OEF
In Marja, it’s war the old-fashioned way
Feb 20th
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran–Washington Post Foreign Service–
MARJA, AFGHANISTAN — They had slogged through knee-deep mud carrying 100 pounds of gear, fingers glued to the triggers of their M-4 carbines, all the while on the lookout for insurgents. Now, after five near-sleepless nights, trying to avoid hypothermia in freezing temperatures, the grunts of the 1st Battalion of the 6th Marine Regiment finally had a moment to relax.
As the sun set Thursday evening over the rubbled market where they set up camp, four of them sat around an overturned blue bucket and began playing cards. A few cracked open dog-eared paperbacks. Some heated their rations-in-a-bag, savoring their first warm dinner in days. Many doffed their helmets and armored vests.
Then — before the game was over, the chapters finished, the meals cooked — the war roared back at them.
The staccato crack of incoming rounds echoed across the market. In an instant, the Marines grabbed their vests and guns. The 50-caliber gunner on the roof thumped back return fire, as did several Marines with clattering, belt-fed machine guns. High-explosive mortar rounds, intended to suppress the insurgent fire, whooshed overhead.
And so went another night in the battle of Marja.
The fight to pacify this Taliban stronghold in Helmand province is grim and grueling. For all the talk of a modern war — of Predator drones and satellite-guided bombs and mine-resistant vehicles — most Marines in this operation have been fighting the old-fashioned way: on foot, with rifle.
They hump their kit on their backs, bed down under the stars in abandoned compounds and defecate in plastic bags.
“This isn’t all that different from the way our fathers and grandfathers fought,” said Cpl. Blake Burkhart, 22, of Oviedo, Fla.
The battlefield privation here is unlike much of the combat in Iraq, which often involved day trips from large, well-appointed forward operating bases. Even when Marines there had to rough it, during the first and second campaigns for Fallujah, they didn’t have to walk as far and they remained closer to logistics vehicles.
In Marja, U.S. military commanders figured, the best way to throw the insurgents off-balance and avoid the hundreds of homemade bombs buried in the roads was to airdrop almost 1,000 Marines and Afghan soldiers. That provided an element of surprise when the operation commenced, and it allowed the forces to punch into the heart of Marja. But it also meant they would have to tough it out.
Because they had to stuff their packs with food, water and ammunition, sleeping bags and tents were left behind. That seemed fine, because summer temperatures in southern Afghanistan often reach 140 degrees. But at this time of year, the mercury can dip — and it did during the first days of the mission, to freezing temperatures at night.
Huddled under thin plastic camouflage poncho liners, the Marines lucky enough to get a few hours of sleep in between shifts of guard duty huddled close together, sometimes spooning one another, to keep warm.
It didn’t always work. In those first days, more Marines were evacuated for hypothermia than for gunshot wounds. One grunt in the battalion’s Alpha Company proudly displays the frostbitten tip of his middle finger as his battlefield injury.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Change in Military Policy, Punishing Commanders for Injured Troops
Feb 5th
Military members in Iraq can recall in the early days of the war the rules of engagement (ROEs) and the frustration they caused U.S. commanders on the ground. Then, ROE incidents had career consequences if civilians were injured in the course of action. Today, in Afghanistan, U.S. commanders face even tougher discipline for battlefield failures.
The Washington Post reports, the U.S. military has reprimanded an unusually large number of commanders for battlefield failures in Afghanistan in recent weeks, reflecting a new push by the top brass to hold commanders responsible for major incidents in which troops are killed or wounded, said senior military officials.
This new change in military policy marks a departure for the U.S. military, which until recently has been reluctant to second-guess commanders whose decisions might have played a role in the deaths of soldiers in enemy action. Disciplinary action has been more common in cases in which U.S. troops have injured or killed civilians.
In response to the recent reprimands, some military officials have argued that casualties are inevitable in war and that a culture of excessive investigations could make officers risk-averse.
