Month 8 Day 3

Notebook Entry
Five reports given. Drug guy lost. “When do we want to move this kandak?” MoD-14 S-2 and S-1 gave new tashkil, Lines of Operation Sync.

Journal Entry
A 12 year old blew himself up yesterday (open source). What is wrong with this place. I should also say there there was almost no reaction from the ANA staff re the death of Bin Laden. Then again a few months back Samir seemed to think that the attacks on 9/11 were started in Pakistan so I probably shouldn’t put too much stock in the disaggregation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The RCT [regimental combat team-our higher headquarters] tried to come over and partner and teach MDMP [military decision making process]. I guess it was a resounding failure. Capt Nowak has basically been told that he now needs to create all of the things that the ANA [Afghan National Army] need to do the planning. It is just stupid. Again, I am trying to get them to remember cardinal directions and the RCT is wasting their time with this. The S2A [assistance intelligence officer] basically wanted me to come babysit him, set up his projector, etc. He got all pissed off and tried to confront me about it, I’m like Sir, it’s just like any other projector, you really just don’t know how to deal with the ANA. They are people, tell them what you want to do and figure it out. I was thinking ‘you are a Capt for God’s sake.’ One of the analysts came over and tried to teach targeting to JAbar, I saw on his notepad that acronym CARVER and discussion points about link analysis. I specifically told the S2A that this was too advanced for them. They are just wasting their precious-little time.

I was busy the entire day again in the COC [Combat Operations Center] working on the ConOps [Concept of Operations]. I chewed out a Croat who was supposed to be helping us from RC(S) [Regional Command South] I just started going around him to the Americans actually fighting the campaign to get this information I need. This whole coalition thing is pretty useless. You have to talk to them on a completely separate computer, the language barrier is a major hindrance. They seem to get shuffled to positions where they don’t have much effect on normal operations, which makes sense, but there are times that people like me need them.