This would be a lot more interesting if people made comments or asked questions
Thanks for your service! Keep the pics coming man!
I travel for work and have been to places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (which isn’t even comparible to your experience) and it’s a real eye opener.
How do you feel about the locals? I’m friends with a guy in spec ops that did a lot of work with locals and elders and has showed me a lot of crazy shit. He has shown me what they call “green zones” that’s where the watermelons come from lol. All shitty ass desert them bam a few hundred acres of lush beautiful greenery.
Yeah just outside of jalalabad to the east of it. It’s north of the MSR from twin tower gate and on the other side of the river. There a huge area for lush farming. We’d also get some Taliban that would try to sneak through that AO because it’s a side road into J-bad.
The locals were alright. There were some crazies but most just wanted to get by. The police were really good guys, many of them had family in Europe, UAE or the US and felt it was their duty to stay there and do their job (hence why I have blurred everyone out in my photos). The unfortunate reality is that who over has the largest weapons controls the population and is responsible for security.
The SF guys were reckless and it frustrated me to no end. Nearly every Afghan Elder, businessman, policeman, and army officer in my AO knew me by name by the time I left. You would think MARSOC would come talk to me before they handed out weapons to the crazies.
Manas:
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After we assessed the people and equipment it was time to assess the security. The biggest issue was attacks on the fuel convoys which we were specifically told not to secure because NATO was paying for the afghan version of blackwater to secure. However, we quickly found that we would not be able to complete our mission of handing security over to the police without “solving” this issue of frequent ambushes.
damn, so how did you guys get the area secured? What was their method of ambush?
This is so far removed from my isolated little bubble of life I wouldn’t even know where to start asking questions.
Keep posting though. 
^ This is the kind of stuff they gloss over in the media. It’s unfortunate too because it gives people an appreciation for the difficulty of what people are doing over there.
I’d be much more interested in your DelSol being done. WTF
I enjoy the hell out of this thread. Keep it coming and I will ask questions when I think of something, lol
There is massive “depth” to the situation there. If the media attempts to sum up a story into a 15 or 20 minute segment then it is probably missing most of the essential information. As Freek pointed out, different areas are so completely different that you cannot go into them with the same mindset as others. For an example, in my AO we had primarily 4 different tribes, insurgent funding was thin due to our distance from the border from Pakistan, it was mostly flat and dry, and nearly all the people had ties with Iran - schooling, business, family, etc. So the way we operated on a day to day basis had to take that infromation into account.
After I came back I was a victim of Fraud from a NJ Car dealership and lost $9k. Unfortunately the Del Sol is still on hold while I attempt to recover the funds. Unfortunately the maximum small claims in NJ is $3,000 and I cannot find a lawyer who thinks a cut of $9k is worth their time. Welcome back to the USA!!!
The ambushes would be 2-3 men, typically on motorcycles who would setup in ditches or hills and spray the fuel convoys with PKM or RPG fire. Towards the southern end of my AO the insurgents used IEDs. One thing I noticed was that the attacks were NOT taking place in the populated sections of highway - which meant to me that these attacks were not tolerated by police or civilians. Another theory was that the Afghan blackwater was draining the fuel from the tankers and staging the attacks themselves. They would then sell the NATO fuel and collect insurance on the burnt trucks.
An unfortunate reality is that the drivers of the attacked trucks would typically be killed. If they didn’t die in the initial gunfire of blast and were able to escape the fire, they would be taken hostage and their bodies found days later.
So I made my three prong plan:
- Ambush the ambushers by setting up at the locations of historical attacks
- work with the police and civilians to identify the insurgents, weapons suppliers, and bomb makers (they knew who they were)
- Stay close to the Aghan blackwater to determine their level of involvement with the “insurgents”
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So we kicked out on foot to the ambush positions:
Click this one for fullsize
All while working closely with the police which meant sometimes we had to stay at their CPs and OPs to help them fight off retaliation attacks.
And while all this was going on I was doing the PR thing with the Aghan security commanders
Damn. You need to put all of this into a memoir / book!
Did you end up catching the guys? Ever find out if the security guys were involved? Sucks about the fraud.
This is fascinating to me. I don’t have any specific questions at the moment but am thoroughly enjoying the first person account of what goes on over there. Keep it up!
Sounds like a logistical nightmare too.
Did you/do you have confidence that the Afghan Army/ANF/NDS were going to be able to take on the roles and responsibilities of the international military units and hired foreign contractors that were stationed over there?
Also did you guys encounter IED’s often or is that something that was much more commonplace in the areas that border Pakistan like you were talking about?
I need more details on that fraud. Sorry to hear man.
Also, anyone who quotes a long picture tpost just to say they LIKE it, is an asshole.
^ Haha, repped for the thing about quoting posts with pictures. It take just a couple seconds to delete the pictures from the quote.
Yeah, didn’t realize till after I posted it. Fuck off though :tup:, and I’ll edit it so you can stop being so upset.
haha
Happy now?
I like your optimism but lol at thinking you could fix or solve anything over there. I know the culture was different in your AO but the real issues are way deeper than you ever realized. Afghanistan was nice because it allowed for cowboy activism.
I think I will, i need to put some stories down on paper. Some of the most interesting and frustrating things that happened are still current and very sensitive to those involved.
I bought the wife a 530xi wagon for a mom-mobile and paid an extra $1000 for the warranty.
30 days after we bought the car the transmission failed completely and needed to be replaced.
After months of arguing the warranty company gave us a signed statement that said the dealership pocketed the $1k and didn’t submit the warranty contract to them. (this is a bit sketchy because the dealership was acting as a agent of the warranty company and gave us a signed contract between me, the warranty company, and the dealership) I eventually paid the repairs out of pocket abiding by all the contract rules.
The day we got the car out of the shop with the transmission the water pump failed.
The dealer literally told me to fuck off so I contacted a lawyer friend who recommended me firms in NJ where I bought the car and they all said in the same breath that it was a open shut case (I have everything documented and signed) and that $9k wasn’t worth their time.
I saw it like a game where the rules were clearly defined and if you played well you could win. I was well aware that “winning” wouldn’t solve anything or bring about peace.