“This is a war where the other side is trying, too,” said one Army officer who commanded troops in Afghanistan and requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
As many as five battlefield commanders have received letters of reprimand in the past month or have been the subject of an investigation by a general who recommended disciplinary action. A sixth commander received a less-severe formal letter of admonishment. None of the investigations or letters of reprimand has been released publicly.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Michelle Obama announces more funding for military families in FY 2011 budget
Jan 27th
By Robin Givhan–Washington Post–
First lady Michelle Obama, on Tuesday afternoon, delivered a promise of more federal money dedicated to supporting military families — the first tangible results of her many visits to bases and hospitals, as well as conversations with veterans and their loved ones in 2009.
In a 20-minute speech to the Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives’ Luncheon at Bolling Air Force Base, Obama announced a 3 percent increase in funding over the 2010 fiscal year budget. That bump-up in dollars would bring spending on military support — from child-care services and improved housing to spousal-education programs — to $8.8 billion.
“These are all major investments,” Obama said in her speech. “They are the result of military families speaking up and being heard. And they are part of a larger ongoing commitment to care for our troops and their families even after the fighting ends.”
Even before Obama became first lady, she emphasized her concern for military families and the stresses placed on them as the country fights two wars. She spent part of last year reaching out to servicemen and women and their families through private conversations and public events. She thanked them for their dedication before she and vice-presidential spouse Jill Biden attended the opening game of the World Series. And she honored their history when she hosted a tea for military women at the White House. Mostly, however, Obama was on a listening tour.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Morphine found to help stave off PTSD in wounded troops
Jan 15th
By David Brown–Washington Post–
More than 200 years after it was isolated from poppies, morphine remains one of medicine’s best painkillers. But that isn’t its only use.
Physicians sometimes include the drug in a cocktail of medications given to people having heart attacks. It can relieve the breathlessness of pulmonary edema. It decreases diarrhea. A famous physician of the early 20th century, William Osler, once called morphine “God’s own medicine.”
Research published this week suggests that the compound might have at least one more use.
In a study of about 700 troops who were wounded in Iraq, those who received morphine soon after being injured were about half as likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder as those who did not get the drug.
It is not known whether morphine’s apparently protective effect arises directly from the relief of traumatic pain or indirectly by blocking the brain circuits that lay down traumatic memory.
The researchers and outside experts agreed that the effect would have to be proved virtually beyond a doubt before morphine would be routinely given to prevent the mental disorder.
“I would be very reluctant to suggest any change in clinical practice,” said Troy Lisa Holbrook of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, who headed the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We need to understand a great deal more how this appears to work.”
Morphine has been used for pain relief from battle wounds as far back as the Civil War. Since World War II, medics and hospital corpsmen have carried small injectors filled with the drug.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Is U.S. prepared to care for more casualties from troop buildup?
Dec 7th
WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration ramps up the war in Afghanistan, veterans advocates say the government must develop a better plan to handle the wounded when they come home.
Eight years of war have overtaxed the health care systems that treat service members and veterans, several said, and President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy 30,000 to 35,000 more troops in Afghanistan will compound the stress.
Treatment at medical facilities that the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs operate is viewed as world class despite its well-publicized lapses. However, both often struggle to care for large numbers of soldiers and Marines with devastating physical and mental injuries.
Coordination between the military and the VA is often slow, veterans groups say, and waiting times to see doctors and process benefit claims are long. A recent VA investigation found that 11,000 claims filed at offices around the country were still unresolved after more than a year.
More disturbing still is that suicides by combat veterans are at record levels.
“A war plan has to include the care of vets on the back end,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “What was lacking in the Iraq war was a plan for all the resources. We’re going to encourage them to not just think about bombs and bullets, but social workers and hospital beds.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Army Medical Command couldn’t be reached for comment. A VA spokeswoman declined to speak on the record, but said the Obama administration already had taken several steps to improve the delivery of health care to veterans.
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 14% [?]
In pre-dawn darkness, Obama salutes victims of war
Oct 30th
By Michael Fletcher and Ann Gerhart–Washington Post–
On Wednesday, President Obama started his day in the Oval Office as he always does, with intelligence and economic advisers alerting him to trouble spots and bits of improvement. He ended it 20 hours later, after a surprise trip to Dover Air Force Base, where he witnessed the return of 18 Americans killed this week in Afghanistan.
