about anywhere. You have to pretty much clear the area. Some of that 

training should have been geared towards that.

There also should have been more time spent on maintenance. Nobody likes to 

do it but you just have to beat it in to people. “You’re going to do it. Everybody is 

going to do it. You’re not just going to stand there and watch. If you’re not greasy, 

you haven’t done it.”

The radios were a problem as well. They were hit by a resource constraint. 

They were begging for radios over in theater, so how many can you pull out to 

have for train-up? You need to do that, though. I think what they need to do that 

which is what the 218th did with their Humvees. 

They brought their thin-skinned vehicles back with them. They’re not the uparmored ones but at least they’re closer to what you have. Have them with the 

radios too, instead of everybody using their cell phones. There are about four or 

five different flavors of radios over there so you need to be familiar with them and 

know what the limitations are of each. The tactical satellite, the TACSAT, radios 

especially. They gave us classes on the HF radios but we never used them. They’re 

not amenable to mobile use. There was also the new multiband inter/intra team 

radios or MBITRs. They’re nice because they’re so versatile. Maybe you need 

to trade them off so everybody gets a chance to use them for more than just five 

minutes in a class. I think that would have been a worthwhile thing to do. 

LL: Was there any part of the training that you felt was a waste of time? 

JJ: The battle studies was a waste of time. You can always take something 

away from any training but I would say that the payoff from that was pretty low. 

If they really wanted to study that, then they should have gone into more detail on 

the books they gave us. They gave us “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and 

every vignette is basically the same. “We went out, we got attacked, we failed and 

we came back.” Maybe once in a while they were lucky and had success. You don’t 

learn a lot from that except that if you don’t do it right it isn’t going to work.

These people are primitive, so to speak but they’re good at what they do. If 

you want to learn it, go read “The Other Side of the Mountain” [sic] because it tells 

about all these attack sites. These names are awful familiar and you know why? 

They’re using the same spots and they’re doing a lot of it in the same ways. 
374

Then you can understand their way of thinking better, too. You will learn that 

there are chinks in their armor that you can go after. There are spots in there where 

their stuff didn’t work out either. Had we spent a day or two going through that, it 

would have been more worthwhile. As far as a spending a week studying battles 

from the 1800s with the British? Okay, they’re a tough people and as soon as there 

is a gunfight they’re all there. It’s the same now but it didn’t take that long to do it. 

In my mind, MPRI should have still been used there but not in that role. If I was 

king for a day, I would have said, “MPRI is over there writing a doctrine for their 

army, programs and policies. What they need is a big pipeline, that as they gin that 

stuff up over there, it’s sent back here and then you spend a couple days learning 

what their doctrine is and how much of it they have. They have these doctrines and 

here’s what you need to know because this is what you’re going to work with.” 

Otherwise you’ll have no idea. 

They didn’t have a Uniform Code of Military Justice, the UCMJ, when I got 

there. That would have been nice to know going in. It also would be nice to know 

going in now. “Here it is. It’s only 20 pages long. We’re going to read this. The 

fact is, I’m going to give you a test on it. Instead of just nodding that you know it, 

you’re going to prove you know it before you go over there.”

The other one, and they’ve started to do this now, is sending Afghans over here 

to work with us. We only had a couple Iraqi interpreters to work with for half a day, 

and working with an interpreter is a skill. You can’t get good at it in a mobilization 

station but you can cut the edges off of it and get a better appreciation for what 

you’re going to get into. Instead of trying to work with an interpreter and your 

Afghan counterpart and trying to learn two things at once, at least you can know a 

bit about the interpretation part. They started to do that. 

They sent over a 30-man platoon from the 201st Corps, either to Fort Riley 

or the Joint Readiness Training Center, the JRTC, this winter to do that. It was a 

treat for the Afghans. They get to go to the US, they’re bottom-end guys too. For 

us, the guys who are going over there, you’d be able to cut through the crap. You 

could actually talk to them and find out what they’re like. Everybody likes to tell 

the stories that are the exception rather than, “Here’s the mundane. This is the way 

it is. This is what you’ll go through every day.” It’s not as good of a story but that’s 

the way it is. 

They sent over a platoon and the general from the Afghan corps who Colonel 

Cariello actually mentored. He came over for a visit and he spoke to different 

groups. He only spoke for an hour or so but an hour is way better than nothing. You 

could see what they look like and how they talk, so you’d get a little inclination 

about what they’re like. That’s one thing I would have liked. Thankfully they are 

doing that more now. 
375

LL: When did you actually head to Afghanistan? 

JJ: This was on 23 February 2006. 

LL: How did your actual movement from the US to Afghanistan go? 

JJ: It’s a little bit of a moving target. You’d think things like that would be 

pretty much set in stone a fair amount of time ahead but they’re not. We didn’t 

really know for sure until the day or two before. It wasn’t too bad. There were 

some challenges in that you don’t know until the last minute how many bags you 

can take. There always seems to be a new directive coming down. It didn’t change 

a lot in the end, though. It went back and forth a lot but it still settled out at about 

the same place it started. It came out pretty good and they kept issuing stuff to us 

at the last minute. They gave us a lot of stuff and I left a lot of it back because I 

didn’t need it. 

We went down to Gulfport. There was a chartered plane that came in and we 

loaded up on that. We went to Bangor, Maine, and then stopped in Germany. We 

then went to Manas and I don’t know why they do that. Maybe if you look at a 

globe it makes sense but I couldn’t figure it out at the time. We spent a couple days 

there and then we flew down into Kabul. We got lucky. We flew right into Kabul 

International Airport. All of our stuff was with us and our movement went well. 

We had a chartered plane. 

We were not limited by passengers. We were limited by weight. There were 

quite a few empty seats, so for that long ride we had some room to spread out. It 

was a pretty good trip. The only ordeal of it was just a matter of bad timing. 

We got to Manas and there were 132 of us in our group that had to get down 

to Kabul, to Phoenix, and they didn’t take us all as a block. They split us in half, 

threw us in a C-17, and the next group was supposed to come in the next day but 

in the end it took them a week to get there. Part of the problem was that President 

Bush came in and that stopped all the flights. It was always one thing or another 

for a week. 

They finally caught up to us and we should have only been at the base camp 

in Phoenix for a week, although we ended up there for two weeks just because we 

had to wait for the other half to get in. 

LL: Once you got to Afghanistan, what did you find yourself doing? 

JJ: I’ve been to third world countries before but I was just trying to figure out 

how things worked. We spent some time organizing things and figuring out where 

we were. 

We had to in-process and make arrangements for the follow-on half to come 

along. The colonel spent time working out assignments for where people were 
376

going to go. We really just went through the processes of how Phoenix worked and 

what you needed to know. They briefed us up so we had a little bit of a clue on how 

things were going to be.

We moved downrange and ended up convoying down to Gardez. That’s where 

I went. We took a bunch of brand new up-armored Humvees down there. They 

needed drivers and we were all there so we helped them. It snowed when we went 

down there and that was an immersion right away into the whole situation. Once 

we got there, they still needed to figure out exactly where we were going to go once 

we got to the corps then, too. 

We knew that night where we’d be going and that next day we started to work 

with who we were going to replace. We were shown around the area and introduced 

to the people and places that were there. 

LL: How would you say the handoff went between you and the guys you were 

replacing there at Gardez? 

JJ: It wasn’t too bad. I lucked out in a way because the guy I replaced was 

actually filling two positions. So, I moved into one of them and he just stayed 

full time in the other. He was always there anyway for the next several months, 

so it wasn’t like I was left hanging. There were some things that could have been 

different and I think we improved on them with our briefings and receptions to the 

folks that came in later on. “Here’s exactly how this place works and what you 

need to do.” 

We didn’t get that when we got there. We were left with a lot of questions in 

our minds and they didn’t have a lot of answers anyway. It took a while to figure 

things out but any new job is going to be like that. It takes you a while before 

you make it your own. You figure out where your boundaries are, where the real 

work is and what you need to spend your time on. In that way, it’s probably not 

any different than any other job I’ve ever been in. You always think you know 

everything about it before you get in it, and then once you get in, it’s like, “Oh, I 

didn’t know this was going to happen.” 

LL: What did you find yourself spending most of your time doing? 

JJ: I worked with and mentored the corps sergeant major mostly but I did some 

other things as well. I tried to coordinate different things. I had to fix sometimes 

minor problems and work on setting up more major things. For example, working 

with the corps sergeant major, if somebody came up to us and said they had a pay 

problem and they couldn’t fix it. “Did you talk to the officers?” “No. I cannot talk 

to them.” “Let’s go. They’ll listen to me. They know I’m enlisted but they also 

know I have US Army on my uniform so they’ll do whatever.” 
377

We would go over there and spend time working through something like that 

but we also worked on getting a system in place so they could send their NCOs to 

schools. We’d spend time thinking about how we were going to generate an order 

of merit list, how we were going to get them to Kabul when they have to go. 

Everything took longer than what you expected and it seemed like you 

could never fix something to where it stayed fixed. You had to monitor it all the 

time. It just happened that way. At the stage they’re in where they don’t have an 

institutional history, everything is still being built and is new and maybe it’s only 

been done once. That doesn’t set a tradition or a pattern yet for a lot of that kind 

of thing. So, you have to spend more time going back over that sort of thing. You 

also have to develop systems. I can do fixes of one or two but then all you do is 

fix things one at a time. At that level I was trying to look at things, “Okay, he has 

a pay problem. I know he can’t be the only one. Let’s see how many more there 

are and then let’s look at how we’re going to keep this from happening at least 99 

percent of the time.” 

We worked through that and had to try to keep them motivated to work through 

those kinds of things. That was quite a bit of it. “I know this army has problems 

but it’s young. Let’s work on these things.” In my particular case, I spent quite a 

bit of time on that. 

LL: Is there a big cultural difference between the US Army and the Afghanistan’s 

ANA over how NCOs are perceived and utilized? 

JJ: Definitely. For whatever reason, their NCOs are treated and perform more 

like they did in the Soviet Army than the American Army. In the American Army, 

NCOs have a lot of authority. They also have a lot of responsibility in things they 

have to do or there will be repercussions for it. Over there, a lot of those things 

that we’d have our NCOs do, they have officers do. There is a lot of inflation in 

their officer ranks. There are a lot of officers on staff there and I think it’s a way 

to increase a person’s salary. Make them an officer and they’ll get more money. 

Whether they’re qualified or whether you need an officer for that particular position 

or task is almost irrelevant sometimes.

It’s a problem with two sides to the coin. I got this a lot from the NCOs, 

“Officers won’t let us do that. Officers do not give us authority. Officers do not 

respect us.” “True, but you can’t use that as an excuse all the time. If they tell you 

or ask you to do something, you better belly up and perform.” There were times 

when I wouldn’t have given them any authority or responsibility because they 

wouldn’t have come through. As a group, they’re more educated than the officers. 

There’s a higher literacy rate among the Afghan NCOs than the officers. It’s much 

more of a merit-based thing but not 100 percent because connections and money 

can still get you things over there but there is a higher literacy rate in the NCOs.
378

I think there are also more English-speaking NCOs than there are officers. 

There’s just more of a willingness to learn English as well. More of them would be 

in the classes or at least try to work through it than a lot of the officers would. The 

officers haven’t learned that giving NCOs power and authority doesn’t weaken 

their position but it strengthens it. If you not only give them the authority but you 

put the responsibility on them, their success is your success and it makes you look 

better. Trying to get the NCOs to realize that, “It isn’t your job just to look good for 

yourself. It’s your job to make your commander successful. That’s what we have 

to go about doing.” 

We spent days fighting that. That’s just a cultural thing that takes time to 

change and it did while we were there. The corps commander was really starting 

to understand it. At first he said he did but I’m not really sure if he did or not. He 

didn’t really give the NCOs much authority or pay them much mind because he 

wasn’t going to spend a lot of time working with people who didn’t come through. 

He would just ignore them and move on to the next one. Maybe he just didn’t have 

the appreciation for it but in the end he was trying to get the NCOs more involved 

in stuff. I think the next year will go even another step further. As long as they don’t 

disappoint him, they will progress. So, there are two parts to that whole thing. 

LL: What would you say was your biggest challenge mentoring the ANA corps 

sergeant major? 

JJ: Working with him to just keep him in the army. He was a very idealistic 

young man. He was there and his dream was for a better Afghanistan but he was 

not necessarily real patient with it. He wanted to see it happen faster than how 

it was happening. He was a very honest and equitable individual which put him 

at odds with other people in that organization. He wanted to see all the soldiers 

treated the same and correctly and to see the NCOs fall into their proper place. 

The army just wasn’t at that stage yet though, and that would get very frustrating 

for him. There would be days where he would throw up his hands and was ready 

to walk out the door. “I’ll come back when this is fixed.” Instead of saying, “I’ve 

got to keep working to fix my part.” and realizing that it probably will be a slow 

process.

The other part of it was that he was an educated man. He went to the Kabul 

University and had a degree in journalism. So, he has other options. He could 

speak English pretty well. I never needed an interpreter around him. In fact, he 

would be a good interpreter. He could do financially much better leaving the army, 

turning around and getting hired as an interpreter for US forces. He knows the 

military and he’s very fluent in English. He’d be a great interpreter for somebody.

It would be a challenge sometimes just to keep him going. He’d get into a 

head butt with an officer and just by the nature of it all it would be a head butt 
379

rather than, “Hey, let’s work it out.” Sometimes I could appreciate his frustration. 

I could go back to the US side and not worry about those issues but he had to live 

them 24 hours a day. That was one of the bigger things. Some days he’d take off, 

just be enthused as heck about something and we’d formulate a policy or start 

a program. It would go pretty good for a while, until there would be an episode 

where someone would insult him or not treat him how he thought he should be 

treated, and off the edge he’d go. We’d have to get through it until he spun himself 

back up again. Fortunately, every time he would.

To his credit, he cared a lot about the soldiers. Soldiers would get cheated out 

of things because of someone somewhere along the line. For example, the dining 

facility. He knows they get so much money to buy the food and he could tell it 

wasn’t being spent on that. He could see the soldiers were getting cheated and 

somebody was putting that money in their pocket. That would really upset him, 

and rightfully so. It’s a big problem to fix, however, although we were starting to 

do it. 

They just got the UCMJ there this last year and they threw the garrison logistics 

officer, the S4, in jail. They found out that he was part of the problem. He was still 

sitting in the lockup when I left. They hadn’t gotten to his trial yet. There was only 

a small legal staff and they were burdened with all the work they had there.

So, keeping the sergeant major focused on things was important. I had to 

remind him that it wasn’t as if we could write a policy today and tomorrow all of 

his dreams would come true. It just doesn’t work that way. I think sometimes the 

amount of work just became overwhelming for him.

Also, trying to get to where he got the stature he should have as a corps sergeant 

major. The commander he was working under before the guy he has now kind of 

spoiled him. He gave him more authority and responsibility than you should be 

giving the corps sergeant major. It’s not that he wasn’t capable but those aren’t 

the duties and responsibilities that come with that job. He was like the deputy 

commander rather than the corps sergeant major and there’s a big difference 

between the two. He was used to that, had lived that for a bit and liked that. Now 

he wasn’t getting that anymore. That was always hanging over everything, I think. 

He was a very promising individual. It was worth working with him because when 

he put his mind to something, it was good and he was very talented. I liked him. 

LL: You used the word “young” to describe him. That word isn’t usually used 

to describe sergeant majors. 

JJ: Yes, he was 28 and had three years in the army. He was a sergeant major 

before he even had a year in service. That was one of the drawbacks for the NCOs 

in the senior grades in that they’re not senior in time. By the time you get to be a 

first sergeant or a sergeant major in our Army, sure you’ll blow corks but you kind 
380

of know when to do it. You don’t just do it at everything. You’ve learned to roll 

with the flow when necessary and when to stop the flow when necessary. There 

are just going to be some things that you grit your teeth on and bite your tongue 

and you know which times to pick your fights. These guys, though, will come out 

of basic training as first sergeants. I think that’s what happened to him and it’s just 

because of the expansion of their army. There isn’t a lot of military experience 

there.

I’ll tell you he was in some ways wise beyond his years with his understanding 

of how some things should be. He was very literate in English, Dari, and Pashto. 

He could also speak Urdu. When I went over there, I took a couple of the NCO 

field manuals with me. I took one to him, showed it to him and he said, “Can I have 

this?” I said, “Sure, you can have that.” I know he read that whole thing. Every 

once in a while, things would come out and I would know where he got it. He read 

that FM and he took it to heart. I think he must have studied it and just sponged it 

up. He knew what was right and how things should be for the most part. It was just 

that matter of experience and time that was missing. That’s what he has to work 

with so he has to do the best job he can. He was very young.

If he wasn’t a first sergeant when he left basic training, it happened not too 

long afterwards. Then he became a garrison sergeant major within his first year 

of service. Then he became a corps sergeant major maybe six months later. That’s 

rising up. 

LL: When you showed up, was that ANA corps on a red cycle or a green cycle? 

JJ: They were on a green. When we got there a year ago, though, it was winter. 

Things slowed down. They didn’t shut off but they had slowed down depending 

on where you were in the corps. It may have been very quiet or it may have still 

been fairly active. 

They were still doing combat operations. There were two brigades. 2d Brigade 

was all in Gardez. They had come that previous September and they had not yet 

been pushed down further. 

They were working through their plan as to how they were going to station 

them. 1st Brigade was spread out all over the place in the corps area. In the spring, 

2d Brigade would move out. When we got there, 2d Brigade was doing mostly 

local operations and their operations tempo was quite a bit lower than 1st Brigade 

which was covering the rest of the corps area. Every day they were being run pretty 

hard and 2d Brigade was a bit lighter. Even 2d Brigade wasn’t red but they were 

still new and doing training. They were probably on an amber cycle. 

LL: Did you end up going out with these units on operations or was the 

headquarters fairly static? 
381

JJ: The headquarters was fairly static. I went out on a few with them in the 

early part that I was there and we did unit visits. I pretty much went wherever the 

corps sergeant major went but he didn’t do a lot of traveling. Part of it was that he 

looked at himself as being able to fix every problem right away. He still had that 

mentality where he felt he had this authority and power where, “If I say make it 

so, it will be so.” That just wasn’t the way it was and that’s not the way it is in our 

Army either. A lot of generals will say, “Make it so,” and they come back a week 

later and it still isn’t so. He didn’t like going down because he couldn’t fix soldiers’ 

problems either immediately or otherwise. 

