Reflections from the River

Kabul fell

September 03, 2021 Bill Enyart
Reflections from the River
Kabul fell
Show Notes Transcript

Kabul fell 

Eerily like Saigon fell forty-six years ago...

Kabul fell 

Eerily like Saigon fell forty-six years ago.

We all knew it would happen. We, being the military leadership, the foreign policy folks, the people who pay attention to such things.

As wife, Annette, and I sat on the shade shrouded, screened in porch enjoying an unusual, delightfully cool, mid-August late afternoon we watched all too familiar images of helicopters evacuating a US embassy as the excited voices of television reporters recited the too familiar refrains of a story we’ve heard before. Chaos in the evacuation of US personnel. Classified papers burning at the embassy. Rag-tag looking fighters taking possession of a nation’s capital.

Two American presidents, Trump and Biden, who couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, had agreed on one thing: we’re getting out of Afghanistan. When former President Trump announced the pullout last year, I told Annette, the Taliban will take over shortly after we leave. I told her a month ago the Afghan government won’t last until Labor Day.

All the television pundits and the American government spokesmen are announcing what a shock that the Taliban have won so quickly. That my friends, is PR spin. If they believe that, they should be immediately fired for ignoring reality. Anyone paying attention could see that the Afghan government would quickly fall.

Watching the US Army Chinook helicopter ferry the loads of American civilians through Kabul’s dust-choked skies, I turned to Annette and said: “This is killing me.” 

Startled she asked, “What???” 

“Watching this.”

It wasn’t the raging grief that I’ve felt on too many occasions at soldiers’ funerals. It was a dull depression. It was the sick-to-my-stomach emptiness at the bottom of my gut.

As the commanding general of the Illinois National Guard from 2007 to 2012, I’d trained, equipped and ordered thousands of soldiers and airmen, men and women, to Afghanistan and the Middle East. Lives of citizen soldiers interrupted by a call to war thousands of miles away. A twenty-year war. A war among people whose culture few understood and even fewer cared about. A war that since there was no draft and relatively few casualties, at least compared to Viet Nam or Korea or World War II, few cared about. Or cared enough about to protest or burn draft cards or march on Washington.

Most of those part-time soldiers came home. Some of them grievously wounded, all of them deeply changed by the experience, a few came home with an American flag draped over their coffin. All of them were honored. Some with medals, most with parades, and nearly twenty-four hundred with rifle volleys fired by smartly uniformed honor guards at tiny country cemeteries and sprawling, immaculately manicured military burial grounds. 

Twenty-four hundred lives that will never be lived. Two trillion dollars that will never be invested in education or highways or clean water. Veterans’ hospitals that treat the wounded with scars seen and unseen. 

The soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen did as they were asked. Their families lived through sleepless nights. The Guardsmen and reservists’ employers and communities missed their services. They are good and honorable men and women. They served, and serve, their country well. Did the policymakers of our country serve them well?

Did we prevent another terrorist attack like 9-11? Did we protect the lives of our innocent countrymen? Or were the lives, blood, treasure, and valor needlessly squandered? Were our actions those of righteousness or of vengeance? I don’t pretend to know the answers to those questions. What I do know is that while I don’t miss the long boring hours riding in a C-130 with sixty dozing troopers while the four propellers pull us through night skies from the Persian Gulf to Kabul, I do miss the camaraderie, the sense of purpose and teamwork of the American military.

With each Memorial Day, each Fourth of July, each September 11th, each Veterans’ Day, and most other days too, I relive the grief and the guilt knowing that of the soldiers I ordered to combat, nineteen of my comrades, nineteen of the citizen soldiers, nineteen of the volunteers who stood up and said: “Take me Lord”, didn’t come home to their families. That is a burden I cannot and will not put down. It is a burden American politicians and policymakers should consider before they order us to war again.

As German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, said in the 1800’s, “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” What will be said of America’s involvement in Afghanistan two centuries from now?

Kabul fell Sunday. 

(c) William L. Enyart
Reflections from the River
E-mail: bill@billenyart.com
www.billenyart.com