My last month in the valley was completely insane.  I was on the receiving end of enemy fire every single day I stayed in that valley, many times more than once.  Incredibly, not a single soldier with me was killed, with only one man wounded with some shrapnel bits.  There is a 6-day break in my journal of enemy contact, where I visited troops at "safe" forward operating bases to the east of our valley.  Otherwise, the attacks were so constant that I took to wearing my helmet and body armor around at Able Main. 

I should have been dead - repeatedly. My life was only seconds and inches from ending so many times.  God had indeed prepared a table before me in the presence of my enemies.  

So much conflict is generated by misunderstanding, and, sadly, it often costs lives.

In David Kilcullen's book, "The Accidental Guerrilla", he describes a battle between US Special Forces with their Afghan allies versus the Taliban.  In that battle, many of the locals joined in to attack the US forces.  Afterward, a journalist followed up with the locals to ask if they hated the US.  The local men replied that they didn't hate the US at all.  They fought, basically, because a fight broke out and they weren't going to miss it.

This story encapsulated our experience in the Pech Valley.

It always seems the men who die in combat are the ones you think least deserve it.

Shortly after we lost one man, far away from our area, we lost another in a common security mission in the middle of our valley.  As a way of keeping the enemy from attacking voting areas, supply units, or local forces, our platoons would set themselves up in known ambush areas..and wait.  On one, I was in the back seat of a truck, and we had been there a while.  I had to pee.

You may have heard that the only son of a family can't be sent to war.  You heard wrong.

We went three months without a KIA.  On the one hand, that sounds pretty amazing.  Over 1200 fights in a year, and three months with no one killed? 

You get used to the danger.

I was interviewed by a reporter from Starts and Stripes, who asked me, “how does everyone deal with a life in which they could die at any moment?”  I replied, “they cope by dismissing the danger.  You can’t live life walking around and thinking about how you might catch a machine gun bullet in the mouth.”

In 1914, on the Western Front, armed enemies had a widespread "Christmas Truce", exchanging gifts and playing games together on Christmas Day.  In the Pech River Valley in 2010, we were attacked four times on Christmas.

November had been a hard month, losing more men in the first part of that month than the entire five months prior combined.

Combat introduces elements into life that we don't find back at home, like flying bullets and explosions.  It also removes distractions that affect how we think.

Last time, I shared how very, very few people think of God in the midst of a firefight.  However, in those gaps between fights, people think.  A daily, acknowledged, consistent, life-threatening danger leads people to think about what matters, and what may matter.  Even a high-risk area like ours was really a year of boredom punctuated by regular bursts of intense activity.

You've heard the line, "There are no atheists in foxholes."  Actually, there are a lot.

Military members are a shifted sample of America.  Sure, there is diversity of home state, religion, education, skin color, and dialect.  However, it isn't a truly representative sample.  Because we have an all-volunteer military, our men and women are shifted culturally as a group.  They are more likely to be conservative, rural, religious, and married than Americans as a whole.  Military officers are shifted even further along those lines.  Within the Army, there are also differences in the roles they hold - the infantry are most likely to be white, less educated, and from America's heartland (rural and urban).  They also love what they do.

My men loved to fight.

How much is a child's life worth?  In Eastern Afghanistan, about $170.

Before the deployment, I talked to a number of soldiers who were concerned about being able to kill someone, even someone who was trying to kill them.  They recognized that it's not a video game.  They knew that people who were very different from them in some ways were also just like them in others.   However, when the shooting started, basically everyone shot back.  

I had never seen a "blow-up doll" before.  My infantrymen made sure that shortcoming was fixed.

Being a chaplain in an essentially all-male unit is guaranteed to put you in a tight spot.  Yes, you are officially the commander's advisor for moral and ethical issues, which isn't a problem.  It is the unofficial element, the "man of the cloth" part, that makes you a walking representative of morality.  While there are, of course, those chaplains for whom simply being a moral person is a problem, the real issue is how to balance that perception with approachability - yeah, you're the God guy, but are you a prude, too?