Mary Beth Email Inspires Reflection

Mary Beth wrote me an email and as I responded to it I began to think and reflect on my service in Afghanistan. It helped produce the following words. I think it is a pretty accurate collection of my thoughts on the whole situation. Thanks, Mary Beth for helping me put my thoughts into words. Below is a section of my email to Mary Beth.

It is an understatement when I say that I cannot wait to see Angie again. I understand why we can’t be together and my mission here is very important, but I really do miss her many many times every single day. If nothing else, a deployment certainly teaches you to be grateful for all that you have in terms of love, family, and safety. It also makes you grateful for what you don’t have (in the US) like insecurity, corruption, and hunger; fear, uncertainty, and a lack of things essential. This is what many Afghans live with every day. So while I miss Angie dearly, as long as I have to be deployed, I work to improve the situation here.

Every day the military police in my battalion partner with the Afghan police and government officials to get rid of some of those things that we are glad not to have in the US. And where we cannot get rid of them, we work to lessen their impact on Afghans. It is precisely these shortcomings that make the environment ripe for Taliban to win over followers. While the Taliban’s success relies on the further degradation of conditions in Afghanistan, the Afghan government’s success and the success of all of the coalition forces here depends on the ability of the government and security forces to better serve and provide for Afghans and improve conditions. Clearly these two objectives stand in contradiction to one another. With coalition attempts to provide security, Taliban attempt to undermine it through violence and destruction. With coalition attempts to recruit legitimate security forces, Taliban attempt to insert evildoers who will wait for their time to again degrade the improvements made in Afghanistan. The hope and the prayer then, is that which has been hoped and prayed for for centuries- that good will overcome evil. I believe that in the end, it always will.

And while these goals are noble, let us not forget our ultimate end here- providing a secure and stable Afghanistan that will not stand for and has the means to prevent those supporting the evil that conspired and trained in Afghanistan to attack us on September 11, 2001. Our road is not easy, but our efforts are significant and this end is crucial.