My name is MSgt. Clifford Oberg, from Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.

I was born in Fargo, ND and lived in Georgetown, MN for a couple of years until my family moved to the great state of Montana where I grew up. I still have much family in the Fargo – Moorhead area.

My sister, sales associate and columnist Tammy Finney, a member of The Extra’s production team as a sales associate and columnist, has asked me to provide some insight into my military career and now my current deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan. Hopefully, I can tell you my stories over the next year. But first, I want to give you a little background of myself.

I graduated from Polson High School, in the northwest part of Montana. Soon after, like most kids, I felt lost and was looking for a way to get my life started. I have always had a love of aircraft and technology. The Air Force seemed like a perfect choice for me, so I joined in March 1993 and left for basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. After that, I started out my career as a Survival Equipment technician, rigging parachutes and working on all types of survival gear that went onto aircraft.

A few years ago, my career field merged with Aircrew Life Support, which literally changed my life in many ways. It was at this point where I was afforded some new opportunities to learn different things, new travels, and see the Air Force from a whole new perspective. This also brings me to where I am now, as an Air Force Advisor in Kabul. When I was initially tasked with this deployment, I had no idea what the heck an Air Force Advisor was or that even there was such as job. But after doing a little research, I started to get a very dim light of what the job entailed. If you read or watch the current news, you may have heard about President Obama wanting to pull combat operations out of Afghanistan by 2013 and stick with an advisory rolel and that is where I come in. I have been tasked to be an Advisor to the Afghan National Army on life support operations dealing with Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters along with C-27 cargo aircraft.

Prior to coming here to Afghanistan, I am very thankful the Air Force sent me through some very good training in preparing me for the combat operations I’m about to endure. Last summer, I had the pleasure of attending a course that basically teaches you survival captivity, how to escape and in-depth training on Military Code of Conduct. That course definitely put a whole new perspective on our soldiers that have become Prisoners of War (POW) or Missing in Action (MIA). After that course, I spent another month at Ft Dix, NJ at the Air Force Advisory School. It was there where I learned the basics of speaking Dari (one of many languages in Afghanistan), Afghanistan culture, how to work with interpreters and combat operations. That course helped prepare me for my next year here in Afghanistan and was probably some of the best training that I had ever received. Back home from that course, it was time to prepare my family for my year-long deployment. It had been a while since I had been gone for an extended time, so it was very tough on my wife and two daughters to see me leave for Afghanistan. As tears were shed, we had to say our good byes for a year and hope for the best.

*MSgt Clifford Oberg will write a weekly blog for the FM Extra, detailing his activities in words and pictures for the next year of his deployment in Afhganistan.