Just another day in paradise

I got to chat with Stephan briefly this morning. He's back in Afghanistan, and he posted this article on Myspace about his platoon from last month. As you read it, continue to pray for him, and don't forget to keep praying for all of our troops!

ASMAR, Afghanistan — When the young American lieutenant and his 14 soldiers glanced up at the rock face, they thought that the major who had planned the mission must have been kidding.

Elijah Carlson, a strapping, blue-eyed Southern Californian and self-​proclaimed "gun nut," gripped the crumbling rock, tugged backward by 90 pounds of ammunition and gear. "If we fall back, we are dead!" he whispered to Lt. Jake Kerr, the platoon leader.


In seconds, a rock shot loose beneath one soldier's boot and dropped 20 feet onto another soldier below, sending him tumbling 15 feet to the base and cracking his bulletproof side plate.

What transpired over the next 16 hours was the kind of clash that's led Kerr's commanders in the Army's 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y., to conclude that there's no "victory" waiting around the next bend in Afghanistan, only a relentless struggle with a fleet-footed, clever enemy. For Kerr, a recent West Point graduate who specialized in counterinsurgen​cy,​ it was the first face-off with an often-elusive opponent and a case study in the complex politics of rural Afghanistan.

Kunar, where Combat Company of the 1st Battalion of the 10th Mountain Division's 32nd Infantry Regiment is stationed, is one of the most violent provinces in Afghanistan. Asmar is just 10 miles from the border with Pakistan's Bajaur Tribal Agency, which has been a sanctuary for al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban leaders.

The mission was to disrupt the men and weapons infiltrating from Pakistan and root out their staging bases in Afghanistan. The Americans had hoped first to confer with village elders, but after intelligence indicated that insurgents were in the area, they moved in with heavy machine guns.

Kerr's platoon moved for three hours in the darkness. Each time they thought they'd reached the peak, the land shot up farther. The unit came across enemy fighting positions, piled high with rocks and littered with food wrappers.

Afghan and American intelligence reports said these were "Bakt Ali's men," insurgents who lay claim to nearby villages in central Kunar. Ali is a senior Taliban guerrilla leader in Kunar who's thought to have direct ties to Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, an Egyptian al-Qaida leader in Pakistan. At each dug-in position, Kerr recorded the GPS coordinates of unmanned enemy positions, down to the 10th digit.

As dawn broke over the rocks, company commander Maj. Andy Knight, of Ann Arbor, Mich., set out on foot in the valley 700 feet below. Kerr would provide support from his eagles' nests as Knight attempted to clear two villages where, he said, residents had complained of insurgent intimidation. Accompanied by a reporter, Knight and a detachment of Americans and 14 Afghan soldiers stepped carefully along mud dikes, greeting Afghan children and their parents with a cordial "Sengay?" - "How are you?"

What Kerr, from Lake Placid, N.Y., heard from his perch above the valley was a surprise: Unseen men along the valley floor were shouting to one another like an oral tag team, passing the news that "the Americans have arrived."

Within minutes, three men - one in a white shalwar kamis (a loose pajamalike shirt and pants), another in a black one and a third in a brown shawl and gray pants - sprinted down the valley from the west with machine guns toward Knight's patrol, which was walking along a dry, rocky streambed about 1,000 feet away.

Kerr, 25, part of a new generation of American warriors schooled at West Point in the raw lessons of fighting counterinsurgen​cies in the Islamic world, spotted them instantly.

"They were running at Major Knight with AK-47s," Kerr said after the battle. "We opened up on them, and they began firing. But we had the three men outgunned, and they dove for cover in the streambed."

In the valley, the hiking party splashed through irrigation channels and dove for cover amid tall bushes that lined the stream. The chatter of machine guns fired from both sides echoed off the ridges and stone walls.

