This is a 60 Minutes II special from May 2004 showing the efforts at Camp Blessing.
This video showed a weapons cache recovery in Waygal Valley in 2004. Lara Logan from 60 Minutes II was on this operation. Most of our weapons recoveries in 2004 were friendly operations where negotiation, respect, and sometime money were used to capture and decommission arms that could be used against the Afghan government and the Americans. The Taliban and AQ would use money and force to take these arms from the locals and use these weapons against the Americans. Recognizing that every respectable Afghan male has an AK-47 to protect his family from Taliban, AQ, or local thugs, Hammerhead Six never took small arms or individual weapons from homes. We were looking for RPGs, rockets, and other explodables that could be in an attack or as IEDs.
This is another AFN story on our efforts to set up a girls school in Manogay Afghanistan. The efforts to build and support the education of the valley’s youth, including young women fulfilled two objectives; it gave us the opportunity to make a positive impression on the up and coming generation, and an education allowed these individuals the raw opportunity to improve their lot.
This video ran for years on AFN. It shows our locally hired Afghan Army in the Pech Valley in 2004. Unconventional Warfare with local fighters is cheap and effective. It was their country, their valley, their villages and they just needed support, training, and leadership from the Green Berets to help them secure and defend their villages. The Fighters at Camp Blessing were the only ones to wear the Tiger Stripe uniforms in the Afghan War.