Saturday, August 17, 2013

Month 12 Day 17

Notebook entry
Qais ready Salim sleeping, Munir operational terms and graphics, police advisory team coming, fire extinguisher plane.

Journal entry

Munir, with his excellent personnel management skills, had Salim up
working really late, so when it came time to do class Munir said he
was 'sick' even though he was sleeping.  I gave a class to Qais, who
was a willing participant, but I didn't have a linguist, so I couldn't
hit the finer points, just a review.  After that I took him to the
office.  We worked on putting the boundary lines down between the
districts.  That was a tedious process, but they learned how to use
the acetate, remembered how to plot points, and started to see the
fruits of their labor.  Munir followed me to class immediately
following.  I gave him a class on Operational Terms and Graphics.
Basically just a dictionary and reference guide.  You'd be surprised
how difficult it is to get someone who is not ised to using a
reference manual to learn how to look things up.

In the morning one of the soldiers in the drivers course cracked his
head open after he was messing around with a fire extinguisher in one
of the trucks in the drivers course.  The fire extinguisher itself did
not hurt him.  It just scared him, but he tried to get out so quick
that he opened up his head on the door as he was leaving.

At midday we had a meeting about the turnover, how we are going to
make sure they get all of the information that they need.  We have a
reasonably short time to work with them.  In the meeting it came out
that the next LtCol wants to make sure that Maj Neller and Lt Love are
Field Ordering Officers (they can order stuff up to a few 10s of
thousands of dollars) before the next fiscal year.  He wanted to make
sure that he 'had that option.' When he got here.  Like he could curry
favor with the ANA by buying them stuff.  The problem is they don't
look at it as a favor, they expect it.  Thier RCT is even worse than
ours in one way.  Their police advisor team made it all the way
through training and are in-country without anyone bothering to check
if there are Afghan Uniformed Police, or police of any type at this
level.  They are fighting a brand-new war.

I worked on the Concept of Operations for our first convoy, that took
a while, it is going to be a big one.

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