Knight, who played tight end on the Army football team, shot past in a blur to the front of the marching party. He didn't yet know that two of the insurgents had been hit. They were pulling themselves on their bellies through the rocks, desperate to reach a bend in the stream.

Within five minutes, two Apache attack helicopters buzzed the valley, scanning for enemy positions and listening to Kerr direct them to the target. "I was shooting tracers down at the two fighters crawling in the stream, and the other man in a brown shawl was shooting back," Kerr said.

Hidden behind a wooden shack, Knight's party could see the two Apaches sweep down, ripping up the stream bed. The insurgents had slipped just out of Kerr's sight, however, back up a bend in the stream and away from Knight's party. When the Apaches unleashed their Hellfire missiles, the men already had vanished.

"Dawg 1,6!" Knight snapped into his radio to Lt. David Poe, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y., a few hundred yards away, as he crouched in the rocks. "Are you near the woman in the green dress, tending to the animals? We are moving towards your location."

Almost all the males in the valley had gone missing, but Afghan women were trying to keep spooked cows and goats from fleeing. As Knight's party climbed into the rocks above the stream and dashed along the mountainside, a woman in a black shawl appeared, waving her arms and wailing, berating U.S. and Afghan forces as they passed. An Afghan soldier shouted back, incorrectly, "Back in your house, lady! They shot first!"

Knight stopped to catch his breath. "Do we have maps of these villages?" he demanded of Lt. Eric Forcey, 23, of Lynchburg, Va., who was at his side.

"No, sir," Forcey replied. "For all intents and purposes, they do not exist."

"I think they've existed for a long time, Forcey; the mapmakers just have not found them," the major replied.

"Yes, sir."

With "shhh-thwamps, shhh-thwamps," two more Hellfire missiles crashed into the rocks.

With constant translations of the enemy radio chatter in Pashtu, picked up through electronic eavesdropping, and the major's narration of the battle, events appeared to turn. "I think one of them is badly injured," Knight speculated. "They will have to make a decision to drag him out or leave him."

The U.S. forces, augmented by the 14 Afghans, were deliberate, at times cumbersome. From above, Kerr's men heard radio traffic indicating that the insurgents had slipped into a larger village farther up the ravine.

Enemy radio chatter also indicated that the helicopter strikes were landing just in front of the house from which Bakt Ali's men apparently were talking.

Still, this was a shell game with no certainty about the targets' whereabouts, and Knight - who spent a year in Kunar in 2006 and 2007 - knew it. He refused to order an airstrike on the suspected hideout.

Instead, he took Kerr's plea over the radio: "We can own this valley, sir!" He ordered two Humvees to rush up the stream bed and take up "​support-​by-​fire"​ positions in front of a group of wooden houses and dispatched Dawg Company's Poe to oversee a group of Afghan commandos, who'd search the village on foot.

The choppers returned from refueling. Once in the village, the Afghan soldiers went house to house, room by room. A cluster of women and children stood on a rooftop. "This is a virtual ghost town, sir," came Poe's report. An Afghan interpreter sniped: "It almost always ends this way."

Kerr and his men were tired and frustrated. No one had found the fugitives' "blood trails," which he'd hoped to follow.

As his men packed in their heavy weapons and began to pull back down the mountain, the insurgents' radio traffic intensified.

"We could hear them actually counting our numbers, and they were saying that they would hit us. A commander told them to wait until we were grouped." The insurgents apparently wanted to target only the departing forces and to avoid destroying the village.

Kerr's team hiked back down the ridgeline, descended about 1,000 feet into the riverbed, linked up with Knight's fighters in U.S. jeeps and reached for water bottles.

Suddenly, an Afghan interpreter, monitoring radio traffic, heard Bakt Ali's commander order the attack. Kerr dove for cover. The pavement exploded with rocket blasts and fire from massive PK machine guns. Carlson, 23, from Torrance, Calif., dropped to his knees, curling into a fetal position under a dirt ledge with his machine gun trained on the crest of the mountain he'd scaled earlier. One U.S. soldier was hit in the groin as he leapt for cover.

