First Contingent to Pakistan

My first operational tour was actually in Pakistan. I was lucky enough to be chosen for the mission. There were four contingents of twelve soldiers each. There was a captain in charge. There were three female officers and then eight enlisted guys from the rank of master warrant officer sergeant major down to, in my contingent I had a corporal with me. And our responsibility there was to train what was termed very nicely by the UN at the time to be Afghan refugees. And the training consisted of teaching these guys how to find minefields, how to identify them and find them and get in and safely destroy any mines or ordinance that was there. The Afghans that we were teaching were not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. Today, they’re known as the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. And these guys flocked out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan to a Pak army base called Rasulpur which is probably about a half hour drive from the city of Peshawar which is probably still the hot bed of activity in Pakistan. These guys were paid fifty dollars US to take a ten day course. So basically all it was for them was ten days rest and relaxation out of Afghanistan. The Russians only left in ‘89 and I think basically there were seven political factions and they simply turned on each other as the Russian tail lights went out of sight and the last two standing was the Taliban and the Northern Alliance so the people that we were dealing with were just that, the so-called Mujahideen.