The days are getting shorter. The weather is getting colder, grayer, and ominous. Even so, we still occasionally get a little IDF. The other morning we had one come in a little after 0500. I didn't even hear the alarm because I was absolutely out cold. Then my phone rang, which blasted me out of bed to the feel of the icy floor on my bare feet. Running to grab my phone I heard the announcement over the big voice, "IDF impact! Take cover! Don IBA if available!" Those words resonated through the cobwebs of my still-sleeping brain and registered just as I answered the phone. It was my Deputy checking to see if I was okay. I had recovered from my sleep enough to sound official. I asked him for a quick update. Fortunately, it was another complete miss by the bad guys outside the wire. The "All Clear" sounded shortly afterward. I promptly went back to bed in an effort to salvage my precious last 45 minutes of sleep. That endeavor proved fruitless. Thank you Taliban for ruining my sleep. I slowly eased back onto the cold floor, sauntered over to the coffee pot and got the morning brew on. The sun was rising to reveal another cold, overcast day in Afghanistan. Just a few minutes earlier I'd been dreaming of that beautiful snow and view as I was skiing down Coronet Peak in New Zealand. But the reality of being awake shook that image from my mind. There's no skiing in this cruddy place. At least I had my coffee.
I find many aspects of this place to be vastly different from my many experiences of deployments to Iraq. As strange as it may sound, Iraq was a much more "civilized" and orderly placed to be holed-up in the middle of a war. There's something about Afghanistan that casts a dirty pall over everything we do. I can't put my finger on it just yet. This is a land that covets war. The people who live here have known only war for centuries. We come here from places that know only peace and, for the most part, prosperity only to find that Afghanistan is the one place on God's beautiful Earth where peace and prosperity have never existed. We find ourselves not comprehending how it can be that the people here don't seem to want things we take for granted. The Taliban and Al Qaeda knew exactly what they were doing by making Afghanistan their base of operations for launching their dastardly attacks of September 11, 2001. In doing so they knew we'd come to Afghanistan and inexorably become sucked into the vortex of violence that is this country. When the war was about expelling the Taliban and Al Qaeda it was simple and easy. But the war became something infinitely more complex. How many nations have come and gone before us in the name of peace and prosperity for Afghanistan? In the end they all left and Afghanistan remained as a desolate, war-torn place of tribal bickering, crime, and death. Now we've reached the point where after 12 years of expending blood on behalf of the people of Afghanistan their government can't even agree on a security agreement with us without demanding an apology. An apology? Would they rather still be ruled by the Taliban? For that matter, did the Afghan government demand an apology from the Taliban? Never mind that the Taliban practically single-handedly destroyed what little fabric of society remained in this country, obliterated artifacts from its history, and murdered tens of thousands in the process. I feel a foreboding that very soon we are going to do exactly like we did in Iraq - cut sling rope and high-tail it out of this place. And Afghanistan will be once again left with war, tribal bickering, crime, death, and the Taliban.
We Soldier on because we believe in each other. It may sound selfish to say this but the reason we still shoulder the burden in this shitty place is for the person to our left and right. Not one of us will falter nor fail so long as we have each other.
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