So, what was it all for?
I first set foot in Afghanistan stepping off a plane at the Kabul airport early in 2006. I had been in Baghdad, Iraq through the fall of 2005, and this Kabul did not have the same vibe. It was somewhat similar, but also somehow different than Iraq. I was fast-tracked through “customs” just like I had been in Iraq, and in minutes was in an armored vehicle passing out the same gate that at the end would claim the final thirteen American lives. I was driven to a holding area where I stayed for a couple days. Finally a couple helos landed and picked me up, flying me off, a couple hours away to Kandahar where I would spend years of my life. I finally left Kandahar in 2010, got medevac’d back home where doctors decided my goose was cooked it seems.
During those years my young boys grew up without a father. Five long years. They only saw me a week here and there. I lived on a crowded airbase next to a crap pond, literally. I was rocketed and mortared so many times that I couldn’t hope to remember them all. I remember the one that hit the mess hall during supper. That was not nice. I remember the one that hit a woman’s barracks. I think that one killed four, but some have told me the number was eight. I refuse to believe that and hold on to four.
I was shot at so many times that it is nice to not actually realize just how many bullets came up from behind rocks and from the shadows. Funny story: We got new voice activated mics installed on our helmets and in the aircraft. That next day the darned thing kept giving me this snapping sound, so afterward I took the helmet back for repair. The helmet checked out fine. My buddy, the sergeant major who was flying with me laughed. He was standing by during all of this. He grabs me and says, “Don, you dumb ass, those snaps were bullets passing by.” I sent quite a few right back at them though, so we’ll just call all that even. They tried to kill me. Like almost every day, and I happily returned the favor.
I carried my first casualty soon after arriving. Poor kid had been too close to a big explosion. His skin was completely torn off his body, although his body was still inside. That made me pretty mad, since it was a Taliban converted Afghan national police officer who set the bomb. Not long after that my door gunner caught another “Cop” pointing his AK at us, so instead of continuing, I yanked the aircraft hard around and set it right at his feet, maybe twenty feet away from him. I told the man through a SF interpreter that I’d shoot him dead with my pistol if he ever did that again, he got the message.
They were primitive people. Another day after landing while covering some ground operations with my Huey gunship, two of those people got in an argument with another Afghan police. The police officer shot one man in the butt, and, Dick said let’s get out of here so we took off and went to the only safe place, 3,000 feet in the air. I flew convoy cover, flew medevac missions, and provided gunship cover for lots of people, lots of times. Sometimes I was lucky and sometimes I had to watch our people getting shredded. Tried to cover a big convoy one day coming north to Kabul. They hit the first tanker when I was maybe twenty miles away. I pulled every ounce of power that motor would provide, but it didn’t matter. By the time I got there, three of our tankers were burning with all below me dead. I couldn’t find a single person to shoot at…I was so mad that day.
I did Christmas over there four times, I think and five thanksgivings, all of my birthdays, all our anniversaries, and all of my kids birthdays. I watched my wife collapse on the floor crying so hard one day. No one could help her, and it happened just as she was supposed to drive me back to the airport to go back over. I had to ride that plane for 15 hours with that thought, and she had to see her husband leave yet again. The boys cried to, and of all the people I have ever heard just break and cry, that time right there was amongst the most mournful. It was just awful.
I had one family member say that I was going over there because I didn’t want to deal with raising my boys, and so many of my friends couldn’t understand why this Afghanistan thing was so important to me. But it was. The very camp where Osama trained terrorists was a couple miles away from where I lived in Kandahar. We used that place to train newly arriving gunners on how to fire and aim the GAU-17, a 7.62mm mini gun. We carried two of them along with extra fuel and 9,000 rounds of ammo.
We were Satan alive to those Taliban. They knew the sound of our aircraft and feared us. We raided their meetings, their safe spots, and blew up a lot of their drug labs. Ya, that…Afghanistan produces 97% of the worlds Heroin and we were taking a really big bite out of their profits. We took monies they used to kill people all over the world and made them far less effective. But hey, who cares, right?
