PBC continuation...The Road North...

"We were given three men from the SECFOR element to act as guides on the ride up to Wolf but were told air cover was unavailable. The poppy eradication mission “Riverdance” has begun south of Lashcar-gah and Girishk and seems to do little more than piss off the general populace. The main problem is the MOD and the ANP are destroying the poppies but not compensating the farmers.
Last week we were operating out of Farah on a cordon and search when a guy drove into our area on a motorcycle with a six year old kid on the back. The ANA stopped him and went through all his shit and found a five pound ball of opium.
Now, I’m watching all this going on and the commander of the ANA comes over and starts a very animated discussion about the drugs and the Taliban and I’m thinking they’re gonna start roughing this guy up a little bit.
Instead, the man starts crying and begging the commander to let him go and tells him his whole life story and what happens?
He gives him back the opium and lets him go. At the time I was thinking “What the fuck, over? What are we doin here? I thought we were supposed to be curtailing the drug industry not helping it,” but later on the more I thought about it the more I understood why he let him go. This guy was just a little fish, and taking those drugs wouldn’t have made a piss in a rainstorm’s good to the whole drug eradication effort. He probably worked his poppy field for six months to get the only commodity he can sell."
My War Stories