Greetings from Jalalabad! Hope this letter finds everybody in good health and living in the grace of God.

I have truly entered into the deployment mentality. With modern communications of satellite phones and internet, along with the ever-present military newspaper Stars and Stripes, soldiers at most bases are able to read about events at home on a same-day basis. But reading about events is not the same as participating in them, so it really underscores how far away we really are. For my part, three events that brought that reality home to me were from the parish: the opening of the school year, the death of Mary Ruth Dargis, a fine Christian lady and gentle soul if there ever was one, and the parish festival.

I’m starting my fourth month in Afghanistan . Most of the soldiers I work with here arrived in May and June, so they are approaching the halfway mark of their year deployment. Although I am nominally assigned to 82^nd Airborne Division, the unit I work for day-to-day is a brigade from Fourth Infantry Division based in Fort Carson, Colorado. Most of the subordinate units here are part of the brigade. On the map, our area of responsibility is east and northeast from Kabul. If one looks at a map, it is not a particularly large area compared to the whole of Afghanistan, but much of it is heavily populated, mountainous, and for most of the past decade it has the dubious distinction along with Kandahar for being the most violent region of the country. Things have only gotten worse over the past year as the Taliban and the other insurgent groups grow in strength. The two largest attacks against American forces the past year were both in our area, including the one last week that killed eight Americans and came within a whisker of being a complete massacre of the soldiers stationed at that post.

The Army here is considerably different than from Ft. Jackson. The Southern-flavored “Confederate Army” I encountered there is much weaker out here, and I believe I have met soldiers from every state plus the American commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands. The straight-forward training at Ft. Jackson was about basic inculturation into the Army and basic infantry skills to keep us alive in difficult situations. On the contrary, out here one experiences the great diversity of roles that soldiers have. Since the soldiers wear the same combat uniform and everybody (except the chaplains) is armed, one cannot determine a soldier’s particular job unless he or she is asked or observed in action. I find most soldiers are like sailors in that they like their MOS (Military Occupational Specialty—their job) but are ambivalent about the Army at large. That is quite unlike the Marines, where most Marines are proud to be a Marine but many are unhappy doing their own particular job. The Army “system” is quite unlike the naval services in that “staying in your lane” is paramount for soldiers whereas in the Navy every sailor is a firefighter and “every Marine is a rifleman.” Soldiers often resist and grumble when assigned tasks outside of their training. This even affects my work: as the roving priest I am always visiting other chaplains’ soldiers and am therefore careful to limit my role to that of visiting Catholic priest and by making many referrals to unit chaplains. One crosses out of his lane at one’s own peril.

Soldiers are young and male and this is a hyper-masculine environment. I made the mistake of leaving the September Valley Catholic (for non-San Jose readers that is San Jose’s official Catholic newspaper) out in the office and the visiting soldiers were laughing themselves silly over how feminized and trivial the issues covered therein were. The statistics I could find online say that women soldiers make up one out of seven members of the U.S. Army, which is what I see here on the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). It’s no wonder women soldiers often walk and eat in pairs or packs: not for physical safety but for moral support. And that is at the FOBs, where one sees the diversity of soldiers: both sexes, different races, logistics, communications, combat troops, aviation assets, etc. The smaller COPs (which stands for Contingent Operating Posts or Combat Outposts, depending on who you ask) and OPs (Outposts) are all male and overwhelmingly combat troops: infantry, artillery, and cavalry scouts. The latter are trained to be reconnaissance troops who avoid premature contact with the enemy, but in this country they are used as infantry troops who mix it up with rifles, machine guns, grenades, and mortars with the bad guys as much as any regular infantryman would do. The majority of the fighting soldiers I have met were born after I first entered the Navy in 1986: I feel ancient! While the armed forces are fully integrated by race, on the COPs one observes the reality that whites and Hispanics form most of the fighting soldiers and an even higher percentage of those killed in action. African-Americans, despite their large numbers in the Army, tend to work in logistics and other support positions. I had an interesting conversation one day with an African-American combat officer about this phenomenon. Infantry combat is a young man’s game, not only for the physical exertion it requires but also because the late teens and early 20-somethings get the biggest adrenaline “rush” out of combat. The dirty little secret of war is that if you’re not taking significant casualties it can be the ultimate sporting event. And given the qualitative superiority of the Americans, we don’t suffer a large amount of casualties in most engagements with the enemy. As a group of young soldiers told me, “Combat is 95% excitement and 5% terror.” It is the older soldiers and the soldiers of units that have been hit hard who are sober about it. And their chaplains!

In the Navy we commonly refer to soldiers as “soldiers,” and with the Marines I’m used to hearing either “soldiers” or the WWII era term “GIs,” but here the troops are referred to in the aggregate as the “Joes,” particularly by the officers and chaplains. For example, after an attack a chaplain could be sent out to the attacked base “to take care of the Joes.” I notice among themselves that the enlisted soldiers refer to other soldiers by their specialty: “He works in S-2,” “He’s in infantry,” or “She works in AirCav.” In this they are like sailors who do the same.

Despite the calumny offered by opponents of the military that military members are from the bottom of society, by any objective measure much of the elite of our young adults are here. As a recruiter told me once, most military members are from the top 20% of their generation (based on criteria including intelligence, physical ability, emotional and mental stability, and lack of criminal activity and drug use) and the Army is only allowed to recruit a small amount of the next 20%. Thus 60% of soldiers’ contemporaries back home are not even qualified to enter the Army. My impression interacting here with visiting civilians is how impressed they are by these soldiers, as young and rough as they are.

American civilians would be shocked by the amount of loaded weapons around. Rifles, carbines (light rifles), and pistols are carried everywhere except in the gym. That includes the chapel: a couple gun racks are in the back for worshipping soldiers to stack their rifles. You can think of it as our version of St. Victor’s crying room. All service members are qualified on the weapons they carry. That makes the American bases immensely strong defensively. Any enemy trying to enter an American base would have to face a huge amount of well-aimed small arms fire. That is how the defenders of COP Keating last week-- surprised, greatly outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded by high ground-- managed to survive an attack designed to overrun and annihilate them. That is different, however, from being able to operate effectively offensively “outside the wire;” that is, outside of the base perimeter. Most patrols originate from the COPs, which are virtually all fighting men. On the other hand my home base, FOB Fenty, with its many logistic and administrative components, has only a small proportion of troops who are involved in patrolling. Many of the other FOBs are similar. By American counterinsurgency theory something on the order of 750,000 soldiers and police should be involved in effectively protecting Afghanistan’s population from the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Instead, we are about 60,000 Americans with about 30,000 other NATO troops here. A bewildering array of Afghan military, police, and security forces are supposed to make up the difference, but there aren’t that many of them and because of corruption, illiteracy, and tribalism they are far less effective than their numbers would indicate. Thus one can understand why General McChrystal speaks about the prospect of losing this war.

A bit of a rambling letter this time but I hope you get a feel for the heroes who are fighting in America’s name. Please say a prayer for them each day!

St. Martin of Tours, Patron Saint of soldiers, pray for us!

God bless, Fr. Michael