Blog Post from Bagram

Hello everyone from lovely Bagram Air Force Base Afghanistan. Sonya has said that she is getting a lot of questions about what I am doing on this deployment, and what the conditions are like. So I figured I would hijack the blog and put out some info to help explain what exactly I'm doing this time around.

For starters I am in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, Afghanistan is on the Eastern side of Iran and it borders Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and, China. Kabul is the capital city and Bagram (where I am) is located a little ways north of it. I work for the Headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division. Afghanistan is split up into 5 different areas and the 82nd is responsible for running the war in Eastern part of the country.

In the headquarters I work in the J33 section. J is for joint since we have all of the services working here, I have a marine Staff Sergeant in my little section. The J33 works with all current operations. In my piece of the J33 I am in charge of a section that processes fragmentary orders (FRAGOS), concepts of operations (CONOPS), and requests for information (RFI). FRAGOS are orders that come down from the headquarters above the 82nd, and we push out the information to the people that need it. And we task other sections with writing FRAGOS for our subordinates based on the higher FRAGOS. For the CONOPS part we track the proposed missions from our subordinate units and coordinate the briefings for our bosses, and make sure that they are aware of what operations are going on at a given time in our battlespace. For RFIs we get questions from our higher headquarters and we task different sections with answering the questions.

So all in all, a lot different than my last deployment. That's about all I can say for now. Congratulations to all the new graduates out there, and I hope everyone is having a good summer.

Chris