Greetings and welcome to a reporter’s journal I’ll be keeping between now and my return from Afghanistan, where I’ll be for three weeks in September.

Once the trip is under way, I’ll also be filing stories for broadcast on VPR and photos from the field.

I’ll be in Afghanistan with the 1,500 members of the Vermont National Guard, who’ve been there since the beginning of the year. What I hope to provide is a close-up view of the Guard’s mission and how things are going from their perspective.

There’s a long list of military ground rules about not reporting sensitive tactical information, but I’ll have plenty of access to Vermont soldiers, and I’ll be free to report on what I see and hear while I accompany them.

I’ve been covering the Vermont Guard for a while now, including attending lots of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and a fair number of returns, most memorably when I flew down to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, in 2006 to talk with members of Task Force Saber just off the plane from Iraq. I’ve also covered far too many funerals for Vermont soldiers.

As I prepare, I’d like to hear from you. If you’ve got suggestions for stories I could do when I’m with the Guard, or questions you’d like them to answer about their mission; or if you have friends or family serving in Afghanistan, feel free to send me an email at ReportFromAfghanistan@gmail.com.

Thanks,

Steve Zind
VPR