Afghanistan, Iraq and Culture

Picture I took from the top of Mout Gharib Ghar

What if the world’s best violin player EVER was born in Afghanistan? What a loss to the world to never hear her play.

I began my military deployment to Afghanistan by going through individual replacement training at Fort Benning Moore, Georgia in January. It is a two-week long course intended to prepare you for Afghanistan and Iraq. Active duty military, reserve military, and civilians attended the course. I did not learn much as I was familiar with everything they taught but I did see some exciting interactions as novices to a modern military learned the old-fashioned way by making mistakes like:

  • The civilian who ignored my advice and walked away from his M16 during weapon assembly/disassembly class. He received personal and intimate counseling from as Master Sergeant who recounted the error of his ways.
  • The activated elderly physician who despite all of his years of training, apparently did not understand how grenades work. He pulled the pin, dropper the lever, and took his sweet time to aim the grenade. A sergeant saved his hand from mutilation by rushing forward a forcing him to throw the training grenade. It exploded midair.
  • The dentist on the obstacle course who thought using his M16 as a pole vault was the correct technique to go over barbed wire. He actually did not get in trouble as the sergeant first class commended him on using the element of surprise to overcome the obstacle. The SFC was correct as everyone on the obstacle course stopped what they were doing out of shock and surprise. He used the muzzle as the plant for the pole vault.

I did enjoy firing a M2 Browning 50 cal again. That is an old and deadly weapon. I did not enjoy cleaning it or carrying it. I definitely would like one in a fire fight. It can kill you in so many ways.

I deployed to Kuwait where all soldiers coming into theater stage before flying to their final assignment. For Iraq, there were flights every day. For Afghanistan, there were flights every couple of days. I had to wait which was fine. I need to reacclimate to the field army where Colonels are very rare and feared. If a Colonel walks into a tent, everyone pops to attention and stays that way until I say “at ease”. It was a quick adjust.

I flew to Afghanistan in February 2008 landing Bagram Air Base and taking an armored convoy to Kabul. I would spend the next three months at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA). The head of the USMA contingent at NMAA was LTC Scott Hamilton.

First Impressions

There is abject poverty the likes of which I hope you never see. There is a hardiness to the people who have endured much with almost fifty years of occupation from one group or another. There is a hardness in their eyes – even the children have seen terrible things. There are the tell tell signs of that destruction visible everywhere and hints of what was once prosperous capital. There is a tenacity in the people of this hard land as the call to prayer rings out five times every day. Given their challenges, it should ring out 500 times. There are no hypocrites to their faith as I saw in other Muslin nations. They believe.

There was a graciousness with every meeting starting with a traditional cup of chi, offered pleasantries like popped corn and jelly sweets, and polite conversation for 20 minutes before any work can be attempted. There was quiet respect if you eat with them which I did everyday at lunch – a simple fare shared among comrades in arms. There was laughter if you spent time with them on their single day off (Jumla) and played soccer (they would win even though they played in Army boots or barefoot) or Frisbee football (we would win). There was curiosity about the rest of the world and significant misperceptions about how the rest of the world worked. There was gratitude if you were sincere in your attempts to help them improve their nation.

Number One Target

The number one target of the Taliban was not the Americans nor the Afghan police or military or leaders or women. The number one target of the Taliban was the internet because it provided a gateway to learning about the rest of the world. They would target fiber optic connectivity and cell phone towers first. Institutions like the NMAA, Kabul University, and the American University of Afghanistan were high value targets for the Taliban. Having said that, my time in Afghanistan was quiet.

National Military Academy of Afghanistan

Based out of the Kabul airport, we worked daily with our Afghan counterparts to build their military academy and take nascent steps to establish the 33rd tribe of Afghanistan – the tribe of the entire nation of Afghanistan. NMAA was based on a West Point 48 month developmental model. There were female cadets and faculty. There were no political appointments or favors – every candidate had to take a test in person administered by the Americans.

My daily routine was straightforward. I would wake up at 0430 and head to the gym while it was quiet and do a full body workout at 8,000 feet above sea level. Quick american breakfast and read of one chapter from the Imitation of Christ (a book that Sarah Goss gave me prior to deployment). We loaded up at 0730 and made the spicy drive over to NMAA and got to work. At lunch while most Americans returned to the airport, I joined the Afghans and ate with them at NMAA. It was a much shorter commute, good food, and opportunity to form deeper partnerships with the Afghan leadership. Back to work until 4:30 when we made the spicy drive back. Dinner at the American mess hall run by Indians (the food was quite good), some personal time, and then to bed by 8. Rinse, repeat. Friday was a day off for the Afghans but I and a group of soldiers went over and played soccer/Frisbee football and I would work on the network running ethernet cable and installing routers to strengthen the network at the academy while everyone was off. Afghans worked on Sunday but got part of the day off. For me, that meant attending Mass from a Belgium priest in French. Once a week we ate at the Thai restaurant in the Afghan airport again run by Indians. It was always a great meal.

