MAJ Glen Helberg served as a scout platoon leader with the 187th Infantry in Bagram, Kandahar and Paktia Province, Afghanistan during 2002 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and as a company commander and brigade planner with the 25th Infantry Division (ID) in Baghdad, Iraq during 2007-2009 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In this December 2009 interview, MAJ Helberg discusses his unit's role in Operation Anaconda, a short mission in Pakistan providing airfield security, and his deployment to Iraq and the vast difference in condition on the ground between Iraq and his early deployment to Afghanistan. MAJ Helberg concludes his interview with the observation, "The biggest thing I took away from this deployment and from a stability operations perspective is just looking at your area or your responsibilities as a systemic approach rather than a lot of things you have to fix or things that have to get done. More often than not that list of things is all interconnected. Finding the right place to apply your resources is absolutely critical and really multiplies your effects. Whether it is infrastructure repair or security force transition and training, those things are all interconnected in stability operations. Finding the right place to leverage that is definitely not something I'd ever really thought of before."

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