They’d come to him and say, “I don’t have boots.” “I don’t have uniforms.” 

and things like that and he couldn’t fix it. It was embarrassing for him to go down 

there. He didn’t want to be a phony. He didn’t want to say, “Okay, I’ll fix this 

stuff.” and then not be able to do anything about it. He basically would avoid 

it. When you took him down there, he did like to visit and he liked to see his 

troops. He knew many of them by name. He knew his corps pretty well and they 

were always glad to see him but once you got past that welcome, it got down to 

the nuts and bolts. “We don’t have any boots.” “This needs to be taken care of.” 

Unfortunately he didn’t have the ability to fix a lot of that stuff. If I go talk to an 

S4 or a S1 personnel officer, I can at least work through something as the brigade 

sergeant major. I won’t order anything but I can make sure something happens as 

the commander’s representative. He didn’t have that kind of ability though, and 

that was frustrating for him. That would limit how often he’d go out. In retrospect, 

I wish we had gone out more just to stay in tune with what was going on but it’s 

not like we should have gone out every day or anything because that’s not his job. 

He was responsible for everybody, not just onesies and twosies. 

We probably didn’t get out as much as we should have but a lot of the brigade 

sergeant majors would more, depending on their personalities. A lot of it was 

personality-based. When I did go out on combat operations though, he went along. 

LL: When you went out on combat ops, what did you see and how good was 

the ANA? 

JJ: I think in the combat ops they were pretty good. They pretty much know 

what to do. When they get out there and it gets into the small-unit tactics, even up 

to the battalion-level, they seem to know. 

They’re pretty good at that and it varies. You have some commanders who are 

very good at that and some who are not. It’s just like in our Army. That part of it 

was pretty good. The formal planning varied a lot but was more weighted towards 

the lower end of things.

The same was true with logistics planning. There weren’t too many shining 

stars with that. They’re still suffering with that but that’s why we’re there, to 
382

help them work through it. The ANA are in their own country. They know when 

something isn’t quite right. I always felt pretty darn comfortable around them 

because they would know when something was up. For the most part, they’d react 

to things pretty well. When the bullets started flying, you wanted to be with them 

because they knew what was going on. 

LL: So it seems that they don’t really need the mentorship so much on the 

tactical side of things. It was more on the institutional side of things? 

JJ: Yes, I think the thing that will keep this army growing and sustainable is 

to get those institutional things taken care of and getting their UCMJ as a regular 

part of life. 

They need accountability. That way if you do something wrong and it’s a 

criminal thing that people will pay for. If it’s a judgmental thing or a procedural 

thing, maybe there will be some career ramifications. Your connection with some 

general somewhere isn’t going to get you through this. Getting their logistics 

system to the point where they can account for things and where you can break 

that hoarding mentality they have. It has a very good basis for being there. If 

you don’t know where your next shipment is coming from or if you don’t have 

confidence that you’ll get more then you’ll hoard what you have. That’s just been 

life in Afghanistan. 

We also had to get them to understand that soldier-caring is important. There 

were a lot of attitudes in the officer ranks that, “If the soldiers go, the Kabul Military 

Training Center, the KMTC, will send me more.” That isn’t the way it’s going to 

work, though. Officers were told, “If you can’t keep the ones you got, why would 

we send you more?” It was starting to sink in slowly. Somebody is going to have 

to take a tumble and then the rest will wise up. They’re not that dumb. Those kinds 

of things will keep that army as an attractive thing for recruiting. It will keep that 

retention up and they’ll go forward and be able to increase and maintain security 

in that country.

Do they know how to fight and do counterinsurgency? For the most part they 

do. Maybe not to the point where we think they should but they’re not starting at 

zero by any means. They’ve come a long way. Can things be improved? Of course 

but we all keep going to school too. That’s not the long pole in the tent, so to speak, 

right now. It’s the logistics, the judicial, and the soldier-caring things that will keep 

that institution there. They need to reduce the number of AWOLs and attritions. 

LL: How was your support in Afghanistan? 

JJ: I think it was pretty good. Everybody will always want more. That’s just 

the nature of things. When we got there, we drove down about 15 of the 30 new 

up-armored Humvees they had gotten for the corps. They only got up-armored 

Humvees at all just six months prior to that.
383

Some of our shortages were equipment things like radios. Because of the 

mountains, the single channel ground-to-air radio systems, the SINCGARS, don’t 

work very well. You have to get back to the TACSAT. They were the nicest ones 

to use. The chronic shortages were TACSATs and heavy weapons. We were a little 

short on crew-served. We didn’t have one for each gun truck so we’d float them 

around. I don’t think it really limited us, though. I think it was just that it would 

have been more convenient if we had more but it wasn’t a limiting factor. 

Maintenance support was another issue. If you were an embedded training 

team or ETT and you were at the corps, maintenance was good. 

We had a LTF [logistics task force] and FLE [forward logistics element] down 

by us, so we didn’t have any problems there. It seemed like they could get parts 

fairly quickly. Down at the brigades it got a little tougher. 

We did get contract trucks in there while I was there and that helped. If you 

get to some of the outlying kandaks, though, it was hit or miss. For example, 

Lieutenant Colonel John Schroeder was in Ghazni or Sharana where there was 

another provincial reconstruction team [PRT] and another US installation there 

with one of the 10th Mountain groups and they were pretty good at supporting. 

You come in wearing the same uniform and they’d take care of you. I never heard 

of any problems like that. More accolades than complaints. However, if you get 

down to someplace like Karakul, there was a US unit there. 

They’d help them as much as they could but when they weren’t there, if 

something breaks, it’s a two-hour drive to anywhere. Orgun-E was like four hours 

away. You just hope that the vehicle is actually drivable at least. So that was a 

challenge. It was harder to fix. You just have to get more maintenance folks, more 

contract trucks and put them in a circuit. Then, once you get there, you can’t be out 

running missions. The vehicles have to be there, so you get into this whole chicken 

and egg thing. “I need to use it.” “But I need to fix it.” They’d go back and forth 

on that.

As far as food goes, that was good. Even in places where they had to cook for 

themselves, they didn’t seem to mind it that much. They just made a rotation and 

went with it. We had KBR where I was and that was good. For a while, one brigade 

in Sharana didn’t have any dedicated cooks. They had about 40 people there so 

they would trade off and that took quite a bit of effort. They finally got a couple 

Navy and Air Force guys in there as cooks and life became good.

ETTs spent too much time working US support issues. About halfway through, 

they brought down some Air Force brigade support teams, the BSTs. At first I 

thought, “Geez, this is just more people to take care of.” It didn’t take me long 

to figure out that they were there to take care of us. That was a good move. They 

didn’t have to do mentoring. They just had to take care of the operations there. 
384

Even what they did there could trickle down another layer or so and help the folks 

below them. That’s where they got the cooks for Sharana. So that was good. 

They know how to do that stuff and it unburdened a lot of the overhead, even 

for operations. They ran the tactical operations center, the TOC, for us. Maybe 

we’d have one ETT guy in there but the rest would all be Air Force or Navy. It 

made your output as an ETT much better as an organization. The other thing was 

transportation. There’s never enough aircraft, and when you do have them a lot 

of times they’re limited by weather. Moving people around country could be a 

challenge but I can’t complain. It wasn’t bad. 

LL: How were you set up for interpreters? 

JJ: They had a contracting company called Titan. I think they were under the 

same parent company as MPRI/L-3 Communications. They were the contractor 

there for quite a while during my time there. 

We had a lot of interpreters. I don’t know that we ever had a shortage. We 

never had all the staff positions full but there was always somebody on leave so 

their interpreter wasn’t being used and interpreters weren’t being used all day 

because you were only working with the ANA for a half day or three quarters of 

a day. You could spring them loose. A lot of times it was a matter of convenience, 

“My interpreter is gone. I have to go work it out.” That would be the thing that 

would be the drawback of it. 

We had a pretty good staff at corps as well as on the FOBs. From time to time 

we’d have spot shortages but we worked through them. One of the ETTs had to be 

the interpreter person. I’m glad I didn’t get that job because that could potentially 

be a lot of work. We did end up having an on-site manager come from Titan which 

helped a bunch. We didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day things in there. The 

interpreters lived in their own compound adjacent to ours. 

We had hired a contract caterer so they didn’t have to cook either. They had 

their own little mess hall to eat in. 

We got to know who they were pretty well. They were an invaluable resource. 

I won’t say they could make or break you. They’d break you only if you let them. 

They were an important part of your success. There’s no doubt about that. You 

could learn a lot from them and you’d want to. They could give you a lot of insight 

into the culture and what was going on. You had to learn to manage them, too. 

You couldn’t let then run the conversation. You had to do that. There’s a lot of 

skill involved in working with an interpreter or working with your counterpart 

through an interpreter. There were a lot of English-speaking Afghans because of 

the proximity to Pakistan where the official language is English since that used 

to be a British colony. There are a lot of English speakers around that area, more 
385

than you might think at first. There were a lot of applicants for the interpreter 

positions but a lot of them don’t have the necessary skills. Some think they can 

speak English but they can’t do it well enough to be an interpreter. I don’t really 

have any complaints on that. There wasn’t anything more than you’d expect to 

have to work through and I think in a lot of ways it was less. The interpreter service 

was pretty good. 

LL: Did you ever encounter any kind of cultural barriers in trying to work with 

the ANA? 

JJ: Of course. Let me give you some examples. One of them was cleanliness. 

We had to work with them on their food preparation and sanitation. That’s 

really not so much a matter of Islamic culture but it’s more a culture of poverty 

thing. They have never had nice kitchens like we’re used to. They had dirt floors 

in their houses. They spread a mat out to do their preparations on but they’re done 

on the floor. They don’t have plumbing. Soap is expensive. It’s used sparingly if at 

all, so a lot of things are just rinsed instead of washed.

The way they operate their guard rotations is different as well. If there was a 

guard post or an observation post they had to man, they’d put the whole crew out 

there. Everybody who was going to have a shift then would go out all at once. 

Their thinking was that, that way, they were close by in case they needed them. 

Well, yes and no. It just doesn’t work that way because most of them don’t have 

their weapons but they’re lying down and doing whatever. 

They’re not really “available” as much as you might think. You might end 

up with only one guy working out of 10. If you’re rotating, there should be three 

guys always working. It was just things like that. If you go read some books on 

the Soviet Army, they operated like that then as well. It became very intensive in 

manpower when they did things like that.

Driving was an issue as well. Getting them to drive correctly and have 

discipline when they drive was difficult. Most of the soldiers couldn’t afford a 

vehicle so many of them had never driven before in their life. It was all either full 

gas or full brake, one or the other. If they crashed something, there wasn’t any 

responsibility for it. They’re thinking was, “The ETT should bring me a new one. 

This one is broke.” The biggest cultural thing and it was a little bit manipulative 

was, “Insha’Allah” or “God’s will.” “That happened. I’m not responsible for it. 

It’s what God wanted.” So, you’d have to work through that one. It was used 

as an excuse. Fortunately, I never had to work through that with Sergeant Major 

Fasil. He never said, “Insha’Allah.” He was not a dumb man. He knew he could 

have done something about it so he would just get mad if things went bad. He 

understood that it was people he couldn’t control, not God. That would come up a 

lot with the soldiers and officers who’d just basically say, “Oh well.” But it’s not, 

“Oh well,” and we had to get them to understand that.
386

The cultural barrier is evident when you have a tribal society. How does a 

person have power? Part of it is age and part of it is also the awarding or withholding 

of favors. You see them trying to use that system as well. Authority in their military 

didn’t necessarily come from your rank but from your ability to award and withhold 

favors. We had to break that down and get them into an institution where rank 

means something. You have authority and responsibility when you do that and it 

has to be used correctly. You’d see that underlying some of the motives, decisions, 

and actions that were taken. The same thing happens in our Army with the supply 

sergeant who does this or that, for example but it tends to be infrequent, at a pretty 

low level, or with small things. In their army, it was the basis for a lot of things.

What always amazed me when I walked into their TOCs was that things always 

looked nice but they didn’t ever update things. They used them as a showpiece 

more than anything and it takes a while to change that. That’s one you have to stick 

on them every day over an extended period of time. 

They have a reluctance to use forms to drive administrative things such as their 

requests for supplies. I’d swear that sheet of paper weighed 10,000 pounds because 

you couldn’t get them to fill one out and take it up there. “That’s all it takes. Use 

it.” It was a struggle to get them to do it that way. You run into those things and 

it helps you to get around it if you understand the roots of it. Is it a culture of 

poverty? Is it an Afghan tradition? Is it an Islamic thing? It’s an Islamic country but 

it’s not the same kind of Islam as you’ll see in the Arab cultures. It’s not practiced 

as strictly. At prayer time, everybody doesn’t drop what they’re doing, get out 

their rugs, and start praying. A couple of them will, two out of a hundred maybe. 

They’re all Muslims but it’s not as strict. 

LL: How do you think most of the Afghans viewed you and the rest of the 

American Army? 

JJ: Most of them either support you or don’t care. They either support you 

actively or passively, maybe passively by not supporting the Taliban. 

They know we’re pumping a fair amount of money into their country and, 

unfortunately, the surveys have shown that they don’t see the government doing 

these things for them. They see the Coalition forces doing it for them. The challenge 

there is to work it through their institutions to empower and legitimize them. By 

and large, they’re pretty benign.

I’ve heard it said, “You can buy an Afghan but you can never own one.” That is 

true. They’ll do things for money. As soon as the money stops, they don’t have any 

more loyalty for you. It turns pretty quick. As long as you’re doing something for 

them, they’re your friend. When the money stops, though, they’re gone. Once you 

work with the ANA soldiers, there are motivations of loyalty that go beyond that. 

I felt pretty safe around those guys. I would say they were loyal to us because they 
387

appreciated the fact that we were coming there and trying to make things better. I 

don’t think we were seen as an occupier. We’d tell them, “We’re not staying here 

forever. Let’s get this done because we want to go home.” They appreciated that, 

I think.

The people who don’t want you there are Taliban and a lot of them had their 

own sources of income set up that would be at odds with an organized government. 

Maybe it’s drugs or some kind of racketeering scam, something like that. Maybe 

they felt that if the government was in power, they were going to lose something 

because they were possibly a village elder, they controlled what goes on and they 

didn’t want to share it with anyone else. 

We’d get waved at a lot, from kids especially. The only time we’d get cold 

stares was in particular villages but you knew the Taliban must be around there 

or they actively supported the Taliban. You can sense that pretty darn quickly 

when you go into those places. Most of the time, however, if they weren’t overtly 

friendly they’d just ignore you. 

LL: When you left, how well did your handoff to your replacement go? 

JJ: Were there things we could have done differently? Yes, I thought we had a 

lot of time and then all of a sudden we realized there were a lot of things going on 

and we didn’t have as much time as I thought. 

We forced ourselves into it. I passed off as much of the historical stuff as I 

could to him. Fortunately my replacement wasn’t coming from the US. He was 

coming from the brigade level and just coming up a notch. He knew half of the 

corps already. He just didn’t know the other half or the corps per se but he knew a 

lot of the people he’d be working with. That was an advantage for us. 

We sat down and set aside time to go through things. The fact was that we 

had two handoffs. I had one to my permanent replacement, plus one with another 

brigade sergeant major mentor who came up to fill a gap because my replacement 

was going on leave. Before I even left country, he went on leave. There was another 

intermediate which filled the gap for a month. 

We all just sat down together and went over things. They were familiar with 

quite a bit of it already. After I left, I remembered some things I should have told 

them so I just shot them an e-mail. As I was doing things, I would copy them on all 

my correspondence so they would know what was going on. I had things I wanted 

to finish up and he had started new things already while he was there. There were 

more things we could have done but I think we got about a 75 percent solution, 

maybe even 90 percent. The people to ask would be them. You should ask them if 

there were any holes. I take that stuff seriously, even on the civilian side. When I 

leave a place, I make sure everything is laid out so the guy who’s walking in there 

knows what the deal is. I don’t like walking into a mess and having to spend too 

much time figuring it out. 
388

LL: Did you spend much time working with other US services or Coalition 

forces? 

JJ: Yes. In our corps area, we had Navy. They were the garrison mentors and 

came in later as part of the support group. 

We also had Air Force as part of the support group as well as being mentors for 

some of the logistical stuff. 

We had Marines down in one particular kandak as a mentoring group. However, 

the people I didn’t spend a lot of time with were the Marines because they were two 

levels down. I didn’t interact with them a lot because of distance and organization. 

I worked with the Navy a lot, though, mainly from being the sergeant major of the 

US group that was there and from being the mentor. I worked with the Air Force 

on ANA logistics issues as well as on the US side, not so much logistics issues but 

FOB operations issues. I monitored a lot of day-to-day stuff. When he came in, I 

didn’t have to do it anymore, I just had to know what was going on which really 

made life good.

We had Romanians in our group. The Romanians were two levels down 

organizationally. They were located on our FOB so I worked with them on FOB 

operations and in an administrative role. 

We also had the contract companies of KBR, MPRI, and RM Asia there as 

well. 

LL: Did you have any problems with any of those groups? 

JJ: There were little personality problems that we worked through. We also had 

some problems in the beginning trying to figure out whose way we were going to 

run things. That was more of a person-type thing than it was an institution thing. 

“We’re going to do it my way.” and he just happens to be from the Navy. The 

groups I worked with for the ETTs that were setting up the logistics were so helpful.

There are just a lot of talented people out there. The Navy folks were a 

good group to work with and had a lot of talented people. There are differences 

between the services. The Navy is a platform-based service whereas the Army 

is a personnel-based one. There are different ways of approaching problems and 

that causes issues at times. Once you realize this, you can move forward and get 

things done. In our corps area we got out of the “us versus them” thing. There will 

always be some of that between the services but it will be there within the Army as 

well. “I’m infantry and you’re artillery. It’s you artillery guys who are causing the 

problems.” I would say that it was no greater than that kind of thing. When those 

Air Force folks came in and I figured out what they could do, I was happier than 

heck. It was really a great day. 
389

LL: What about the contractors? Did you have to deal with them a lot and did 

you have any problems? 

