Mandeville saw many types of Taliban weapons while on tour, including this captured gun. (Courtesy photo)

    By Carolyn Lee
    The Imperial Republican
     Ten months is a long time to be stationed in Afghanistan, a country with gentle inhabitants and angry Taliban. James Mandeville knows.
     Mandeville, a 2001 Chase County High School graduate, is a member of the ACO 2-4 Infantry 4th Brigade Company of the U.S. Army. He is a communications officer, keeping his unit in touch with other companies.
     Home on leave this holiday season, Mandeville looked back on a country with high mountains, dry deserts and small, rocky villages. Primative is the word that comes to mind.
     There are basically no paved roads in the area in which Mandeville served. "I didn't see a paved road for five months," he said. Twisting dirt roads wrapped around hills, down valleys and through gulleys. That makes the driving more hazardous.
     Mandeville said that several times his unit was hit by incendiary devises as it moved through the night. The narrow roads of the supply routes made it easy for terrorists to sabatoge the lines.
     He'd hear the prayer call in distant villages, and know that his unit couldn't hit the village, because of the civilians. However, a number of times villages would be evacuated and could be searched.
     Mandeville was involved in three major operations-Mountain Thrust, Mountain Fury and Medusa. He has been stationed in south Afghanistan, east of there, "and wherever."
     Several times Mandeville has been assigned to an area where there is nothing but hills at first-no camp, no buildings, no support. Operation Medusa was one of those places.
     The U.S. Army was determining where the supply route was going, in that case.
     "We're in the middle of nowhere," he said. There are some big cities, but donkeys are still pulling carts, as traffic rolls by.
     Women have no rights, Mandeville said, under the Taliban, and children don't go to school. The U.S. is trying to rebuild schools, hospitals and the government, he said.
     "People say they're on your side, but they're scared about when we leave, that the Taliban will come back and hurt them. They don't really want us there, but when we're there they're safe."
     "I hope that whatever we do over there, sooner or later we'll pull out, and the Afghan people will work and not let the Taliban take over," he said.
     Mandeville will leave next week for at least three weeks at Ft. Polk, LA, before being deployed to perhaps Iraq, he said.
     In the meantime he's taking time to enjoy parents, Tina and Jack Mandeville, of Imperial, television and going to the grocery store when he feels the need for something.
     That's a luxury he hasn't been able to take recently.
     He has felt fortunate to help people, especially children, talking through an interpreter. It's the small things, he said, like watching a child's face light up when examining a flashlight, that makes his job worthwhile.