Fitting in

25FEB09
COP TERMINATOR, AFG


There is tons of dust here and it affects how everything works from the keyboard I'm using now, to the phone lines, to the weapons. Maintenance is key.

Life here is good. My company has their own COP in the middle of nowhere with very little oversight. My CO is great, a hooah guy who pretty much just wants me to kill bad guys. The hard part is the bad guys here drop their weapons and radios when we get close so we can't catch them. It's really frustrating. My guys are awesome. My PSG is acting 1SG right now while he's on leave. Until 1SG gets back I have an E6 PSG and 4 E5 SQD leaders. Not really MTOE but they're all great at their jobs and eager to engage the enemy. I lucked out. (For those who don't speak Army, I'm sorry. Just know that it means I'm undermanned)

The platoon has had some hard times. I'm their fifth PL (Platoon Leader) in a year, the last four were all fired for one reason or another. As I said before my boss is pretty cool, so there had to have been extenuating circumstances to get canned. At least the bar has been set nice and low for me. There is nowhere to go but up.

The COP is cool. It's called Terminator which beats our parent base, FOB Ramrod. We live 16 to a tent, have wooden latrines with burn barrels, a tent for a mess hall (it's got a big screen TV though), a tent for a reaching home (8 PCs, 3 phones), and a large wooden building with four big screens for movies and video games. We have a huge Hesco wall surrounding us with a number of large guard towers. This is a contemporary castle. It's kinda cool.

We are out in the middle of nowhere, in a country in the middle of nowhere, and it shows. The people here are straight out of the stone age. I tried asking a kid the other day if he knew where the closest school was. He didn't even grasp the concept of a school, probably twelve years old. The old men know everything, and tell us nothing. They have a hard life. If we don't trust them we can search their homes, even jail them for a few days. If the AAF (Anti-Afghan Forces) don't trust them they'll kill them or their kids. The houses are clay huts with sheets on the walls for decoration and dirt floors. The animals stay inside on cold nights. Rice is an expensive food for them. It really makes jack-in-the-box and porcelain feel like upper class. Pray for them.

Arrival

21 FEB 09
FOB Terminator, AFG


Dear family, friends, and loved ones:

I am writing you from literally the middle of nowhere Afghanistan. I probably couldn't tell you exactly where we are but I really can't anyways because there's nothing here. Except us, and our awesome eye in the sky, and a whole lot of guns.

I drove into FOB Terminator (sweet name, I know) in a convoy of MRAPs. I won't go into detail about these awesome machines suffice it to say they are saving lives. Tell your congressman. Our convoy passed through a small town that would make a set of farm houses outside Yuma look like palaces, it is the center of commerce in this province. To say these people live destitute lives would be a monumental understatement. They have nothing. They are terrified. They have no future. And that's why I am here. When we built our little fort out here in the middle of nowhere two months ago, people wept. They finally had proof that we were here to help them, here to help put and end to the daily terror they have endured for some very long. And help we will.

Besides being a better target for the bad guys (don't worry they can't shoot straight,)we offer them a source of protection, a source of income (many drive trucks for us and help gather resources and supplies), and an outlet for their problems. Corruption in the political system here is a way of life. In Tijuana you can bribe a cop and get out of a speeding ticket, here the cops have road blocks set up to collect tolls instead. This is something we have to combat in a non-kinetic way. We can't engage the local government militarily, we have to be political. Our leaders are doing their best to help and we are making progress.

The other half of our conflict is spectacularly kinetic (mom stop reading). We are engaging with and destroying the enemy in an awesome fashion. We are where I want to be. I can tell you with no apprehension that US forces can defeat any other military force in the world. The great thing here is the bad guys don't believe it. So they are engaging us and we are hitting them back, hard. And we are winning. And our success is driving the people away from the AAF (Anti-Afghani Forces) and to us. Thank God.

I saved thanking God for my last point because He is the most important element. God is here. God has always been here. He is with our troops and with our leaders. And he is listening to you. Please continue to ask him for protection over us, guidance for our leaders (which now includes me, wow!) and love in hearts to help differentiate between the good and the bad.

Sincerely,



Robert M. Woodson
Second Lieutenant, Infantry
1st PLT, A Co, 2-2 IN "Ramrods!"
R.L.T.W!