But Kerr's platoon's work was about to pay dividends.

With a rush of satisfaction, Kerr reached into his pocket and pulled out the GPS coordinates of the enemy positions he'd scribbled down that morning. From six miles away at their base in Asmar, a 10th Mountain artillery battery unleashed a torrent of 105 mm howitzer shells onto the enemy positions. In the twilight, .50-caliber machine guns blazed.

The day was over. No one was going back to hunt for the living or the dead. The insurgents had lost fighters, but they'd proved to be a wily, disciplined and mobile force.

The U.S. and Afghan forces had had a reality check. If they didn't already know it, they now understood why they'd been unable to have a peaceful discussion with the village elders. Bakt Ali's forces owned the villages, and until last Thursday, they more or less controlled the entire ravine. It would take more than better maps for the Afghan army and its U.S. allies to wrest control of them.

Ironically, I'm sorta speechless

I am completely shocked that this is my art. I learned this wet-on-wet oil technique from watching The Best of the Joy of Painting with Bob Ross on TV, and used his basic starter set an extra tube of paint and a few different brushes on a cheap canvas from Michaels while watching Les Miserables with Dad tonight. Within the first few brushstrokes I was sure I'd already ruined it, and this feeling prevailed throughout much of the process, right on up till the end, even up to signing it (that took a few tries, and I'm still not thrilled about that part). I still have a hard time believing that the wet oil painting on my kitchen counter is mine.

Come to think of it, though, Zach's right: the pine tree in the foreground does have a pretty crooked trunk. (^_^;)

Note: the snow is much pinker in person.

Holy WAR

So last Friday night/Saturday morning, The Well went to WAR, short for Waging a Revolution, which was an all-night prayer rally. It was sheer awesomeness! The Lord totally showed up in a powerful way, and the Spirit was moving in us like never before. I can't wait till we do it again!

We prayed for everything from our nation to our city, our schools, our family and friends, and everything in between, from 2300 hours Friday till 0600 hours Saturday, with short praise and worship "intermissions" between prayer sessions. I cannot stress enough the amazingness of it all. Really, I can't. I can barely think of any half-decent words to use here, out of my alarmingly sizable vocabulary arsenal. Basically, I'm darn near speechless. Which, if you know me, is kind of a big deal. ^^;;

I pray that we never lose that wonder that God Almighty hears our prayers, Who holds the universe in the span of His hand. That I never go back to my previously pathetic "prayer life", but continue to press on in growing in the Lord, in spending more and more time in prayer and in the Word and in fellowship with other believers. I am such a wretch, and it just highlights how amazing the Lord is to not only hear my feeble prayers, but to pray for me when I don't know what to pray, to intercede for me constantly before the Father! It just blows my face off that He would bother, but He goes out of His way to draw me in to Him! (@_@) Wow.

In other news, Stephan is back for another week and a half or so on leave. Hooray! <(^.^<)(>^.^)>\(^o^)/ Unfortunately, when he stopped by our house to visit, I was in the Crusade Office making calls, so I missed him. But I'm sure I'll see him around soon, so it's okay. Do keep him up in your prayers, though; it's unbelievably hard to go through what he has to on a daily basis in Afghanistan! Pray that the Lord uses him to minister to his buddies there, and for His continual hand of protection upon him, and all those in the 10th Mountain Division (and in all of our armed forces while you're at it).

Until next time, hooray for Jesus! (^v^)v~Victory!

Stephan Alemdar Update

I am such a slacker, it just makes me sick sometimes. (-_-") I've been meaning to update you all with any news about Stephan in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division of the United States Army as I receive it, and I have been remiss. I've found three articles in the Press-Enterprise reagrding his unit, and I will share them with you now, in link form because for some reason I can't get flickr to accept these JPEGs:

• 17 February 2009: "Newest US troops come under fire"
• 26 February 2009: "US troops in push south of Kabul"
• 1 March 2009: "American deaths rise in Afghanistan"

Keep Stephan in your prayers, along with all those in his unit, and in all our Armed Forces! God bless America!

