Posted on 04/18/2003 10:59:45 AM PDT by 1riot1ranger
Capt. Bob Diggs Brown Jr. focused his digital camera on a young girl who was looking into an ad hoc classroom set up by U.S. Special Forces at a ruined school site in Afghanistan.
Snap!
The Sony camera recorded a crisp digital image of the shy, brown-eyed girl with a loose black cloth draped over her head.
Brown and his unit of special forces soldiers helped drive the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. But, for the 46-year-old Duncan native, rebuilding one school outside the capital of Kabul was their biggest achievement.
“Part of winning any war is winning the hearts and minds of the populace,” Brown said. “That’s what (special forces) is trained to do.”
When the troops first discovered the school in a small village near their Afghanistan compound, it was in ruin. Decades of war and years of Taliban oppression left the building damaged and vacant.
“The school had been destroyed,” Brown explained. “The Taliban had torn out all the lights, broken all the windows, burned all the furniture and destroyed all the books. The place was a mess.”
Brown, who is with the Army National Guard’s 19th Special Forces, and the unit’s chaplain, referred to as “Chaplain Andy” in Brown’s e-mails, asked permission to teach English in the school. Their request was granted, and they started working to make the school functional again.
“The Afghanis received it quite well, so we would go over once a week and spend all day teaching English to the different classes,” Brown said.
Brown focused the camera on the class “chalkboard” and framed up the watching group of Afghans.
Snap.
His camera recorded the first few English classes at the school. Afghan men and boys crowded into the dark, dried mud room, and listened to a U.S. soldier trying to teach a language without any supplies.
“The kids would come in and sit on the floor,” said Brown. “They didn’t have notebooks; they didn’t have pencils. When it got dusk, you had to stop class because there were no lights; when the winter came, you had to stop class because there’s no glass and no heat.”
The soldiers did what they could to teach English in the school. They painted a section of the dried mud wall black to use as a chalkboard.
“It wasn’t even good chalk,” Brown said, with a chuckle.
The classes were divided by knowledge instead of age, so they were filled with boys and men, ranging from ages 12 to 26. The Afghans wanted their girls to learn as well, but did not want men teaching them.
Brown and the special forces continued their classes in the spartan classrooms, until an innocuous e-mail gave rise to American generosity.
“I wrote home,” Brown said. “I was sending e-mail to about 10 people, and it’s grown. I bet I have 5,000 people reading my e-mail now.”
As word spread, high school and elementary school students started reading the stories Diggs Brown was sending back home to Fort Collins, Colo., and to his parents in Duncan.
“I mentioned how awful the conditions were in these schools, and all of a sudden we started receiving boxes and boxes of school supplies from children in American schools.”
The flow of school supplies grew as word of the Afghan school spread.
“It was amazing,” said Brown. “I bet we received over three tons of school supplies. People started contributing money to refurbish the school.”
The troops eventually collected around $5,000, enough to refurbish one classroom in the school building.
Brown focused the camera on the newly painted far wall of the classroom.
Snap.
The camera recorded another image, this one little resembling the dilapidated classroom in which these classes started. These walls were painted white. There was glass in the windows. A white, dry-erase board had replaced the smear of black paint that had served as the chalkboard. Rows of desks and chairs filled the room. Afghan kids rummaged through boxes of school supplies lining one wall, collecting the material they would need for the English class.
“Eventually, the Army picked up the project and finished the school out because they saw this was a good thing. We’re winning the hearts and minds of the populace,” Brown explained.
He described the renovation of the school as a victory for the special forces, and for the Afghans, saying, “The teachers and students were ever so grateful to the Americans. It’s amazing to me that this world doesn’t see how generous we as Americans are — we take care of everybody.
“These (American) kids in grade school, junior high and high school, that sent these supplies, they didn’t ask for anything in return. They just did it out of the goodness of their hearts.”
The school’s future is not certain in the devastated country. Afghanistan is a nation that has been ravaged by nearly 30 years of war and oppression. Buildings and infrastructure are damaged or destroyed, and children are in constant danger from the remnants of ammunition and land mines from the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and relentless civil war.
“Ten people die every day in Afghanistan from mines and unexploded ordinance — UXOs,” Brown said.
Military estimates list over 5.7 million mines in the country, and countless unexploded weapons that can still detonate at any time.
The influence of provincial war lords and drug traders has been reduced, but not eliminated. Tribal tensions are high in a country that is still building a national army under the control of the president.
The combined effects are nothing less than devastating.
“Everything’s destroyed,” Brown said. “There’s hardly a building that doesn’t have something wrong.”
The rebuilding process also has to contend with a revival of the Taliban among the Pashtun tribes along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and in other quadrants of the country. A majority of the Taliban regime was from the Pashtun tribe, and it received support from the ethnic group in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Remaining Taliban fighters try to prevent rebuilding efforts, or destroy any completed projects.
“They offer $10,000 to go burn down the school,” Brown said. “People will go do it, because that’s more than some make in a lifetime.”
The school Brown and his unit worked so diligently to reconstruct was not destroyed during his seven-month stint in Afghanistan, and he has plenty of hope for its future.
Part of that future is sharing the story with those who made it possible. Since returning from Afghanistan, Brown has been speaking at schools and churches that corresponded with him during the reconstruction.
He’s taken this week off from his job as a regional bank manager, to spend time with his friends and family in Duncan, sharing with them the images from his extraordinary story.
Brown focused the camera on an elderly Afghan man.
Snap.
The camera recorded the picture of a old man sitting in a chair in the refurbished classroom. He had a thin smile lifting the edges of his long beard. The man sat calmly with a plastic sack full of recently acquired school supplies. Standing next to him was a wide-eyed young boy.
It’s a picture that capsulized what the special forces were able to accomplish.
“That was, in my mind, the grandest thing that happened while we were there,” Brown said. “War isn’t just about fighting here and fighting there; it’s hearts and minds.”
The only things that do get done, are those things done by individuals like these, on their own initiative.
That's funny. Somehow the Peace Corps and Special Forces just don't seem to go together.
All check out his website in #10
They really are our finest.
But I got to Texas as fast as I could!
"That's funny. Somehow the Peace Corps and Special Forces just don't seem to go together."
Actually, there are some similarities:
+ SF has always been insanely dedicated to understanding customs language and culture of the (100+) countries they have projects in.
+ inventing the Peace Corps and rejuvenating SF were both big projects of JFK (maybe the only good things he actually got done).
+ They both put extremely heavy emphasis on teaching people in other countries to do for themselves.
+ I have a relative in SF, the motto on their flash is "de oppresso liber", "to liberate the oppressed," which rhey did a very good job of in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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