Time ticks away....

My time on vacation is ticking away.....the first week is usually best but the 2nd weeks slides away so quickly.....still got some fun ahead including watching the VP debate Thursday evening.  Going to make every minute count until I have to get on the plane.

Beliefs

A while back, I posted some of what I listed as "beliefs".  I am reposting it as I am getting ready to take on a new task, and it is always good practice to reiterate what is important on a regular basis. Here's what I posted two years ago.

Beliefs –



I saw that there was a webpage posted by a highly regarded milblogger about what he stated were his beliefs…..this sounded like a healthy exercise in putting some thoughts on paper ….or electronic webpage as it were….Here’s my swipe at it…tried not to get too wordy (sorry) but needed to cover the subject well:


I believe in the US Constitution and have sworn to uphold it against all enemies foreign & domestic; including willingly giving my life to defend it…Retirement from the military has not altered this agreement nor will any condition alter it during my lifetime.


I believe in the USA….always have, always will. My country is a global force for good as we are and have been the last best hope for much of mankind. That said, I believe that the less intervention Government has in our lives, the better. Our Government is a model for others and in need of constant updates/revision as it is an ever changing entity and in need of constant improvement. Our Government is designed to serve the people, and not the other way around.


I believe in the inherent goodness of people and have an optimistic outlook on humanity as a whole, well grounded with a firm understanding of the demonstrated history of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man and all other living creatures. Free will was given to us by our creator along with all the responsibility that comes with it.


I believe History is an important subject and one that too many ignore – we can learn more about ourselves through history than many other fields of study….History is a deep and fascinating subject as it is more compelling than any piece of fiction written.


I believe that my wife and I are truly meant for each other as God has a wry sense of humor…My Wife has been the best thing in my life and has made me a better person, as I hope I have done for her also. That said, I know that we are in love, a love that is our blessing in this life and that our love is sacred. She is the one I love and I have pledged my life to her, in all ways, in all manner as she has also done for me.


I believe that Family is one of the most important factors in life and one the shapes us all….Family can be good and families can also have issues….Parenting is the toughest task you will ever take on but one that returns the greatest rewards – I believe Children need parents who are their moral teachers and life-leaders – That they need love, affection and most of all to be taught a sense of responsibility. This job is a lifetime appointment.


I believe that we are not here by accident and that we all have a purpose in this life, ordained by a heavenly God. The idea that any one religious belief has moral or ideological superiority over others is somewhat amusing as I feel that those that preach that ideal will be in for a rude awakening when they do finally meet their maker. Like many things, religious beliefs can be misused and that is a travesty. I feel that the ideal of religious freedom is one that is sacrosanct, and included in the US Bill of Rights as it was one of the reasons our country was founded. Kinda important if you ask me….


I believe that we all will have an opportunity to obtain everlasting life through our belief in our God and I will look forward to meeting with Him to discuss this issue in approximately 50-60 years from now or longer.


I believe in the Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots, Boston Bruins and the Boston Celtics as they are the best representatives of our modern major league sporting teams. I also believe that most of the players are highly over-paid for playing games that are inherently designed for fun, not as money making enterprises. Nonetheless, I understand that people will pay the price to attend and watch the games, so more power to them.


I believe in not allowing the enemies of free men to go unchallenged and assisting all who seek to be free. This is accomplished through many means up to and including sending young men & women to defend liberty where it is in the most dire straits…This has been the course our country has chartered for the past 234 years or so….it is what separates us from the timid and less capable countries and those who will be conquered because they lack the understanding that Freedom is not free.


I believe in the United States Navy and all that she represents….Her history is one that has shaped the nation and the world….We (Navy & Marine Corps Veterans) are her legacy and we will always represent the ideals of Honor, Courage & Commitment. I also believe that the Navy will prevail at the ARMY-NAVY game in December….as it should be.


I believe in the friends I have cultivated through my life and that I owe them a great debt as they have been instrumental in assisting me along life’s path. The friends I have are like family and I treasure each and every one of them. They are the people who have made life’s journey enjoyable and well worth taking…I also believe a few of them are serious knuckleheads and would not want them to change one bit. I also believe in sharing a good cigar & beer with them is a great exercise in what friendship should be ….a lifelong relationship built on trust, admiration and learning from each other.


