Report From Afghanistan
(Host) This month, VPR presents "Report From
Afghanistan," a series from the war zone where 1,500 members of the
Vermont National Guard are currently deployed.
One of those Guard units
is commanded by Captain Larry Doane, a VPR commentator. He’s been keeping an
audio journal of the deployment from a soldier’s perspective.
Today, he talks about
the daily patrols that he sends his soldiers on.
(Doane) It’s 1
p.m.,
or 1300 in my current language, and all my guys are on patrol. We’ve got a pretty large area to cover, about
the size of Rhode Island, and like usual, we’re
going in eight different directions at once.
Some of the platoons are
on routine patrols or at least routine as things get in Afghanistan. Others are investigating reports of one
ambush or another. Some search for IEDs
or weapons caches waiting in the streets and fields surrounding Ghazni
city.
I’m at my desk. I juggle three computers while half my mind
listens to the radio traffic, sorting the mundane from the potentially
dangerous. The screens in front of me
stream information of all sorts, from classified intelligence to logistics
requests to Facebook status updates.
It’s a different sort of
war out here, and even on the frontier there is no escaping the homefront’s
need for news, for reassurance. The
flies buzz my desk despite our best efforts to trap and screen them away. I take the occasional break from typing or
listening to swat them away. The traffic
on the radio increases as one platoon starts to clear a known ambush site.
There’s not much I can
do from here on the base but I rise anyway and move to the map. I stare at pushpins stuck into the wall and
the red stickers surrounding them. The
pushpins are us, my team on patrol. The
red stickers are intelligence reports noting possible enemy locations. It’s a dance on the wall between our pins and
their stickers. Some days we’re on our
game and the stickers flee from the pins.
Other days are harder and the line between chased and chaser blurs. Today, though, our dance continues and I
wait, listening to the radio and waiting to see whose turn it is to lead.
(Host) VPR commentator
and Vermont National Guard Captain Larry Doane. In tomorrow’s journal
entry, he’ll describe attending a party to celebrate an Afghan marriage.
VPR’s Steve Zind is headed to Afghanistan to report on the Vermont Guard.