Flew assaults all over the south, the west, the north over mountains 16,000 feet high and in the east too. Almost died one day up there when we lost visual contact with the ground at 12,000 feet right beside a towering mountain. I’m sure God and some pretty good flying by the flight lead saved my life that day. We had the German Army refuse to refuel our aircraft because they knew we were off on a raid and they didn’t want us to stir up the hornet’s nest. Thing is, we are Americans and we DO NOT run from a fight. Screw those wussies, and while I’m at it, screw all the wussies in the US who brought about this terrible end to the efforts of so many brave Americans, Afghans, Spanish, Romanians, Germans, French, British, and on and on, ISAF warriors.
That war wasn’t easy. That cost me and the rest of us quite a bit personally, and we are not asking for a thank you. But we are looking right and left and wondering why our fellow Americans sold us out. We tried to do it right. We didn’t abuse or kill indiscriminately, like the Taliban no doubt is doing at this very moment. We didn’t treat women like dogs, like the young ones who are now learning about that for the first time. We didn’t rape young boys like the men of Afghanistan do by the thousands every Thursday night. No, we tried to correct all that. And what came of all that effort? What happens when a man without a soul who is coopted by obviously evil powers decides to toss a grenade into all that and walk out the door? A man who would leave a man undefended to die all alone in a place like that? Who would do that?
Had a guy die in the back of the helo while I was trying to get him to Bastion, a big British base in the south. Had Pete, a big former SF Sergeant Major working on him. To my dying day, I will remember his words when I looked back at him. He must have known I was looking at him, he said, “Donald, give me every bit of airspeed you can.” Pete needed just a few more seconds, but I couldn’t do it. My transmission oil temp was above the maximum limit and I was bleeding N1 rpm, and drooping my rotor RPM a bit. I think we were nearing 130 knots, which is pretty fast for a Huey, but I failed. The boy died and I am dammed angry about that. What if I had had a tail wind, or perhaps a couple degrees cooler so I could have pulled a tiny bit more power? Who knows, could he have survived to the operating table and those doctors?
So what was it all for? I suppose no one from there came here and blew up anything here. Hollywood mesmerized America with season after season of the Bachelor. When you go shopping at the mall, there aren’t too many guys walking around with prosthetics, so all in all, we didn’t mess with the normal American day to day life all too much. We did provide some pretty good heroics which accounted for some block buster movies, yep, we did that. We fired billions, tens or hundreds of billions of bullets, artillery, rockets, hellfire missiles, tomahawks, this’s and that’s, and I’d say we killed a fair number of folks. We blew up a lot of stuff leaving some impressive holes literally all over the place. We burned up a lot of jet gas, wore out a lot of tires and tracks and boots. We stressed the US mail system to the max, and overloaded satellite links with our billions of emails and phone calls home.
All in all we did a lot of stuff, and ran out twenty years of American history. Then all that landed in the lap of an unprincipled weak man, and he screwed it all up. Ya know, I was not a general officer, but a school kid could have told you that if you pull the air power away from a fight, the guys on the ground are gonna lose. Our president did that. You see, if he hadn’t, then the Afghan government might have had a chance. And our next generation of top guns would have had a place to practice. Just keep Bagram and Kandahar open and a bunch of hot shot jar heads with F-18’s and a couple of flyboys with B-1’s around and a phone call away, and the Taliban would have remained much like the sand people of the first Star Wars movie.
Ya know, F-it. I did my level best, and about a million other real people did too. We could beat the enemy on our worst day, but seems we couldn’t beat a child molesting liar who procreated and made more of the same. Nope, he beat us. Kicked our ever-lovin’ ass, it seems. Screw it, I’m going to hook up the bush hog and set my thoughts to my children, wife, friends, and grandchildren and listen for when real Americans finally find a spine and march on Washington. I’ll just sit back and wait, and hope age does not overtake me before real Americans wake up and realize what just happened.