I believe in working on old cars is one of the pure joys in life as the automobile significantly shaped our American life…..The enjoyment imbued in the design, function and simplicity of all older vehicles (those built before 1975) is something that is sorely missing in the computerized and overcomplicated pieces of junk the automakers are producing these days. Regulations and a push to lighten autos has taken away some of the things that made the older cars superior. The older cars were built to LAST and made of steel….steel that would protect the occupants and give the car character…..chrome, tailfins, large steering wheels and large engines….all things related to internal combustion engines and automobiles are very cool….some cooler than others obviously.


I believe in the following companies as they have made awesome machines and products – Chevrolet, Pontiac, GM, Porsche, Volkswagen, Bugatti, All companies past & present that produced outstanding military vehicles such as North American, Vought, Curtis-Wright, Grumman, Northrop, Bell, etc. etc. – They have provided the things that have taken us to all four corners of our globe and back….I also deeply believe in Man’s exploration of Space and all that it represents as we travel beyond the shores of our small and beautiful globe.


I believe in our unbreakable bond with our K-9 companions – 15000 years ago or so we made an unwritten, unspoken pact with their ancestors…We would provide warmth, shelter and easy access to food…in return, they would protect us from the things that lurked in the darkness that wanted to harm us or have us for dinner….This pact has been unbroken since and likely is that longest unbroken agreement in the history of man.


I believe in the following words regarding our K-9 Companions: "He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion." – Author Unknown


I believe in the beauty of music, art, film & the written word…all these things have increased our understanding of the human condition and provided great insight into humanity as a whole…..Music is something I would find very difficult to live without...I also believe in Scientific research & knowledge as it will supply us with the answers to many things that have plagued mankind…..Science is a tool and like many tools, it can be used for ultimate good and ultimate evil if misused.


Lastly, I believe whole heartily in the concept of Honor, and that it is one area where all good men of conscience cannot compromise – I came across these words, spoken by US Senator John McCain when he was presented the Profiles in Courage award by the John F. Kennedy Museum in 1999 for his political courage, and I believe in these words with all my heart and my soul:


“ I wish I could pretend to you and to myself that my efforts were comparable to the courage with which I have seen many good men live and die, and whose inspiration has given me heart in difficult times. But I cannot. For my actions are less a profile in courage than a profile in shame.


When I was a young man, and all glory was self-glory, I responded aggressively and often irresponsibly to anyone who questioned my honor.…. But as I grew older, and the challenges to my self-respect became more varied and difficult, I was surprised to discover that while my sense of honor had matured, its defense mattered even more to me than it did when I believed that honor was such a frail thing that any empty challenge could threaten it.


The courage of the living and the dead taught me that. They taught me to dread dishonor above all other injuries.”


Remarks delivered by U.S. Senator John McCain, recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award Ceremony, awarded on May 24, 1999 at the JFK Library in Boston, MA.

More to follow.....

US fights to open school in Taliban area....U.S. troops to refurbish school "in friendship with the People of Afghanistan"

The educational indices of Afghanistan are among the lowest in the world.
Any effort to increase the level of literacy can only yield a better future for Afghanistan....

Fri, Dec. 31, 2010
US fights to open school in Taliban area
By TODD PITMAN
Associated Press

Over the past six months, U.S. troops have wrested the school away from insurgents. They have hired Afghan contractors to rebuild it, and lost blood defending it.
The tiny school has yet to open, and nobody's quite sure when it will.

American commanders have called the Pir Mohammed primary school "the premier development project" in Zhari district, a Taliban heartland in Kandahar province at the center of President Barack Obama's 30,000-soldier surge.

The small brick and stone complex represents much of what American forces are trying to achieve in Afghanistan: winning over a war-weary population, tying a people to their estranged government, bolstering Afghan forces so American troops can go home. But the struggle to open Pir Mohammed three years after the Taliban closed it shows the obstacles U.S. forces face in a complex counterinsurgency fight, in which success depends not on firepower, but on the support of a terrified people.

Similar battles are occurring across the country. In Marjah, for example, a former Taliban stronghold in neighboring Helmand province, several schools have opened since American-led troops overran the district in February. But many parents still are too afraid of violence and Taliban threats to let their children attend.

In Senjeray, too, "there are teachers ... and we've found them and talked to them," said Capt. Nick Stout, a company commander from the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. "We say, 'When the school's built, do you want to come teach?' And they say, 'No, no, I don't, not at all.'"

