Page 84 - Wish Stream Year of 2018

Soldiers unloading a British naval gun for display outside the ANAOA Museum
Royal Navy warship which had docked in India, or of an armed East India Company merchant- man, but later hauled ashore to serve as part of a siege train or, more likely, for the defence of a fixed, fortified position. Lt Col Steve Wall MBE (PWRR), our superb Deputy Chief of Staff, played the key role in rescuing these fine pieces from the obscurity of a NATO storage container in Kabul. Keen members of the Royal Engineers and Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers based at Qargha managed – after several hours’ effort involving muscle, winches,
Labelling a weapon for the Museum. Acquiring and identifying artefacts for the Museum figured prominently as part of my second tour in Afghanistan
Protection contingents who served within the wire to keep us all safe, demonstrated a superb degree of professionalism throughout, but I was particularly blessed by the enormous support provided by the four Chief Mentors under whom I had the great privilege to work: Brigadiers Charles Page, Ian Rigden, David Colthup and Adam Griffiths. All of them provided me with val- uable and unswerving practical help, guidance and support in ways too numerous to mention. As the only Civil Servant amongst not simply the
ropes, straps and the aid of an Afghan-driven forklift truck guided by a Dari-speaking Danish mentor – gingerly to mount the guns on their respective pedestals outside the entrance to the Library, of which the Museum forms a complementary educational component.
...my military colleagues began to refer to my subsidiary role as an arms dealer..
mentoring team but across the whole Qargha community – amounting in all to several hundred personnel living cheek-by-jowl, especially during the particularly cramped conditions which characterised my second tour – I was particularly struck by the manner in which officers and other ranks uni- formly treated me as an equal, not a circumstance I have consistently expe- rienced over the course of many years’ contact with military personnel.
Considerable effort also went into
a further project, which involved
interviews of 150 Afghan National Army (ANA) personnel, representing a wide range of ranks and responsibilities, all with frontline experience against the Taliban since 2001. The resulting mass of data, drawn from over twenty questions put to each interviewee on such issues as leader- ship, logistics, weapons effectiveness, communi- cations, medical care, pay, morale, enemy capa- bilities, strengths and weaknesses and other matters, led me to produce a lengthy report on the many reforms I believe are necessary to raise standards across various levels of the ANA – but particularly in the field, where casualties continue to number in the thousands each year.
Over the course of my 26 months at Qargha, the mentors, interpreters, the many different Force
The four interpreters with whom I worked – but whose names are withheld for security pur- poses – played so fundamentally an important part in my work that I simply cannot overstate their value to the mission. Utterly committed to supporting the academic element of mentor- ing at ANAOA, these men – at no small risk to themselves – performed magnificently as inter- preters, translators, and in liaising with booksell- ers, antiques dealers, carpenters and a range of Afghan military contacts with whom I had con- tact for over two years.
During the course of both tours I greatly enjoyed delivering regular lectures to the mentors and Force Protection personnel at Qargha on a range
82 ACADEMICS