My old friend Sgt. Butler redeployed to southern Afghanistan this summer. We’ve been in touch lately and he’s send me some great photos of the rural world he’s been living in and what exactly he’s been up to. We even got to video chat this week for almost and hour. It’s still surreal to be able to open a little portal from New York to Afghanistan so my sister and I could talk to Kenny as he ate his gross cafeteria dinner.
Kenny is in the part of the army they used to call PsyOps. That started sounding little too video-gamey so they changed it to the innocuous sounding “4th Military Information Support Operations Group” even though they do the same work they used to. And although I like to imagine Kenny participating in some Manchurian Candidate operation or dosing village water supplies with LSD he says what he actually does is pretty boring, “I watch TV and movies on my computer all day.” He would occasionally get assigned as an RG-33 driver when the Special Forces guys need to get Kabul. Kenny says:
The first time that I was put on a mission to drive I got in and told the truck commander, that’s the guy who sits shotgun and calls the shots, that I had never driven before he had me switch out with someone else. Then they just kept putting me on missions as the driver and eventually I just had to drive.
But lately his group has been focused on preparing to wrap up the bigger Afghanistan mission and that means training local police forces so they can take over when our army finally leaves. Ken sent these photos of some of the local police recruits. Check these dudes out!