JJ: I dealt with them a lot. The MPRI guys were the doctrine experts and they 

did some mentoring. I thought they were a great resource because they didn’t need 

to worry about any operational issues on the US side. All they had to do was worry 

about the ANA. 

They could just keep turning out training products and things like that. They 

could research stuff for you and that was enjoyable. I had a particular person I 

worked with who was also an NCO mentor and we got to where we could get 

things done very quickly. 

We talked all the time, every day. “What are you going to do today? How are 

you going approach this? Which part are you going to do? Which part am I going 

to do?” He was a good person to work with. He had a good personality. I was sort 

of the FOB mayor until the Air Force came in and then I didn’t have to work it 

as much. During that time I worked with them on different maintenance issues or 

FOB improvements and things like that. That was in conjunction with the camp 

engineer and a little consortium of folks to take care of the day-to-day things on 

the FOB. 

We also had a formal meeting every week to see what we needed to work on. 

KBR was good to work with. The guys down at Khowst were fantastic as well. 

They were there to support the troops and they knew it. That’s what they wanted 

to do. The same thing was true for the ones up there in Gardez. They’d do as 

much for you as they could. Sometimes they’d kind of stretch the boundaries of 

what they were supposed to be doing just to help you out but I never wanted to do 

anything that would put them or their jobs in jeopardy. Some of them had military 

experience. Their managers had been in their game for quite a while. This wasn’t 

their first trip around the block. A couple guys had been in different places around 

the world. I worked mostly with the KBR managers and they were a good bunch. 

I have a lot of respect for those guys and what they were able to do with the labor 

pool they had.

The only ones who were a little more of a challenge which was easily overcome 

with more communication, was RM Asia. They were a little secretive in what 

they did, so you were kind of wondering what they were getting done and then 

you’d go see for yourself and you’d find it was some real good stuff. They were 

the contractor for maintenance of ANA vehicles and they also maintained all our 

pickup trucks that were really ANA vehicles, too. 

We’d get a lot of KBR cooks from Eastern Europe. The trades tended to come 

from the US. They all wanted to do a good job. They really did. There were a few 

we had problems with but they weren’t there very long once they became an issue. 
390

I suspect that was a pretty lucrative operation for those groups and they wanted it 

to stay that way. They were an asset. Get the facts before you get upset because 

you’ll probably find out that you shouldn’t be getting upset and it could probably 

be fixed with communication. Ninety nine times out of 100, that’s what it would 

be. 

LL: Did you have any contact with the media? 

JJ: Yes. While I was there we had a reporter come down from the Milwaukee 

Journal Sentinel. She had stayed with troops in Iraq a couple times and then she 

came down with us. At first we felt it was just another thing we had to take care of. 

That was always my first reaction but when we met her, we realized it wasn’t going 

to be that bad. She did everything herself. She went around and did interviews. She 

went with us on visits to other units. I don’t know if she went on any operations. 

I know she didn’t go out with me. She did daily reports and she’d share what she 

was writing with us. She was the one I was most involved with. There were a 

couple others. They’d be there for short periods of time. She was in country for 

about 20 days and I think she spent 10 of them in our corps area. 

LL: Was Gardez where all the Wisconsin National Guard soldiers were? 

JJ: No, when we first went over there, we were split between two corps areas 

of Kandahar and Gardez. 

They were further broken down from there. Originally we came down to 

Gardez, and for a while there were about five of us there. Once they did the spring 

stationing, where they broke the 2d Brigade out and pushed them out in May and 

June, for quite a while I was the only guy from Wisconsin there. In the end, when 

the Phoenix 5.0 guys came in, they wanted to get the States back together as best 

they could. It wasn’t practical for the previous groups so they didn’t care. You 

could go anywhere back then but they tried to change that and keep team integrity 

a little better. 

They started to group them back. All the guys came up from the south into 

our area and even then they still ended up divided between five locations. At least 

we were still in the same corps area. At that point, there were five of us at Gardez. 

We also had a book author come and visit as well as a TV reporter from Oregon. 

That reporter was there around Christmas but he had to leave for an emergency 

back home. He wound up showing back up after that business was taken care of. 

In those 11 months, I think we had maybe five reporters there at the most and they 

were only there for short periods of time, maybe a week. They were mostly promilitary. 

LL: What was your biggest accomplishment while you were there and what 

was the biggest thing that was left undone? 
391

JJ: The biggest accomplishment I had while I was there was that the corps 

sergeant major stayed in the ANA. There were some days when I really thought 

he was going to bail on me, and I know he came close to it a couple times. It had 

to be a hard decision for him, especially since he wanted to get married and had 

finally gotten engaged. That is not a cheap proposition and at the pay scale he was 

at, that was very difficult. He was talking about going into debt for a number of 

years to pay for the wedding. It’s that big of a deal, especially when he has the 

ability to earn a much greater income as a civilian than he would in the ANA just 

because of his skills in English and his degree. I worried about that every day. I 

don’t think I can look at one particular thing but getting a number of things at least 

partially institutionalized in there, for example their school system within the corps 

and their promotion system. We didn’t get a lot of guys promoted but we did get 

some. There were big fights on that. I don’t know if there was just one thing, just 

raising the water level overall. Status is very important and getting the role of the 

NCO raised.

I think we did quite a bit of that and also getting them to use the logistics 

system. Those were probably the biggest things. I didn’t finish it by any means. I 

don’t think there was anything there I finished. I got it further along. That was the 

best I could do on a lot of it. There were a lot of things I think I would have done 

differently, knowing what I know now. There were challenges to overcome of just 

raising the status and the authority of the NCOs a couple notches. 

We still have a long way to go but it got better. The seeds were surely planted 

in a lot of places. I could tell that by the answers and the things they would suggest 

without any prompting that that was happening. 

LL: If you could make a military recommendation to the powers that be, what 

would it be? 

JJ: I think we’re going to see more of this in the future rather than less. I think 

this whole program of mentoring, nation-building, and developing is not only for 

foreign armies but for foreign police forces, too. If you don’t do all of it, none of it 

will work. I think it all has to come together. That has to somehow become more of 

a priority in our Army because we’re going to be doing more of that in the future. 

Should it become a skill identifier? Do we need to make it so people go through 

ETT school where they learn how to teach others? Maybe it becomes something 

like what we have here at Fort Leavenworth, where we set up an institution of ETT 

studies. It may not need to be that dramatic but something.

The Army spends a lot of time studying how to teach people things. We have 

a good education system in teaching people what they need to know. I think ETT 

should be another branch or course that needs to be done and it would be worthwhile 

to do. We’ve stumbled over there and, fortunately, I think we’ve learned from our 
392

mistakes. I feel that Major General Robert Durbin surely has. He isn’t one to keep 

beating his head against the wall. He’ll react to things in a very rational way when 

he sees that things aren’t progressing like they should or not turning out the way 

they should. 

I have seen that from just the year I was there. People have been working in 

this. I thought of that when I was over there but they didn’t show up because I 

thought they should. Somebody else thought so. Having the ANA come over here 

to the US and that may be because I thought they should. I gave some input to 

some of those folks who came over to ask us what we thought of our training. 

We had four different groups come over to ask us about the training and by 

the time the third one came over I told them that we should send the ANA over to 

the US. I doubt that was the reason. There was probably somebody else with more 

influence which made it happen but things are definitely changing and getting 

better. That role is going to come away, in many cases from the Special Forces, the 

SF, who traditionally did that because it’s so much different. You’re not standing 

up a militia or a village protection unit. You’re trying to stand up an enduring 

institution which in many ways is beyond what SF is missioned to do, prepared 

for, or wants to do.

Maybe it should be mandatory for all officers to spend some time on an ETT. 

I hesitate on that one because not everybody should be on an ETT. You have to 

be very tolerant of people, understand that they’re not going to jump when you 

bark. You need to understand their motivations and why they’re doing what they’re 

going to do. You’re going to have to appreciate and be willing to do some things 

that you might have been uncomfortable with before, things like how they express 

their appreciation, gratitude, and familiarity. You need to be able to indulge in their 

cuisine and understand the way they live. It’s not for everybody, to be sure but it’s 

something to look at. How can we get really good at this? I think we’ve started on 

that. The new counterinsurgency manual will play a big part in this. If this is going 

to be the new face of conflict for the next generation, then we need to get good at 

it now. I think this organization has the means to do it. 

LL: Do you think that National Guard and Reserve Soldiers are more suited 

for the ETT mission than the Regular Army just by the nature of where they’re 

coming from? 

JJ: I think there are certain strengths they bring to it that give them an edge 

in some areas over the Regular Army. I think the Regular Army has strengths that 

we don’t because it tends to live it more than we do. Their expectations will be 

more stringent than ours are as far as military discipline and how things should go. 

That’s more of a strength for them but I think the Guard and Reserve bring a little 

more in that they are not only military but they all have a civilian occupation, too. 

That definitely helped us out there. 
393

We had small groups out there and you picked on people’s skills a lot from the 

civilian side of the world, be it law enforcement or information technology. We had 

an infantryman come over who knew a ton about IT. In fact, that’s what he did in 

the civilian world. He could network and stuff. He didn’t like it but for his first four 

months that’s what he ended up doing. He was our IT guy. That was very valuable. 

You won’t get them to the level of professionalism that the Regular Army has. It 

goes back to my first comment. 

They live it every day. We all set our standards to the Army standards. We know 

there can’t be Guard standards and Regular Army standards because that just won’t 

work. I think sometimes we’re more likely to cut corners than they would be. At 

particular stages you need to accept that from the counterparts you’re teaching and 

don’t let it frustrate you so much. Since I’ve been over there, though, I’m thinking 

that that’s just not as important and after seeing some of the other Regular Army 

units, I don’t think that’s necessarily so true either. It’s just like anything. There’s 

a whole spectrum out there. I can point my fingers in any direction and find that 

without too much trouble, so that isn’t such a matter of importance.

So, this is strength and it will give you an advantage in some cases but I look 

at the Marine group that we had down there and they were all full-time Marines. 

They did a hell of a job and they were good mentors. It had more to do with 

expecting more and being more demanding of them, and they rose to it. There 

were things they did that, looking at it with civilian eyes I wouldn’t have done it 

that way. It may have been more efficient but I don’t know if it makes or breaks 

you. I do think that it’s a good tour for Guardsmen and Reservists, especially for 

those in senior ranks. I think it’s a very fitting tour for them. Why? Because at that 

level and when you’re trying to grow an army like the ANA, you can do the job 

just as well as your full-time Army counterpart. Maybe there’s some advantage to 

this here and there but the bigger thing is that they can do the job just as well. The 

tolerance thing comes into play at times because I could see some units that we 

were partnered with who were almost afraid of the ANA. 

They wouldn’t get out of their trucks and they wouldn’t mingle with them. 

I don’t know if that’s a Regular Army thing. If you go into a room with a lot of 

strange people you don’t know and you don’t have much in common with, you’re 

just going to be very hesitant, whereas if you’re there every day with them and you 

know them, it’s no big deal. I don’t know if there is a lot of difference now that I’ve 

talked it all through. I will say it’s a good tour for senior reservists and guardsmen. 

LL: Can you talk about family separation? 

JJ: I’ll tell you that it sure makes it easy when you have a good spouse. I saw 

folks who had family issues and I just thanked God every night that I didn’t have to 

go through all that. It’s hardest when you have young kids. I have a couple of them. 
394

They’re 11 and 12 years old now. That’s harder. You miss them. There’s no two 

ways about it. Some of it is alleviated by being able to communicate with them by 

e-mail. I e-mailed every day. Voice makes a lot of difference as well. There’s where 

it probably swings the other way. Regular Army families are used to separation 

more. Unless you have a civilian job where you do a lot of business travel and 

even then it’s not like you’ll be gone for months at a time. This was the first time 

my family had to go through this. It was eight months before I saw my kids and 

took leave. That’s a challenge but it’s just something you endure. You think, “Well, 

I’ve missed parts of their lives.” The other part of it is, though, that this is a duty 

we should do for the country. My wife and I like to think of it this way. Think 

about the active duty folks such as that guy who goes into a submarine, sinks for 

six months at a time and then comes up. Think about these Regular Army people 

who have these extended deployments, not just one but a series of them, and then 

they’re moving from base to base. They have to uproot the kids all the time. On the 

civilian side you might do that too if you’re a career person with a company, you 

might get moved quite a bit. By and large, though, it doesn’t happen like that. In 

the military it’s more of a way of life.

In the Air Force, they know that every third year they’re going to see a new 

house. I think that kind of tempered it for us. You have to have a mature relationship 

and if isn’t steady when you go, it isn’t going to get better when you’re gone. 

Hopefully you have some financial stability and you’ve been married for more 

than a year. Now, it will depend upon the person as well. One of the guys got 

married when he went home on leave. I assume everything is pretty good. I haven’t 

seen him much since. I think it can happen, it just depends on the maturity of the 

individuals and you have to keep that long-term goal in mind. “Why am I doing 

this? I have these young kids. If I go now, maybe they won’t have to go later.” 

That’s another thing you factor into it. Six months would be too short of a tour. Six 

months is a long time to be away from your family but it’s too short of a tour over 

there. There’s a lot of argument that nine months is the way to go with this. It looks 

like the Guard and Reserves are trying to get to that. 

They’ll mobilize you and then you have a year. What the Army does with you 

during that year is up to them. It isn’t like now where it’s a year of boots in theater. 

You have to add on the front end to that. I’ll tell you this, going back to the Regular 

Army and the Guard there is a definite difference in mentality on the use of time. 

Time is money to me in my civilian job. I will not waste people’s time because 

it will cost the company money if I don’t get a product out. It isn’t unique to the 

military. Any budget-driven organization whether government or inside certain 

businesses, there’s this kind of a thing where output isn’t nearly as important as 

being there and having a head count. Then if you just need more, you go beg for 

more money and resources.
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In my civilian job, working in a factory in management, I have to live on what 

I make. I’m not going to get it from anywhere else, except from customers. I have 

to produce. You tend to be more efficient and worry about getting things done on 

schedule, not because your boss wants to have it but because that’s how I’m going 

to eat. I think you tend to bring a greater sense of urgency in general as a Reservist 

than you do with the Regular Army folks. Sometimes the Regular Army mentality 

can be, “Well, there are 20 years to my retirement. If I don’t get it done today, I’ll 

do it tomorrow.” I think that mentality is there. Now, after you’ve been there for six 

months, it kind of gets into you, too, no matter where you come from. At least at 

the start, you tend to be a little more aggressive on things you want to do. You can 

always find exceptions to that anywhere you go. Like General Durbin, he has these 

benchmarks he’s got to hit and he wants them done. The leadership is underneath 

a magnifying glass for that whereas the lower ranks are not. There are a lot of 

examples on that but there’s definitely that mentality difference to varying degrees. 

LL: If you had the opportunity to go back to Afghanistan and do a similar job, 

would you go? 

JJ: I probably would. I’d love to do it. The only reason I’d say no would be my 

kids. I’d miss being with them more than anything. I actually had a grandson born 

while I was over there. I’m anxious to see him. I missed being in the younger kids’ 

lives. As far as what I was doing over there, yes, I could see myself doing it again. 

Looking back, I see there are a lot of things I would have done differently and, in 

general, I should have been more aggressive on everything. I backed off because 

I was afraid that someone would take off on me. I would have done less of the 

lower-level things and tried to influence more people. I would have tried to work 

my role better than I did. You always want a chance to try and fix that stuff. It’s a 

great mission. Those people grow on you after a while. I think it’s a noble mission 

as well, what we’re doing over there. 

LL: Is there anything else about your deployment to Afghanistan that you’d 

like to add to this interview? 

JJ: I’m glad to have had the chance to come back and talk to other people about 

it. My experiences were not the same as everybody else’s. I was glad to have the 

opportunity to do it. My only hesitation was, “Can I do a good enough job on it?” 

Now I know that I do know enough to go over there and do it. It’s just a matter of 

doing it. A lot of the things I wanted to see done in training are being addressed. 

There’s more I think could be done on that and I have a suspicion that a lot of it 

will get approved. It was a hell of an experience. It really makes you appreciate 

what you have here and the country we’re fortunate to be blessed with. You feel 

bad for the few people we did lose over there. I always keep them in the back of 

my mind. There are families that are now left without husbands and fathers. It’s a 
396

good thing we’re doing, though. I do believe we will finish this one out and I think 

it’ll be successful. 

LL: Thank you very much for your time.
397

Master Sergeant Michael Threatt

20 September 2006

JM: My name is John McCool (JM) and I’m with the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Master Sergeant Michael Threatt 

(MT) on his experiences during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM 

or OEF. Today’s date is 20 September 2006 and this is an unclassified 

interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified 

territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any 

classified information and if classification requirements prevent you from 

responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. Could you start off by 

giving me a brief sketch of your military career up to the present and then 

we’ll focus in on your OEF deployments? 

MT: Sure, I’ve been assigned to 3d Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg since 

1990. I started out in 3d Battalion, 3d SFG, I did a Special Warfare Center tour 

for about 20 months, and then I came back to 3d SFG and was assigned to 1st 

Battalion. That was in November 2003 and I was there up until July of this year. 

Now I’m here at Fort Leavenworth in the Combined Arms Center, SOF cell. 

JM: You had two deployments to Afghanistan for OEF? 

MT: Yes. 

JM: Can you tell me what those dates were? 

MT: Roughly from January 2004 to August 2004 and then June 2005 through 

February 2006. The first rotation I was in Regional Command-South, the RC-South, 

in Kandahar where my battalion was habitually regioned during their alternate 

rotations. The second rotation I was attached to 2d Battalion, 3d SFG, which had 

the RC-East picture which is considered the border fight for Afghanistan. 

JM: What were your duty positions in each of these deployments? 

MT: Initially I started the first rotation as the company operations sergeant 

which migrated into operational detachment alpha, the ODA, team sergeant. 

JM: Was this in Charlie Company? 

MT: Yes, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion. The second rotation I was the ODA 

team sergeant throughout the whole rotation. 

JM: Let’s proceed generally chronologically. Can you describe the 

circumstances surrounding your initial deployment and any preparations you made 

prior to deploying? 
398

MT: For the first rotation in 2004, the unit was already on orders to go months 

before. When I got to the unit, they were already in the final preparations of 

deploying and were pretty much ready to deploy. It was at the point where all the 

pre-deployment activities were taking place, the training. The only thing left to do 

was palletize and that was done around 6 January. 

