Notes From Across The Pond

Jeremy Riegel
HHC 173d STB
JBAD PRT
APO, AE 09310
October 14, 2007

 

Afghanistan Update
Sunday, October 14, 2007 6:27am EDT

Hi everyone,

It’s been a busy month, but we’ve done a lot of good, and I’d like to share what the Chaos Team has accomplished over the past month. Also inlcuded are a bunch of pictures of us passing out donated goods, as well as an updated mailing address for me.

We have received an incredible amount of toys, school supplies, and beanie babies as donations for the Afghan kids. To all of you who have sent boxes, thank you! I received about twenty boxes today alone. All told we have handed out at least a thousand beanie babies, 10,000 pens and pencils, and nearly a thousand happy meal toys. Without the generosity of those who have mailed stuff over here, this contribution would not have been possible. ALL donations, big and small, are greatly appreciated and put to good use.

For most of the last month the Afghans have been celebrating Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. During the fast they do not eat, drink (even water!), use tobacco, or have sex. Needless to say, this affects attitudes and causes many to get irate easily. By late afternoon drivers are much more aggressive and tempers are much shorter. The ANP that we work with have much shorter attention spans, and training is difficult because they lack the energy to participate actively.

Due to Ramadan, we have not even attempted to train intensively with the ANP. Rather, we have conducted some refresher training on first aid skills. We’ve also focused on training the ANP staffs to plan and track missions. This has been a difficult task as both ideas are extremely foreign to Afghans. We joke, “what’s the Pashtu word for ‘planning?’” The answer is “planning” because they have no word for that act because they never do it, so they just adopted the English word!

We’ve also partnered with several schools in my area of operations. We have passed out hundreds of student kits, teacher kits, and thousands of pens and pencils that people have donated. The Afghan kids are always excited to see us, and the teachers are greatly appreciative of our donations. Most schools here are boys schools, but each district has at least one girls school. A few schools are co-ed, but the boys and girls are always taught separately. I am still surprised at how many kids here are learning English! Significant portions of the kids enrolled in school learn English, and many participated in voluntary summer programs that focused on teaching English. Democracy will not fully take root in this country until a significant portion of the population is educated, and they are well on their way.

Health clinics are also an area we have focused some of our efforts. We have delivered motorcycles to a clinic’s mobile vaccination teams. Because some vaccines have to remain refrigerated, the motorcycles give doctors the capability to reach the outlying towns that would take most of a day to walk to. The motorcycles also help the district doctors react to emergency situations.

We’ve also expanded our partnering and training to the Afghan Border Police, or ABP. I only have a small border of my AO with Pakistan (about fifty kilometers), but we have started working with those Soldiers as well. We are teaching them how to conduct vehicle checkpoints and searches to keep illegal goods from being smuggled into the country. Since it takes so long to get up to the ABP on the primitive Afghan roads, we usually spend the night and conduct two or three days of training. We are also conducting cross training with both ANP and ABP, as well as training multiple districts at once.

In the city of Jalalabad, we continue to make progress in improving the daily lives of Afghans. We installed about 120 solar powered street lights to make two main roads much safer at night. We also continue our mosque rehab project where we install carpet, build shoe racks (Muslims remove their shoes and wash their feet before prayer), and paint the building. US Soldiers don’t physically do the labor, but we survey the mosque and submit the project, then pay a local contractor to perform the work. My goal is to do some sort of rehab on all hundred mosques in the city of Jalalabad before we leave. The purpose is to undermine the Taliban’s message that the coalition forces are here to defile Islam and we hate Afghans because they are Muslim. Kinda hard for the locals to believe that lie if they are worshiping in a mosque that we helped repair.

It’s hard to believe we are already into our sixth month this deployment, my 27th total month in Afghanistan. We continue to make progress and I see it on a daily basis. The best example of this is the ANP/ABP relations between two districts in my AO. When we first got here, the ANP in Ghosta and Lal Pur (two districts that border Pakistan) would not even talk to each other. They flat out refused to cross the district boundary to help each other, even if their ANP brothers were under attack. To address this issue, we started training the Ghosta on specific tasks, then taking them to the Lal Pur ANP station to help us train the Lal Pur ANP. This build bonds between the soldiers and leaders, and after several iterations the leadership began communicating on their own, sharing intelligence and agreeing to support each other in times of need. We applied the same concept with the ANP and the ABP in both districts, with the same result. Now, the ANP and ABP talk and fully support each other tactically. About a month ago we were staying overnight with the ANP in Ghosta after a day of training. The Ghosta ABP called the ANP Commander and informed him a Border Checkpoint was being attacked, and asked for assistance. We went with the ANP to man the ABP Headquarters so the ABP could reinforce the checkpoint under attack. It was a perfect example to the Afghans the benefits of working together to make Afghanistan safer.

In the Chaos AO, in my honest assessment we are truly winning the COIN fight. The populace is telling the enemy that he is no long welcome in their towns and villages, and demanding the bad guys leave. This has happened in several areas and continues to happen. There have been a few “explosions” believed to be IEDs, but none of my convoys have yet been hit with an IED, nor have we received rocket or mortar fire on the JBAD PRT. We are still in the long fight, but we are succeeding regardless of what CNN reports.

I have a lot more that I could tell, but I’ll explain the rest with pictures.

Finally, but certainly not least of all, there are many individuals and groups that I need to thank for sending supplies for my Soldiers and the Afghan kids. If I’ve left your name off, I apologize, I’ve not been writing names down.

Dwight VFW Ladies Auxiliary (over 25 boxes so far!)
Steve, Delores, and the All Faiths Chapel (over 15 boxes!)
Operation SOS
OSOT-IL
Lalita at TelePacific
Lisa and her Med School Friends
Vern for the hand made wooden toy cars
My grandparents
Janet and Gerald
Ed and Connie
Diane and Robert
My parents and Amber

If you want to donate anything for the Afghan kids (happy meal toys, beanie babies, pens/pencils for schools) or Soldiers (Books, DVDs, socks [ankle or calf socks, only white visible outside the shoe, no stripes or logos], powdered drink mix [not requiring sugar, we drink .5 liter bottled water mostly], nuts, trail mix, etc.) you can send it to me at the NEW address below. Anything I don't use I pass on to my Soldiers or the kids, so nothing will go to waste.

Also, Dana is still doing well, and is currently conducting change of command inventories. She will take command of HHC, 173d Brigade Support Battalion next month. She will be responsible for about 160 Soldiers spread out over seven FOBs here in Afghanistan. It will be interesting having a husband-wife commanding in the 173d Airborne Brigade, in combat, together. Please wish her luck, I'm certain she will be a great commander.

Thanks for all your generosity, we really do appreciate the outpouring of your support!

Very Respectfully,
Jeremy Riegel
HHC 173d STB
APO AE 09310
(Note the new zip code!) Mail sent to the old address will be forwarded.