![]() When the unit jumped back into the Black Hawks, I counted soldiers. I scanned mountainsides and brush for hairy, bearded mujahideen with Kalashnikovs or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Rooted in my designated seat, each time the unit leaped from the open doors and sprinted off, I counted minutes. The soldiers searched for Norgrove and distributed pamphlets. “Roger that.”Īs we flew toward Nangarhar province, we dropped in on mountain villages. As we lifted off, soldiers barked instructions familiar to me from many years in Iraq - do not move, talk, complain, make noise, pass out, get in the way, demonstrate a need for any bodily function, or act like a fragile civilian female snowflake. The voyage began at Bagram Airfield and progressed to the outpost in Nangarhar. The moon rises over Pekha Valley, Achin District, Nangahar Province, Afghanistan, Sept. But in my military family, I couldn’t show my face at Thanksgiving or survive my own mirror test if fear prevented me from completing an assignment. Too many deployments made a person paranoid - each helo or convoy could be the last. I hoped Linda would be found alive, and I wondered if this helo ride would finally be the one that killed me. Army personnel recovery team on a search mission for Norgrove, who’d been employed on another American USAID-funded project when she was taken. My helicopter transport to the outpost included a U.S. I didn’t ask why, but I suspected the kidnapping of aid worker Linda Norgrove pushed my colleague’s mental resilience to the limit, necessitating a break. My task at the Nangarhar outpost was to cover for a colleague who departed on an extended absence. I had completed an 18-month tour on an embedded provincial reconstruction team in Iraq, so they selected me for the job in Afghanistan. I arrived there in 2010 hoping that rural provinces were somewhat permissive, hoping that aid projects could have more success than in Iraq.Ī USAID-funded project needed an aid worker to assist military personnel on a joint U.S.-Afghan army outpost in Nangarhar province, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Afghanistan made me rethink my own nationalism and question the cognitive abilities of our elected officials. Iraq wore me down with unceasing explosions so regular the coffee tasted like plastic explosives by the time I departed. Iraq was bonkers, but Afghanistan was a special kind of hell. The two halves of the war blur together in a sandy haze of beige frustration. How else could the suck have possibly concluded? Yet still, the callouses of our collective cynicism didn’t buffer the gut punch of watching it unfold in real-time. No one I served with asked that question as we texted our heartbreak. I sat alone in the dark sipping bourbon, staring out the window of my house in the African country where I now work. Commentators in America lamented, “How did we come to this?” I didn’t ask that question. In the summer of 2021, bearded Taliban fighters swaggered from the shadows where they’d been governing secretly for decades and into the presidential palace to make their takeover official. In sleep, we cry out what we cannot express in daylight, fighting our way out of the same village, the same valley, the same unarmored aid project pickup truck, again and again. ![]() Our individual experiences, worldview, and the impact of the wars upon us differed such that only silence maintains family cohesion. In my multigenerational, vast military family, “ the suck” strained the bonds of love and commitment. ![]() In the mid-2000s, I overlapped with one or both of my family members in each war zone. We are still there, frozen in the suck - a boomer, a Gen Xer, and a millennial - ducking mortars, mourning dead colleagues, and waiting for care packages curated by Mom.įor seven years, I was an aid worker outside the wire and embedded with the U.S. My stepfather, brother, and I served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Editors Note: This commentary first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. ![]()
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