We had that pre-deployment cycle of aircraft that would go until the end of 

the month and we ended up in Kandahar around 20 January. It was kind of weird 

the way that rotation was broken down. Obviously there’s a continual transition of 

firebases in both RCs. In RC-South there were only five or six firebases that were 

still going to be under SOF control. Those teams that were going to those firebases 

were dedicated ahead of time and they knew where they were going. Once we 

landed at Kandahar and did the transition with the outgoing unit of 3d Battalion, 3d 

SFG, those ODAs were immediately sent out to the firebases to finish the transfer 

of authority process. That started on 23 January. It’s a very rapid process at the 

ODA level. The remainder of my company ended up staying based at Kandahar 

and we didn’t have what we call a place to live as far as being assigned to a specific 

firebase. 

We were used as a general purpose force for most of that rotation. When I say 

that, I mean there were a lot of long range-mounted vehicle patrols, numerous air 

assault operations against medium-value targets or MVTs and high-value targets or 

HVTs, and we shared in some training of the Afghan National Army at that point. 

The ANA we had at Kandahar were already trained by the previous battalion in 

the rotation before us. It was hard to stay mission-focused on any particular thing 

during that rotation because we were really never given a defined area to operate 

in. When there were no HVT or MVT targets on the platform for targeting, my 

ODA, which consisted of 10 guys, and our three ground mobility vehicles were 

sent out to an area such as Deh Chopan, Musa Qaleh, or areas like that and we 

would just drive around sometimes for what seemed like weeks at a time trying to 

develop intelligence on the region. I wouldn’t say we were ever sent somewhere 

blindly. INTEL always led us to go to these places. We didn’t pick the locations. 

The locations were dictated to us. Once we got on the ground though, what we did 

within that area was up to the ODA. 

We did have priority information requirements, the PIRs, which we were trying 

to satisfy for the command. Most of the time we weren’t able to answer a lot of 

the PIRs we were handed but we were able to generate other types of INTEL. You 

can’t go into any town or village in Afghanistan and talk to the local population 

without someone telling you about bad guys, so we ended up generating a lot of 

INTEL all throughout those operations. A lot of them ended with us capturing lowlevel leaders or people who were associated with the Taliban. I don’t think on that 

first rotation we ever caught anybody who was a confirmed al-Qaeda member. 

Rather, they were low-level Taliban operatives. 
399

That whole process of doing operations that way was very unsuited for a 

Special Forces, the SF detachment, because we’re used to having a piece of ground 

we own with INTEL that can be developed consistently day after day. That wasn’t 

the case in this rotation because we weren’t given a solid piece of ground. For a 

period of one week or two, we may be in one province and then called back to 

Kandahar, stay there for a predetermined amount of time, and then we’d be sent to 

another area. It was pretty frustrating for the ODA. 

JM: Is this how 3d Battalion, 3d SFG was employed also? 

MT: No, they all had pieces of ground, and I’m not sure why we didn’t assume 

the same role they did. I think it had a lot to do with the realignment of bases with 

infantry units and things of that nature. A lot of the bases were closed down. I 

think what happened was that there were a certain number of firebases operational 

in RC-East. Some of them belonged to the infantry guys. The majority of them 

belonged to SOF. During that previous rotation before us, the decision was made 

to shut down a certain number of those firebases and at some point in time relocate 

them to other areas but those areas hadn’t been designated yet. So we had an excess 

of ODAs on the ground versus the number of firebases. What we did was when one 

ODA at a firebase was out on a mission and needed reinforcements or just more 

people to help execute a mission, ODAs at Kandahar from my company would get 

sent out to those guys to help augment. That happened a lot. Not really from my 

ODA. My ODA was generally focused on the Deh Chopan area which is a very 

mountainous area and a very bad place in Afghanistan. 

We were sent there originally to confirm or deny some INTEL reports that 

we’d gotten about 400 to 600 active Taliban operating and also staged in that 

area. Because we were at that spring transition period between the snow and good 

weather at the lower altitudes, we had a hard time getting into the area because of 

the amount of water runoff from the higher elevations when the snow was melting 

but once we did get into Deh Chopan, we confirmed that there was a heavy Taliban

presence and that they were holed up there for the winter. It was isolated from any 

US bases. There was generally one good route in and one good route out of the Deh 

Chopan area, at least by vehicle, so it was a good place to be holed up for those 

guys. As we started operating in there, we started stirring them up. 

They planned numerous attacks on us and none of them were ever successful, 

primarily because we never stayed fixed in one place long enough. At this point we 

were 100 percent mounted. We didn’t have tents or anything and we were probably covering 20 to 50 kilometers a day. Logically we would hit population centers 

within Deh Chopan of about 20 to 200 people. Not a whole lot of people there but 

we kept making those rounds into the population centers, building rapport with the 

local leaders. Despite how isolated these people were from the rest of the country 
400

and living in the interior portion of the valley and cut off by these mountains that 

were in excess of 12,000 feet, one thing we found very unique was that the local 

mayor of Deh Chopan knew we were coming two days before we got there.

That first trip up took us about four days because the routes we initially went 

in on were mostly impassable because of the mud. When we talked to him, we 

asked him how he knew we were coming two days out and he said he had a pretty 

good security system that he had organized for the local people. I don’t think he 

had ever taken a hostile role against the insurgents in that area because they were 

outnumbered. It was primarily to protect against local thugs and normal crime. He 

had a hand-drawn map in his office that had all the little regions in Deh Chopan and 

who were the leaders he dealt with at that level. It was amazing for a hand-drawn 

map. It had all the passable routes drawn on it, very realistic for something that a 

couple people just sat down and drew with pencil and paper. It was pretty unique. 

He was able to give us a lot of information about local Taliban operatives and even 

MVT Taliban operatives that had habitually used Deh Chopan as a refuge. 

They would go into provinces within the southern region of Afghanistan to 

operate and when they were out of ammunition or just tired of fighting, they would 

retreat back into Deh Chopan because the mountains and cave complexes in the 

area were so enormous that we’d never find them. It was a hole-up spot for these 

guys. 

JM: Were there any significant operations you conducted in the Deh Chopan 

area? 

MT: Well, I won’t mention the name of the operation because it might be 

classified but we ended up getting into one big operation there where we actually 

engaged about 400 Taliban, not just my ODA. 

We got up there, found the support network in the area for the Taliban and 

realized it was a place for these guys to hole up. The little indicators we were 

picking up and the big INTEL picture we were getting on the ground from the 

locals helped a lot as well. Plus, we also had a dedicated INTEL team with us that 

was able to hear Taliban traffic on radios. 

We put all that information together and realized there were a lot of Taliban

in the area. We sent that information back to the forward operating base, the FOB, 

which was our higher headquarters, and they came to the conclusion that, as soon 

as the weather gets a little better, the Taliban were going to start moving around 

and getting active. The FOB then sent another ODA up into a different part of Deh 

Chopan and they got ambushed on their way there. Lucky for us, no US personnel 

were hit but two vehicles were shot up pretty good.
401

Little incidents like that over the next two or three weeks led to a companysized SF operation with about 70 to 90 ANA and a couple embedded trainers from 

the Marine Corps. The company commander planned a two-part operation. We 

needed to have people on the ground in vehicles to keep generating the radio traffic 

so we could pinpoint Taliban units in the area and my team basically filled that 

role. Once we generated exact locations on the ground, then they started to bring 

other ODAs in by air around Deh Chopan in blocking positions. 

We would move through the valley hoping to push the enemy together and it 

was actually pretty effective. My ODA was never decisively engaged with small 

arms fire, however several ODAs were. They were actually able to ambush Taliban

trying to move out of the area. At this point, we had interrupted their mission cycle. 

They were holed up there with limited supplies of weapons and ammunition 

and this was not a region where they habitually fought in. It was a refuge area for 

them and we interrupted that process. I don’t think they were actually ready to 

engage US forces at that time. We kind of pushed them into it. Like anywhere else 

in the country, they always like to pick and choose the place and time of the fights 

and this did not afford them the chance to establish a plan against us. 

We moved them around the mountains and engaged them every chance we 

had. It was very successful as far as interrupting their daily life. I don’t think we 

killed as many insurgents as we wanted to over the seven to 10 days we were up 

there. It’s hard to say how many we killed because a lot of aircraft were used and 

the aircraft were used to bomb positions high on the mountains that we couldn’t 

get to. 

We could, however, use optics to guide aircraft into the area. In that particular 

operation, one night my ODA was still on the valley floor level about 2,000 feet 

below but we had optics on the side of a mountain around a cave complex that had 

active guards outside. Well, we tried to get an AC-130 Spectre gunship up there 

to engage it. They wouldn’t do it. The aircrew wanted to engage but they did not 

get permission from their higher to go hot on the target, even though there were 

actually five to eight guys outside that cave actively pulling roving guard on the 

entrance, they clearly had weapons, and the company had been in a moving gun 

battle with these guys at this point for three to five days. Anyway, the aircrew 

positively identified the number of people and the number of guys who had guns 

but what they didn’t have was an element of hostile intent from the aircraft side. 

Because we weren’t actively engaged in a gun battle at that point, they weren’t 

cleared hot. 

They were bad guys. Everybody knew they were bad guys but it’s at this 

point when an operation starts to linger on where the rules of engagement don’t 

necessarily change but it gets harder to do certain things, especially when you’re 
402

dealing with aircraft that can do enormous damage and generally destroys whatever 

it attacks. Somebody at some level didn’t want them to engage that target. Not at 

our level, of course but these bad guys were at a point where we couldn’t really get 

to them and if we did try to get to them, they have observation posts out as well and 

they would have been long gone by the time we got there. 

We were actually trying to devise a plan to get to these guys since Spectre 

could not engage but it would have required having Spectre on station for hours 

past his station time and for some reason we couldn’t get that. I think at one point 

he had to go back and refuel. 

We were trying to get him back on station to keep eyes on the guys as we 

maneuvered to them which would have taken hours but I think there were other 

troops in contact somewhere else in country that pulled Spectre away. So we lost 

the momentum on that and we didn’t get those guys. Looking back and putting two 

and two together, that’s probably where Mullah Omar was holed up. It’s a common 

TTP [tactic, technique, and procedure] when there’s a HVT around that he’s in a 

very defendable location with active guards and that’s what we saw. 

The operation finally ended after about 10 days because we’d pounded them 

so much over that week that they just left the area. Like they will anywhere else 

in the country once they lose momentum, they just drifted away in small numbers 

and melted back into the population until someone reorganizes them again. That 

was the biggest operation we did that we actually saw results from. I would say 

that, during this rotation, we did 15 to 20 air assault operations with the ANA and 

the 10th Mountain Division. All those were fruitless. 

We never caught intended people but for every operation we always brought 

back a couple detainees who were associated with some other operation, just named 

people not MVTs or HVTs. A lot of those guys were questioned by the Defense 

Intelligence Agency, the DIA, and released. The ones who weren’t released were 

turned over to the holding facility at Kandahar. They were normally held for one 

to three months and then released. Not a lot of excitement in that department as far 

as my unit was concerned. 

JM: What were some of the tangible effects of your unit not actually owning 

a piece of ground? 

MT: We’d become pretty frustrated and worn out and that’s probably because 

we didn’t own a piece of ground. SF guys are notorious for taking a piece of 

ground, molding it and shaping it into what they want it to be. Every ODA has the 

ability to develop its own INTEL and obviously some do it better than others but 

the INTEL you get from a specific piece of ground that you’re operating on every 

day is the INTEL that matters. By the time you often get INTEL from the higher 

echelons, it’s old and a lot of times you don’t even know how old it is so it’s usually 
403

not actionable. It’s the INTEL you gather on your piece of ground that you can 

action on a lot of times with effects. 

We saw that lots of times on the second rotation. We were that SF detachment 

and we had our own piece of ground on a firebase. During that first rotation, a lot 

of good things happened for other ODAs but as far as mine was concerned, we just 

drove around the countryside trying to develop actionable INTEL which didn’t 

happen a whole lot. 

Then we did a relief in place, the RIP, with 3d Battalion, 3d SFG again. We 

were just a mounted team so we didn’t RIP with another team per se. The guys at 

the firebase did, though. Let me go back a little bit. During that rotation, we were 

actually given a mission to go back into Deh Chopan, probably a month later. The 

command was mulling over the fact that there were a lot of bad guys in the area. 

There was no police network established and no ANA camps, and so we needed to 

put a US/Coalition presence around Deh Chopan. So we were given the mission 

to go up there and find a good piece of ground to build a firebase on. We were on 

the ground for about 10 days and came up with primary and alternate contingency 

sites for firebases, taking into account the environmental effects, force protection 

and accessibility. We had a matrix to go by. 

We came up with three good locations and turned them in. From what I 

understand, the rotation after us actually built a firebase around southern Deh 

Chopan. I’m not sure if they chose one of the locations we found. I don’t think it 

was actually a hard firebase that you would expect to see in the rest of the country 

and I don’t think they had the intent to leave it there and man it throughout the 

progress of the war. 

They took HESCO barriers, made a defensive wall and the guys up there lived 

in tents. I’m not even sure if SF guys manned the base. I want to say infantry guys 

did but I’m not 100 percent sure. I do know that a firebase was built in that region 

based off information that we had put together. The intent was already there to 

build one; they just wanted somebody there with eyes on the ground who knew 

what the area was like to do the initial planning for that location. 

JM: How were you resourced as far as interpreters went? 

MT: We had a local category 1, the CAT-1, interpreter or ‘terp that we had 

used during our whole mission cycle. He wasn’t the only one but he was the main 

one because he spoke several dialects, was fairly educated as far as the Afghans 

were concerned, and he had a fairly decent ability to interpret back. We could 

understand him, his English skills were pretty good, and so he was a good person 

to bring with us. This guy lived with us everywhere we went. He was on my 

commander’s vehicle and he had access to everything we did. 
404

We didn’t do anything that was really classified, though. Most of our operations 

were presence patrol type operations that maybe escalated into something else, 

capturing guys or developing INTEL. I won’t mention the area because this was 

a DIA operation and is probably classified but we were in this area and close to a 

target that was a DIA-vetted target. From information that was given to us on the 

radio, we learned that the guy was in the area we had been in for three to five days. 

His name came back up and they knew he was there in that area but we didn’t have 

any INTEL on the guy. 

We didn’t know what he looked like or where he lived and there was actually 

some confusion about where he lived. Anyway, they flew a helicopter in with a 

DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] source and he could positively identify the guy 

and the compound he lived in and this source actually came with a hand-drawn 

map he had made. Originally they wanted to send just the map out to us but we 

told them that wouldn’t do us any good because most sources we’d used from DIA 

didn’t draw well enough for us to go into an area that we don’t know. DIA and our 

command wanted to take this as far as they could though, so they sent the source 

and the DIA agent out on the bird. The DIA agent gave us a five-minute overview, 

left the source with us, and then he took off. The next day we were going to hit the 

compound, and this was around 2200 or 2300 at night when we actually got the 

guy. 

We talked with the source the rest of the night, came up with a plan, got a 

little bit of sleep, and the next morning we briefed the ANA. Finally, we went to 

the target and captured a couple low-level guys in the compound but the guy we 

actually went to get we had missed by 30 minutes to an hour but no one on the 

target knew we were coming to get him.

So we went back to the site we had stayed at the night before and it was at that 

point that the DIA source told one of our ANA guys who could speak a little bit of 

English that the interpreter we were using was a bad guy. “Well, what do you mean 

by bad guy?” What had happened was that when the detachment commander was 

telling the ANA through the interpreter just what we were going to do and who we 

were going to get, the interpreter was telling them something different. He was 

telling the ANA not to engage targets, not to capture people, and things of that 

nature. I don’t think the interpreter realized that one of the ANA guys could speak 

English, enough to where you could understand him. 

Anyway, we started talking to the DIA-vetted source a little more and he 

basically said, “You need to have that interpreter checked out because he isn’t 

working for you, he’s working for somebody else.” Being that this information 

was coming from a DIA-vetted source who had done countless operations with a 

handler, he obviously had some legitimacy so we took his word for it and didn’t let 

on to the interpreter that we suspected him until we got back. Our normal process 

was to drive back into the front gate of Kandahar and go by what we called the 
405

‘terp shed. That’s where all the local CAT-1 ‘terps would hang out until a US guy 

would come back and get them for an operation. This is where we’d usually drop 

them off. This time, though, we told him we were going to go right back out, that 

we only needed to get fuel, food, and reload vehicles and then we’d be going out 

again. We told him just to stay with us and so we took him back into the SF camp. 

We’d already coordinated with the intelligence officer, the S2, to have this guy 

interrogated and they were going to use Marine interrogators who were on loan to 

our FOB. 

JM: What were the interrogators able to find out? 

MT: They worked him over for about two days and I think it came out that 

this guy was actually working for either Pakistan or Iran. He was a source sent 

in. Although this guy never had access to classified operations or classified 

information (we never really shared any information with the guy until it was 

necessary) having a guy like that embedded in your organization who you’re 

relying on, who’s working for the wrong people, is very detrimental. He’s probably 

reporting operations as they happen. 

We’d use this guy for a week at a time, bring him back and drop him off at the 

‘terp shed. What does he do? He goes right back to the people he’s working for 

and he tells them, “Hey, they’re doing operations up in Deh Chopan.” He knows 

the names of people we’re targeting because you have to tell him so he can tell the 

ANA. He sees way too much. I don’t know a way around that. 

Obviously there are not enough CAT-2 interpreters in country to farm out 

to every maneuver element on the ground. I wish there were because you have 

about a 99 percent chance that those guys are legitimate. The CAT-1 interpreters, 

on the other hand, are only genuinely motivated by one thing and that’s money. 

Most of these guys have only learned English since the US has been operating in 

Afghanistan and they realized that guys who learn English are getting paid good 

money. I think our average ‘terp was making about $1,200 a month which is a lot 

of money, especially for a young Afghan guy 16 to 23 years old who’s never done 

anything but farm dirt before and has never made a decent living at all. It’s a lot of 

money. It’s very easy for these guys to start working both sides of the fence once 

they become embedded with a unit.

