ANYONE CAN
BUILD A SCHOOL
FEW BUILD RELATIONSHIPS. THAT MAKES
ALL THE DIFFERENCE.
BY CHRIS KOLENDA
I
n early 2007, my unit — roughly 800
men and women of 1-91 Cavalry, 173rd
Airborne Brigade — was scheduled to
deploy to Iraq. We were busy with pre-deployment training that focused on the
history and culture of Iraq as well as the
basics of the Arabic language. Some of the
paratroopers with an exceptional aptitude
for languages even received special Arabic
language training. All of us were doing our
best to learn as much as possible in a short
amount of time.
Then, unexpectedly, orders changed. We
were instead headed to Afghanistan. All of
our research about Iraqi culture and our
Arabic language training suddenly became
useless.
In a crunch for time — deployment was
only a few weeks away — I frantically read
everything about Afghanistan that I could
get my hands on. Despite it all, my unit and
I were not prepared fully for the complexity
of Afghanistan.
Then we were deployed to one of the
most violent areas of Afghanistan.
The firefights in the complex mountainous terrain were intense and deadly. We
won every time, but four of my paratroopers
had been killed and scores were wounded in
an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.
32 | JOURNEY OF HOPE
I picked up Greg’s book expecting a feelMost recently, in late August 2007,