What is an ETT anyway?

"The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted"  - Kierkegaard

ETT stands for Embedded Training Team. We refer to the members of the team as ETTs. As for what we are…well, we’re generalists. We come from a variety of MOS's (military occupational specialties). As far as I know the job is open to any MOS, though the team leader has to have a combat arms MOS. As ETTs we have to have wide variety skills. One needs to be able to troubleshoot a .50 cal machine gun as well as have the cultural sensitivity to communicate with local elders in such a way as to not piss them off. An ETT needs to have the savvy to negotiate reasonable prices from local contractors on construction projects as well as know what pieces of information are believable or should be discarded.

A good ETT needs to be an infantryman, operations officer, diplomat, civil affairs professional, engineer, intelligence analyst, supply officer, mechanic, linguist, and communications specialist all rolled into one. Of course, we have specialists to help us in many of these skill sets, but at any given time we have to: troubleshoot communication systems; design and improve the force protection measures at the base; negotiate and supervise construction projects; maintain generators and vehicles; mediate disputes between the US Army and the ANA; and conduct meetings with local groups, in addition to the normal everyday patrolling requiring infantry skills, which are without a doubt the most skills to have in this environment.

Other helpful skills: the ability to eat rice with your hands (Pack it into a little ball and then use your thumb to shovel it into your mouth.); the patience to talk for two hours about business and yet accomplish nothing; the ability to refuse to help without alienating; the stomach to take food and drink that might not be prepared according to what you’re used to and may be covered with flies; and the fortitude to deal with the same issues and problems week after week and day after day.  Having a bad day is not allowed, and if you do not care for or believe in someone or something, you'd better have the maturity to fake it.

The days are not super busy - the ANA don’t tend to want to work with us for a lot of hours during a given day. But there’s always something going on, so as an ETT you don’t often have a lot of time to yourself. The day’s patrol may be finished before lunch, but then you have lunch with the Afghan commander, followed by supervisory tasks on construction projects, coordination meetings with the Army, communications with our own bosses, normal cleaning and maintenance of our gear, more meetings with the Afghans, etc. The day may start at 0530 and not end until 2100, but we’re not busy that whole time. Plenty of 30-minute periods of freedom are interspersed in there. Put a couple of those free periods together and you get an entry like this.

The Bad News Bears

Today's firefight lasted 2.5 hours. Which I know sounds crazy until I explain how it goes sometimes. We're driving down the road in an 8 vehicle convoy when we take a few shots from the ridgeline maybe 800 meters away. So we stop and start returning fire in the vicinity of where it was coming from. An Army convoy happened to be right in front of us, so they coordinated artillery and mortars on the enemy positions. But with all the rounds and explosives raining down on them, we simply could not get those guys out of their positions in the mountains. Things would be quiet for a few minutes, and we'd think they were finished, and then they'd shoot a burst our way. This went on for what seemed like forever. The bad guys would shoot a few rounds and then we'd return fire for a minute or so. Wait a couple of minutes and repeat. Finally we called an end to it and started to get the ANA back into the vehicles to push out of there...but as soon as we started driving away we'd take another burst of machine gun fire nearby and the ANA would jump out of the vehicles and light up the mountainside.

Here's a few interesting tidbits from it all:

-the ANA needed an ammo resupply from a nearby base 30 minutes into the fight since they'd shot so many rounds so fast.
-several ANA went into a local shop and drank chai during the fighting; many other ANA began eating lunch from their semi-covered positions during the shooting. The eating wasn't even the funny part - the funny part was how much they were enjoying the food and the camaraderie under the circumstances. They were a bit put off when I refused their offer of a granola bar.
-the Apaches finally showed up and showered the area with rockets (this usually puts an end to the bravado of our good friends in the mountains), but to no avail as the sporadic shooting continued. When the guy on the ground tried to correct the impacts of the Apaches' rockets, the pilot came back over the radio laconically replying, "We hit the spot the rounds were coming from."
-at one point we decided to use the vehicles as cover so the ANA soldiers, who do not yet have the luxury of armored vehicles, could run across an open area on the road. The ETTs managed to execute with our vehicles but the ANA driver drove off and left his guys in the open when three of them tripped and stumbled over each other.

Some of the stuff you really have to laugh at. The image of the ANA First Sergeant walking around gesticulating and yelling at his guys, and then after hearing a pop shot from the enemy, turning and distractedly firing a 20 round burst from his AK toward the mountainside while hardly losing a beat on his rant at his guys was absolutely priceless.

On the positive side, the ANA did keep their big guns working the whole time, and none of them were afraid to fight. They all will jump out there and start shooting, even if they don't aim and squeeze off all their rounds at once.

Once the fixed wing showed up and started dropping bombs it came to an end; this was shortly after we finally managed to get everyone on or in a truck and get clear of the area. As for a better way to fight the fight.... When guys are buried into the mountains with strong, covered, bunker-like positions from which to shoot at us, it's tough for us to combat them. Assaulting 800 meters up a steep mountainside is not really feasible. The best thing we can do is get a bomb directly on target. I've bagged on the Army in the past for using anti-tank weapons to shoot at individuals, but today something like a TOW missile complete with its infrared sights would've been handy to destroy a bunker or cave. Preemptively, we can go up there and destroy those positions, which is something we do with regularity. But not often enough apparently.

As for the title of this post...I put it there for comic relief, not because we're really that bad. The ANA have made me proud on a number of occasions - today just wasn't their finest hour. And in any case, I've learned by now that if you can't laugh a little bit at some of the ANA antics, you're bound to drive yourself nuts.

