Damariscotta Police officer Adam Lewis enjoys his job. He likes the diversity – out of 100 traffic stops or 100 theft investigations, no two are exactly the same, he says.
The day-to-day work of a patrol officer in Damariscotta, however, is a world apart, not just geographically, but in terms of culture, politics and danger, from Lewis’s 18-month assignment as an advisor to police in Afghanistan.
Lewis was born in Chicago. The son of a Navy veteran, he spent his early childhood in California. His father transferred to the Brunswick Naval Air Station when Lewis was 8.
Lewis originally wanted to follow his father into the Navy as a nuclear engineer on a submarine. He met with a recruiter and passed the necessary tests, but “they wouldn’t let me work on a sub because I had asthma when I was a kid,” he said.
Instead, Lewis chose to follow his father into his second career as a police officer. He earned a law enforcement degree from Southern Maine Technical College and landed a job with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department in 1995.
For the next decade, Lewis worked for the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office and the Topsham Police Department. From 2002-2006, he was Topsham’s patrol sergeant. He left for DynCorp International, a State Department contractor, in April. After two weeks of pre-deployment training in Virginia, he arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan May 6, 2006.
The work in Afghanistan promised “a different challenge,” Lewis said. “I’d always wanted to do this. Years before, I was looking into it,” but, with a young family at home, “it wasn’t a good time,” he said.
Following three weeks of in-country training in Kabul and a stint as a police academy instructor in Gard¬ez, a two-and-a-half-hour drive southeast of Kabul, DynCorp assigned Lewis to an 85-man forward operating base in Waza Khwa.
Lewis and his coworkers on the remote base, in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan, an hour by helicopter from Gardez, were advisors to the chiefs of seven districts, each a four-to-five-hour drive away.
Lewis’s work with the district chiefs afforded him his first glimpse of the “rampant” corruption of Afghan law enforcement.
“Corruption ranged from the top of the chain all the way down to the bottom,” Lewis said. “That was our number one problem.”
“The higher up you were, the more corrupt you were,” Lewis said.
At the bottom, the Afghan police responsible for operating safety checkpoints would charge cars to pass. “They were running their own personal toll booth,” Lewis said.
Ascending through the ranks, the police chiefs also use their position as a means for personal enrichment.
Afghanistan largely lacks conveniences like direct deposit, electronic banking or a reliable postal service, so the chiefs travel to Kabul and collect funds at the finance ministry to pay their officers.
At least one chief Lewis worked with felt himself entitled to keep a percentage of his officers’ pay as a “travel fee,” he said. “Some guys wouldn’t even get paid.”
Travel to the outlying districts presented another difficulty. “There were no paved roads,” Lewis said. “We always traveled in military convoys.”
The convoys from Waza Khwa to the outlying provinces were a frequently targeted for guerilla attacks by insurgents. The attacks start with the explosion of an improvised explosive device, or IED. “It scares the s— out of you,” Lewis said.
After the explosion, “all hell breaks loose” as “small arms fire opens up,” Lewis said. The military escorts return fire from the Humvees’ gun turrets, but the contractors aren’t allowed to exit the vehicles.
“The whole point is not to stay and fight – the whole point is to get your stuff and get out” or “get off the X,” as veterans of such ambushes say.
Twice, a convoy Lewis was in was a target of similar attacks, although no one was injured in either the blasts or the ensuing firefights.
DynCorp employees and the military work “hand-in-hand” in Afghanistan, and this close cooperation, together with the military’s professionalism, instilled in Lewis a deep respect for the troops.
“They treated us like gold,” Lewis said, and made the contractors’ safety paramount. “They would bend over backwards to make sure we had what we needed,” he said.
The civilian contractors share quarters with the troops, and friendships developed between them, as, with few options for entertainment in wilderness outposts like Waza Khwa, they would play poker, watch movies or work out together to pass the time.
Lewis also befriended the native interpreters.
The majority of the interpreters take the job, which pays more than almost anything else available, with the hope of earning enough to leave Afghanistan “for a better life,” Lewis said.
The career choice isn’t always popular with other Afghans, some of whom see interpreters as traitors. This attitude led to the darkest and most grisly episode of Lewis’s time in Afghanistan, when, in February 2007, Maiwand, a 21-year-old interpreter working with his unit, was kidnapped and executed.