What happens is that you find an interpreter you like and can work with and 

you tell him that he’s now your ‘terp. Even when you’re not using him, you keep 

paying him because you don’t want him farming himself out to another US unit. 

You generally keep him on retainer, so you’re paying money every month to keep 

him on standby because it’s hard to find an interpreter you can work with. This 

guy would just hang out, collect a paycheck, and be there when we needed to do 

operations and then come back and report. Well, bad guys see this process. It’s not 
406

covered up. It’s in the open. They see US guys going out, picking up the ‘terps, 

going out to do operations and then bringing them back afterwards. 

They realize these guys have a lot of information, because they’re working 

with guys who’re doing 80 percent of the work in Afghanistan, especially at MVT 

levels. Why not target these guys? They’re motivated by money, so what’s stopping 

these guys once your hands are off them from being approached by someone 

from al-Qaeda or the Taliban and getting paid to tell what they know about the 

Americans? Or maybe they threaten them or their families. 

JM: Do you know what this guy’s motivation was? 

MT: I’m not sure what his motivation was. I know he was sent there but I 

don’t think he was forced into it. I think he was probably trained to do that job. He 

had firsthand access to numerous types of operations, even operations he didn’t 

participate in. He overheard radio conversations of just local chitchat between 

US and Coalition forces about people, places, and times. At some point in time 

we could have easily become a target for a deliberate ambush, a sophisticated, 

deliberate ambush based on information this guy knew. Luckily we never were but 

that’s something people have to think about. 

We’ve gotten so wrapped around the axle, once we’ve been given a mission, 

about getting outside the wire to where our target area is and doing the operation 

that we pick these ‘terps up at the front gate and don’t even think twice about it. 

Guys need to be very selective. There are ways to vet interpreters. If you’re going 

to use a CAT-1 ‘terp, give that guy’s name and all his personal information to the S2 

and have them do an extensive background search. Every major element operating 

in Afghanistan has access to a database of named people. You have a white list, 

a black list, and a gray list. Run his name and see what comes up. Use Englishspeaking ANA guys or partner forces who speak English to help vet those guys. It 

worked out for us that time and obviously it was just too late in the operation. Have 

CAT-2 ‘terps vetted through normal conversations. One thing we did on my last 

rotation was to take tape recorders and tape record everyday conversations when 

the interpreter was on missions in his interpreting role, hand it to a CAT-2 ‘terp on 

the firebase and have him listen to it, see if anything he says raises flags. That’s 

how we caught the first guy. He was telling the ANA to do the exact opposite of 

what we were telling them to do. 

We were very security-conscious, both actively and passively. Things you can 

do actively to vet that guy, you need to do. A lot of people will say that you can’t 

tape record a guy without him knowing about it. Yes, you can. US law doesn’t 

apply everywhere you go. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand. We 

have laws in the US that protect US citizens against illegal wiretaps and things of 

that nature. In most states it’s against the law to tape record conversations unless 

you have consent but that doesn’t apply over there. 
407

We videotape guys in interviews because you don’t have the ability to vet them 

on your own. You don’t speak Pashto or Waziri or whatever is spoken wherever 

you’re operating in. Use the tools you have in your tool bag to help you do that. 

You don’t have the ability to have a CAT-2 ‘terp everywhere you go. However, I 

promise you, if you’re in your firebase there’s always a CAT-2 ‘terp who just does 

normal stuff such as translating documents or whatever. Use those guys. They 

make a lot of money and they’re a good asset to have. On the second rotation, 

we didn’t have any instances where we thought anybody was dirty. There were 

times when we had indications that someone may be dirty but our vetting process 

proved that they weren’t. They just turned out to be uneducated and were not able 

to interpret things that we wanted them to interpret. 

JM: It seems to me that the only surefire way to prevent that is for US forces 

to have enough of their own Pashto and Arabic speakers. How were you guys 

situated as far as language skills? 

MT: When you look at a SOF unit, they all have a language capability. I came 

from 3d SFG and my target language was French. I know 3d SFG has an internal 

language lab that teaches Pashto and Farsi but not to a graduate level although at 

the operating level. The problem you have in SF units is that we have the assets 

there that are good assets and we’ve even intended to do it several times but it’s 

just having the time to do it. What you’re looking at is a six-month rotation on the 

ground but you have that month before and month after for RIP and then getting 

in and out of country. You’re actually on the ground nearly eight months. You’re 

going into a 45-day refit and recovery period followed by a block leave period, 

then you have two to three months of train up on ranges, vehicle training, and all 

that other stuff you need to do to get ready to go back and then you’re back in 

the combat zone again. There’s just no time. My detachment took the level-zero 

Pashto course offered at our language lab. 

We probably learned 50 words but those 50 words helped. With all this 

technology available now there are CDs and interactive language programs on 

the computer and the big Army is starting to get big on that. People need to take 

advantage of that whenever possible. It’s hard for the SF guy to do it though, 

because he’s so time constrained but if you could learn 50 words, you’re going 

to be 50 words better off than you would be if you didn’t know those 50 words. 

Choose the words carefully. Choose the words you’re going to commonly use. 

Make them military-oriented words and you’re going to do okay. Pick up a lot of 

words in country. In the SF world, we work one on one with Afghans more so than 

Americans. At my firebase on this last rotation we had about 120 Afghan security 

forces, the ASF, and a company of ANA that eventually turned into a full battalion. 

This interaction allows us to pick up a lot of Pashto. They may laugh because my 

accent sounds really funny in Pashto but it motivates them to interact with you and 

it’s a great rapport builder. 
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JM: With respect to working with the ANA, the ASF, or just with the population 

in general, what were some of the other rapport building strategies you used that 

you felt were particularly effective? 

MT: There are two areas we can talk about concerning rapport. One is at the 

level with the military which is dealing with your Afghan counterparts or Iraqi 

counterparts. Rapport is a process of becoming someone’s friend. Not his buddy 

but his friend. You build a respecting and trustful relationship but you also need 

to understand that there are boundaries within your relationship. At the SOF level, 

we build rapport with people to get them to do what we want them to do. How do 

you get people to do what you want them to do? Make them your friend. Whether 

they’re your friend or not, when the rotation is over with, you have to make them 

believe they are and you do that by treating people with respect regardless of who 

they are. Just because they’re Afghan doesn’t mean they don’t know what respect 

is.

If you look at Afghan society, their entire life is built around relationships. 

Everything they do is relationship oriented. All the males will get together in their 

villages every Friday for prayer. Americans tend to be standoffish, so you have to 

assume a different role when you go over there. You have to embed yourself with 

them. There’s a term “gone native” but you don’t have to go native and if you do 

you lose sight of what your actual goal is and what you’re trying to accomplish. 

You don’t want to become an Afghan but you want to get embedded with them 

enough that they believe that when they wake up in the morning, you’re going to 

be there. That relationship has to be built upon every day. 

They’re going to look at everything you do and how you do everything. They 

already had a preconceived notion of what Americans were like before we even 

set foot in Afghanistan in 2001. Now that they’ve worked with us for the last five 

years, they know what America is about and they’ve seen a lot of us. 

They know there are different attitudes and quirks that Americans have and 

they realize now that Americans are people too. The primary thing you can do to 

build a rapport is to partner yourself with that person you want to build the rapport 

with. You want to act as much like them as you can while still maintaining your 

perspective as an American. 

They hold Americans in very high regard so when you do something, especially 

if it’s contradictory to what you’re telling them to do then they’re going to notice 

it. They may not say anything to you but now you’ve built a mental block in that 

person’s mind who you’re trying to partner with every day. For example, we had a 

military role with the ANA guys and my team leader, a captain, would partner with 

the Afghan officers. He would sit down and have chai with these guys. He would 

train these guys. He actually showed genuine interest in these guys and very good 
409

rapport building. I would take the senior noncommissioned officers, the NCOs, in 

the unit and build rapport with those guys. I would show them how to do my job 

and they’d show me how to do theirs. I’d show them how to make their job better 

and it wasn’t done in an authoritarian style. 

They don’t want to feel like they are inefficient, especially the senior leadership 

and the officers in the military. They believe that knowledge is power and if you 

take knowledge away from them, they feel like they have no power. You have to 

understand that to effectively build culture with the Afghans or the Arabs you have 

in Iraq, you have to understand their culture as much as you can. You’re not going 

to be able to understand it all but if you understand enough, when your boots hit 

the ground with the guys you’re going to be working with, you’re going to make 

friends. You’re going to make good friends.

When you work with these guys, you need to show them every day that you 

care. If you make a promise, keep that promise. Show him you’re not just concerned 

about him but how he does his job as well. Give him the tools to work with. If he 

screws up, don’t go bashing him on the head and telling him he’s all screwed up 

but show him the right way to do things. Always give this guy a way out. Never 

make him feel like he’s a failure because if he feels like he’s a failure, it’s not going 

to work out for you because now he’s going to be embarrassed to deal with you 

every day. He’s going to feel like he’s let you down. It’s the reverse in our military. 

We talk about mentorship in our military but our mentorship is crushing 

somebody every time they do something wrong. Well, that approach doesn’t equate 

over to the other side when you’re dealing with Afghans or Iraqis. They don’t live 

their lives that way and when they have lived their lives that way, it’s been under 

an extreme regime like the Taliban or Saddam Hussein and they don’t want a part 

of that. Now they’re free nations. They want to operate like free nations. 

They want to be free thinkers and a lot of these guys are free thinkers if they’re 

given the ability to do so. Another good way to build rapport is to not segregate 

you from your partner force. That’s probably the worst thing you could do. There’s 

an article out there titled “A Camp Divided” about the military training team, the 

MiTT, role the big Army has in Iraq and it’s a prime example of how not to build 

rapport.

Our firebase was probably 300 meters by 150 meters, very small. In that space 

we had 400 ANA, 120 ASF, 10 SF guys, a couple CAT-2 ‘terps, six to eight Marines, and an artillery battery. It was pretty crowded for a firebase and living like 

that forces you to live with your counterparts every day. You don’t have to go 

native and live your life by their code. That’s not what they expect you to do but 

what you don’t want to do is have your side of the camp, where you’re living like 

kings and be separated by a wall from the rest of the camp where they’re over there 
410

living like scum which Americans are famous for. That’s one thing the SOF side of 

the Army has figured out and known for a long time. It’s hard living but that builds 

a relationship between you and the guys you’re going to combat with every day. 

It fosters an environment that allows these guys to believe that you’re as much a 

part of their unit as you can be as a US soldier and that’s what they want. There are 

going to be counterparts who don’t like you. That’s just human nature but if you 

look at the whole scale of things, you’ll have guys who are more devoted to you 

than even your own soldiers.

I’ve heard this a lot at a couple conferences I’ve been to recently about being 

SF advisors and trying to give guys advice on how to be advisors. The biggest 

question that comes up is, “If I’m at a FOB with 450 Iraqis and there are 10 of 

us, how do we effectively perform the force protection role?” Obviously they’re 

looking at it in a linear way. “I have 10 guys. I don’t have an infantry platoon 

for security. How do I protect myself?” Well, you do this through your building 

relationships. The rapport you build with your counterpart is your force protection. 

That’s an uncomfortable answer for the big Army because they’ve never had to 

operate like that but now they’re getting forced into that role and they don’t have 

any tools to work with or any experiences to draw from. SOF has now become the 

big learning tool. Every place I’ve been in the last couple months, I’ve heard, “This 

is the way SOF does it.” It’s not like we’re special people. I don’t think we are. I’ve 

been in SF for almost 20 years now and I don’t think we’re special in the aspect of 

how we do things. I think we’re special in how we’re perceived by the big Army. 

Throughout an SF guy’s career he’s been taught how to work on the small element 

level. That’s his job. Big Army doesn’t do that. 

We go into the mountains of Afghanistan with just eight or so SF guys. 

Sometimes I’ll have two SF guys out with 50 ANA or 20 ASF in some of the worst 

parts of Afghanistan that US soldiers could go and they’d be perfectly fine. That 

relationship you build and the rapport building process that you have to engage 

in every day is your force protection. On the ground in Afghanistan during that 

second rotation, if one of my guys would have gotten shot it would have simply 

been a freak of nature. When gun battles ensued or the rockets were flying, my 

guys were surrounded by Afghans. It’s considered an insult for you to get killed.

Remember, building rapport is a two-way street. While you’re building a 

rapport with them, they’re trying to do the same with you. You have to be aware 

of that because that will obviously strengthen your friendships and your rapport 

building process. Once you establish that, you don’t have anything to worry about. 

There’s always the chance for someone to do something stupid such as a suicide 

bombing attempt or something similar but there’s very little defense for something 

like that. You just have to watch for the indicators. Chances are, though, if you 

have a good relationship and a good rapport that you build on every day with your 
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partner unit, anything that may become questionable as far as force protection will 

become answered on the host nation side usually before it even becomes noticeable 

to you. 

They don’t want anything like that to happen. They understand the friendship 

and rapport process too, probably more so than the Americans because they are a 

rapport based society. They don’t understand rapport as we do but they do it every 

day. Their whole life is about making friendships, trust and dedication. 

They’re professionals at what you’re trying to learn. If you build a strong relationship with your partner unit, you don’t have to worry about force protection. 

They’ll protect you. 

JM: What about the tactical abilities of the ANA? What were your experiences 

with that? 

MT: That’s a hot topic. What you have to do is stand back and think about who 

they are. As US guys, we spend most of our careers training on how to do a task. For 

me this task is light infantry stuff, SF type tasks, and infantry guys will get tasked 

to do things. They spend their whole careers learning how to be infantry soldiers, 

so they can say they’re proficient at it. What they don’t understand, though, is that 

the guy they’re getting embedded with is right off the street most of the time. He’s 

either motivated by money or patriotism or both. He doesn’t have any training. 

There is no basic training, as we know it. So they have to be responsible for these 

guys’ training. You can’t expect to see Afghans running around doing things like 

infantry squads in the US Army because it’s just not going to happen. They’re not 

at that point yet. There was a battalion commander who talked to a team one time 

and he said, “Let’s not make these guys American soldiers. That’s not our job. 

We’re trying to train them to be soldiers. We’re trying to train soldiers who 

don’t have any training at all.” If you could train them up to a 1940s or 1950s 

military, isn’t that good enough? Some people will say, “No, that’s not good enough. 

That wouldn’t work today.” Well, I don’t agree. Look at the level of training for 

al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It’s not as sophisticated as ours. It’s better to train them 

to a level where they can execute properly and do things right than trying to train 

them beyond their abilities, to a level where they can’t execute at all. So if you 

look at it like that and you see them out doing training and you see them out doing 

operations, they’re really not that bad. At least they all have their guns, the right 

gear, and the right mentality. 

JM: On your second rotation you were involved in actually training Afghans, 

is that correct? 

MT: Yes, on our second rotation, a key task for us was to train these guys to a 

suitable level. What exactly was that level? I don’t know but we just kept training 
412

them as well as we could and we’d set the standard where it needs to be. When 

we got there, these guys could operate. Were they good? No, were they good to 

an Afghan standard? For soldiers who really didn’t know anything about being 

a professional soldier, yeah, they weren’t too bad. If you look at it through that 

prism, it gives you creative ways to make them better. First of all, you have to 

understand how they do things as a military. 

They don’t have a professional NCO corps. Who does 90 percent or more of 

the training in the US Army is the NCOs. NCOs are trained and professional and 

that’s what they train their soldiers to be. It doesn’t happen in those armies. 

They have officers. You have a company commander and he’s the boss. He 

tells people what to do. He’s responsible for training and all the admin functions 

and everything. You say, “He’s an officer and a company commander. He should 

be responsible for those things.” Well, I agree but responsibility and the act of 

doing are two different things. In our Army, company commanders are responsible 

for the same things but they task different things down to lower levels of authority. 

Platoon leaders get tasked. Platoon sergeants get tasked. Platoon sergeants task 

squad leaders. Squad leaders task team leaders. You have a multi-echelon process 

there to ensure our soldiers are trained to standard. 

We have doctrine, we base our training off that, and our doctrine says that 

an infantry squad or an SF detachment should be trained to do certain things at 

a certain level of proficiency, and we train to that proficiency. The ANA doesn’t 

have doctrine like that. It will probably be years down the road until they have 

doctrine. The only doctrine they’ve ever been introduced to is what we’ve handed 

them through our open sources such as things like the Ranger Handbook, Infantry, 

FM 7–8, or FM 7–10 but all those books are written in English. They can’t read 

them. Some SF guys have gone as far as having Ranger Handbooks interpreted 

into Pashto and having copies printed off to give to key leaders of their partner 

units. That’s an awesome idea. Another great idea is to have interpreters translate 

the classes you want to formally give. Don’t just go into a unit, evaluate them as 

screwed up and say, “I can’t believe my leadership is making me go to war with 

these damn people!” People with that attitude will never make that unit any better. 

What US soldiers don’t understand but what SOF does understand, is that what 

you have is all you have to work with and so you can either leave it like it is or you 

can make it as good as you can for your eight months. My personality is that if you 

give me a piece of crap, I’m going to take all the time I can dedicate to fixing that 

piece of crap and I’m going to make it into something useful. If nothing else, I’m 

going to make it better than it was when I found it, at least for my own protection. 

You’re going to combat with these guys almost every day. There’s no downtime 

on the SOF side. 
413

We don’t do five days of operations and then 15 days in the firebase. In this 

last rotation of 280 days or more on the ground, we spent all but 23 days outside 

the firebase doing operations. At the same time, you have to train your Afghan 

counterparts. You didn’t have time for team training because your team training 

time was used to train the Afghans. All the other administrative functions of 

running a firebase must be maintained as well and you had 10 guys to do that with. 

You were burnt. You had 18 or 23 hours in your days sometimes and there could 

be two or three days go by when guys wouldn’t get any sleep but you can’t lose 

focus on what you’re doing. Do that initial assessment of where the ANA are and 

know that unless they’ve done two or three rotations with a good MiTT team, with 

an SF detachment or with embedded trainers, they’re not going to be trained. So 

when you get over there, you should have already convinced yourself that you’re 

walking into a bowl of soup and you need to be determined to make something 

solid out of that bowl of soup before you leave. If you go in with that attitude, you 

will leave a better trained unit. 

JM: How did you approach the training and development of Afghan NCOs? 