The Afghan National Army

"You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just doesn't work that way." - Warren Buffett (referring to the speed of the economic recovery post-stimulus plan)

By all accounts, the Afghan National Army (ANA) has been one of the most successful institutions we've built since our arrival in this country in 2001. The US has done almost all ANA training, funding, and fielding since the war 'ended' and the ANA were established in 2002. Other countries have focused on other things - the UK on counter-narcotics and the Germans (originally, until they failed so miserably) on training the police for example. The ethnic breakdown of the ANA reflects that of the country as a whole, with about 40% of the soldiers being Pashtun, 25% Tajik, 15% Hazara, 10% Uzbek, and 10% other. Each Kandak (battalion) and smaller unit reflects that mixture as well. Almost all soldiers speak Dari or Pashto. Many speak both languages. Estimates on the number of ANA troops vary, but at this time the ANA has about 80,000 soldiers. The size of the ANA has steadily expanded over the years, and I'm sure we'll keep trying to expand it. We may be plowing a lot of money into the ANA, but the individual Afghan soldier must be at least one order of magnitude cheaper to field than one of our own.

There's a certain amount of pride that goes with being one of the a very small contingent of Americans walking amongst the populace with local soldiers, and I've been told many times by the local people that they feel a lot of pride in seeing their Army out on patrol. For this reason, I often attempt to keep a low profile when I'm out with my guys - let them run the show and do the talking. If anyone asks, I tell them I'm only there so they can communicate with the American units. It's always an especially proud moment for me when the ANA soldiers are looking good and taking things seriously. Impressions are important, especially for the local soldiers. Whether the ANA ever kills a single Taliban insurgent or not, they can still be effective by looking competent and professional, and in so give the local people something to believe in and take pride in.

Many times I've been out with the ANA as the lone American in the group as we patrol in a town full of people that may or may not hold some degree of antipathy towards us. But it's not something we as ETTs worry about because we know the Afghan soldiers would take care of us if it came down to it. When you build that good relationship with the soldiers and a degree of mutual respect exists, then working together can be a pleasure.

To experience those moments of pride, however fleeting they may be, ETTs have to go through plenty of frustration. The laziness and unwillingness to train, the whining and harassment for comfort items they don't need, the hashish smoking, the general slovenliness, the willingness to let us do their jobs for them, the corruption and stealing at all levels, the refusal to do as many operations as they should, the painfully slow learning process, the pathetically short attention spans, the disobedience to some of our demands, and the repetition of simple mistakes all add up to weigh on you at times. And it's those times that I understand why our tours as advisers are shorter than the normal tours that many people do over here. One can only take so much. Most days we take it all in stride as we know what to expect from the ANA. Keep your expectations in check and you can't be disappointed. But then something will happen like an interpreter getting beaten to a bloody pulp for no good reason or your best local contractor getting shaken down by the ANA commander and his platoon (mob) to the point that he can no longer work for you, and you ask yourself whether all of this is going to add up to something in the end. Are the ANA really going to be any better when we leave than they were when we got here? Tough to say. Will the Afghan National Army ever be able to work without us holding their hands? The only way to know will be to kick them out of the nest at some point and see if they fly. Better sooner than later I say because at this point they have the equipment and training to do the job. Whether they have the will to do the job is the question, but I think will will come with necessity, and necessity will come when we're gone.

NATO weapons transition

You know, I don't miss being bothered constantly by the Afghans...until I'm not. It's been a while now that I've been gone, and I miss my little outpost in the middle of nowhere, where my Afghan soldiers wake me early in the morning to complain about a toothache or to ask to borrow a tool.

Until I saw how things are run with the 'embedded' trainers at other bases I really didn't appreciate how lucky I am to live in such close proximity to the Afghans. My Afghan commander lives in the room directly below me, and we see each other all hours of the day and night. We eat pretty much the same food and live in the same conditions and do the same things together. Sometimes it's a pain being so accessible and I just want some peace and time to myself, but it's much more rewarding than the sterile relationships these other guys have, where there's no shared hardship or proximity to build that bond.

As for here near Kabul, it's been a slow but relatively interesting week. Helping out with teaching the Afghans to shoot the M16 has been enlightening. Most of them actually shoot pretty well, though when they are shooting at paper targets they don't really get into it very much. Give them an armored vehicle or a steel bell to shoot at though, and they get excited. The ones that don't shoot well, really don't shoot well. We had a guy miss the entire 2x4 foot target with 15 straight rounds from 25 meters away until we figured out he was using the wrong eye to look through the sights. I had wondered why his head was cocked all weird. It took awhile but we convinced him he'd be better off shooting using his right eye if we were going to shoot right-handed.

The training done here is run by civilian contractors. I'm just here to learn a bit and then go back and train the rest of our battalion. All the trainers are former military, usually infantry or SF. They're a cocky bunch, competent and entertaining to be around with all manner of funny stories from around the world, although the amount of hours they put in working is pretty sparse given their salaries. Spending time with them has been educational for me on many levels. The contractors tend to curse and yell at the Afghans more than I do when I'm doing training back "home", but then these guys can get away with it because they don't have to live with the ANA the way I do; I'm a bit reluctant to anger my Afghans too much, considering my life is really in their hands.

Civilian contracting certainly seems like a pretty good gig if you can get it since these guys really aren't working very many hours for the ridiculous amount of money they make, though I'm not sure I would want to run rifle ranges all the time. Of course, not all these guys run rifle ranges - plenty of other opportunities exist for all manner of specialties.