Steve Bunting

And then we start kind of learning about what that mission's going to be.

You know, once you get there, you get divvied up amongst the Helmand River Valley and you get your assignment on which VSP site you're going to go to.

Where were you at?

Yeah, so we were in the Helmand, but I was at the northernmost part of the Helmand near the Kajaki Dam, where the Kajaki Lake is.

So it's like kind of the forward line of troops there for the Helmand River Valley.

It's 2013.

that when the big push was happening down there with the marine corps that was 2010. that was 2010 was that the height of that push where they're kind of reclaiming it where the brits had been managing and i'm sure they did a good job but there's a lot of work to be done and um yeah so that big push between marja sing in um 2010 was okay a lot of casualties but that's the pretty iconic one the one they'll probably have in history books okay yeah right on so you're down in helmand yeah not a

great place to be if that's what you want oh yeah that's what you want to do so a better place for the marine corps than the helmand river valley i'll tell you that how was uh what was the mission so we were doing um kind of as a quasi sf model okay which i was a little bit irritated about initially right because there's not much about the heart you know by with and through and the hearts and minds thing that resonated with marine corps mentality and just you know with with doing the work but

But that's what we were doing.

So we're doing village stability ops, where essentially there'd be a contested area and a team of commandos, right, partnered with, you know, a coalition force would go in and they'd fight anywhere between 72 and 96 hours to create a bubble.

And then once they create that bubble, they'll start creating Afghan local police, start building up the militia, start putting outposts.

And then your job, like after that, a team would come in and manage that post and their job would be to keep pushing that bubble out over the course of that deployment.

So we fell into a region in the north that was kind of a pretty tricky situation, because that was the rat lines from the other provinces into the Helmand River Valley, right?

So there's a pretty nasty place called Ziminduar there, which had a bazaar.

I think it was called the Gendimerese Bazaar, where that's where they would do, buy all their RPGs, buy all their stuff, and then push deep down into Lashkar Gah, Sing, and Marja, and start whooping it on.

And our job was to hold that region down.

Right on.

Yeah.

Right on.

How fast did you guys get into it?