As an aside, the toilet paper was pink, extraordinarily hard and thick. It would not stop a bullet but it would slow it down.

We traveled from the airport to the military academy daily in bulletproof civilian vehicles. The doors weighed a ton and the glass was very thick. Our greatest threat was aircraft doing whatever they wanted and ignoring the tower. The bigger the aircraft, the more likelihood they would ignore the tower. They assumed you would get out of their way rather than die. A close second was air force officers and their pistols. We had one officer who after accidently discharging a round into a clearing chamber three times. He became our Barney Fife and we would not let him load a magazine. He got a single bullet unless we had a firefight. We never had a firefight.

Occasionally we would go from the airport through Kabal and the US embassy to the closest military base. This was a high alert drive like any drive in Kabul as there were Taliban attacks occurring. Like Korea, this was a place that was deadly serious and everyone worked seven days a week.

I was assigned a young smart interpreter who was fantastic and we quickly became friends. As there are those who would kill him if they knew his real name, I will refer to him as Abe.  He is an Afghan hero in exile now.

I worked closely with the department chair of computer science and taught classes to the Afghan students. They were good computer science students with massive misperceptions about the rest of the world. Because they did have slow but unfettered access to the internet, they were addressing those misperceptions while being completely vulnerable to misinformation and scams on the internet. I also mentored the computer science department chair. He was a senior military leader with limited experience in computer science or running an academic department. We worked together well and made good team. I normally met with him as soon as I arrived at NMAA and we had a cup of chi and discussed our plans for the day.

In addition to mentoring the computer science chair, I spent a lot of time with the NMAA Provost and President on strategic leadership of a military academy. These meetings were weekly, started with a cup and chi and pleasantries, and were sometimes hard conversations about the difficult decisions.

Putting on my old signal corps hat, I fixed a lot of NMAA network issues. One of the more humorous incidents involved an American Sergeant Major who commandeered the uninterrupted power supply for the network router to protect his computer against the power outages that occurred frequently. I made it a win-win situation with the priority being the network router that served everyone.

Uniting Higher Education in Afghanistan

In addition to my work at NMAA, I also reached out and had success in brokering conversations between the American University of Afghanistan, NMAA, Kabul University, and NMAA. The intent was to build partnerships between the three universities and collaborate on areas of mutual interest. While there is only so much you can do in three months, I was able to facilitate the initial conversations and see subsequent conversations bloom.

Visiting the other universities gave me insight into much of higher education in Afghanistan at that point. NMAA was the new player. It was rigorous liberal arts experience and was highly selective. There was no cost to attend. The American University of Afghanistan was a very high quality program, taught classes in English, and came with a very high cost (for Afghanistan). Kabul University was the largest of the three universities and was in-between. The cost was low and classes were taught in Dari but not free and it had the most enrollment of the three universities. The University of Kansas had a relationship with Kabul University and there were Kansas faculty, effectively on sabbatical in a war zone, working tirelessly to educate Afghan students. All were armed camps and if you explore the university links above, all but NMAA were attacked repeatedly with the deaths of students and faculty.

Side Trips

You don’t really do side trips in a war zone because you will get yourself killed. However, we were able to make four trips inside Kabul to more fully understand the environment and accomplish the mission at NMAA. Two of the :

One of the major areas that NMAA trained their graduates was in field artillery. I was able to attend a live fire of Soviet made D-30 122mm artillery. It occurred at an Afghan military base and like many artillery live fires, it started slowly, was executed well and without incident, and the NMAA cadets performed impressively.

We visited an Afghan military installation which led to a subsequent hike up Mout Gharib Ghar which was on the Afghan base. The image at the top of this page is a composite picture from the peak. The soldiers in the image are walking on deeply jagged rocks about 18 inches across. If the rocks splinter or break under the weight, the fall is fatal as it goes about 2,000 feet straight down. The reward is a panoramic view of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The fear of death is palatable.

TV Hill was a major communications site located one mile from the center of Kabul. In any other major city, this site would be dominated by mansions with stunning views of the city and the Hindu Kush mountain range. In a city without functional plumbing in many locations, it is surrounded by a slum area as you had to walk longer to secure water every day.

Eagle Camp is where the CIA and other agencies trained Afghan forces. Given NMAA’s involvement in the development of Afghan military police officers, there was collaboration between the two sites. On one visit at Eagle Camp, we visited the Tajbeg Palace and Darul Aman Palace. We walked through the ruins of the palaces and I pondered where Afghanistan could have been without the plethora of strife and conflict both internally and externally.