Just Get Married!

Every now and then, the Lord moves a servant of His to deliver a radical, bold, earth-shattering, life-changing message that affects Christendom for years to come ("Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God", for example). I believe that this message delivered through Pastor Ed young of Fellowship Church in Florida is just such a sermon. The title says it all: "Just Get Married". Gird up your loins, Christian soldier.
These days, it seems like fewer and fewer young Christian men are getting married (or even dating, as far as I can tell), and the average marriage age is on the rise. Single guys (very few that I have known are worthy of the title of "men") are putting off marriage at an alarming rate in order to instead pursue education, careers, and just plain goofing off. Meanwhile their eventual mates are put in an unnatural position of having to provide for themselves, when God never intended for this to be the case.
These "man-boys" are waiting until they've had their fill of carefree, single life, until they're past they're prime and set in their ways, to seek out the "wife of their youth". What they don't realize is just how arrogant this proves them to be: they expect us women to "look like Angelina Jolie, with the morals of Mother Theresa," and yet we are left to just take whatever we can get for fear of becoming an old maid. They avoid commitment like the plague, excusing their cowardice with statements like these: "I need to be 100% sure;" "I gotta 'feel it;'" and even the ultimately chauvinistic "What if someone better-looking comes along?"
Let me ask you something, Christian: Were you 100% sure when you first gave your life to Christ? I don't think so! Or do you think your parents always "felt like" not killing you in your teens, or that they let you live out of sacrificial love for you, regardless of their emotions (which are chemically based, mind you)? Oh, and guess what: There will always be someone better looking! Since when has a successfully God-honoring marriage EVER been based on the outward appearance? (Please don't forget that we have eyes too.)

The bottom line is this: If you have a desire for the opposite sex, it is God's will for you to marry! (1st Corinthians 7:9) Because, guess what: marriage solves most of the sexual temptation that plagues us right and left in this world and within our own sinful hearts! 

"When you get married... your sex life with your spouse will cause you to seek God in a deeper way, and in a more profound way, and even in a more passionate way.... In marriage, as we fulfill each other sexually, it will free us up to hear from God in a deeper way."

Pastor Ed talked about the new depths that your prayer life can reach when you are sexually fulfilled in marriage because when you're satisfied, you won't be all distracted when you're trying to pray; this reminds me as well of hunger: when I am hungry, I become very distracted from whatever I am doing, and find my thoughts turning toward food constantly until I am able to eat. Then once I'm satisfied, my mind becomes clear once again and I am able to focus completely on the task at hand. And though my own thoughts have not been straying in a sexual direction, I have noticed that the past few months have been incredibly frustrating for me with my own prayer life and worship because I find myself constantly thinking about someone in particular. (And if you think that either you can guess, or that I am going to tell you whom, you need to go take your meds because you are out of your mind. ...Let's just say that all of my trains of thought, no matter if they carry cargo or passengers, must run through the same depot. ^^;;) Back to my original topic now...

Other problems solved by marriage include laziness and selfishness, as you strive to obey the Scriptures and be a godly husband. Let's face it, guys: The greatest sermon you will ever preach is in your marriage! Ephesians 5:22-33 makes it very clear that marriage is meant to be a picture of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and His Bride, the Church. In order for you men to lead your wives in following Christ, you must exemplify Him in your own life, following after Him with every fiber of your being!

