Down by the Schoolyard

According to the 2000 census (which was the latest information I could find) the average American family has 1.86 children. There are 6.9 children in the average Afghan family. In case you were wondering, that's a substantial difference between the two countries. Here we are thinking that American schools have an overcrowding problem. Well, combine a lack of space, a lack of natural resources that generate revenue, and a central government that is in general disarray and you can almost imagine what public education is like in Afghanistan.

Your guesstimation probably isn't far from the mark. But even using your most vivid imagination, I'm sure what I saw on Thursday at one of the local Afghan schools would absolutely blow you away.

We pulled our 6 MAT-Vs (huge, armored military vehicles) into the courtyard directly in front of the school complex. Now I should mention that our MAT-Vs make a huge amount of noise, so it wasn't like we could sneak up on the place. It was sheer pandemonium from the second we arrived, which is part of the reason we could really only stay for about 45 minutes before we determined that we needed to cut and run.

Because there are so many students and such little space (and on account of cultural norms), Afghan public schools are structured in a very different manner than Western schools. The boys and girls are segregated, and the sister schools sit together in the schoolyard, governed by two principals (a male and a female). The students attend one of three daily sessions beginning at 6:30am and ending around 7pm. At any one time there are 8,000 students on the complex...half boys, half girls. Our fatal mistake this time was that we arrived almost precisely at shift change, and therefore encountered about 16,000 students who were eagerly practicing their English (and their ability to rip candy from our pockets).

This humanitarian aid drop of school supplies and teacher's kits is a fairly regular mission we perform under the auspices of Operation Outreach. Outreach is the officially sanctioned humanitarian aid program that the US forces support in Afghanistan. We receive donations from across America and the world and distribute them to families here. But like I mentioned earlier, I'm not convinced that our small donations to a school of 24,000 students even count for a drop in the bucket. We definitely perform this mission as a labor of love, and as a way for Afghans to associate positive feelings with the American military.

I trained very hard for 10 weeks to be able to safely perform "outside the wire" missions. Those are missions that take our team outside of the safety of the front gate of our forward operating base (FOB) and into downtown Kabul. We perform those missions almost every day. A majority of the people who came with us to the school have received little to no training on how to stay safe outside the wire, and even more frightening was the fact that many of them did not know how to shut the vehicle door, buckle a seatbelt or properly wear their protective gear.

I understand that there is something exciting about leaving the FOB and experiencing Afghan culture, but based on what I saw from inexperienced American Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen on our mission, I think it's time to institute some type of pre-mission training for people who want to be a part of these missions.

And that right there is tonight's lesson. Before I came to Afghanistan, I wanted to believe that American service members truly wanted to be here and truly wanted to try to make a difference. Now granted, making a measurable impact in Afghanistan looks and feels very different from making a difference in the States. But the similarity is that in both cases, some effort is required of the service member. Instead, what I'm finding here is that much of the good training we received before being sent to Afghanistan (always wear your helmet off base, take good care of your weapon, maintain 360 degrees of security) go right out the window the second boots hit the ground in this country.  And the typical reasoning behind these (and many other) bad decisions sounds a little like this: "well, anything goes...this is Afghanistan."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we let the bad guys win. We voluntarily take inexperienced people off the base, expose them to a potentially dangerous situation when they're not wearing their full protective gear and haven't been properly trained, and we wait for the insurgents to hunt us down. And we become complacent. We mistakenly believe that because the bad guys didn't hit us yet, they never will.

Make no mistake about it, the typical Afghan does not want to kill Americans. The typical Afghan seems to me to want to practice basic English phrases, eat a nice piece of American candy, drink a bottle of water and give us the thumbs up. It's a great feeling. But the bad guys sure do exist here. And they hide well.

I am very proud of the humanitarian work Americans are doing in this country, but you and I both know that I'm a bit of a stickler for the rules. And when those rules involve wearing gear that could save our lives, well, you had better believe that enforcement is coming the way of our volunteer Airmen, Soldiers and Sailors in very short order.

If you'd like to see more pictures from Operation Outreach, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roblisameehan/sets/72157627067377683/show/