you ever seen the movie heat before yeah yeah this makes me think about this is the second time i’ve thought about it in recent times but you know like um the cop is telling the the the cop is saying hey you can make mistakes or no i can make mistakes doesn’t matter if i catch you or not like i’m gonna go home at night yeah you make one mistake and it’s game over yeah and and that’s what i think of you know the enemy in that situation they don’t have to take very big risks at all they can lob [ __ ] at you from wherever and they just have to get lucky one time that’s a to get a guy yeah and you’ve got to be vigilant all the time and you got to keep your guard up all the time and even if you keep your guard up all the time you’re still just exposed just by the nature of the fact that you’re in a valley surrounded by indirect fire or direct fire in terms of rockets yeah yeah our strategy in that firebase um was a test bed for creativity we built a mosque like i physically built a mosque with my hands my oda brick by brick helped build a mosque why because we wanted to build rapport with having a place of worship inside of our firebase for afghans but it also deterred indirect fire because no terrorists wanted to be responsible for dropping a mosque in the middle of an american fire base like we had to think outside the box and we truly were set up almost for failure in that circumstance but every firebase had to hold its territory before vso where village stables uh stabilization operations where you’re setting up in the actual village the idea of firebase is derived from obviously from vietnam er from john striker meyer error of hey let’s go out set out these bases and establish a presence and so we were present and the bad guys knew about it and it was a sharper learning curve steep learning curve to say the least where are you getting food from typically uh in initially we were flying it in until we started getting creative we built a a bread house where we were making foot bred afghan foot bread in the middle of our fire base then we started procuring goats and sheep and then slaughtering them and then eating them and then rice and we were getting supplies from pakistan because it was right across the border and bringing it in to to make actually good mills versus the mermaid child that we’re getting that was garbage dude it was disgusting did you uh did you take any casualties from all those attacks yeah i mean we’ve had we had wounded in actually killed in action our company um we you know during the mid range um which was we just had the anniversary of operation red wings which was the 28th of june we got hit up for that mission task for that with that um camp vance which was in bagram kind of assembled the quick reaction force that eventually went out and lost one of the birds on the mh-47s that were shot down so we did qrf for that um did some big operations in what kotya valley near bear account and uh took casualties we lost mh47 during that trip pretty expensive bird but it was i mean it was overall it’s a good trip i mean our our firebases were successful in disrupting the enemy but we just started over man the the detriment to warfare is this vicious cycle and when you take a playbook and you plan the playbook but you don’t put in the same continuity pieces to establish a long-term relationship you just start the vicious cycle all over again every detachment commander every team sergeant wants their mark in history on that battleground and it doesn’t do well long-term in in warfare which is obviously where the point we’re at today i mean pulling out of afghanistan
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