Posted on 03/25/2007 2:47:13 PM PDT by SandRat
Air Force Tech. Sgt. James Fisher, who until recently was at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, will send regular dispatches from Afghanistan.
Excerpts will run on Sundays in the Star.
Find Fisher's blog at http://go.azstarnet.com/kabul
Hello, I must be going (Jan. 5)
My name is Jim Fisher. I am a technical sergeant in the Air Force, assigned to Davis-Monthan, and I'm on my way to Afghanistan. I have been stationed in Tucson for less than a year, but I have family here, and I've been coming here to visit for years.
I'm 16 years into a 20-year career (hopefully), and my wife and I are looking at making Tucson our permanent home. I'm getting up to speed on shopping and have a favorite restaurant, root for the Wildcats, Sidewinders, D'backs, Coyotes and Suns (the Cardinals may take some time) and consider anything under 100 degrees a cooling trend. I can also make a good argument for Speedway vs. Broadway and vice-versa, depending on the time of day and destination.
But my wife and I have recently taken a more concrete step in becoming Tucsonans —we bought a house — and the day after moving in (a few days after Christmas), our son Andrei was born. We've been doing some major settling in and preparing for my deployment — keeping the stress meter pegged since mid-November.
I departed Jan. 3 for the combat skills training course at Fort Sill, Okla. Like more and more Air Force members deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, I will be filling a position that would normally be filled by an Army member. Hence the monthlong course at Fort Sill. I need to be able to perform many of the skills Army members normally carry with them when deployed.
While I left Fort Sill certified as a combat lifesaver, fully acquainted with the hazards of duty in Afghanistan and how to respond to them, I was also about to perform my career-long role as a public-affairs craftsman — a military hybrid of journalism and public relations.
That's where this blog comes in. I've spent 16 years telling the Air Force story, from the heroism of our pilots to the sacrifice of our security forces to the impact of our quality-of-life initiatives.
I'm about to be in a place and circumstances I've never encountered before, and I'd like to share that story with you. I offer the following disclaimer upfront: I am a member of the military — a combatant, placing loyalty to my comrades and doing my duty first. I can't offer you the objectivity, detachment or dispassion of a journalist. I'm not a reporter embedded with the troops, I am a troop.
Boots on ground (Feb. 8)
"Boots on ground." This is the phrase which describes the actual entry into the combat theater of operations, or the CENTCOM AOR (Central Command Area of Responsibility). It's significant because once you are boots on ground, you can begin counting down your deployment. As I write, I am one day into my time here in Kabul, which will last 179 days when all is said and done. It is also significant, because the prospect of combat-related danger is no longer theoretical.
Afghanistan looks very poor and battle-weary. The people are wearing rags, and smiles are nonexistent. Buildings are in disrepair, with some battle damage apparent here and there. There's no telling whether it happened last week, five years ago or during the Soviet occupation. I measure it against my points of reference. It seems much worse than eastern Europe, even worse than Thailand. As we travel farther it occurs to me that Kabul makes Bangkok look like Oro Valley.
At one point a taxi has been behind us for too long, and the crew start to plan a contingency if he follows us around the next turn. Fortunately, he peels off. Suicide car bombers frequently encroach and try to enter convoys. For some crazy reason, so do many other local drivers. They can't know that the convoy crew sees them as possible harbingers of death.
Café Europa (Feb. 15)
"OPSEC" is operations security, or the strategy and tactics used to protect the security of our military operations. It's basically safeguarding information. I'm at HQ ISAF (International Security Assistant Force) so you can probably guess about the mission: management, oversight, and command and control of most of the international military and civil-affairs efforts in Afghanistan.
We are a NATO command, and in the immediate vicinity of my workstation I work alongside Greek, Polish and Romanian officers. Around the camp, there are contingents from almost every country in Europe. Turkey and Canada, as well. In fact, I work with two French Canadians/Canadiens Francais. One of them, Caroline, also has a blog. Hers is much more interesting than mine, but it's in French and full of subtle and sublime profundity, or so I imagine.
So in addition to being in a part of the world I've never seen before, ISAF is a very multicultural environment. I refer to it as Café Europa because several of the countries represented have small cafés (glorified snack bars, really), and even the food in our chow hall is more European than American.
My particular task is to gather information from the battlefield and pass it to our media operations section so they can provide the press with accurate, detailed information. I do research on past actions, battles and other combat-related activities in the country. I alternate between being generally amazed at just how depraved and sinister the Taliban really are and being sickened by the details of the dead and wounded.
I'm also amazed at the high degree of futility in every one of their operations. A vast majority of the casualties in Afghanistan are Taliban, Afghan army and police, and Afghan civilians. We are very good at killing the Taliban, but when they come out of hiding, their operations often inflict the most pain on the Afghan people and not ISAF or coalition forces.
It's sometimes hard to forget about this at the end of the day. There's a café here where you can get cappuccino and look out the window at snow-covered mountains rising almost to the stratosphere. "We could be in Colorado," someone jokes. "At a ski lodge in Colorado." Yeah, maybe for half a second. Because in the periphery, the barbed wire and guard towers obscure the view.
6 Months IN KABUL
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