Hello from LT Miller August 18

Hello all from Herat Afghanistan.

The biggest news is dust and more dust. Apparently we had not seen the worst of the dust / sand storms. I have attached a few pictures. One is a before, one is an after and one is me at a little after noon which almost looks like evening. It is even worse once you get outside of the base since there is nothing to block the wind. We apparently have another month of this before the winds calm down. Everything is pretty well coated in sand. Our hut is the cleanest around because when we moved in we duck taped all of the windows and cracks. Turned out to be a very smart move since the windows are useless anyway. They are not glass or screened they are just holes in the side of the building with a wood flap. So if you open them all you get is dirt and flies. Another big event was we received our combat patches this week. General Pritt came by to personally hand them out. Unfortunately our Navy will not let us wear them on our uniforms since we are not really in the Army (they could have fooled me). The big news for the Afghans is we opened the hospital on the Afghan side of the base and it is serving as a regional hospital for Herat. The Minister of Health came by for the opening and she gave a very passionate plea for increased health care. She was also critical of the Afghan government for not doing more for health. This surprised a lot of people since you do not expect Afghan women to have high-level roles in government and also to be publicly vocal. But as we are finding out woman are more involved here than the Western World is led to believe. Don't get me wrong the Afghan society has a very long way to go but it is also another tale of the media not telling the whole story. Speaking of which we had our first reporter come by and live here. He was given only two rules to be truthful in all of his stories and no classified information. The first story he wrote misquoted one of the people working in the hospital as saying the staff is not trained to run a hospital. The true story is there are 60 doctors, nurses, medics and techs mostly trained in India and Pakistan (by the way so are many American doctors) and the quote should have been we could always use more help. Well since nobody would talk to him anymore he has since moved on. I don't care if someone is for or against something I just would like to here some honest objective reporting not just lets see what went wrong today or how can I take a good thing and write something bad about it. Enough of this battle for now. Good news of the week is that we now have a full time chaplain. We took him in to our hut as a hut mate. Many people were leery of living with the chaplain, which is kind of funny. I guess they felt that they would have to modify their behavior. He is an Air Force captain and is very neat and a good roommate. I received some comments about the village elder in the picture in the last update. First off it was not Dave Grange in his Special Forces outfit (at least I don't think so) and believe it or not he claims to be 50-54 (everything is a range around here). Personally I think he looks 80 but that is not uncommon here. They think I am in my late 20's but I tell them 35-40 (keeping with the range tradition) Those of you that have been in the Army, Navy or Marines will appreciate this. My funny for this time is that 17 new Air Force personnel came in yesterday. After they were shown around (as if you could see anything with the dust) they were shown their living quarters. After a couple of hours I saw a bunch of them sitting outside their hut. I thought it was odd to be sitting in a sand storm so I asked what's up. Their response was that they were waiting for their hut to be ready. I said what do you mean? They said the beds were not put together. I guess they thought we had maid service here. Much to their dismay I informed them that if you need it here you have to do it yourself. Got to love the Air Force.

Take care and keep in touch.
LT John Miller