---

Perched amid majestic mountain crags at the base of a fertile river valley, the village of Senjeray resembles a walled fort, 10,000 people living in a labyrinth of steep, hardened mud walls.

Pir Mohammed sits at the southeastern edge of the village, a pair of modest, single-story buildings that once served hundreds, maybe thousands of children. A small plaque at the entrance engraved with black words on light gray marble indicates U.S. troops refurbished the school "in friendship with the People of Afghanistan" in November 2002, a year after the American-led invasion.

Canadians finished the school and opened it in 2005. But in 2007, Taliban fighters attacked it, breaking windows and wrenching doors from their hinges. They took away a dozen students, cut the fingers off some and killed the parents of others, said Bismallah Qari, a 30-year-old black-bearded mullah from Senjeray.

The Taliban opposes Western-style education, and apparently saw the school as a symbol of government authority. Qari said the Taliban also believed children would be forced to study Christianity there.

Since then, Senjeray's children have had only one place to go: a handful of Islamic madrassas run by conservative mullahs like Qari that some American commanders say are radicalizing a new generation of Afghan youth, turning them away from President Hamid Karzai's government and the NATO coalition.

Speaking through an interpreter as American troops searched a recently filled hole in his madrassa they suspected held a weapons cache, Qari said he wanted his kids to attend Pir Mohammed, too, but "we can't do it."

"The Taliban won't allow us to go there," he said. "They'll kill us; they'll kill our children."

---

Pir Mohammed occupies ground highly valued by the insurgency - part of a corridor the Taliban use to traffic arms and guerrillas through villages along the Arghandab River and into Kandahar city.

In April, American troops seized the school in a military operation backed by Afghan troops. They found it in ruins, its rooms reduced to toilets littered with needles, apparently for drug use.

When Stout's unit arrived in May, he deployed two platoons to protect the school around the clock. On their second day, a U.S. soldier was shot in the lung, but survived.

For weeks, firefights erupted almost daily.

U.S. engineers knocked down walls and trees nearby where insurgents hide. Afghan security forces set up checkpoints on surrounding roads. And armored American trucks stood guard to defend the school's crumbling outer walls.

The school itself was turned into a de facto military base: Stout's men stacked sandbags in the windows and installed machine gun nests on the rooftops. They filled rooms with metal boxes of ammunition and anti-tank rockets, and slept on cots inside it.

The American occupation drew the ire of village elders. In mid-July, more than 300 turbaned men from Senjeray urged the provincial governor to pressure the Americans to leave Pir Mohammed. Stout said that in meetings afterward, elders told him the Taliban had pressured them to do so. Nevertheless, they reiterated the plea, and made a crucial promise in return.

"They were saying, 'Look, if you get out of the school, we'll protect the school,'" Stout recalled. "They said, 'We got it. We'll keep attacks from happening. And people will go there.'"

Withdrawing, in fact, was exactly what Stout wanted. It fit with the wider strategy of letting Afghan forces take on security, and freed Stout's troops to secure more ground elsewhere.

So the American platoons pulled out in mid-August, leaving their Afghan counterparts in charge.

---

Instead of the peace the elders promised, attacks increased, Stout said. Within days, the school suffered two grenade assaults and a pair of shoulder-fired rocket strikes, one of which killed a 7-year-old boy playing outside.

At meetings that week with mullahs and elders, Stout's team displayed a poster-sized photo of the wounded boy just after the explosion, his face bloodied with shrapnel.

"We said, 'Look, how does this sit in your stomach? Does this bother you?'" Stout recalled. "We told them: 'These people clearly don't care about you, your family, or your livelihood.'"

The elders agreed, and Stout made a proposition: "Come bleed with us and defeat the bigger problem: help drive the insurgents out."

At that, the elders drew back.

Some said they did not know who had carried out the attack. Others said there were no insurgents in Senjeray. Most said they were mere farmers, and if they cooperated with the Americans, the Taliban would cut their heads off.

Stout rebutted with a grim warning: "As long as you guys tolerate this, as long as you turn your backs, your children are going to continue to suffer."

The elders nodded. They promised to escort American troops through Senjeray, where attackers hidden on rooftops tossed grenades at U.S. patrols nearly every time they passed by.

