Getting American and Afghan soldiers to bond is not easy, writes BEN FARMERwith the 101st Airborne
THE AFGHAN soldiers had been with their new comrades for less than a day and already the American first sergeant was on the warpath.
Someone had used the shared shower tent in combat outpost Senjaray as a latrine. Suspicion had fallen quickly on the new Afghan arrivals.
“This is going to stop straight away!” he bawled grabbing his camouflage hat and storming from his plywood office in search of his Afghan counterpart.
The shower incident followed a potentially more deadly accident when a careless Afghan private had fired a rocket-propelled grenade through the roof of his barracks.
Five days earlier The Irish Times had seen an Afghan army driver reverse a truck through a brick wall, sending masonry tumbling perilously close to the kennel of a US sniffer dog.
“At least they have stopped selling my guys weed,” said a crusty US sergeant trying to look on the bright side.
American commanders are finding trying to get young soldiers from two alien cultures to bond and fight side-by-side with each other is not without its difficulties.
Nato army trainers are pumping out 5,000 new Afghan soldiers and policemen each month as they chase ambitious targets to bolster the country’s forces.
Building an army and police force that can replace 150,000 Nato troops has become the centrepiece of western efforts to try and defeat the Taliban insurgency.
As death tolls mount and scepticism grows in world capitals, the impetus has grown.
America is ploughing in billions of dollars to expand the Afghan army from 92,000 in September 2009 to 134,000 by this October and 172,000 by October 2011.
The police must undergo similar growth.
The growth means that for the first time, talk of Nato commanders partnering with their Afghan allies is more than wishful thinking.
In a scene mirrored across southern Afghanistan, in Zhari district of Kandahar one of the American army’s most illustrious units is teaming up with one of the Afghan army’s newest battalions.
Twenty-year-olds from the 101st Airborne Division, which traces its history through Iraq and Vietnam to the battlefields of Normandy, are living, eating and patrolling with 20-year-olds from the 205 “Hero” corps of the Afghan army.
The two units have recently arrived as part of the joint Hamkari, or “co-operation” offensive, to try and secure the critical southern city of Kandahar, where the Taliban first arose.
While previous partnering has often seen a token handful of Afghans, in Zhari, a battalion of Americans is stationed with a full battalion of nearly 600 Afghans.
Graduates from Afghan training camps are arriving so quickly that the Americans are having trouble finding space to house them.
At Combat Outpost Durkin, nestled at the foot of bare, brown mountains, First Sgt Paul Bailey and Capt Paul Deleon are listening to the demands of the 90 Afghans due to move in.
“We can’t come here until we have another well and somewhere to wash before prayer,” explained Lieut Habibullah Khan.
An American offer to share tents with Afghan soldiers is declined. “We should have our own quarters, because of our culture,” he explained.
“We will see what we can do,” said First Sgt Bailey, adding to an already long list in his pad.
Despite teething troubles, the Americans say most of their comrades’ faults are “young soldier problems” that will fade with experience.
Rough new soldiers walk around with weapons carelessly pointed in any direction. Shots are accidentally fired. Petty pilfering occurs.
Their advantages outweigh their faults they say though. Afghan forces have greater understanding of the villages and have demonstrated an uncanny ability to spot booby traps or sense an ambush.
Many of the 101st Airborne served in Iraq alongside Iraqi soldiers and the Afghans are better natural soldiers they say and often fearless.
“There people have been fighting for years, it’s second nature for them,” said 26-year-old Staff Sgt Brandon Griffis with admiration.
Zhari’s residents are more likely to talk to an Afghan soldier than an American decked in so much high-tech equipment he seems a visitor from another planet.
However, successful bonding between the two sides asks a lot of American soldiers as young as 18 who have never left their country before.
As dusk falls at the sandbag-swathed Pir Mohammad school on the outskirts of Senjaray, Lieut Cory Donohoo watches his men and Afghans throw around a tattered American football and believes his own platoon has made the breakthrough.
“They are playing ball with us, they are lifting weights with us. I’m not sure that happens anywhere else,” drawled the 24-year-old proudly through a lipful of chewing tobacco.
“I think that it’s amazing that these 18-year-old kids want to talk to someone who doesn’t speak their language and who they may not even trust.
“They are playing football here with us and when we first got here they would barely talk to us. It’s night and day.”