Victory Point - Ed Darack [80]
Deciding from day one that he was going to leave an indelibly positive mark on the war-ravaged area, Bartels set out to better the lives of the area’s people through any means at his disposal. While Task Force Devil’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams kept busy with construction and improvement of wells, roads, schools, and mosques, Bartels focused on the locals’ simple day-to-day needs and wants. A village elder who came to the entrance one morning to speak with him noticed the lieutenant drinking from a paper cup; the local asked Matt if he could have the cup once he was finished. “No,” Bartels replied, disappearing momentarily, “but you can have eight hundred unused, brand-new ones for you, your family, and your village,” and with that, he handed over an unopened case to the stunned elderly Afghan. The lieutenant also made personal friends with a number of the area villages’ merchants and craftsmen, including a local baker, whose son—whom the Marines knew as “C-Put”—would bring fresh “sugar bread” to the camp every morning and often stuck around the camp and followed Matt, who helped the eight-year-old learn English. Matt also ensured that word got out that anyone in need of medical care should immediately come to Camp Blessing, where the camp’s “saints”—the tireless Navy Corpsmen—diagnosed problems, doled out appropriate medication, set broken bones, disinfected blisters and lacerations, sutured deep wounds, even saved an elderly man during a heart attack, medevacing him to Bagram Air Base for emergency heart surgery. The corpsmen didn’t limit their work to humans, either, stitching up the leg of a villager’s donkey after a fall on a steep trail one afternoon.
Recognizing that a clothing staple Americans take for granted was one of the commodities most coveted by the region’s men—shoes—Bartels jumped online and registered a request with a number of websites that organize aid drives to deliver care packages to deployed American troops, stating that he wasn’t procuring for Marines, but for the locals of Nangalam and the Afghan warriors who fought side by side with the grunts on missions. Shoes, sizes seven to nine (the most common range for men in the area), poured in; Matt and the Blessing Marines immediately distributed them to the grateful locals. He then continued the shoe drive through his friends and family, who donated both brand-new and used sneakers and boots. Still short of the village’s needs, the lieutenant used his own money to purchase a final fifty pair from a major discount shoe company through its online store.
The Blessing Marines’ most notable outreach achievement came from providing items not to adult Afghans, however, but to young girl students of the school adjacent to the camp’s entrance, which often took the brunt of Shah’s rocket and mortar attacks during the terrorist’s spring offensive. Noting the girls’ lack of basic supplies—pencils, paper, uniforms, and backpacks—as he watched the storage facilities of Blessing bulge with the unused care packages delivered by Sabre’s Big Windy Chinooks during weekly mail runs, Bartels hatched a plan to ensure that the students of the Nangalam Girls’ School would never be without their vital matériel. He e-mailed friends, family, even distant relatives and old classmates, asking for both financial donations and shipments of pencils, pens (a treasured implement for both adults as well as children throughout the mountains of the Kunar province), backpacks, folders, and notebooks in lieu of typical