But in the weeks that followed, nobody ever turned up.

Qari, the local mullah, said Senjeray's residents were caught in the middle and could not control the insurgency.

"We told the Taliban we don't want your support, and we don't want the support of the U.S. Army," he said. "We told them: 'We can ensure our own security; just leave us alone.'"

---

Part of the difficulty of winning over people in Afghanistan is that NATO-led forces are trying to do it in full body armor.

American troops live in fortified bubbles surrounded by blast walls and dirt-filled barriers. Their window onto the country is often an alien landscape that is hard to see through inches-thick bulletproof glass covered in dust.

On the ground, American strategy often rests on fragile agreements between two groups worlds apart: young muscle-bound troops with crew cuts and tattoos and conservative white-bearded elders in turbans.

There may be no place tougher to win hearts and minds than Zhari. Here is where the Taliban movement was founded 16 years ago. A few miles to the west is Singesar, where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar once ran an Islamic school.

"Obviously there's a lot of Taliban sympathy out there," Stout said. "These people don't give a damn about us, ... and quite frankly, why would they? We're strangers, we've been here for a few months, we walk around the town with guns, 40 pounds of body armor and (a lot of) grenades."

Afghan troops, too, acknowledge the cold reception in Senjeray, where they are seen as foreigners trying to finish off an old war. Much of the Afghan army's rank and file here are drawn from the north - Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara - who fought the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taliban in the 1990s.

"The people in this town hate us," said Lt. Said Abdul Ghafar, an ethnic Tajik soldier based at Pir Mohammed. "The Taliban tell them we're not real Muslims, that we're infidels. So the children throw rocks at us and won't even say hello."

Ghafar said 12 of the three dozen Afghan troops at the school were wounded in their first three months there. Eight others never returned from leave.

On Sept. 6, just after midnight, U.S. soldiers inside a truck pulling security at the school spotted someone turning a flashlight on and off in a nearby orchard. The Americans fired a yellow illumination round that fell gently from the sky.

Suddenly, a silhouetted figure stood up and ran, and the gunner on the American truck opened fire. Within seconds, the entire undergrowth lit up with muzzle flashes. Red tracer rounds crisscrossed the sky. Orange rocket trails streaked by.

After about 20 minutes, U.S. mortars ended the battle.

The next day, Stout made a decision.

U.S. forces would occupy the school again. The elders had proved incapable of protecting it, and the Afghan troops could not do it alone.

That night, two American soldiers at Stout's outpost grabbed drinks from a dining hall.

"I really don't want to go back down to that school," one of them said, shaking his head. "Why do we have to do the ANA's job for them?" - the Afghan National Army.

His colleague, equally frustrated with the struggle to open Pir Mohammed, spat a few words of dark humor back.

"We should just drop a J-DAM on it," he said, referring to a bomb weighing up to 2,000 pounds.

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Sitting on a step behind his plywood office, Stout dug his combat boots into the dirt and pondered the war. The captain was part of the 2007 surge into Iraq, and said it took 10 months before things turned around there. Senjeray, too, will take time, he said.

Despite months of fighting, the Americans have readied the school to open. They hired Afghan contractors to paint stone walls and install new windows and latrines that together cost around $70,000. They also spent some $150,000 on security, building the shell of an adjacent police post.

But building a school like Pir Mohammed "is not just putting in windows and whatnot," Stout said. "Building is people actually buying into it."

American commanders no longer speak of military victory. The goal is to push the Taliban far enough away so teachers and children and can attend without fear of firefights or reprisals.

A recent U.S. operation has accomplished much of that: many Taliban fighters have fled Zhari, along with thousands of residents - some of whose abandoned homes were bulldozed or destroyed because they were booby-trapped by insurgent mines.

Convincing residents the school is truly safe is going to be "another battle," Stout said.

"If we can create an environment where neither of us interfere with their lives, that's winning for us," he said. "And that's what the people want. They don't like us. But they don't like the Taliban either."

For now, the American strategy appears to be working. Hundreds of people line up daily at the U.S. hilltop outpost for a cash-for-work program, something they would not have dared do just a few weeks earlier.

But the Taliban are not gone. On Nov. 1, a motorcycle bomber blew himself up at the entrance to Stout's base, killing two American soldiers.

The school was attacked the same day.

It has yet to open.