No better friend

More and more Amercians - both liberals and conservatives - favor withdrawing military forces from Afghanistan. If we do withdraw them, we will also be withdrawing the most effective humanitarian force: the US Marine Corps. Here is an article on 2nd Lt Fafinski's platoon in Helmand. (Photos of his platoon by U.S. Marine Corps).

Marines save lives, assist Afghan National Army
11/5/2009 By Staff Sgt. Luis R. Agostini, Regimental Combat Team 7

FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — As Seaman Jared D. Wilson, a corpsman with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, stepped into his humvee on the morning of Nov. 2, he knew he very well could find himself in the position of saving lives.

He didn’t expect it to be Afghan lives.

On the evening of Nov. 1, the Marines of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment were tasked with the security of a re-supply convoy the following morning for the Afghan National Army.

The Marines have been down this road before. Part of the route the Marines have taken from their forward operating base to their final destination has been identified as a Taliban hotspot.

“The last time we went down that route, we found three, 100-pound IEDs. It was kind of nerve-racking,” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Joshua J. Azarte, also a corpsman with Co. I, 3/4.

“That’s a bad place. We’re finding IEDs all of the time over there, and last time, we took indirect fire that came really close to our trucks,” said 2nd Lt. Robert R. Fafinski III, the commander of 1st Platoon, Co. I, 3/4.

After a two-hour delay waiting on the Afghan National Army right outside of the FOB, the convoy made its way to the Afghan Uniformed Police checkpoint, with Ford pick-up trucks of Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army soldiers integrated.

The Marines have learned to exercise patience and develop their mentoring skills with the Afghan forces. From departure times to picking up trash, the Marines are trying to lead by example when it comes to military discipline.

“We’re going to continue working with them. It looks like their heads are in the right place, they just need more mentoring,” said Lance Cpl. Jacob Fournier, a section leader with Co. I, 3/4.
Although labeled as a security mission, the Marines were looking to “get some.” Because of the previous attacks on the Marines in the same location, the Marines were hoping to draw fire from any enemy forces in the area and do what Marine “grunts” are known for: seek, close with and destroy the enemy.

About an hour into the convoy, a domino effect of red brake lights brought the convoy to a complete stop. An Afghan truck driver waved down the lead vehicle of the convoy, and through a Pashtu translator embedded with 1st platoon, informed the Marines of a nearby car accident.The Marines didn’t take any chances, keeping a strong sense of vigilance while investigating the scene.

“Myself and a bunch of the Marines approached the scene thinking it was an ambush. Within 30 seconds, we switched gears from expecting enemy contact to a lifesaving mission,” said Fafinski.
Wilson approached the scene, and immediately noticed signs of a potentially fatal car accident. A rear bumper, glass, windshield and a shoe was strewn throughout the road.

As the Marines and Afghan forces made their way off of the right side of the road, they immediately knew the accident was no ambush. An Afghan family of nine fell victim to an off-road accident. The injured Afghans lay near a totaled, white, hatchback vehicle. Two Afghans were pronounced dead on the scene. Although ruled a car accident, Fafinski believes the family may have been swerving, trying to avoid a possible IED. He believes this for good reason.

About two weeks ago, an Afghan family struck a Taliban-emplaced roadside bomb, killing one and wounding several others.

“They’re hitting their own people. Not only does it disgust me, it makes me want to get them a lot more,” Fafinski said. Wilson and Azarte immediately went to work, prioritizing their new patients for triage.

The “docs,” as the Marines refer to them, have completed extensive training and participated in numerous field exercises, including Mojave Viper. Mojave Viper is a 40-day field exercise at Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., required for all Marine infantry battalions deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Part of the training includes mass casualty exercises, which Marines and corpsmen learn to work as a team to treat a multitude of simulated casualties.

But this time, it was for real.

Three of the injured passengers looked to just suffer cuts, bruises and shock. As they were identified, the corpsmen moved on to the more serious injuries.

The Afghan family was driving from Lashkar Gah to Afghanistan’s Nimroz province, to treat the grandmother for hypertension. She was now being treated for a severe foot injury, which at first glance, may have required amputation. The Marines, corpsmen and Afghan forces began working together in a concerted effort. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sgt. Paul V. Cooke, began coordinating a casualty evacuation for the injured Afghans requiring urgent care, while the rest of the Marines cordoned off the area.

The Afghan soldiers offered what help they could, from communicating with the family members able to speak, to providing security on the main road.
The corpsmen tended to the wounded, which included the grandmother, two boys and a young girl. While dealing with the wounded, the corpsmen kept the Afghan and Islamic code of conduct in mind.

“I asked the interpreter to ask permission from the son to treat the injured women,” said Wilson, a 21-year-old from San Dimas, Calif. “The son didn’t hesitate to allow us to treat them.”

Within 30 minutes, two UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters landed within the vicinity of where Sgt. Randolph J. Chatfield, a section leader with 1st platoon, popped yellow smoke.

The coalition of Marines, sailors and Afghans again worked in unison, loading the patients onto stretchers and transporting them from the accident site to the helicopters.

“They responded very well,” said Azarte, a 21-year-old from Tucson, Ariz.

“If we didn’t have the interpreter and the ANA, it would’ve been a lot harder to treat those people,” Wilson said.

“They showed genuine care. They were willing to do what they could, but comfortable enough to know that we had it in control,” said Cooke, a 31-year-old from Grant’s Pass, Ore.

The injured were taken to FOB Delaram, where they received treatment from the Army’s 67th Forward Surgical Team. From there, they were flown to an Afghan hospital in Kandahar, where they will receive CAT-scans for head trauma and any possible neck and spinal injuries.

As the helicopters departed with the Afghans, the Marines and Afghan forces pushed forward to complete their original mission, but not before being delayed again by several hours, due to a possible roadside bomb.