Leaving Afghanistan

After three months, it was time for me to leave Afghanistan and travel to Iraq to do the same thing – try to strengthen the national military academies of Iraq. I felt like I had accomplished a lot in three months. There were farewell parties with the Afghans, the turkish and american forces, and the eight translators who I worked with. Each of these farewells was heartfelt and especially the one with the translators. These brave men risked their lives to aid the Americans and try to build a new Afghanistan. My translator’s fiancée, who I have never met, took three days and painstakingly made the traditional afghan dish of mantu . It was such an unexpected, authentic and selfless act. It melted in your mouth and was insanely good. In 2026, I will be in the same country as my previous translator. He married his fiancée and I plan to thank her in person for amazing act of kindness to someone she had never met.

Traditional Afghan Mantu

Iranians, Iraqis and a Warm Welcome

I left Kabul in a military convoy for Bagram Air Base and spent the night before an early morning flight to Iraq. The flight was in a C-17 and we would fly within 20 miles of the Iranian border before turning towards Baghdad. Because of my rank, I was the aircraft commander and they moved me into the vacant 3rd pilot’s seat which was much more comfortable than the seating in the back of the plane and with a better view. I could also hear all of the aircraft to ground communications.

Stock image of Cockpit view of C-17. I was in the back pilot seat.

As we approached the Iranian border, the young pilot attempted to contact the Iranian air control 50 miles out so as to coordinate flying within 20 miles of the border so there were no misunderstandings. He tried five times with each attempt being five miles closer to the border. At 25 miles from the border, Iranian air control responded accusing the pilot of not attempting to contact them until the last second and risking a “holy war” with Iran. The American captain stood his ground and calmly responded this was his 5th attempt to contact the Iranians, he would be turning in five miles, and he wished them a good day. The pilot switched the comms to in plane only and explained that this happened every time they flew near Iran and it was best to not respond.

We landed at Camp Victory, Iraq late at night where we met by Sergeant Major who was visibly still recovering from a road-side explosion. The men and women were moved into tents and I was moved into temporary quarters. The following day, I linked up with my NATO unit and was assigned to the G5. MAJ Dave Dinger met me (we had worked together at West Point) and ensured that I was taken care of. I moved to the NATO quarters and begun my work as part of a multinational task force to improve the capabilities of the Iraqis.

I lived in the Green Zone which at this time was being shelled daily as part of the Tigris River Offensive from Sadr City. Insurgents would set up mortars on their apartment balconies, fire across the Tigris River, and run back inside their apartment to escape counterbattery fire. The green zone was fortified into a series of small sandbag honeycombs 15 feet tall to limit damage. It was a needle in the haystack attack. It did not take long for us to identify the sound of mortars and our bodies instinctively moved into a prone position for protection. The most dangerous areas were parking lots outside the honeycomb The first month I was there I slept in full body armor on the floor next to my bed sans my helmet. As others from a combat zone will tell you, certain sounds gained new meaning and your body would react without thinking to the stimulus.

NATO and the Multinational Security Transition Command

I joined the the Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq and would be assigned to the Nato Training Mission – Iraq. The planning cell (G-5) consisted of three officers: LTC Steven Windmill, LTC Hasan Huseyin Kanbur, and me. My focus area was trying to get the four Iraqi military academies to work together. This was going to be a very difficult task for a couple of reasons:

  • The Iraqi military academies took high school graduates, applied a Royal Military Academy experience, and graduated officers. This was an accelerated process with high school graduates in contrast to the the 4 year NMAA, Royal Military Academy, or West Point experience. The graduates were poorly prepared to lead.
  • The academies used three different languages.
  • There were two Kurdish academies, one Sunni academy, and one Shia academy.

I engaged with the four academies and was warmly received by their leadership. I was able to obtain copies of their course of study, detailed individual course material and assessment all translated to English from the three languages. This was a win and highlighted the stark differences between the academies as apparently they had never shared this basic information with each other.

Coordinating with the rest of the task force, it was logistically impossible to visit three of the four military academies. The ground situation was too fluid and dangerous. The only academy we could influence was the oldest of the Iraqi academies – Rustamiyah which was formed in 1924. It was only six miles outside of Sadr City but was a very active combat zone at the time with surrounding air filled with Apache gunships actively engaging ground forces. LTC Steve Windmill and I flew in on a Blackhawk and were greeted by the Superintendent of the academy. We had several hours of productive conversations and was hopeful that the visit might get spur greater collaboration between the academies.

