Hartford Courant April 09, 2007
On A Mission To Mentor
Fifteen senior specialists from the Connecticut National Guard will be deployed to Afghanistan to help train the commanders of its fledgling national army.
By Jesse Hamilton
When the fledgling Afghan National Army runs into a problem within the next year, when it struggles with communications issues, when it's unsure how to build an airfield or can't get the right unit to the right battle, it will probably turn to specialists from Connecticut.
Fifteen senior members of the Connecticut National Guard leave today for training in Kansas, but they will soon be in Afghanistan, where they will be mentoring its security forces. Men with long U.S. military careers -- a colonel, several lieutenant colonels and majors and a number of senior enlisted men -- will advise their Afghan counterparts.
"It's a 5-year-old army," said Lt. Col. Spyros Spanos, the team's communications expert who lives in Waterford. "There's a truckload of policies and procedures that we need to teach them."
Though they've spent their adult lives in the most advanced military in the world, many on the team - which Spanos jokingly referred to as the "Senior A Team" - haven't been to a war zone. Although the Afghans may have little know-how in high-tech combat or high-efficiency logistics, they are a people who have been constantly at war, and the latest skirmishes against a growing insurgency have been increasingly bloody.
The "embedded training team" will be teachers, but there will be plenty of opportunity to learn, too.
A previously unified national army in Afghanistan had largely dissolved under Taliban control, according to the military information service GlobalSecurity.org. The first problems facing the formation of the Afghan National Army were low recruitment and high desertion rates. Now that the army has tens of thousands of soldiers, its leaders have much to learn about operating a modern force.
Its soldiers come from a country with a 36 percent literacy rate, according to the U.S. Department of State. And other training teams have had to teach recruits how to tie the laces on their first pairs of boots.
But Connecticut's team will live and work with the big thinkers, the higher leadership of the Afghan army, national police and border forces. They are a team of senior officers because they will have to be heard by other senior officers who come from a culture sensitive to rank. They are all male for the same reason.
The team hasn't been told where it will live. Its members aren't sure how much travel or action they will see. They don't know exactly who they will be coaching and how much they need to know. They will work alongside experts from other nations in the NATO coalition, adding more languages to the challenge of working with the Afghans. In many ways, they will be fish out of water.
"I don't know exactly what will come up," said Maj. Kim Rolstone, an engineer from Meriden. But he and Spanos, both 44, are specialists in being outsiders, too. Both men came to America as immigrants born into other languages and cultures - Rolstone from South Africa and Spanos from Greece.
"I hope this doesn't sound corny," Rolstone said. "By virtue of where I grew up, I saw a lot of inequity in that society. I see the same in Afghanistan. I just hope that I could make some difference, to women and children who had a really bad deal. Walk away having built something, hoping to contribute to eliminating the threat to our nation and theirs."
As a military engineer, he's an expert generalist. "What I go armed with are a lot of my engineer manuals."
He volunteered for the mission and said he's proud to be doing it. Afghanistan, he said, "has had such a hard run for God knows how long."
"They want to be an independent state again," Spanos said. "Hopefully, we can make a little bit of difference for that effort."
As Connecticut prepares to welcome home about 500 Connecticut National Guard soldiers with the 102nd Infantry who have spent a year in Afghanistan, it officially said goodbye to these 15 at a ceremony on Thursday. Since then, the men have lived in limbo between their send-off ceremony and the reality of this morning's plane ride to Fort Riley, Kan.
They had a little more time with their wives and children, a few days to finish preparing their homes and lives for a year's absence. Spanos has said goodbye to his two boys, 14 and 11, though he said, "They are puzzled. They are scared. They are full of questions."
Rolstone has four teens. "My promise to them is I will take as good care of myself as I can," he said. He told them he won't take chances. "That's about the best I can do for them."
In Kansas, these men who have already known each other for years in state Guard circles will get to know each other even better. They will learn about the Afghan culture and train with weapons that weren't around last time they were regulars at the firing ranges.
"I want to get it started," Spanos said. "I'm eager to go through the training, be a sponge, absorb as much as possible."
In Afghanistan, they will teach lessons that are universal to militaries, not force American doctrine or methods down their throats, Rolstone said. "It's a good mission," he said. "It's right where things need to be."
© Copyright 2007, The Hartford Courant
