Iraq to Afghanistan: A radical adjustment

[unhappycamper]

Iraq to Afghanistan: A radical adjustment
y Heath Druzin, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Friday, December 18, 2009

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Sometimes in Iraq, it almost felt like a normal job for the soldiers of the 4th Engineer Battalion: Fieldwork for six to eight hours with little action and then back home, where high-speed Internet, reliably hot showers and real beds with a roof overhead awaited them.

Three months into their tour, however, they were transferred and faced frontline fighting in southern Afghanistan, days that regularly stretched for 15 hours or more, and a cot in the dust during chilly desert nights for the little sleep they were afforded between missions.

The combat engineers, pulled from Baghdad to Afghanistan midtour in April, are part of a migration of people and equipment from the relatively quiet front in Iraq to a war in Afghanistan that has been steadily increasing in ferocity.

The soldiers were switched to Afghanistan to help clear roads in the increasingly bomb-plagued south.

"Just as we unpacked our stuff, they said, ‘You’re going to Afghanistan,’ " said 1st Lt. Spenser Bruning, 24, of Seattle.


Rest of article at; http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=66743