Christmas With the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan
A Christmas like no other for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.
KHOWST PROVINCE, Afghanistan, Dec. 25, 2007 — -- They prayed for their families, their fellow troops and the chance to see another day. The Christmas worship service at the Bak District Center in this volatile valley of irrigated canals and mud brick compounds was a small and somber affair — a chaplain and 10 other men.
The soldiers, officers and enlisted men from the U.S Army's 82nd Airborne's 2-321 Battalion clutched their caps and muttered along a nondenominational prayer reader. The chaplain, Capt Scott Kannaugh, a tall missionary with a distant gaze, read earnestly from John 1:14.
He prayed that peace, which reigned at the time Jesus was born, would again become flesh. But it's not peace or salvation many of the men in the Bak District Center desire, but something much more earthly — a ticket home.
This is their 12th month in a 15-month deployment, one extended in April, three months into their tour. They spent their first five months here, through the searing summer and now through the bone-snapping winter.
Some like Sgt. Jason Laurencelle didn't even know it was Christmas.
"I had no idea until my little sister called." Another soldier chimed in that the single way to make time pass was not to mark it. "You can't think about what day of the week it is … then suddenly months slip by."
The district center is a new concept, a brainchild of counterinsurgency warfare. It calls on small groups of soldiers to live with the Afghan police and military units they train out in the countryside. That's what brings the men of the 2-321 Battalion to the rural Khowst region.
There are four such centers, and three on the way. Maj. David Pierce, the operations officer of this battalion, said this is the only province in which coalition forces are embedded in district centers. It's a method that appears to be working. The Khowst province, which the Soviets never managed to subdue during their 10-year occupation of Afghanistan, has largely been cleared of Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents.
