No Such Thing as a Typical Day

The great thing about being in that position, there was no such thing as a typical day. Every day was a little bit different. Some days we would be patrolling. Some days the platoon would be on gate guard just to protect the camp that we were on. But typically we would wake up early and we would do our physical training, get that out of the way before it got too hot out and get the sun. For a platoon commander there’s always the office side of things that had to be done, depends if we were doing an operation at the time or if we were doing our patrolling or if we had a meeting to set up and all these different variables that we had to take into account. At the same time, I would have my sections out doing their patrols. You know, just having that presence out there and kind of winning the hearts and minds, is one of the lines we used, of the Afghani people. We weren’t there to overtake the country or anything, we were there to help them. That could be from handing out, you know, tools to them to just patrolling with the local police and the local militaries. So everybody was doing a different job at one time. And then sometimes at least a few times a week I would get out and do my own patrols and not only meeting mayors and the elders from each of the communities but also dong my own patrol, presence patrols and being out there as well.