A military patrol found Maiwand’s body six-and-a-half miles outside Waza Khwa. His throat was slit, his hands tied behind his back.
“He was this young kid just trying to make his country better, getting a job, helping out his family, and just because he was working for the coalition, the Americans, they kidnapped him and killed him,” Lewis said.
Conversely, a challenging special assignment during Lewis’s stay at Waza Khwa became what he remembers as the high point of his time overseas.
DynCorp chose Lewis and three other employees to lead a pilot program to train the first recruits to the Afghan National Citizens Auxiliary Police, the country’s equivalent of a reserve officer program.
Lewis flew back to Gardez and, after a three-day briefing, Lewis, one other advisor and a six-man military training team left by helicopter for a remote area of Andar province.
The other two advisors were due to follow the next day, but the military, shortly after dropping off Lewis and his skeleton crew, deemed conditions “too dangerous” for travel.
The advisors and trainers started work, expecting relief in a week’s time.
The trainees “were just your everyday Afghan citizens” lacking any particular expertise, Lewis said. The program covered everything from civil rights and the Afghan constitution to basic operations and strategy.
After a week of 14-hour days without fresh food or hot water – the unit subsisted entirely on MREs – instead of a break, the Americans found themselves stranded in Andar for another week.
They persevered, however, completing the two-week training period without reinforcements.
“By the end of those two weeks, what I was looking forward to the most was getting back to Gardez for a hot shower and a hot meal,” Lewis said.
Despite the complications, Lewis, having seen the value of the program to Afghan law enforcement, included in his official report to Kabul a recommendation to continue the program and lengthen the training period.
Headquarters followed his advice, instituting a permanent program. “I felt like I was doing something worthwhile,” Lewis said.
Lewis completed his first year in Afghanistan at the isolated base in Waza Khwa. Far from cell phone service or Internet access, Lewis’s only contact with his wife and sons, ages 6 and 7 at the time, was a weekly call via satellite phone.
At the end of the year, Lewis agreed to a six-month extension, with the condition that he return to Gardez in order to be able to communicate with his family.
This time, DynCorp placed Lewis in charge of a provincial advisory team. The four-man team was responsible for the head provincial chief, a position roughly equivalent to a state police commander.
The team’s goal was to ensure the chief fulfilled his responsibilities, such as providing his officers with appropriate arms, pay and training, a job made more difficult by the chief’s corruption and limits on the contractor’s authority to stop it.
Lewis and the other team members could and did address the corruption directly, but “it didn’t take,” he said. “They don’t listen to you.”
Otherwise, the DynCorp advisors didn’t have the authority to force the chief to comply. Instead, they wrote reports and sent them to “the head guys in Kabul.”
“Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t,” Lewis said. During Lewis’s time in Waza Khwa, for example, Kabul fired or transferred four of the seven district chiefs for corruption.
The provincial chief, however, eluded justice, manipulating personal connections and officials susceptible to bribery to hold on to a position of power.
The country has honest police, too. “The majority of [the police] there wanted the country stable,” Lewis said. Unfortunately, “a lot of the head guys exploited what was going on over there.”
While Gardez offered the modern communications infrastructure unavailable in Waza Khwa, it didn’t isolate the advisors from the hazards of living and working in Afghanistan.
“You never forgot you were in a war zone,” Lewis said. “There’s always a sense of the dangers.”
Enemy insurgents sometimes target forward operating bases and police academies. The academy at Gardez came under mortar fire during Lewis’s time there.
Lewis and the academy escaped unscathed, as the mortars “all landed about 100 yards away from the compound,” he said.
Despite the frustration of dealing with crooked commanders, the danger of IEDs and mortar fire, and the isolation, Lewis enjoyed his time overseas.
He returned to the states after 18 months in Afghanistan and, after a short stint with the Houlton Police Department, came to Damariscotta in May 2008. Now 36, he lives in Topsham with his wife and two sons.
Lewis stays in touch with several of his former coworkers, some of whom are still in Afghanistan, as well as an Afghan interpreter.
The reports from Lewis’s friends on the ground are mixed. “Some of my buddies over there say nothing’s changed. Some say it’s changing slowly,” he said.
“We’ll be over there for a while,” he predicted. “It just takes that long to get them to understand the democratic form of governing and good law enforcement.”