Please note, however, that I am not saying that this problem is one-sided; we women are not innocent victims! On behalf of my half of the family of God, men, I sincerely apologize for not striving to be the godly women that godly men deserve and need as helpmeets! We have neglected our bodies, the Temple of the Holy Spirit of God, by stuffing our emotions down our throats and lazily avoiding exercise; we have not been the pure and chaste women we should be, partying and clubbing with our friends; we have told you with our lips that we want to be pure, but with our clothing that we do not; we have put our own education and careers above developing those skills so vital to being a good homemaker for you, a good mother for your children; we have ourselves chauvinistically blamed all of our relational woes on you while doing nothing to ensure that we are worthy of the men we so long for.

Ladies, we also must rise up to be those women that the Scriptures declare are to "be praised" (Proverbs 31:10-31; Titus 2:4-5; 1 Timothy 2:9)!

But men, it is your duty to initiate the relationship, to lead the woman in following Christ, and to earn her respect for you as her leader. In those cases where the woman feels she must take charge and initiates the relationship, there will always be a measure of insecurity that she wasn't good enough to be pursued. Things just have a tendency to go badly when the man does not lead.

And for those of us who find ourselves twitterpated (at least seemingly) without return but who refuse to wreck their chances by taking matters in their own hands, I humbly suggest that you take more chances--ask us out. Don't play around, but diligently seek out a woman who can be a good helpmate for you, a supportive wife and loving mother, and don't wait until you're "sure". In my opinion (for what little it's worth), as long as God is being glorified and the devil is denied a foothold, it is in God's will. Don't over-think it, just follow the leading of the Holy Spirit and walk according to the Scriptures, and you cannot fail to please the Lord.

"See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil." --Ephesians 5:16-17

Ryan's Sweater, Part 3

Does my procrastination know no bounds? The following pictures were taken on 14 December, 2008, and given to me on 21 December, and I have only just this morning scanned them in order to post them on my blog. Robert and Melissa brought Ryan to church with his little sailor sweater on so I could see it on him and get my picture taken with a real-life Internet celebrity. ^^ And so, without further ado, I give you: the goods.

Isn't he just adorable? (^w^)

In other news, I'm back at the gym now (FINALLY!), and when I can't get a ride there, I've got that wonderful Bowflex (finally getting all the bugs worked out, and getting used to it now) to help me keep my muscles strong and burning fat. I'm learning the hard way, however, that I simply cannot get away with failing to stretch after a particularly strenuous leg workout, and not working out at least a little the next day. So, Dad, you get to say "I told you so." I deserve it. (-_-;)

Our family friend Stephan Alemdar, 

18, Charlie Company, TF 1-32 Infantry out of Fort Drum, NY, shipped out to an extremely remote and dangerous part of Afghanistan today (I think his tour is nine months). Please keep him up in your prayers, for him to draw close to the Lord and for the Lord to touch all the men in his unit through his witness, and for Him to supernaturally protect them from any and all harm as they relieve a unit that has suffered heavy casualties in this war or terrorism, this fight for freedom and security.

Also, my friend Aimee is undergoing brain surgery as I type to relieve the pressure because her brain is too large for her skull, and had been dropping down into her upper neck, giving her unimaginable headaches, etc. Please be in prayer that the Lord would bless the surgeons' hands as they operate, and that not only would He bring her through this trying time, but also that her parents would be driven to more closely seek the Lord as well.

Finally, all that stands between me and my ISSA Certification as a Fitness Trainer is my exam, and a CPR/AED course I take on 22 January at the Red Cross here in town! I am so excited to be so close to the finish line! I will be taking my practice exam today, just in case, and soon, I'll be working and able to actually pay off my bills! (>v<)

Oh yeah, one other thing: this Sunday, 18 January, I'm singing worship at the Eastvale Satellite Campus of Harvest! It's kinda scary, but also really exciting to lead worship on the frontline for the first time. And, I have to admit, it's extremely appealing to me that my call time is at 0800 hours, instead of the usual 0630, which requires me to get up at 0430 in order to speed my way to church in time (terrible, I know (>_<;) ).

By the way, my family is hilarious. ^^

Pray for our troops; they keep us safe at the cost of their lives!