His day already had been crowded. By nightfall, the president had appeared in public five times. He honored a Senate pioneer, named an opponent to a panel, signed the defense bill, planted a tree and held a reception for a crowd jubilant over a new law. He made jokes, offered embraces, posed for photos, spoke firmly. He had dinner with his two girls, on the eve of their first Halloween in Washington. His wife was in New York at the first World Series game.
All the while, he knew the most sober and grim public duty of his new presidency awaited him after midnight.
He would stand in the chilly pre-dawn darkness Thursday at the Delaware base, his arm in a stiff salute, jaw clenched, and see the toll of the war he is waging. He did not look away.
Obama left the White House by helicopter just before midnight Wednesday. Marine One came to a halt behind the hulking C-17 military transport plane that brought the remains of 15 soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents who died in two different incidents this week, in a month that has become the deadliest for U.S. troops since the war in Afghanistan began.
Wearing a dark suit and a topcoat, the president first met privately with the families of the dead. Aides heard him repeat, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Popularity: 18% [?]
Obama to attend return of remains
Oct 29th
– Michael A. Fletcher– Washington Post
President Obama left the White House late Wednesday night bound for Dover Air Force Base in
Delaware, where he planned to attend the arrival of the remains of 18 U.S. personnel who were killed in two separate attacks in Afghanistan.
The fallen consist of seven soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents who died when their MH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed Monday, and eight soldiers killed Tuesday when their Stryker vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb blast in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president would travel by helicopter to the base to attend an arrival ceremony for the fallen troops and DEA agents before returning to the White House about 4 a.m. The visit was not listed on Obama’s public schedule, and the reporters accompanying him were told just hours before his departure.
The president’s attendance at the solemn rite will mark an emotional moment as his administration mulls over the way forward in Afghanistan. October has been the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year-old war, adding pressure to the administration’s efforts to settle on a new strategy for the war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/28/AR2009102804567.html
Popularity: 10% [?]
Obama seeks study on local leaders for troop decision
Oct 29th
AFGHAN PROVINCES TO BE ANALYZED
Details should help president determine need
By Scott Wilson and Greg Jaffe –Washington Post–
President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.
Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war. The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration’s turn toward Afghanistan’s provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.
“This is obviously a complicated security environment in Afghanistan, and the president wants the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet that challenge,” said a senior administration official who has participated in the Afghanistan policy review and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. “Any successful and sustainable strategy must clearly align the resources we provide with the goals we are trying to achieve.”
As U.S. forces in Afghanistan endure the deadliest month of the eight-year-old conflict, Obama is weighing a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for a quick jump in forces to blunt the Taliban’s momentum against concerns that too many new troops could help the insurgency’s recruiting efforts.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Bombings kill 8 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan
Oct 28th
DEADLIEST MONTH OF WAR
‘Taliban are patrolling and walking freely’
By Joshua Partlow–Washington Post Foreign Service–
KABUL — October became the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan when two powerful bombs killed eight soldiers and an interpreter in separate attacks Tuesday.
This time of year typically brings a decline in violence as insurgents regroup as cold weather approaches. Instead, the bloodiest days this month have displayed both the range of threats American soldiers face and the persistent danger of the most basic weapons.
Soldiers have died in a lone outpost in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan that was nearly overrun by more than 100 insurgents firing rockets and grenades. They have been killed in gun battles and in crashing helicopters. And they died Tuesday in Kandahar province in a dismayingly familiar way: by homemade bombs buried in the road.
The significance of Tuesday’s violence was that it again showed an inability to protect against the type of explosives that killed the most Americans in Iraq and are killing the most here, too. This year has already surpassed any other in Afghanistan in U.S. military deaths, and the rising toll poses urgent problems for the Obama administration as it attempts to fashion a new war strategy. Fifty-four U.S. troops died in October, surpassing the previous high of 51 in August, according to iCasualties.org.
Popularity: 4% [?]
U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
Oct 27th
Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is
fighting
–By Karen DeYoung–Washington Post–
When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
Popularity: 9% [?]
