Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Mahmood Qadri (right) in front of a Special Operations truck as troops pause along a road looking for terrorist hideouts in the rugged eastern mountains of Afghanistan. Qadri left his full-time Army National Guard Training Division job and his family behind when he deployed to Afghanistan early in the conflict. He volunteered as a indvidual mobilization augmentee to serve as a linguist for Special Operations troops.

Even during the earliest stages of the War on Terrorism, the National Guard fought on the frontlines of Afghanistan, thanks in part to a citizen-soldier who volunteered to serve as a linguist with coalition special operations troops rooting out Al Qaida and Taliban fighters.

Sgt. 1st Class Mahmood Qadri is now safely back at the Army National Guard’s Readiness Center in Arlington, Va., serving in the facility’s Emergency Operations Center. But only a few months ago, he roamed the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, in search of terrorists.

“It’s like the wild West over there, only worse,” Qadri said. “There are all of these different military gangs in the country. They’re like the mafia. Then, you have the business people who want protection and different governors. But the government can’t do anything because they have nothing.”

Immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Qadri worked the telephone as a training noncommissioned officer for the Army National Guard’s Training Division in Arlington. A few months later the Army’s Central Command based in Tampa, Fla. ordered Qadri to report to MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. for temporary duty as a linguist. Qadri speaks both Arabic and Urdu -- a Hindi dialect spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Not long after Qadri transferred to MacDill, he volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan with special operations troops to help communicate with the local population.

“They were fighting over me in Afghanistan,” he said. Qadri and three other linguists quickly joined the special operations troops, who traveled throughout Afghanistan training local militias and providing perimeter security for coalition forces.
At an abandoned Russian airstrip in eastern Afghanistan, the coalition troops came under hostile fire. The trained Afghan troops traveling with the coalition soldiers used a Russian tank to quickly dispatch the aggressors.

“When we were fired on, the Afghan troops quickly fired back and they got them,” Qadri said. They were really good and very experienced.”

Qadri came by his language skills because he spent much of his childhood in the Middle East and Asia. His parents are from Hydrabad, India, known as the high-tech “Silicon Valley” of that country. When Qadri was a child, his family lived in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia because his father worked as a linguist for the U.S. State Department.

Qadri later attended a private high school in Lebanon, but when the country’s raging civil war reached a boiling point in 1975, and forced his family was forced to leave for the United States. After graduating from school in the United States, he joined the Marine Corps.

In 1982, Qadri returned to Lebanon during coalition attempts to quash the violence there. He remained in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve for six years before joining the North Carolina Army National Guard. During the Persian Gulf War, he earned a combat patch while augmenting the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade as a linguist.

Eleven years later, the 46-year-old National Guard soldier trudged up and down dangerous Afghan mountain passes with coalition special operations troops, earning the right to wear another combat patch. But this time, it was much different than serving in Beirut and Kuwait.

“Most of the troops I worked with were in their early 20s. They called me ‘the old man‘ all the time,” Qadri said. “They treated me with respect, but I was feeling old because I was with these much younger people.”

Qadri wasn’t a single soldier anymore, either, as he had been during previous wartime deployments. When he went to Afghanistan, he left behind his wife, and young children. “That was hard, really hard,” Qadri said. “I really missed my family and I thought about them all of the time.”

After he volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan, Qadri’s orders directed him to immediately stow his razor blade. With beards, Qadri and the other linguists and special operations troops could more readily blend with the local Afghan population. The soldiers also adopted native clothing and headgear.

Qadri’s beard was an effective diguise; so effective, in fact, his children didn’t recognize him when he returned from Afghanistan. Although the children finally started getting used to his beard after several days, Qadri shaved off the bushy growth. And the family had to go through the familiarization process all over again.

“They finally got used to me being around again,” Qadri said.

Although Afghans in eastern areas of the country lived in the midst of a brutually dangerous war zone, Qadri said they were extremely friendly toward U.S. and coalition forces.

“Their concerns were about basic things like their family, their safety, eating, getting water, getting their children educated,” Qadri said. “I hardly saw any women; it was mostly just men. Many people had sent their families to Pakistan.
“There was no hostility toward us. I would sit down and eat dinner with the local people and talk to them about these things.”

Also, the local populace urged U.S. troops to remain to help rebuild the war-torn country, Qadri said.

“The Afghan people are very hard working and they are a proud people. They just don’t have the opportunities that other people have,” he said. “I don’t think Afghanistan is going to stay the way it is now. The people there don’t want the Americans to leave because they feel there will be better hope for the future if we stay.”

By Sgt. 1st Class Eric Wedeking