Mission Day

One of our jobs is to assist the Afghan National Army (ANA) in planning and executing their own missions. Today we saw some very positive results from our assistance. They received their own intelligence, did their own planning and executed all on their own while we observed their performance just there. We went on this mission and it was a total success. The intelligence was about a cache in a local man’s home that he found while doing some work. Sometimes, this kind of thing is the local’s way of looking for some free money. It wasn’t this time. It feels good to actually get good, solid info and in the long run save someone’s life because we, or the ANA acted on something that could have been a false report. When we go on any mission we always bring Humanitarian Aid items such as shoes, candy and coloring books with us. We also give a lot of it to the ANA because we really want he ANA face on all things we do. The kids of this local man were great. They came out to see us and we and the ANA gave them everything from coloring books to candy to shoes. They loved it. The looks on their faces when they were given something was priceless. One boy who could not have been more than 3 had no shoes at all. His feet looked horrible. I could not let him go without any longer so I asked another team guy if we had any more shoes and he said that in fact we had two pairs of shoes left and both were about ten sizes too big. The boy took the shoes anyway and was thrilled. When the candy was handed out one boy took his gum out of his mouth and put it on top on his head (he had a hat on). We found this amusing. All in all this was by far the most successful mission to date for us and the ANA.