“I’d rather spend six hours finding out it’s not an IED, than .3 seconds finding out that it is,” Cooke said. The Marines completed the re-supply under the cover of darkness and with the use of night-vision goggles. After returning to the FOB, the Marines cleared their weapons, cleaned out the vehicles, and waited for the platoon leadership to give their intelligence debrief, which included praise heaped on the corpsmen.

“The corpsmen handled themselves well and took care of it pretty good,” said Chatfield, a 23-year-old from Kona, Hawaii.

“It’s Doc Wilson’s first deployment, but it looked like it was his fifth. That was his show,” said Fournier, a 21-year-old from Lanesboro, Minn.

“The corpsmen kept their cool really well. They had tactical patience, and dealt with a lot more than expected,” said Cooke.

“If this was a football game and we were giving out a game ball, I’d give it to the corpsmen and the platoon sergeant,” said Fafinski, a 24-year-old from Chaska, Minn. Fafinski mentioned Cooke due to his performance in coordinating the casualty evacuation.

“After it happened and we got back in the trucks, I had a deep feeling of confidence in our corpsmen. One of my lance corporals, Lance Cpl. Joel Fadden, looked at me and said, “it’s sure nice to know that the corpsmen know what they are doing.’ If he thinks like that, I’m sure all of the Marines are thinking it too.”

The best of all possible motives

In the ten days since Major Nidal Hasan yelled “Allah is great” and shot bullets into 43 people, Allah’s will has continued working in mysterious ways. Egyptian Muslims poured acid on and stabbed a Christian for entering a Muslim brothel. Forty Ugandan Muslims entered a Christian church and began beating parishioners with metal clubs. Two Pakistani Muslims exploded themselves to kill 18 kafirs. A New York Muslim tried to run over non-Muslims and told police “Muslims will fix this country.” Saudi Islamic law prescribed sixty lashes for a female TV anchor whose segment mentioned sex. A California Muslim at a mall yelled “Allah is power” and tore a crucifix from a fellow-shopper’s neck. And Filipino police found the sliced head of a local teacher who jihadists had kidnapped in October. Without the four FBI foils of Islamist terror attacks earlier this fall, the list might go on.

Walking back the cat, however, Allah’s will itself (i.e. everything that happens, according to Muslims) appears to submit occasionally to reason. In October, the United Nations focused not on fighting religious extremism but on criminalizing negative stereotypes of religions, such as, say, “religions are extreme.” Meanwhile, a Minnesota judge ruled that airport officers who took precautionary action against suspicious Muslims on a Minneapolis flight had to pay the Muslims for their mistake. They would not make that mistake again, and neither would the Army, with its UN-esque anti-stereotyping “equal opportunity” standards. No absurdity, then, that Hasan and his open Islamist sympathies would evade profiling and defamation.

Canadian writer Mark Steyn accuses multiculturalism and its requisite “warm and fluffy” feelings toward all things diverse of warping the West’s sense of proportion. But look deeper and you’ll find its frozen core. There is a cold detachment, for example, in The Nation columnist John Nichols’ question, “Was Major Hasan a cold, calculating Islamic extremist or a deeply troubled man who was about to be dispatched to a warzone…?” Who are we to insert our emotions and judge, he seems to ask? Nichols is like the critic in Voltaire’s satire Candide: “you were in the wrong to shed tears...The author does not understand a single word of Arabic, and yet the scene lies in Arabia.” The anti-Muslim idealogues do not understand a single word of the Quran, and yet they accuse Hasan of terrorism, goes the Nichols line.

Nichols warns us not to jump to conclusions: “There was clearly something wrong with this imperfect follower of Islam. But that does not mean that there is something wrong with Islam.” He jumps to the conclusion that “the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia." But by his own multicultural logic, who is he to judge what constitutes an “imperfect follower”? What is moderate Islam? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that Muhammad is the infallible messenger of Allah? Can there be a moderate way to accept, as all Muslims do, the Quran’s opening line: “This Book is not to be doubted,” even while “this book” promotes misogyny, bigotry, and mutiliation? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that all happens according to Allah’s will?

Voltaire’s Candide asks similar questions when he realizes that the horrors of the real world differ from the theories and euphemisms of religious philosophers. After his friend is hung, his wife raped, and his life rotting away in slavery, he asks, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the rest?” And so if Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, what then are the religions of war? If Major Hasan is not a terrorist, who is? And if the majority of Muslims are moderate, what are the majority of Puritans and Evangelicals?

In the face of such cynical questions and aboard a ship fleeing persecution, Candide’s teacher lectures about his theoretical “best of all worlds.” “While he was proving this, a priori, the vessel foundered and all perished…” And so it is in America. While we prove that religion is inherently good and moderate, a US Army major in Texas kills Americans in the name of his religion. Was he simply “an unmarried loner,” columnist Errol Louis asks? Surely, but by no coincidence: it takes an extraordinary woman to wish to spend the rest of her life praying five times a day in Islamic uniform with a suicide-bombing enthusiast. Once again, in a religion in which finding a good, Allah-fearing woman is a jihad in itself, sexually frustrated violence is no abnormality.

The Council on American Islamic Relations was quicker to condemn the Islamophobes than future Major Hasans: “No religious or political ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence.” Can you be forced to praise Allah while your older brother is beheaded by the Somali al-shabab, and be content with CAIR’s detached judgment? Can you watch your mother be stoned before a Taliban tribunal, and be content with CAIR’s certainties? Can you be in the line of fire of a man yelling “Allah Ahkbar” and jump to this conclusion? The Islamophobes are right: the Quran is disturbing, and much of Islam is scary. If Islam is peace, then praise be to Allah: we’ll never see a religion of war.