Please help me help kids in Afghanistan

[Major Robert Dump]

deletd

[pevergreen]

Been a fan of you as a person before I knew your occupation, and I support what you are doing.

Lemur, please send the contact info my way.

Get home safe MRD, I miss our late night (for me) unstable hotel net connection L4D games.

[Hax]

Despite having a deep run mistrust against the military, I cannot even begin to express in words how much I respect you and your acts of compassion that try to alleviate the suffering and improve the happiness of the children living there. I will try and find some old toys and forward this mail to my father as well, then I'll be posting here as well.

I just wanted to say "thank you"

[Moros]

My utmost respect for you. I will try to find some stuff together to send. Best of luck back there.

[Jolt]

Great to see you safe and sound, and I am extremely glad to see how humane your approach has been and the support you garnered in your assignment area. You have a deep respect from me as well.

And indeed I would love to read about your interactions over in Afghanistan. I doubt any Taliban or Al-Qaeda supporter might know about this forum (except that Jihad spambot post we had one year ago ), much more about the backroom so for talking about general locations or whatnot (Not so sure about the names of your comrades though), putting your journal in the Backroom (Where it would belong, I gather) would probably be safe as far as "search engine bots" go (As in, you can't pick what you write in the backroom using google or yahoo, etc.)

You are doing a great and honorable thing, and you personify everything that the US and allies are doing of good to Afghanistan and its society.

Btw, you do know why you aren't allowed to give stuff to kids right? A college colleague of mine went on a peace-keeping NATO mission to Chad, and his unit had the same idea as you and one of the my friend's mission colleagues gave some candies to the kids when he was also distributing water and food. Turns out one of the kids who ate a candy apparently had diharrea because of it (Those kids metabolism couldn't cope as easily as ours to the ingredients and chemicals that are components of the candy), and in those parts of the world, that means certain death. Afterwards, the story is pretty standard. The family and village accused "the evil Western devils" of killing the family's child and to avoid further trouble with the locals, he was rotated out of the mission earlier. It struck me as a pretty sensible reasoning, but I can certainly understand why anybody would brake those rules (Heck, I probably would too.)

[Major Robert Dump]

Ice, I don't know what you mean by "not allowed to give stuff to the kids." It is encouraged here.

Furthermore, Pakistan and India mass produce junk food and send it over here. 80% of the fare available in the markets is crap like soda, crisps, cakes and candy. Many of the children who bring their lunch to school bring something like a piece of fruit, a soda and a bag of crisps.

As far as the journal goes, not gonna happen. Not until I get leave at least.

The thing you have to understand about a unit like mine is that while all of our peers tease us, try to screw us with crap jobs, try to pick apart our unit to reassign us to other jobs etc and generally give us a hard time, they are the first in line to try to claim credit for our good deeds. I am part of a small unit that is a division asset, while being attached to a brigade, while being in the battle space of a battallion. In other words, brigade and battallion try to boss us around all the time (doesn't work), and when we score a success they try to claim credit for it (doesn't work). We answer to Division.

That being said, my journal will have some things that in order to be placed into context may very well reflect poorly on certain elements of the 101st and the 172nd Vermont.

I will likley post some pictures and nuetral stories here and there, but the meat will hae to wait.