Be Proud Of Civil Affairs...(Not For The Squeamish Or Those @ Work)

(Reprinted from an email I sent out to ppl)

As you may or may not know, I fully support the Afghanistan mission. Iraq is a different story altogether, but that's another discussion entirely. I'm not here to convince you to be supportive if you weren't before or anything, but the fact is that we and other allied countries are there now and that pulling out too soon would be a grave mistake.

In a computer forum I frequent, one of the posters is a 'mercenary'. You'd probably be thinking that this is one of those horror stories about a merc losing control and slaughtering a bunch of people for no good reason. Far from it. There is something called 'Civil Affairs' in the US Military. I'll let the thread explain what that is w/ a snippet here:

"In a nutshell, CA (Civil Affairs) engages the local populace. They are intended to be a sort of emissary team who win the local populace over by bringing in needed services and/or items. They attempt to establish goodwill and rapport with the locals. They spend more time deployed than almost any unit in the entire inventory, they do most of their work outside the wire, and do so with minimal security most of the time so as not to present a heavy-handed or intimidating appearance."

A lot more useful than what we usually see in the news right? Anyways, I encourage you to read the thread this man started along with all the pictures. Despite what you see in the news and what the popular opinion is, I think we are making a difference there and need to continue for as long as it takes. His story is about a small medical clinic that CA has opened and moves around from village to village. Sure, perhaps we really should be focusing more on things like this than the 'military' aspect of the mission. But I ask you, what point is there to have all these medical clinics pop up if there's no security to guarantee that they won't be bombed by those extremists? Would anyone in their right mind want to volunteer at these clinics if their lives were not guaranteed and have a higher risk of dying than being in an actual war itself? Both the military and humanitarian missions are equally important, because one will guarantee the continuation of the other in a safe(r) environment. It's a very difficult task, but things like this are not to be taken lightly. There is no easy 'kill the big bad guy and win the game' way of doing things in real life. This is no action movie. This is the way the world works.

So, if you're still interested, here's the link: (REMINDER, GRAPHIC AND CONTAINS SOME FOUL LANGUAGE)

Be Proud Of Civil Affairs

Lots more pics here:
Link

I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN, especially when they volunteer to do things like this.