Introduction

This personal, informal, unofficial report describes a mission by a team from Office of Military Cooperation - Afghanistan (OMC-A) to Gardez and Zurmat.

Officially, I went along for “fact finding” and “familiarization.” 

More accurately, I went along to get the heck off the compound.

My job here in the CJ4 has virtually no mission outside of Kabul. Except for occasional meetings at Bagram Air Base, 55 km up the road, and the 5-minute drive to my quarters at a “safe house,” I could spend an entire tour here without ever leaving the compound. So I’m always asking others with more interesting jobs to accompany them when they go outside the wire. I offer them “force protection.” Yeah, right.

The 2-day trip to Gardez turned out to be something of an adventure. It also filled in pieces of the puzzle for me on our military mission and on Afghanistan itself.

next: Background

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