MT: The only way you’re going to make these guys better is by making them 

run the training themselves and what we did was pull out NCOs. We would talk 

to the officers and show them that there were things they just couldn’t do without 

the help of their NCOs. They simply couldn’t ensure that every soldier under their 

personal command was effectively trained. They just couldn’t do it. They can’t be 

there for every training event. So we laid out the process and we used ourselves as 

an example. 

We convinced the officers that this was the best way to do business. We 

showed them what they were responsible for but then we showed them what they 

actually were supposed to do every day. There were certain things that should be 

delegated down to a lower authority. Their job as the company commander was 

just to oversee it all, make sure it meets their intent. These foreign officers don’t 

always understand that and so they had to be trained.

I took the senior NCOs, the first sergeant and platoon sergeants, and showed 

them how to build an NCO corps and how to do business. This was just NCO 

professional development stuff. It forced them to become trained at the tasks, and 

it also forced them to become the trainers and evaluators of the task. My team guys 

would then work with the squad leaders, team leaders, and the soldiers at the squad 

level. I would say that within two months on this last rotation that we had the ANA 

squads and ASF squads out there doing squad and platoon-level operations under 

their own control. The squads and platoons were very effective at it and really knew 

the big pieces of doing it but they just didn’t know how to bring it all together. You 

can’t operate a squad or platoon without all those levels of leadership. Platoon 
414

leaders, platoon sergeants, and squad leaders all need to do what they’re supposed 

to do because their soldiers are just like our soldiers. They’ll walk around with 

their heads down and weapons slung and all those things unless someone forces 

them not to. You had to start imposing some professionalism on their army but the 

key was to use yourself as the model. 

We’re the perfect model. We see our organization as being screwed up a lot of 

times but compared to them we’re the perfect training model. Just make sure when 

you’re out there in front of these guys that you’re doing it right. If you’re showing 

them how to do a task, make sure you’re showing them how to do it right. 

JM: You can’t have any, “Do as I say, not as I do.” 

MT: Exactly, that’s what they’re used to. To get them out of that, you have 

to start forcing them to do it the way you want them to which means you have to 

start holding yourself to a higher standard as well. A lot of times to demonstrate 

a squad attack, we’d take my detachment and we would do the squad attack in a 

walk method so they understood all the moving parts. We would rehearse it also to 

make sure we were doing it right because there are a hundred ways to do anything. 

We just made sure we did it the exact way the guy who was teaching the class 

was going to teach it. They saw us, we were the model for it, and they gained 

confidence in themselves and saw that they could do it as well. They finally were 

able to understand what their roles were as squad leaders and soldiers in the 

organization because they saw us perform these roles and it made things very clear 

to them. That’s what they want. 

They want someone to show them because they’re visual learners. Most 

Americans have many different learning styles. We learn from reading books, we 

learn from watching TV, a presentation, or we’re hands-on. The Afghans are visual/

hands-on learners. If you can understand this and give them all the information you 

want them to absorb in this training manner, they’ll absorb it but you can’t expect 

to go up to an Iraqi or an Afghan and show them a 50-slide PowerPoint slideshow 

on how to do a squad attack. You may as well just put them all in bathing suits and 

tell them to go jump in a ditch. They’d get more from that. 

They don’t have that type of technology in their country, so don’t force 

technology that’s 500 years ahead of where they are. Pencil and paper and drawing 

in the dirt, is something they relate to because that’s how they do business every 

day. They understand that and they can learn from that. 

JM: You were in RC-East during your second rotation? 

MT: Yes, I was at Firebase Bermel. 

JM: This was in Paktika Province? 

MT: Yes. 
415

JM: Obviously this area was very close to the Pakistani border. Were there any 

different or more intense security threats you had to deal with? Did the nature of 

the enemy change at all? 

MT: I’ll give you a little history on Firebase Bermel. It was established just a 

few months before we got there but there was a big gap between Shkin and Lwara, 

probably about an 80-kilometer gap. It doesn’t sound like much but when you’re 

talking about a porous border region, that’s a big area for insurgents to infiltrate 

through and have ratlines and things of that nature.

The bazaar in the town of Bermel was one of the most notorious arms 

trafficking areas, smuggling weapons from across the border. To stop that process, 

what do you do? In the past, guys from Shkin went up there to the bazaar but it’s 

still a 15-kilometer drive. By the time they leave the firebase, all the bad guys 

have time to get the weapons out of there. You can’t sneak up on anybody in 

Afghanistan. Don’t ever think you can. Well, in order to keep that from going on 

in that area, you have to permanently base something in there, something that’s 

going to prevent them from conducting business as usual, so you build a firebase. 

The 1-508 Infantry started it but somehow during the transition it got turned over 

to SOF and my detachment actually finished the firebase while we were there. 

We actually took over the firebase when it was about half-completed from 

where it stands today. By virtue of putting US and Afghan forces there, you deny 

that piece of terrain to insurgents but mostly smugglers. You clean the area up just 

by putting US forces there. You don’t get rid of the problem but you just move it 

somewhere else or make it more difficult for them to do business as usual.

Within our battlespace, around 15 kilometers around the firebase and actually 

it was a lot bigger than that, there was Mangretay Valley and Malaksha which are 

two major mountain valleys that lead into Pakistan. They were high avenues of 

approach for anyone coming out of Pakistan. The next one was further south of 

us and the border control point at Shkin. Those two valleys were notorious safe 

havens for anti-Coalition militia, the ACM, which is what I guess they’re calling 

them now. It changes about every rotation. Anyway, we referred to Mangretay as 

Ambush Valley because I don’t think there has ever been a successful US passage 

through there that didn’t result in a gunfight or an ambush. It’s a nasty area. It’s 

a very passable valley with a defined road easily traveled by large and small 

vehicles. It’s more like an interstate going through the mountains but you have 

extreme high ground on either side of the valley. From the beginning at the western 

end of Mangretay Valley to the eastern side which dumped out into Pakistan, was 

nothing but ambush positions from one end to the other. Lots of people have died 

in Mangretay, lots of US forces, SF, infantry, and some of the other task forces such 

as ANA guys. It’s just a bad place. 
416

We focused on Mangretay for two reasons. One was that I personally know 

guys who were shot there and guys who were killed. The second reason was 

that it’s a major passageway from Afghanistan to Pakistan and it has literally 

gone unchecked for five years now. So we wanted to know how we could affect 

Mangretay. When you look at a campaign in COIN [counterinsurgency] terms, 

you know that bad guys have to survive by how they live by the population. It’s 

easy to drop in and out of Pakistan but once you get into Afghanistan you have 

to have a support network if you’re planning on staying for any period for time. 

The people who lived in Mangretay were the support network for the Taliban, 

the ACMs and they were forced to do so. They would do it because they would 

be killed or harassed if they didn’t. The bad guys owned Mangretay Valley from 

the Pakistani border well into where it dropped out into the Bermel Valley and the 

large population center. 

JM: Was this al-Qaeda as well? 

MT: I don’t think we ever had any defined al-Qaeda operatives but there was a 

lot of foreign fighter influence which are usually sent there by al-Qaeda. 

We knew we weren’t going to take Mangretay in eight months but we knew we 

could at least make a start by taking the population away from the Taliban. How 

do you do that? You increase security. You go in and you treat them like people. In 

the past, these people haven’t been treated well by anybody. US forces have treated 

them badly because it’s been a Taliban safe haven. 

They go in there and every time they go into Mangretay they’re kicking down 

doors and ripping people’s stores apart looking for bad guys and weapons. Of 

course they find them. You can’t go into any village in Afghanistan without finding 

weapons. It’s a part of their culture. It doesn’t give them the right to hold rocketpropelled grenades or bulk explosives but they all have small arms and AKs. 

JM: Was this regular Army that was going in there kicking down doors and 

such? 

MT: For years it’s been a little bit of both, Regular Army and the SOF side. 

I don’t think they ever went in there with the intention to undermine the civilian 

population but there were never US forces based in the vicinity of Mangretay. 

They always had to drive long distances to get there so they were only sent there 

for specific reasons. So when the troops get there, they’re in a purely combat mode. 

They’re there to find insurgents and they know the population supports the 

insurgency because that’s how they survive. When they go there, they’re going 

through specific compounds, they start generating ground intelligence on what’s 

going on, and people are pointing fingers in every which direction. Well, these 

soldiers are moving all over the little populated villages around Mangretay and 
417

they’re making enemies every time they do that. I think searching compounds is 

successful if you recover something that supports the reason you’re there but 90 

percent of the time that’s not the case.

Success is not going to an Afghan compound and pulling out an AK because 

everybody in the country has an AK. Success is finding ACM documentation, plans 

of operations, operative lists, bulk explosives, and IED-making components. Those 

are successes. When you take things like that from a compound and the people see 

you do it, you really haven’t destroyed rapport. You’ve actually reinforced that 

there really were some bad guys there. 

JM: Can you comment as well on building rapport that occurs with the local 

populace? 

MT: Yes, and that’s part two of the building rapport, not only building rapport 

with the military guys you work with every day but the civilian population as well. 

If the civilian population doesn’t have any faith or trust in you, they’re not going to 

help you. What the civilian population in Afghanistan wants is someone to provide 

them security. They don’t want cars and things like that. 

They’re not a want-based society but the few things they do want include 

personal security. If you provide them security, it gives them the opportunity to live 

better in their culture which is a relationship based culture. That’s all they want. 

Most of the people in Afghanistan don’t like the idea of helping the insurgents 

but what are their alternatives? They’re affected by insurgents every day but most 

places in Afghanistan only get affected by US or Coalition forces at sparse periods 

of time. 

They know you’re coming in with great combat power and that you’ll run the 

Taliban out of the area but they know you’re only going to be there for a day or a 

week and as soon as you leave, the bad guys are going to come back. Lots of times, 

they’ll be even worse than before because they’ll want to know what people told 

the Americans. So you have to have permanent security in every region you want 

to affect. Putting Bermel where it was located probably had more effects than most 

people realize. I think they initially planned Bermel as a safety net for the Bermel 

bazaar, for the big part of the town, but they didn’t realize how much it was going 

to affect the outlying areas. 

We went to Mangretay and we lived there. We did our initial intelligence 

preparation of the battlefield, the IPB, when we got there and talked to the ASF 

and ANA guys who had worked in the area for years. We asked them, “If you lived 

here, where would you want to start operating? Where do you see the bad guys?” 

They don’t know how to read maps but they’ll tell you, “They’re at this mountain, 

this mountain, and this mountain.” Well, you start to connect all the dots and you 

can see this is not just one or two guys running around, it’s a whole network of 

operatives and it’s engulfed this whole village. 
418

We needed to stop abusing the people and start to make friends with them, so 

we started to interact with them on a daily basis on some level and it was easy to 

find out what they wanted or needed because they would tell us. What they wanted 

was someone to just keep a permanent security presence in the area. 

They didn’t want a security post in their village. They just wanted a presence 

that came through there more that once or twice every two or three months. That’s 

what they had before. You’re doing it for them but you’re doing it to deny the 

terrain which is the people, to the ACM. When you start running constant security 

patrols through the area, whether you live there or not, guess what? You disrupt 

what they do every day. Now, the insurgents don’t have a security blanket they can 

count on anymore so they have to move. They have to either move deeper into the 

mountains or find another isolated area that’s not been influenced by Coalition or 

US security and set up shop again. 

We did search compounds. You can’t go into any village without searching 

compounds but there’s a way to do it. You don’t just go up to it and surround the 

damn thing with big guns, start kicking down doors, and drag people around by 

their hair. That’s not the way it’s done. What you don’t know at that point before 

you search the compound is whether or not there are really any bad guys there. Do 

they really have illegal weapons or contraband that they’re not supposed to have? 

That’s the premise for your search. People say, “That is soft knocking stuff and 

we’re Americans so why should we be soft knocking? That’s not what we were 

trained to do.” You’re right. We’re not trained to do that. That’s one of those things 

you have to learn, especially now when the primary mission should be COIN 

instead of that kinetic and forceful combat role. That was great in the initial stages 

of Afghanistan and Iraq but we’ve migrated beyond that. 

We’re dealing with small numbers of people but large numbers of population 

and how you make or break those guys determines the outcome of your mission 

on the ground. So we’d go up and just knock on the door. A lot of times, when you 

pull up to a compound with gun trucks and armed soldiers, the male of the house 

is going to come out. Go up and engage in conversation with him. Talk to him for 

five or so. Whatever’s going on in that compound isn’t going anywhere. You’ve 

got it surrounded. If there are bad guys in there, yeah, you’re giving them time to 

prepare but that doesn’t necessarily give you the upper or lower hand in the deal. 

You made rapport with that guy and if anything else happens beyond that point as 

you’re searching that compound, it’s now on him. Ask him specific questions. Get 

to know his name and a little bit about him and who he is. He may be a guy who 

has lived in that village for 50 years. He may be the guy everybody comes to. He 

may be a village elder. He may be a mullah. You don’t know until you talk to him. 

Build a little friendship with him and then tell him what you’re going to do and 

why you’re there. Ask him whether they’re holding illegal weapons or insurgents 
419

or whatever the case may be. Of course he’ll tell you they’re not but what you 

perceive as being illegal is not necessarily illegal to them. 

They never had any rule of law in that country. It’s never been against the law 

to have an RPG in that country. It’s never been against the law to have a rocket 

they dug up or found on the side of a mountain or to have an IED they dug up on 

the road. To them it’s not illegal because they’ve never had any rule of law. So you 

need to ask the right questions. 

They’ll tell you right off the bat that there’s nothing illegal going on, so you 

need to ask them specifics. “Do you have any RPGs? Do you have any land mines?” 

Land mines cover a big area, basically anything with explosives. You say land 

mines and they’ll generally offer those up. Whatever his answer is, just tell him 

you’re still going to search the compound and, if you find anything, you’re going 

to come back and deal with him because he lied to you. Now you start relating that 

particular search and why you’re there to their culture. 

They don’t like to be made into liars and they don’t like being lied to. So now 

you’re appealing to his culture. I can remember numerous times on the ground 

when we approached it like that and the guy would say he didn’t want to be known 

as a liar and so he gave up what was being hidden in the village. 

Then you keep asking questions. “Who else is in the compound?” Make him 

name the people in the compound. “How old are the males? Why are they here? 

Are they related to you?” Males don’t normally come into the compound unless 

they’re part of the immediate family or unless they’re really good friends. Get the 

whole picture before you go in. Then when you’re going through the compound, 

have him come with you. 

JM: Were you also doing these sorts of things jointly with Afghan forces? 

MT: Yes. Another technique we used was to take the American face off the 

Afghan population. It’s impossible to do to a full extent but when you’re dealing 

directly with the population, the population needs to see you and your partner force 

side by side. When you go into a compound, have the ANA go in with you. I’m 

not saying you don’t have to go in but at some point you’ll have to but don’t make 

it look like it’s a US-led operation. Some people say the Afghans aren’t capable 

of doing it. Well, they’re only not capable of doing it because you haven’t trained 

them to do that task competently. You have to put restraints on them too because 

they’ll kick doors and rip things off the walls and slap people around too, so you 

have to train them not to do that. Remember, you need to relate to their culture. 

This is all they’ve known. This is how they’ve done business their whole life. 

Every time they’ve dealt with the military or police in their country, that’s what’s 

happened to them. 
420

They’ve been jerked around and slapped around, so they perceive it as just 

the normal thing to do. You give them some cultural awareness training and some 

sensitivity training. No one likes that word “sensitivity” but they need a little bit 

of that too and you need to do it because you’re working with these guys every 

day and they can screw up the rapport for you as badly as you can do it yourself. 

Even though they’re Afghans, the population knows why they’re there and they 

realize we’re there as a control measure. Have them do it the right way. Give 

that head guy the ability to go in, be escorted by Afghan soldiers, and get all the 

females and children and put them outside the compound in a safe area if you 

suspect that bullets will be fired. It depends on the tension of the situation. Have 

the Afghans do the search. Don’t let them tear things up, and sometimes it’s hard 

not to. In Afghanistan, I’ve never been to a compound that didn’t have some sort 

of locked chest or box and they never seemed to have the key for it. Give them an 

opportunity to get the key but let them know you’re getting into it even if you have 

to break the lock off. There’s a good possibility you’re going to force the guy to 

come up with the key. He probably doesn’t have anything in there but if he does 

it’s probably personal in nature so let him open it up. Let the Afghans sort through 

that stuff. You may come across a Koran or religious scrolls or something like 

that and that doesn’t mean anything to me or you but to them it’s very sacred. It’s 

best to let those guys go throughout the process, then, if anything is destroyed or 

damaged, talk to the guy personally and come up with a means to make him happy. 

Just because you tear a door off the hinges by accident doesn’t mean you have to 

build him a brand new compound. Find out what the going rate is to rebuild a door 

in Afghanistan and give him the money on the spot. It keeps him happy. You don’t 

look like an aggressor anymore. You look like a professional person. You’ve also 

just given the ANA some legitimacy as well. Historically, the people are used to 

seeing Afghan soldiers come through the villages and just tear things up and walk 

away and they wouldn’t pay for it. 

They don’t have the money to pay for it anyway. We’re the bill payers over 

there. So if they tear something up we need to pay for it. It’s all about building 

rapport. The next time that guy sees you, he’s not afraid of you anymore, “Yes, the 

soldiers came in and searched my compound but they treated me and my family 

well. They tore my door up but they fixed it. These are not bad people.” No one has 

ever done anything good for an Afghan, especially on the Afghan side. So that’s 

how you build friendship over there. 

JM: You mentioned the interpreter situation. Were there any other resources, 

personnel or assets you felt were lacking? Did you have enough money? Were 

there any equipment issues you had over there? 

MT: On the SOF side I think we were pretty much covered. Every asset we 

were offered we took. We didn’t turn anything down. At my firebase during our 
421

second rotation, we had a 105 howitzer battery under our control, the SOT-A guys 

who are your intercept guys, we had three CAT-2 interpreters, a civil affairs and 

psychological operations detachments, and a radar detachment. I was probably 

better off than any other detachment I know. A lot of the SF guys didn’t want to 

take in all these people because of space and logistics requirements but I felt these 

guys were just as much a part of our mission as the Afghans were. 

