MAJ Robert Stanton served as company commander with the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry in Kunar Province, Afghanistan during 2006 and 2007 and as an aide de camp at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters at Regional Command - South (RC-South) during 2009 and 2010, both in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). In this January 2010 interview, MAJ Stanton discusses the extreme austerity of the conditions during his first deployment, his unit's ultimately successful mission to stabilize and improve conditions in the Pech River Valley, and the political nature of his role on the staff at RC-South. MAJ Stanton concludes his interview with the observation, "To see the dynamics of that NATO staff was really frustrating, to be honest. Having spent an inordinate amount of time at the tactical level in Afghanistan on a very hard, long deployment with a lot of conflict and contact, everything that goes with real combat deployment; to see the infighting and the difficulty and how hard it was to get anything done."

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