‘I just need peace’

[unhappycamper]

U.S. Army Capt. Boe Faircloth and other soldiers interview villagers during a tour of voter registration sites in Logar Province.


‘I just need peace’
By Michael Gisick, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, September 9, 2008

LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — It had been two or three months since the U.S. platoon had visited the village at the north end of the province, backed up against the dry mountains that separate Logar from the outskirts of Kabul to the north. And this would be a short visit.

Second Lt. Richard Sposito, the 23-year-old platoon leader, hands out some toothbrushes, notebooks and pens to the children, trying to keep the presents out of the hands of the village’s older men.

The Afghan soldiers who accompanied the Americans, meanwhile, begin agitating to head home for afternoon prayers — it being the second day of Ramadan and already late morning, with a long bumpy drive ahead. So Sposito wraps it up with a few questions.

Everything is fine, the villagers respond. They are poor. They need jobs. But security, one offers, is "perfect."

A few minutes later, perhaps 5 kilometers down the bumpy road home, a bomb explodes underneath a truck in the middle of the American-led convoy. No one is seriously injured, but the blast is another sign of the times in Logar.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=57279