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A French Soldier's View of US Soldiers in Afghanistan
By Wes O'Donnell, Army & Air Force Veteran 1997-2007, Speaker, Journalist, and Documentary Filmmaker. Reach out to Wes on LinkedIn.
What follows is an account from a French ISAF soldier that was stationed with American Warfighters in Afghanistan sometime in the past 6 years. This was copied and translated from an editorial French newspaper.
Some snips
They have a terribly strong American accent - from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word?
Whatever State they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other. Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins, and creatine- they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them - we are wimps, even the strongest of us - and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.
And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all - always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later - which cuts any pussyfooting short.
Honor, motherland - everything here reminds of that: the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels.Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud of the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location: books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste, etc. In such a way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is the first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.
read it all @
A French Soldier's View of US Soldiers in Afghanistan
By Wes O'Donnell, Army & Air Force Veteran 1997-2007, Speaker, Journalist, and Documentary Filmmaker. Reach out to Wes on LinkedIn.
What follows is an account from a French ISAF soldier that was stationed with American Warfighters in Afghanistan sometime in the past 6 years. This was copied and translated from an editorial French newspaper.
Some snips
They have a terribly strong American accent - from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word?
Whatever State they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other. Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins, and creatine- they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them - we are wimps, even the strongest of us - and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.
And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all - always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later - which cuts any pussyfooting short.
Honor, motherland - everything here reminds of that: the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels.Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud of the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location: books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste, etc. In such a way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is the first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.
read it all @
A French Soldier's View of US Soldiers in Afghanistan
