Share It had been a brutal winter in Badakhshan.   One of the hardest winters in years had descended upon northern Afghanistan, and the farthest northeastern province had taken the worst of it.  Rugged and mountainous, the snowfall had lain heavy upon the slopes and closed off the passes.  Some valleys, accessible only by foot or by donkey, had run dangerously on supplies; especially the Afghan Border Police.  Several outposts were in dire need of airlifted supplies.  With Afghan airlift capacity, their wait would be long indeed.   COL Mollosser agreed with the 5th Zone commander, a brigadier general, to try to provide some needed sustenance to one of the hardest hit outposts.  He got buy-in from the American general who controls air assets in the RC North.   Thus began a saga that would span weeks. Four previous attempts had been shut down by bad weather.   Members of the team,

Share This is the post that I’ve been dreading, but I knew it would come.   For the first time since WW-II,  Ohio’s 37th (then a division, now a Brigade Combat Team that includes many soldiers from Michigan) has lost lives in combat.   The day before yesterday, out in Maimana, an insurgent wearing a suicide vest approached a group of Afghan Police and their mentors and detonated his vest.  The indiscriminate violence of that act took many lives.  Among the dead were two Americans; SFC Hannon and SFC Rieck.  A third, CPT Rozanski, died of his wounds within hours.  Five other soldiers were wounded, most of them severely.  Two are still fighting for their lives. All three of our honored dead leave families behind.  Children, wives, parents and siblings.  Each of our wounded has a life.  All have a story.  Every single one of them was born into loving

Share As mentors, we go where our counterparts go and we do their missions with them.  Sometimes we are teaching, sometimes we are recommending, and sometimes we are being supportive.  We are also sharing their experiences and taking in their world.  You can’t really advise and mentor very well when you don’t understand the world of the man whom you are trying to help develop as a professional.   The mission to the checkpoint was one of those missions.  I took along others on that mission, partly for communications, partly for security, and partly because if I didn’t, the mission would have been stopped. Another such mission was our mission recently to the Aquina Border Crossing Point (BCP).   Aquina is out west in Faryab Province, on the border with Uzbekistan.    It’s about 160 miles from Marmal.   The ABP Zone Commander, a General and the mentee of COL