‘What did our service mean?’ Taliban rout still evokes raw emotions for US veterans and Afghan...

Changing a ideology/cultural mindset is not a short-term endeavor - it's multi-generational. Lots of blood and treasure lost here for naught

Changing Afghanistan would have required 60-100 years, changing a nation that significantly requires generations. Afghanistan would have had to become the next Germany, Japan, or South Korea. Of which we are still in and still have rotations to.

It is not a unified country, those who see it on a map see borders and geographical features. People on the ground see it differently. Afghans are not united, one region thinks differently than another, one village is different than another. There are similarities, but uniting them as a single people is not the work of 20 years.

Combine that with an unclear mission from politicians who were trying to conduct a war on the cheap which resulted in them spending more and we have the issues we have all seen or experienced.

So one administration decided generational change was not something we were willing to commit to and said to hell with the last 20 years, we're popping smoke. Ok. I can accept that, a lot of Vets can accept that. What's difficult to swallow is how we left.

WE LEAVE ON OUR TERMS.

We're America, no one tells us how to operate. We have spent almost 250 years and two global conflicts establishing who we are on the global stage. We do not throw that out the window just because it's convenient for some pansy ass politician.

I had no problem with us leaving Afghanistan, and one would think we learned our lesson from Vietnam. Evidently history was not well received to our aging leaders who should have been beaten with a sack of text books before even attempting to make decisions like this.

War is hell, the fog of war is damning, mistakes are made and mistakes can be forgiven and learned from. We move on and we do better. This was not doing better, nothing about this was logical no matter how much someone argues hindsight. This was idiocy from the political effete and brass polishers.

Then at the end of the day I have family who were in Afghanistan, I have friends who were there and sacrificed their bodies and mental well being, and I have friends who ended their lives after the fall of Afghanistan. We abandoned allies, we abandoned citizens, we left military equipment in the hands of the enemy who abuse women and children. There is no honor or integrity in what we did.

Politicians and retiring generals will walk away with a pension and some shiny tin and colorful ribbon. Whereas the rest of us get to remember that this failure is going to hurt us in the next war. No one should trust us, we can't prove ourselves to be trusted as a nation. Service members will try, but ultimately we will betray those who help us. That is who we've allowed ourselves to become.

I left Danang for the last time in summer of '72. By '75 we were comfortably homeported in Naples, Italy. Italian TV covered the fall endlessly. By '83 I was aboard the USS Okinawa. Videos taken by her platcams of the chaos were front and center in the Wardroom library. For these young warriors, healing is not likely. But most will compartmentalize the memories and move fwd. SFC Bernard Walko CSM Chuck Stafford SPC (Join to see)