We just didn’t put these guys up and make them Class I consumers. We used 

these guys every day. Our CA guys were actively engaged every day. When you 

have all these other entities out there that you can bring into your mission, they can 

directly support every operation you do.

Going back to the rapport building process with the civilians, we had a CA 

detachment at our firebase. They worked for my detachment commander and me. 

They did whatever we told them to do within their limitations. What’s a good 

way to build rapport within a society? Give them medical treatment. Send them 

into Mangretay and Malaksha and we don’t send a combat patrol up there with 

them but escort them with GMVs and guns and looking like we’re ready to kill 

somebody because you want people to show up. You send them up there in their 

up-armored Humvees but they don’t look like the combat guys. The locals as well 

as the bad guys can tell the difference.

Send two squads of ANA with them for security, have them set up in the middle 

of the town, get all the local leaders together, and tell them why you’re there. Tell 

them to bring their children and if we can treat them, we’ll treat them. I promise 

you that you’ll make instant friends. Ninety percent of the people you’ll treat are 

kids. Many kids at some point in time may die from simple bacterial infections that 

they can’t control in the isolated nether regions of Afghanistan but a little shot of 

penicillin or another type of antibiotic is going to save this kid’s life. 

We treated tons of kids with teeth infections which at some point probably 

would have become life threatening. To them you’ve become a miracle worker 

now. It takes a couple hundred US dollars in medical supplies and eight or 12 hours 

of your time once a week or once a month, whatever you can do. Those are rapport 

builders. You talk about key terrain and America is all about taking terrain but in 

today’s world, especially in Afghanistan, that population is the terrain because the 

bad guys can’t operate without them. So every good gesture you do towards the 

population, you win them over a little more to the Coalition side and you take them 

away from the bad guys. 

JM: What was the nature of the PSYOP contributions? 

MT: The PSYOP guys were in there for all the governing relations. The 

governor had a pretty good plan for the election process, how the voting polls 

would work, and getting ballots to different areas which was already embedded 
422

in the higher levels of US planning as far as creating legitimate voting stations 

and ballot delivery and things of that nature. What they didn’t have was a means 

of disseminating that information effectively. So we used our PSYOP guys to 

generate messages to lead up to the government elections. 

We printed up documents to show where the female polls and the male polls were 

going to be in all these different areas. We carried them with us on our operations 

and we’d go into the villages, stop and have the PSYOP guys broadcast over the 

loudspeakers. This is kind of a way to prep people to vote. In Bermel alone, I think 

we had like 18,000 people show up to vote and people were expecting maybe 900. 

I think a lot of that was due to the CA stuff that had been going on in the smaller 

towns and villages, especially in the areas that had been overwhelmingly occupied 

by bad guys. The PSYOP campaign that was run locally from our firebase focused 

on getting people out there to vote. The biggest problem they had in getting people 

to show up to vote was security. 

They didn’t want a military presence for security. What are you supposed to 

do? They don’t have local police. So what we did at the detachment level was to 

devise a plan. Bermel was good because it was right there about 600 meters out 

the front gate of the firebase so we just sent a couple ANA down there as eyes on 

the ground. This is Margay and it’s four or five times the size of Bermel and is 20 

kilometers from the firebase so it’s fairly isolated. There were numerous ACM 

activity routes into the area and it had been targeted by the bad guys or at least the 

local leaders anyway. 

They had two male and two female polling stations there because a lot of 

people came up from throughout the mountain regions there to that central place to 

vote. The message came out prior to the elections that they didn’t want any GMVs 

sitting out front of polling stations. We agreed with them, because it wouldn’t 

give the appearance of a legitimate election. An Afghan election should have an 

Afghan face on it 100 percent. So my detachment had to try and figure out how to 

provide security for Margay and, at the same time, keep ourselves out of the voting 

situation. What we decided to do was surround Margay. 

We took an ANA unit up two kilometers outside of Margay but on a route 

where if something was to go on inside the town they could react to it. We put one 

GMV up here with about 15 or 20 ANA and I had my vehicle down here which was 

like two kilometers south of Margay with about 15 or 20 ASF. We just sat there. 

We emplaced local police that we had trained and equipped into the town proper 

to provide that immediate local security at the polling station and we gave them 

integrated communications, the ICOM, radios. 

They couldn’t talk to us but they could talk to our ANA or ASF counterparts, so 

if anything went wrong we were literally five minutes away. Essentially since the 
423

town was here but everything around it was open, you had it blocked off. President 

Hamid Karzai put it out about five days before the election that no vehicles would 

come within a thousand meters of a polling station but it didn’t say anything about 

tractors. Well, a lot of people have tractors in Afghanistan. It’s the primary means 

of transportation in some areas. What we did was sit up here to be able to cover the 

major ingress and egress routes and we blocked traffic. 

We stopped vehicles, and not everyone got the word. They don’t have a public 

broadcast system. Every vehicle we stopped, we searched and we didn’t find any 

bad guys. One of the reasons we decided to place ourselves two kilometers out was 

because if anything was to happen, it probably was going to happen against a US or 

Coalition force. So if you’re in the town, then you directly involve the population. 

We were easy targets but we would be the target instead of the polling stations. 

While we were at there, we were shot at by small arms fire and I think six rockets. 

One of them landed about 50 meters from my vehicle. We would just move another 

300 meters to mess up their targeting. It throws their Kentucky windage off. They 

don’t have very good targeting systems anyway. Most of the people outside the 

village never knew what went on out here. People in that country hear explosions 

every day and unless it’s in close proximity, they don’t pay it any attention. 

We were out here being the target while people were coming into the village 

and voting. Within Bermel Valley there were 12 polling stations and some 18,000 

people voted. That’s astronomical. It means 18,000 people walked in for miles and 

miles to vote because they couldn’t drive. 

JM: With respect to this second deployment, what do you look back on as 

major accomplishments? Obviously the elections you just discussed but were there 

any significant operations you conducted, for instance? 

MT: We really didn’t do any major operations. Our focus was denying the 

insurgency a place to work and every mission we did focused on that. 

We needed to take back key terrain which was the population and put an Afghan 

face on everything that went on. In order to accomplish both of those, you have 

to have some kinetic ability. You still have to be able to operate in kinetic mode. 

When we were engaged in populated areas we always had a friendly approach 

to everything but once we got up into the mountains of Afghanistan where we 

weren’t engaged with the civilian population, that terrain was primarily used by 

woodcutters, sheepherders, or Taliban. There was very little to no civil influence 

and once we got up there, we were full kinetic. That had to be done to deny them 

the influence they wield from those safe havens in the mountains. This was key 

terrain to them because they could hold influence over the population by looming 

over them from mountains above their village. 
424

They don’t have the population center anymore but they’re that looming dark 

cloud all around in the high ground. You have to take that influence away from 

them and give it back to the population. When we went up to the mountains, it was 

100 percent kinetic. We weren’t worried about building rapport or losing rapport 

because there was no one there to build rapport with except the Taliban. 

We became so effective and we were so aggressive in our kinetic role when 

we were operating in those isolated areas in the mountains, that the bad guys felt 

they couldn’t get a break and our SOT-A guys actually heard them saying this and 

I read the intercept transcripts. Prior to this, they were used to guys coming into 

Bermel every two months, as a pretty weak element, and the Taliban would hand 

their asses to them in a couple days. So it gave them a pretty strong posture and a 

sense of accomplishment on the Taliban side because they had been 100 percent 

successful in the past. They didn’t have that with us. They would shoot at us but it 

didn’t matter. Everything we did, we did it right. 

We didn’t accomplish anything great there. I don’t think we did. What we did 

though, was the basics and we did them right every day. When we were up in the 

mountain and dismounted, operating at the levels of squad and platoon, we did it 

right. We used planning, reconnaissance, patrolling, and security. All those things 

you learn as an infantry guy that should apply to everything you do, we applied 

those fundamentals every time. That’s what the bad guys hate. 

We’re always ready for anything we come across and they’re not. They don’t 

have the training or the experience we have. They have a lot of fighting experience 

but their fighting experience is not that kinetic and it’s not that violent. They like 

those standoff engagements, so when they start to lose the upper hand, they can 

slowly withdraw at their convenience on their designated routes and get away and 

go back to business as usual. When we did this, we denied them that ability. 

We always had more than one dismounted element. If you only have one 

element, the bad guys like that because they only have one place to focus. They 

can rearrange their forces to ambush you and get you drawn into a bad situation as 

far as IEDs and things of that nature but when you have two dismounted elements 

that complement and work in concert with each other, the enemy doesn’t have that 

advantage anymore. It takes more coordination for us. It’s harder to pull off but in 

theory, it’s easy to do.

Every operation we did was at least two maneuver elements, sometimes even 

three or four working in concert. The bad guys did not have a defense mechanism 

for that. They don’t have training to reinforce that type of operation. So once they 

realize we have two or more maneuver elements out there, their leadership gets 

together on the radios and they say, “They’re too strong and they’re prepared for 

armed combat. They aren’t just prepared to react to whatever we were planning to 

hand them, they’re prepared to destroy us.” 
425

We heard that several times, and that method of thinking on their behalf became 

more profound as the operation went on because they’d taken so many casualties. 

The biggest incident that happened in Bermel was when we were in Malaksha 

which was another area like Mangretay. Everything I said about Mangretay applies 

to Malaksha.

Anyway, we were going to do a border operation in Malaksha. We had a 

planned Pakistani military checkpoint meeting on the eastern side of the Malaksha 

Valley. The primary objective of that mission was to go in and do dismounted 

patrols of that area. We were to find, fix, and target any Taliban we could find. As 

we went in, we were ambushed by 60 to 80 guys. 

We had two dismounted elements of a squad-plus each on the high ground 

as a clearing party for the mobility part of going through the valley. We got to a 

point where our southern clearing party had to come down the hill and go to the 

next piece of high ground which took some time. The northern clearing party held 

in place and they got to where they were going because they were providing over 

watch but we were using jammers in the vehicles which blocks out most of your 

communications. My detachment commander didn’t get the word that they had to 

stop and so he kept going. Finally, he didn’t see guys on the clearing party so he 

stopped. 

We were about a kilometer in front of the clearing party on a bad piece of 

terrain, on a ridgeline that was about 600 meters long. We had two ASF HiLux 

vehicles and three GMVs in a 300-meter stretch of this ridgeline. This ridgeline 

was barely wide enough for a GMV. You had a flat road and then it starting sloping 

off. On the north side it was probably about 100 feet and on the back side about 

200 feet. It was a perfect ambush location. 

We were stopped and had guns pointed in all directions to wait for the clearing 

party to get up on the other ground, and that’s when they initiated the ambush 

from about 150 meters or closer. They were on the same level we were, same type 

of ridgeline we were on about 150 meters across the valley. That firefight lasted 

about 40 minutes. Initially it was two HiLuxs engaged and the two GMVs. The two 

GMVs had .50 calibers. I was in the trail vehicle on this piece of low ground over 

here coming up on the ridgeline when they initiated the ambush.

I pulled up and was able to put my vehicle at a vantage point that looked down 

the ridgeline at an angle where these guys were directly across from us. They 

were only able to see and engage what was directly across from them but I had the 

optimal position and I could see and engage the whole ambush line with my .50 

caliber. There were only three people in my truck. My medic was driving and we 

had an Air Force tactical air controller or TACP on the back with a M240 and I was 

on the .50 caliber machine gun. That firefight lasted about 40 minutes and we had 
426

no casualties. That was an important event over an eight-month rotation because 

that’s something the bad guys had never done before in the history of that area. 

Looking at all the ambushes that had taken place and the conditions of each, this 

is the first time I’d ever seen or heard about the bad guys standing toe to toe with 

a US force at that range. 

JM: Was it because you didn’t have air on station? 

MT: We didn’t have air, and air will obviously force them into hiding as soon 

as they hear it. 

JM: Did they know you didn’t have air, or wouldn’t have air? 

MT: They can always tell. A-10s fly at 10,000 or 12,000 feet and their hearing 

is a lot better than ours. 

They can even hear the bombers up there, or see them. I’m pretty sure they 

knew we didn’t have air and that’s probably one of the reasons why they stayed 

there so long. Even beyond that, that’s the first time they’d ever stayed in a continual 

engagement at that level and they were suffering heavy casualties. 

They’d always had perfect vantage points during an ambush. For example, if 

you’re in the valley most of the time they’re so high above you in almost a near 

vertical ascent that your guns won’t elevate to the height of their ambush locations. 

They did it intentionally, they picked spots like that, and throughout time 

they modified their ambush locations to defeat your capabilities on the ground 

but this time, we were eye to eye fighting these guys. The only thing separating 

us was a big valley that went straight up and then straight down. Obviously we 

didn’t have the ability to maneuver on them and they understood that but still, with 

our weapons superiority, our quick reaction force, and indirect fire assets, it was 

amazing that the engagement lasted that long. Most engagements lasted two, three, 

or four minutes and then they were over with. That engagement killed probably 

40 guys. 

JM: You said this was an ambush they initiated? 

MT: Yes. 

JM: So they didn’t have some HVT they were guarding or anything like that? 

MT: No, this was a deliberate ambush set up for us. It was quite an elaborate 

ambush. You didn’t just have 60 to 80 guys lined up along an ambush position 

on that ridgeline you had three separate elements on that one ridgeline that had a 

distinct separation. Each one of those positions had machine guns and numerous 

RPG gunners. Throughout that whole ambush they probably launched 80 RPGs 

and I don’t know how many bullets they fired. The only thing I think I’ll never 

understand about it was that they showed a distinct will to fight despite suffering 
427

heavy casualties at that close of a range. After five or 10 minutes into it, we started 

to maneuver ground forces against them but it didn’t scare them away. Our guys 

had to directly maneuver across that low ground and then come back and hit them 

because there was no other way to get to them. 

They saw that. They realized they had about 30 minutes before our guys could 

get there but if you show your ability to take the offensive role, that usually ends 

the ambush. It’s over. Well, not in this particular case. 

They were taking a lot of casualties and the volume of fire they were able to 

put against us was going down while ours was sustained. My vehicle carried 1,500 

rounds of .50 caliber and M240 ammunition so we were never going to run out of 

ammo but to me and everybody in my detachment, that was a profound day. Most 

of those bad guys weren’t very well trained at all and there were obviously some 

key leaders involved which we found out later. All told, it was a pretty historic 

moment for those guys. 

JM: Obviously this was an anomaly up to that point but did it continue to 

remain an anomaly or did this represent a change in tactics? 

MT: Months later looking back, you can say it was just one of those times 

when they just felt stronger than they were but at the time we thought it might be 

marking a different type of TTP for these guys where they were going to stand 

and fight because that wasn’t something they’d done in the past in that region and 

against the size of the Coalition force they were going against. If we were a squad 

or something, I could see that. From a team sergeant perspective, the guy who’s 

responsible for my guys every time they went out, I was concerned. I approached 

my team leader about it and said this wasn’t anything we’ve encountered before. 

This wasn’t anything I’d read about and it’s not a normal method of operating for 

these guys. Was it a sign of things changing? Was it a sign of their combat force 

being a lot stronger than we believed it to be? When you’re on the ground there, all 

this higher INTEL was getting dumped down on you. Intelligence summaries and 

situation reports and things of that nature. I don’t know how many times I’ve been 

at the firebase at midnight and, at a lot of times, that was when I was just coming 

back from an operation when we’d get a call from the S2. He would say they had 

all these indicators that we were going to get attacked by 300 guys tonight. 

We never saw anything like that but it was around this same time frame where 

ACMs were supposedly planning an attack with 300 to 400 on a firebase, either 

Bermel or Shkin and the fact that we ran into an ambush like that and those guys 

stayed to fight despite the casualties they’d taken, we thought that maybe things 

were going to change. In the end, it was about a month or so before we realized 

that this was an anomaly. Maybe they just didn’t expect it to work out like that and 

I don’t think they ever anticipated us to be on this ridgeline. The road we came in 
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on took us right into this valley that separated us and them after the ambush was 

initiated but we didn’t go into that valley. We went up on the high ground. It was 

harsh terrain but we still had some advantage over there. 

We got over there just by mission planning and presence of thought and we 

took that route. If we would have gotten down into this valley, there’s no telling 

how many people we would have lost. I don’t want to even think about that. At 

that point, I don’t think we could have elevated our machine guns because that was 

almost near vertical terrain. Once we got lined up on that ridgeline and were waiting 

for our clearing party to get caught up because their next point of clearing was the 

actual ambush line we got ambushed from. That’s where they were en route to. At 

that point the ACM leader had to make a decision. Should he pull off right now and 

we’d never know they were there because he knew we had clearing parties or was 

he going to stay and engage us on the ambush line? Would he continue to wait and 

fight the guys over there and then fight the dismounted element? Would he ambush 

us now and only fight the guys directly across from me because the dismounted 

guys were going to be 30 minutes before they could get to him? 

We think he weighed his options and took the only logical course of action he 

had which was to try and destroy the five vehicles and all the guys right in front 

of him and be out of there before our dismounted guys could get to him. I think he 

took that option. It didn’t work out. 

We lost two HiLuxs that got hit with RPGs and riddled with bullets. The 

GMVs got riddled with bullets. We didn’t have any US or ANA casualties and 

I don’t know how we pulled that off. This whole incident changed the way we 

thought about the Taliban in that area. 

We knew they had good leadership. What we did not know was how 

coordinated it was and how much actual combat power they had. I think that was a 

demonstration but I don’t think they walked away with the benefits they expected. 

JM: What short or long term impact did this fight have on the overall security 

situation? 

MT: After that ambush, the area went dead for about a month, other than the 

rocket attacks that happened almost every day. As far as direct engagements or 

hearing guys talk about pending attacks on US forces which were waiting to ambush 

guys that aspect of the operation on the ACM side just disappeared. I think it was 

a month before we heard any of the key ground leadership talking about anything. 

Over the month, we gathered INTEL from ANA and ASF and over the radio. One 

of the key leaders got on the radio one night from Pakistan and was talking to one 

of his junior leaders still in Afghanistan. He said, “Put all your guys to bed and take 

a break. I’ll contact you when it’s time to form back up. This last engagement with 

the Americans took too big of a toll on us.” He gave us key names of guys we’d 
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been looking for in months who had been killed in the engagement. He basically 

said we killed upwards of 40 guys and there were guys they still couldn’t account 

for and this was a week or two afterwards. One of the ASF guys at Shkin, who was 

home in Pakistan on leave, said that in his village he was sitting in a little restaurant 

and heard some of the bad guys who were in the engagement talking about what 

had happened, trying to figure things out. The estimate he came back with after 

hearing their conversation was that there were almost 60 dead. 