As we waited for our return flight which we would not take place until it was dark, Steve and I went on the roof to watch that firefight taking place several blocks away. Yea, that was not a good idea in retrospect. We were protected from the ground forces but we definitely had the attention of the Apache gunships. Thankfully, they realized we not a threat and we realized this was not a spectator sport and moved back inside. The flight back was exciting as the helicopter popped their flares and went evasive. We did not take fire but it definitely woke us up.

Social Events in a War Zone

As a Colonel, I was periodically invited to engage with Iraqi three and four-star generals at joint social events. Alcohol was served including mixed drinks. US Army personnel are prohibited from drinking in war zone because mixing alcohol and automatic weapons is a really bad idea. So for these social events, Army officers would drink soda and the Iraqi generals would drink alcohol until they would ask us why do we keep beating them in wars. I would always answer the same way – all commands in the Iraqi army move up the chain of command to the first general officer for a decision. In the American army, we spent a lot of resources training sergeants and lieutenants. This creates decision agility and if we operate inside our opponent’s decision cycle, we will win most of the time. They didn’t like that answer and we typically got a lecture on the Ottoman empire during which we would sip our soda and smile.

Camp Victory and Curtis

Our son Curtis was 18 miles away at Camp Victory which for those unfamiliar with war zones, rounds up to a billion miles. Wars are not tourist events where folks just wander around. However, if you are a Colonel, you can call his brigade commander, who is a Colonel, and arrange a four day pass for him to visit you in the Green Zone. This worked out and at 0330 in the morning, Specialist Carver was loaded into heavily armored, multi-wheeled transport vehicle that others referred to as a Rhino. My son arrived at 0500 and we immediately headed to an internet cafe in the Green Zone so that we could connect with our family back at West Point. The internet connection was synchronous satellite (which translates to 23,000 miles up and 23,000 miles down) which translates to a lot of lag. At some point, our daughter Michelle informed Curtis that he was typing too slow and and in the interim, she would inform him about her adventures.

Curtis and I had a great time. We visited the Victory Arch in Baghdad and Curtis met my colleagues that I worked with. I would see him one more time as moved to Camp Victory to catch a flight to Kuwait.

In Retrospect

In retrospect, I was not successful in bringing the Iraqi military academies together. This was in part because of they were not interested in healing the differences between the different factions in Iraq. This was in part because they were not interested in reevaluating the effectiveness of using high school graduates and a Sandhurst like finishing experience as the normal path for new Iraqi officers and the resultant effect it had on organizational decision making and agility. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was a refusal to accept that that the Ottoman empire is not coming back and their recent military defeats should be a cause for reflection and change.

Coming Home

One morning I was working out in the gym at 0430 and in walks someone I definitely know as I worked for him and for a brief time, we were both the same rank. It is Frank Helmick, Lieutenant General Frank Helmick, the incoming commander for my unit. As often happens, it was not as if it had been twenty years. It was if we were getting back together after a weekend. We would have a private dinner a couple of days later as I was preparing to leave theater and he asked my advice as the incoming commander.

Leaving Iraq involves flying back to Kuwait and spending seven days decompressing. I, and pretty much everyone in Kuwait was of the opinion that going home would have been a better utilization of our time.

As we were going through TSA security, one of the soldiers asked the TSA agent if we needed to take off our boots as we went through security. Without missing a beat, the TSA responded, “Soldier, you have an M-16. We are not worried about your boots.”

The security check was really focused on war contraband which was a non-issue for me and an issue for others. I was the aircraft commander again and we flew initially into Washington, DC where we were met by GEN Cody, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. This was on a Sunday. He shook the hand of every soldier on the plane and gave them his coin. It was a remarkable example of leadership by example.

I boarded another plane and they flew me to where I had started – Fort Benning Moore, Georgia. We would coordinate our final flight once we landed to our final destination. Eileen and the kids had traveled back to Savannah, GA so that my return could be shared with the larger family. Unfortunately for our plan, the transportation officers refused to transport me to Savannah and instead insisted that they could only fly me back to West Point. It was very frustrating and illustrative of bureaucrats in charge instead of leaders. It was less expensive to fly me to Savannah. I was going on leave. My family was waiting for me there. I was coming out of a combat zone. But no.

So, I called Eileen and she and Michelle drove four hours to pick me up. Michelle had made a welcome home dad sign that was quite good. I meet them at aafes at Camp Moore and after embracing, we drive four hours home to Savannah for a well deserved leave.

My leave would be short as I had been selected as an American Council of Education Fellow and it was time to join my class, visit universities and their senior leadership teams, and spend a year at the innovative George Mason University. You can learn more about this chapter in Forays into Andragogical Academia because, of course, you cannot get an academic paper published unless you use weird words that no one understand except a very small segment of the population.