Today, 1st lieutenant Jordan Rahal is the executive officer for a medical logistics company, but for seven months last year, he was stationed in the Southern Helmand Province of Afghanistan working with and training the Afghan Border Police (ABP) as the American military helped to secure the borders and hand off security operations to Afghanis. Rahal told Denison Magazine what it’s like to be on the front lines, the cost of voters’ rights, and his favorite part about the deployment.
We patrolled with the Afghan Border Police, convoyed with them, trained with them, ate with them, laughed with them, screamed at them, drank tea with them, planned operations with them, drank more tea with them, and forged a partnership that could never be forged nor forgotten under any other sort of circumstance.
The thing about patrolling is this: On most patrols, you have a task, like collecting census data. But at the same time, you go on patrol to gather “intel.” You go on patrol to talk to people, asking, “Have you seen the Taliban lately? Do you feel safe?”
When you’re operating in a place for a while, you know when something’s suspicious. You just know.
There was a huge public relations effort around the elections. We would go out and tell people to vote. But the ABP, the Afghan National Army, and the national police were the only ones allowed to pro- vide security during the elections. No Marines or any American personnel participated. It was an all-Afghan show and the highlight of our deployment.
Midway through deployment, an IED went off in the main bazaar, about 300 meters from our combat outpost (COP). The Taliban were trying to hit a police mentor team and ended up injuring more than 20 civilians. Their wounds ranged from scratches from shrapnel, to broken bones from the concussion of the blast, to the loss of limbs and blindness. The victims ranged in age from pre-teen to 50s. Thankfully, nobody was killed.
We tried to put the ABP out front more than ourselves. That isn’t to say we wanted them to be in more danger than us, but it’s their country. It made them take charge, and they could read people better than we could.
Kids would always bug us for candy and biscuits. The kids were my favorite part of the deployment.
One day, a few of our guys were conducting counterinsurgency operations, just like any other day. They had been doing everything right, using all the right strategies, but despite that, they hit an IED. Everybody in the vehicle walked away, but the vehicle itself was destroyed.
Fewer than 10 percent of the ABP and the Afghan military are fully literate, so that was a huge obstacle for us and something we had to plan around every day. Even simple tasks–like getting a roster of military personnel or making adjustments to pay or equipment rosters– could become problematic. Because there are only a handful of people who are literate and able to do these things, ordinary military procedures had to be addressed creatively. We were able to scrounge up some school books, and our interpreters did an awesome job of teaching the Afghans basic reading and writing, but there is still work to be done.
Obviously, we have lost soldiers, but a lot of good has come from our work in Afghanistan too. I didn’t do that much, and there are many guys who sacrificed much more than me, so much so that they don’t get to come home. Their stories need to be told, but I never heard anyone talk about how we were able to help the Afghans provide their own security for the election. When I got back home, it didn’t seem like it was important news. To me, it was a pretty big deal.
In Afghanistan, Rahal was part of a border mentor team attached to the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines and 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. He worked with men like Major Hassam- Adin (right), a logistics officer with the Afghan Border Police, to secure the country’s borders.