We never knew how many were actually killed. It was hours before we actually 

got to the objective where they were and by that time they had dragged bodies off. 

We found blood trails and drag marks down to the road behind where they had 

loaded all the dead guys in vehicles. Some of that was probably going on while we 

were there. 

We got into a running gun battle for four hours after that and eventually 

brought in AH-64 Apaches who were directly engaging ground troops. We kept 

our momentum but we failed in one major task and that was to clear the objective. 

We talked about that. To us the objective was cleared because we weren’t 

getting fired from it anymore. The problem was that we got too engaged in chasing 

these guys and trying to cut them off before they got to the border. By doing that, 

we lost sight of the bigger picture, of going back to the objective and putting the 

pieces together. We should have done that immediately. 

We had the ability but what we lost focus on was all our moving parts. Things 

were happening very fast, guys were moving and we realized we had to run after 

them or we were going to lose them. We ended up catching four guys who were 

involved in the ambush. Two of the guys we caught in a village. They basically 

went into a village and told the villagers that the Americans were going to being 

coming here and if they told us that they weren’t part of their village, they would 

kill all of them. 

We went in there, started asking questions and we saw that people wouldn’t 

talk so we knew something was up. We were just in this big firefight and they were 

all saying, “We didn’t hear anything.” “Oh please. It was like Armageddon over 

there for 40 minutes and you’re 1,000 meters away. What do you mean you didn’t 

hear anything?” 

We knew something was up so we started pulling the males and females out 

and, finally, this female told us where the bad guys were. The men were all telling 

her to shut up because they were afraid but she was like, “This is my family. I’m 

not going to let them come in here and threaten my life and my family’s life. I’m 

not going to let them make the Americans think we’re bad people. We’re not bad 

people. We’re good people. These are the bad guys. 
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They came from over there. Their radio is over here. The weapons are there. 

The ammunition is over there.” She fingered them both. The other two guys we 

caught, they surrendered at the last minute before they were going to get blown 

up by AH-64s because they’d already killed the other eight guys with them. There 

were two left, the AH-64 is still above my head and he’s fixing to shoot some more 

rockets when they surrendered. In a combat operation, though, you always secure 

your objective. 

We didn’t feel the objective was hostile towards us anymore. We were pretty 

sure they had fled away from the objective. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but if 

we had just sent two squads to that objective, the importance could have been 

immeasurable. We could have counted bodies, recovered the machine guns we 

knew they left behind (at least seven were counted) and we could have picked up 

excess ammunition, radios, and maybe gotten some frequencies we didn’t have 

before or simply some documentation. It was still a hostile environment and it 

would have taken our guys another 30 to 45 minutes from that point when we 

started chasing the bad guys to get up there. 

We had such a huge area to cover and there were a lot of egress routes and it 

really took everybody we had. I wanted to go back to the objective because I was 

there but the captain wanted to keep chasing guys. I don’t fault him for that. He 

was just thinking a little differently than I was. The battlefield is fluid and things 

happen so fast. You have to be able to react to certain stimuli so fast that you forget 

about things that should be second nature to you, and that’s what happened to us 

out there. 

JM: With respect to how SOF was employed during your two deployments, how 

do you see things going forward? Can they be better integrated with conventional 

forces? What is the right mix of forces to accomplish the goals we as a nation have 

for Afghanistan? 

MT: That’s a touchy subject. We’ll start off with the conventional integration. 

There’s a lot of room for improvement there. There are two perspectives you have 

to take into consideration. You have to take into account the SOF perspective that’s 

used to doing things on their own, being the lone warriors, being the “rebels” per 

se. 

We operate at the small team level and we do things the conventional Army 

doesn’t engage in. SOF doesn’t like the big Army way of doing things. They think 

there’s too much bureaucracy on the big Army side and that they waste more 

opportunity than they create by having a large number of forces. Then you have 

the conventional side looking at us and they think we’re a bunch of rebels just 

running around doing whatever the hell we want to do. I believe I’ve heard that 

1,000 times over the last two years from conventional guys. They say we’re just 
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a bunch of rebels that we have no control and no focus on what we’re doing, and 

that’s really nowhere near the truth. 

They just don’t understand what we’re doing and how we do business. As far 

as the integration piece, if you look at company and platoon level, I think it’s there. 

The pieces that need to be improved on are at the battalion, brigade and task force 

level. There is no integration. You take a platoon sergeant, a platoon leader, an SF 

detachment, a team sergeant and all their little minions, get them to come together 

on the battlefield, tell them what needs to get done and, using common sense and 

with no resistance towards each other, they’ll work together. The platoon leader and 

platoon sergeant will say how they do business, the SOF guys will say how they 

do business, and once everyone understands how each other operates they can all 

move forward. I think it’s easier however, for the SOF side to understand how the 

conventional guys operate because at some point we were all conventional guys. 

Most of those guys have never been exposed to SOF, though, so they have no idea 

what we do or how we do business every day on the ground. In my experience at 

the platoon level up to semi-company level, we’ve been fairly successful because 

we’ve had leaders on both sides which were willing to work together and willing 

to put aside any ill thoughts or feelings they’ve had towards each other. 

They’re willing to make it a team effort. At the battalion level and above 

though, is where your problem is. From my perspective this is what you have. 

You have a battalion commander on the infantry side and he doesn’t have a good 

understanding of SOF and sees them as a burden. He sees them as a bunch of 

troublemakers running around the battlespace just doing whatever the hell they 

want to do. He employs and controls guys every day who only do what he tells them 

to do. That’s just the way the conventional Army works. The battalion commander 

gives the company commanders task, purpose and intent and that’s what they work 

with. That, in turn, keeps going down the line. On the SOF side we get a lot of the 

same thing. 

We have a battalion, we have advanced operations bases, the AOBs, and in 

that AOB you have however many ODAs that work for that AOB. You have the 

same processes coming down, using an operations order or verbal guidance to that 

AOB commander who disseminates it out to all the ODAs but at the AOB level, 

the understanding is already there that no area is the same. 

They already know that they can’t take one single task, condition, and purpose 

and apply it to Lwara, Bermel, Shkin, or all the other firebases. It’s not a cookiecutter process but on the conventional side, that’s the way it’s treated. The ODAs 

are given an enormous amount of latitude to develop operations. 

We were handed that operation of putting together that FOB because it was 

time sensitive, information sensitive and it was in our area so we had to do it. 
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We’ve had those and there will always be those operations but for the most part, 

the ODA is given the capability to develop that area as they see fit. Not as a bunch 

of rogue warriors but there is a task, intent and purpose behind it. At the FOB, the 

initial task, purpose and intent may not resemble that of the conventional side but 

that’s because we think differently, our doctrine is different and our operations are 

different. It’s at that level where I don’t think they mesh. 

You have two battalion commanders in charge of a large force in a large piece 

of battlespace and a lot of that interaction is determined by personality. You take 

two battalion commanders who are equal in pay grade, equal in authority, who 

essentially have the same mission on the ground and in the same battlespace but 

what they don’t have is any rapport with each other. Most times when they talk 

together it’s usually not in a friendly manner. There’s a guy who works here at Fort 

Leavenworth who had a meeting with a couple generals and a few conventional 

brigade commanders. He was doing an interview with them for an organization 

here on Fort Leavenworth and if I say what it is it’ll give him away, so I won’t. 

Anyway, he asked them how many of them had worked with SF and all of them 

raised their hands. 

Then he asked the brigade commanders what they thought of that experience. 

Two of them said, “SOF is screwed up and they don’t know what they’re doing. 

They’re a bunch of rogue people running around, doing whatever they want to. All 

they do is to create problems for us in our battlespace.” When he asked the other 

brigade commander what he thought, though, he said, “I think they were great. The 

problem was that I didn’t know what they were capable of doing until months after 

we were integrated. Once we were integrated, I had that ODA come into my staff 

and we would plan operations together and we would share information. We had a 

great relationship.” I don’t think the others ever wanted to integrate with anyone.

It’s hard for the conventional Army commanders at battalion level and above 

to perceive an SF detachment commander with as much authority and control as he 

has. I don’t think it fears him. I just don’t think they comprehend. You literally take 

a detachment commander and give him almost as much responsibility, especially 

in Afghanistan, as a conventional Army battalion commander would have, just not 

the number of troops. That detachment commander develops operations based on 

the INTEL he has or has been handed to him.

Who develops operations on the conventional side? It’s usually the battalion 

commander. I think a lot of it was just stereotyping. There are numerous success 

stories where the relationships between the infantry guys and SOF guys were great 

because they were willing to integrate themselves. I’ve also heard some horror 

stories where they despised each other and would walk 1,000 miles just to avoid 

each other on the battlefield. I think there was just some general stereotyping going 
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on that wouldn’t allow people to work together but you have to in this day and 

age especially now when the joint special operations area, the JSOA, is going 

away in Afghanistan. The country is owned by the big Army. SOF is operating 

in JSOAs or AOs that belong to Army battalion and brigade commanders, and 

it wasn’t that way a couple rotations ago. SOF used to have its own battlespace. 

That doesn’t exist anymore, so now you have to integrate to be effective. No one 

completely owns the battlespace anymore because you also have the International 

Security Assistance Force, the ISAF, and NATO forces involved so there’s a lot 

more sharing on the battlefield that needs to go on and the only way to make that 

happen effectively is to integrate at the individual level. I think it’s there at the 

detachment, platoon and company level of infantry guys because they’re used to 

working together on the battlefield. 

They’ve done it for years but the interaction at the battalion headquarters and 

staff level and at the FOB headquarters and staff level is not there. I think they need 

to put those fears away and start learning about what the other side does. 

They need to start learning that it’s not a command relationship. No one is 

forcing them to work together but inevitably they have to work together on the 

battlefield. There are two distinctive command relationships but who says you 

can’t integrate? Have liaison officers that share information and things of that 

nature. Have staffs that talk to each other about operations. Start involving SOF 

in conventional operations and conventional guys in SOF operations at battalion 

level.

During my first rotation in Afghanistan we were with Lieutenant Colonel 

Timothy Slemp and he had a good understanding of how to do this. Every air 

assault operation we did, we had 10th Mountain Division infantry guys on board 

with us. They weren’t the guys assaulting compounds generally but they provided 

other levels of support that you had to have to do that type of operation. You had 

to have outer security, inner security, and blocking positions to chase down people 

who were fleeing from the target area. They also provided security for the landing 

zones and that stuff. That takes a lot of people, especially when you’re talking 

about five or six aircraft landing in one small area at one small point in time. That’s 

also a big target for the bad guys. 

JM: How are all these integration issues manifested or considered over where 

you work now at CAC SOF? 

MT: At CAC SOF, everybody’s on the rowboat of conventional and SOF 

integration doctrine. There is some that exists out there but it’s not very well 

defined. It gives perspective, I think. I just got it a couple days ago and haven’t 

had a chance to read it yet so I don’t know for sure but it doesn’t say that battalion 

commanders need to do this and company commanders need to do this. It’s just 
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general perspective doctrine covering key areas that need to be addressed towards 

integration but it doesn’t appoint people to do the integrating and I think that’s 

what somebody is looking for. I don’t know if they’ll ever get that. First of all, I 

think the people who need to develop that doctrine are on the battlefields. In their 

previous rotations they’ve worked together and it has to be a lessons learned type 

of thing. 

They should get together and figure out what they learned about themselves 

on the battlefield but if you go and develop doctrine based off what we already 

know and people here at CAC are willing to jump on board and create a doctrine. 

I don’t think they have the information and background, though, to develop that 

type of doctrine. The Center for Army Lessons Learned, the CALL, is getting new 

information every day and they’re starting to do that integration type analysis, 

the same with what you guys do here at the Combat Studies Institute every day. 

That’s what’s going to be the framework for any doctrine that’s going to come 

out. A lot of people need to be involved. I think you have the right audience here 

with the Command and General Staff College, all these guys who were company 

commanders on the conventional side or team leaders or maybe even company 

commanders in SOF units. You have a good audience for getting the right 

information needed to develop any doctrine that needs to be developed but a lot of 

people I’ve talked to on the SOF side are leery about doctrine, because doctrine is 

only good if people read it and understand it. People I talk to, when they hear about 

doctrine say there are other means of bringing about integration before we go out 

and create doctrine. 

We can create doctrine all day long. It doesn’t mean people are going to read it 

and adhere to it. You have programs at the Battle Command Training Program, the 

BCTP, and warfighters and things of that nature. Let’s start getting guys integrated 

at that level and then use that as another venue to help create doctrine. At some 

point, you have to start integrating training to make it effective on the battlefield 

and there are venues to do that but if you look at the conventional Army’s combat 

and training rotations, they’re planned 36 months out. If you take the SOF side 

and look at a 12-month calendar, though, you see how they’re deployed for eight 

months of that, and then there’s a recovery and refit period and finally a train up 

period. Extend that another month or two and then they’re back into a combat 

zone. Conventional and SOF never line up on the calendar. In fact, we looked 

at this in the office the other day. BCTP was trying to figure out why SOF isn’t 

participating and it wasn’t clear to them until the CAC SOF assistant director went 

over and talked to the BCTP guys and told them why it didn’t line up. He drew it 

out on the blackboard and showed them. BCTP didn’t realize it before that. There 

needs to be a lot more information sharing as we go on so people understand more 

about each other before we arbitrarily start creating doctrine that we really don’t 
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understand, doctrine that leads us down a path we don’t need to be going down or 

doctrine that has already been tried before in a past rotation and didn’t work out. 

JM: Looking back as a veteran of two deployments to Afghanistan, what’s 

your outlook for the country in the months and years ahead and what role do you 

see SOF playing? 

MT: One thing I would like to say is that I think people need to understand 

what our role is, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are no armies left to 

defeat in either one of those theaters. We defeated those armies. 

We’re going on our fifth year in Afghanistan and a lot of it is worse today than 

it was three years ago. Something is on the Internet or in the newspapers every 

day and I’ve seen it firsthand on the battlefield. The Taliban in Afghanistan are 

stronger and they appear to be more effective. NATO is trying to take over and 

the thought behind bringing a 15,000-man NATO force in was to withdraw the 

American forces but that’s not the case. Now NATO is asking for a few thousand 

more forces and there’s still no end in sight for drawing down on the US side as 

far as I know. It’s because we’re fighting an insurgency and a lot of people don’t 

understand COIN. 

They don’t understand the concept of COIN or the doctrinal aspects of COIN 

and a lot of people are having a hard time on the ground. You read the COIN 

manual but how do you actually conduct COIN on the ground? You need to 

remember that the population is the key terrain and in order to deny key terrain to 

the insurgency, you have to win the population away from them. Everything you 

do affects that population. You have to be careful when you’re shooting mortar 

rounds and engaging in firefights in a populated area. I don’t think any American 

wants to walk away from a gunfight. It’s considered cowardly or something along 

those lines and it’s easy to perceive that from a US standpoint.

As an Army in Afghanistan and even in Iraq, people need to be more aware 

of the population and the effects of everything you do on that population. If you 

kill a civilian, they lose one civilian and that doesn’t seem like much in the grand 

scheme of things but how many enemies did you make in that process? Usually in 

a village, when you kill a civilian you turn that whole village against the US forces 

because everything is about relationships to these people. Everybody in that village, 

especially the smaller the village gets, is related along personal relationship lines. 

That’s where the priority lies, with the population. It’s not about blowing things up 

or destroying things anymore. You’ll still have your opportunities to do that along 

the way but think about the population in everything you do and use your partner 

force to do it with. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of these two battles, 

to get them to the point where they can do it and do it effectively. 

JM: Thank you very much for your time. It’s greatly appreciated.

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About the OLE Project Team

Mr. Michael G. Brooks retired from the US Air Force in 2003 after having 

served as an enlisted weather forecaster. Before coming to Kansas to work for 

the Combat Studies Institute in 2005, he was a technical writer for the US Fish 

and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska. Mr. Brooks has a Bachelor of Science 

Degree in History from the State University of New York. 

Mr. John H. McCool was an administrator, editor, and senior interviewer 

for the Operational Leadership Experiences (OLE) Project—an oral history 

enterprise based at Fort Leavenworth’s Combat Studies Institute. The OLE Project 

team conducts, transcribes, and archives interviews with military personnel who 

planned, participated in, and supported operations in the Global War on Terrorism. 

Mr. McCool possesses a Master of Arts Degree in History from the University 

of Kansas and has a demonstrated background in both public and oral history. 

He has participated in several collaborative historical projects to include webbased development endeavors. Mr. McCool has focused his research and writing 

interests on a wide variety of modern American political, diplomatic, and military 

history topics. 

Mr. Laurence J. Lessard was an editor and interviewer for the Operational 

Leadership Experiences Project at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He has a Bachelor 

of Science Degree in History from the US Naval Academy, a Master of Arts 

Degree in History from Ohio University, and is a doctoral candidate in history at 

Ohio University. He is a former Marine infantry officer with combat experience 

in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and has worked as a trainer for the Saudi Arabian 

National Guard. 

Ms. Colette Kiszka acts as the Project Technician and Transcriptionist for the 

Operational Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute. She 

uploads the completed oral interviews onto Fort Leavenworth’s Combined Arms 

Research Library website. She has an extensive administrative background that 

has led her to work in and around the US Army for over 25 years. 

Mrs. Jennifer Vedder was a Military Analyst charged with transcribing 

interviews for the Combat Studies Institute’s Operational Leadership Experiences 

Project. Mrs. Vedder possesses a Master’s of Science Degree in Health Care 

Administration and has previously served as an officer on Active Duty in the 

Medical Service Corps. 

Contributing Interviewers 

From the Command and General Staff College: Major Marty Deckard, 

Major Shawn O’Brien, Major Bradley Helton, Major Conrad Harvey, Major Glenn 

King (New Zealand Army), and Lieutenant Colonel James L. Evenson (USMCR). 
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From the CSI Contemporary Operations Study Team: Ms. Lynne Chandler 

Garcia, Mr. Jerry England and Dr. Lisa Beckenbaugh.