Looking Back to Afghanistan 2008

I left Charleston for this deployment 11 weeks ago today. That seems like so long ago. The middle part of this deployment is here. This is when you are a little numb to everything. I am now completely used to seeing soldiers that are all blown up. The hospital is filled with them right now. It seems normal. Just the other night I had to assess an Afghan soldier in the trauma bay who was on a ventilator and had a blown up leg. It was routine. 11 weeks ago that would not have been the case. I guess you could say that I have come a long way. Nevertheless, my world is a tiny one right now from a geographical standpoint. I work a hundred yards from where I sleep. I eat a few hundred yards down the road from where I work. I exercise at the gym up the road from the where I eat. You can easily get caught up in this and forget about the bigger picture. You can get lost in your own little world. When this happens I find it helpful to look back and think about past experiences. I learned a lot on my previous deployment, so maybe those lessons learned can help me in the here and now.


In May of 2008, I deployed to Camp Alamo which is small forward operating base outside of Kabul. Our mission was to help train the Afghan National Army. Physically, our camp was surrounded by the Kabul Military Training Center. This is thought to be the "premier" Afghan military base. (You'll understand the quotations around premier later) The majority of basic and officer training for the Afghan National Army occurs here. There were 300 coalition troops at Camp Alamo. We had American, British, French, Polish, and Romanian personnel there. We formed an embedded training team or ETT. In other words, each of us was there to train the Afghans in his/her respective field. U.S. Navy logistics officers worked with Afghan logistics officers on developing a supply system. British drill sergeants trained Afghan drill sergeants on how conduct training. Polish infantry trained Afghan infantry on how to shoot. You get the picture.

I was assigned to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) Clinic. My job of course was to train Afghan doctors and medics. The MEPS Clinic was essentially there for recruit physicals. Basically, every single breathing human being that wanted to join the Afghan Army came to our clinic for a military physical. This was the only such clinic in all of Afghanistan. We were there to make sure the recruits were fit for military service. Sounds simple, right? Well, there was a lot more to it than you might imagine. The MEPS Clinic was a snapshot of a third world nation. Each day approximately one hundred new recruits would arrive by bus. They were coming from all over Afghanistan and their journey often took 3-5 days to arrive at our doorstep. The vast majority of the recruits had nothing but the clothes on their backs. The poverty was shocking to someone like myself that grew up in a middle class suburb of Cleveland. Malnourishment was painfully obvious especially when we would examine their musculoskeletal systems from head to toe. In addition, 3-5 days on a bus produced incredible amounts of body odor. Those smells are permanently burned into the recesses of my brain! I do not wish that upon anyone. It had to be taken in small doses especially at first. Some of the Afghan doctors even wore masks during the exams. I felt that was inhumane, so I never did that. Over 90% of the Afghan Army recruits were illiterate. Most had no idea how old they were. After all, birth certificates do not exist here. Many of the recruits had drug problems. We estimated that 30% were frequent users of hashish, the drug of choice in this extremely poor nation. The decision to do drug testing went up our chain of command. It was decided to forego drug testing because after all we were trying to build an Army not disqualify 30% of the guys from the very start. We only disqualified recruits if they were actively "high" at the time of the exam. That was painfully obvious sometimes.

In the six months of my deployment to Camp Alamo, we did well over 10,000 recruit physicals. Looking back, it was quite an experience overall. I'll try to relay some of my "lessons learned" in my next entry. Right now I am off to work the evening shift...