When 16 Air Assault Brigade (UK) was alerted for deployment to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Major John Clark was serving as a squadron commander in 23 Engineer Regiment (UK), a subordinate unit that was also tapped to deploy. As it turned out, though, Clark received word that he'd be attending the US Army's Command and General Staff College (CGSC) beginning in August 2006; and so, instead being on the brigade's operational mentoring and liaison team - the British equivalent of an embedded training team - and advising an Afghan kandak (battalion equivalent) as he'd been originally earmarked to do, Clark "became the commander of the Afghan National Army Training Team (ANATT), which was designed to mentor the leadership at the noncommissioned officer school at the Kabul Military Training Center (KMTC)." As Clark explained, "The mission was very much to mentor rather than train the leadership of the NCO school…. At every level we were mentoring our respective counterparts within the ANA. In my case, I was mentoring the commanding officer of the training team. We were there very much as advisors and counselors rather than as trainers specifically." His OEF deployment was from February to May 2006. In this interview - the second of two conducted while he was a student at CGSC, the other related to his Operation Iraqi Freedom service - Clark details the three courses he oversaw as part of Task Force Phoenix: "a junior NCO course to train lance corporals and up, a senior sergeant course and a company quartermaster sergeant/regimental sergeant major-level course. We spanned the chain of NCO courses. It was a mixture of classroom work and fieldcraft out of the back of the camp." Among the challenges he faced was the fact that students spoke a wide variety of languages and that historically Afghan NCOs had been "generally sidelined- and those who were kept in for show's sake were really just the tea boys for the officers. We had to overcome that," he said. "We had to culturally convince the officers that the NCOs were worth having, that they had a valuable role to play and that they could actually help them with a lot of their work." While in country, Clark also led a mobile training team (MTT) out to Herat to run the same NCO courses for a brigade there that they did at KMTC in Kabul. In closing, Clark stresses the importance of mentoring missions such as these. "It's a very visible demonstration of a nation's commitment to the country," he said. "What's more, in terms of the effect it delivers, it's arguably far more enduring than an offensive operation - the fact that you're building for the future."

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