About this Blog

Timeliness:
To ensure that no operational details were revealed. Each of the posts on this blog were back-dated by two years.  The events actually occurred on the same dates in 2010 and 2011, not 2012 and 2013.

Notebook entries:
These were small shorthand notes that I wrote to myself throughout the day.  They are hour-by hour feelings and thoughts that I recorded as they happened.  I would often use them as reminders of what I did, so that when I filed reports about the progress of my Afghans I could document exactly what they were taught.  I often used them to jog my memory about the events that happened during the day for my journal entries.  I have expanded the shorthand significantly and omitted the brackets because they would be completely illegible to anyone other than me.  Occasionally, when a journal entry has been lost, this will give you some indication of what happened.

Journal:
I wrote a journal every day of the deployment.  Many of the entries toward the beginning of the deployment have been lost. Those toward the end are nearly contiguous.  Every edit that I make has been bracketed [example] for clarity to the non-specialist reader.  Occasionally, when a notebook entry has been lost, this will give you some indication of what happened.

Post Comments:
Because my journal entries were often glib and did not make much sense out of context.  I have tried to highlight key components of the entry, expand the entry to make it more clear to the American public, and provide some of the wisdom that hindsight has afforded me.

Anonymity:
Names have been changed and dates and been scrubbed.  This journal was never meant for public consumption.  Many of the people shown here were exhausted, doing the best they could, and deserve more credit than I gave them in my equally exhausted and emotionally-drained state.  These people were my friends, my colleagues, and I have no malice towards any of them.  Some of them have families and careers that do not deserve to be disrupted by one demagogue.  I wrote the journal with names in because I was going to use it as the basis for a book, but it seems that no one reads books anymore, and that much of the American public is already realizing that the Afghan campaign is not a fruitful endeavor, so I thought it wise to reallocate my effort.  I post it because I hope that some war historians, journalists, and concerned citizens will find it useful.