Who is the Enemy

Being deployed is sort of surreal. From one minute you can go from goofing around with friends, with a levity that is almost like home (minus the gun strapped to you), to the next when you are fighting to save an arm or a face or a life. Even more unreal is trying to comprehend the objectives or thoughts of this insurgency we are facing.

Before I go off on dissertation about who actually is “the enemy”, let’s examine my day a few days ago. I will try to accompany the events of the day with chronological pictures I took that day.
The morning began very ordinarily. I woke up and went for a 3 mile run. I came back and hopped in the shower (which is much roomier than my last deployment, and cleaner; but I still fear that if I drop my soap I will never be able to reach it again), then back to my room for a QT (Exodus right now…just past the 10 Commandments), then over to breakfast.

After breakfast I read several books or articles and checked in at the hospital to see if anything was going on. All was quiet over there and back to my room I went until our lunch gang gathered and my traditional three lunch companions headed over to lunch.

After lunch we were feeling pretty industrious so we thought we would round up some wood and make a desk for an office that the officers had graciously been given to “do whatever you want to do with it”. So it became our mission to make it the coolest place in the hospital to “hang out” in….we’re not there yet. Ergo the gator and the construction hats.

We completed our project and placed it in the office (I was thankful that I didn’t cut my fingers off with the circular saw), just in time to have one of the medics find us and tell us that several traumas were coming in from an IED blast.
After evaluation of the traumas, it was determined that two of them needed to go to the OR. The first was an older gentleman that had been walking in the local market when the IED went off. He had shrapnel rip through his neck, chest and abdomen.



After we fixed him, we moved on to the next individual that had a hip fracture and his nose mostly ripped off from the same IED. We fixed him too. We then sent them to the local hospital now that they were out of the woods….so to speak.





So here comes the diatribe. What is the Taliban hoping to accomplish buy killing and maiming its own people? It is militarily incomprehensible. That is why there must be a spiritual answer. And for me, the only way to understand what is going on over here is summed up in Ephesians 6:12 “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

The works of the IED makers and those that place them are evil! It has nothing to do with Islam. They are misled by the devil himself. They are motivated by evil. They listen to those who are evil and they are unfortunately guided by evil prophets/imams or whatever you want to call them.

Not that I believe in the Quran, but to illustrate my point that these people are not “good Muslims” I quote from the Quran itself, “The Prophet Muhammad (s) said: “Anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should not harm his neighbor, and anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should entertain his guest generously, and anybody who believes in Allah and the Last Day should talk what is good or keep quiet (i.e. abstain from all kinds of evil and dirty talk).“ Sahih Al Bukhari, Vol: 8 Hadith 47.
Clearly these people don’t get it!

These people, as I call them, are still the same people that Christ came to die for. Let me never forget that fact!