Next month, the Maine Army National Guard's 1136 Transportation Company will leave Maine to take part in security force missions in Afghanistan. Part of their preparation calls for learning about local customs and picking up basic phrases to facilitate communication. But a unique cultural awareness program has given the soldiers something much deeper.

Earlier this month, about 20 members of the Guard leadership spent two days with six Afghan students studying in New England, including several from Maine.

"It's something that you definitely cannot jsut pick up and read in the book. You actually need to have interactions with these people," says Captain Pete Carter, the company's commander. "This is a new style of training. It really is a unique approach where you have individuals who were born and grew up in the area where we're going to tell us a little about their life, and then a little bit about their culture."

"If we tell our personal stories, you might not be able to finish it in a few books -- although we are very young, what we experience in our life has been very difficult and full of experience, too," says 21-year old Sulamain Nasseri, one of two Colby College students participating in the training.

He grew up in Kabul under the repressive Taliban regime, which he says banned subjects such as math, and even sports. He recalls how when he was 14, a Taliban soldier wrongly accused him of playing soccer. "And I said, 'I was not the one.' He wanted to take me to the checkpoint to punish me."

On the way to the checkpoint, Nasseri talked the man into releasing him. But he says his narrow escape from a beating, or even death still haunts him. Such stories resonated with the soldiers, Carter says. "We found out that the Afghan people are a lot like us Americans. They want to live in a secure environment."

He says learning to relate and better communicate with the Afghan people is key to success against insurgents. "It will alleviate us making mistakes on the ground and understanding that we just can't go in and kick in doors. We don't want these people to hate us -- we're only fighting a small percentage of the population. Winning the hearts and minds is really the key to winning this counter-insurgency."

The training, which took place in Bangor, was coordinated with help from Walter Corey, president of the Maine Leadership Institute. He's worked with Seeds of Peace, the camp in Otisfield that brings together young people from warring countries.
Corey presented exercises to the soldiers and Afghan students -- such as sharing stereotypes they had of one another.

"A typical one was that all American men are rich and drive large cars," he says. "On the other side, was all Afghan men are Islamasists and hope to be martyrs by blowing up Americans."

Corey says the exercise generated a lot of laughs. But he says there is a science to it. "So as we go through the process of identifying stereotypes and then deconstructing them, a certain amount of bonding takes place. The brain tends to release hormones that lead to bonding -- seratonin, dopamine, and so on and so forth. As this process goes on you can see people's body language relax, they meet with eye contact."

The bonding prepared the group for acting out real-life situations that the soldiers might face in Afghanistan. Like trying to extract information from a group of Afghan men. "We talked for example about respecting elders," Nasseri says. "Back home it is first elderly people who talk, and then it is the age actually that dictates for example if you're in a converstaion who will talk there. It is regardless of education and other things."

The goal is to have the officers at the training dispense what they learned with the troops. But top brass at the Maine Army National Guard hope to expand this program to include more soldiers. Lt. Col. James Campbell says it's important to plan for the future.

"To be truthful, no one in the military expects this thing in Afghanistan to be over any time soon, just to be prudent, it seems that if we expect this to be an ongoing probability that our soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, it only would make sense that we establish ongoing programs that will make it so that they can be more successful."

Aside from Nasseri and the other Colby student, there were three students from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Boston University and one from Gould Academy in Bethel.

Nasseri says he also hopes to see this program continue -- for his country's sake. "If the American troops know about the Afghan culture then they will not provoke a misunderstanding because that country is the frontline for the troops wherever they are. And once they do not do this, then they will not be a fire, if there is not a fire then from both sides then that will save lives."

The 170-plus soldiers of the 1136th Transportation Company leave Brewer March 14. The company is heading to Fort Hood, Texas to do some additional training before deployment to Afghanistan.