Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
March 5, 2008
Pg. 11
The fight in Afghanistan started as Charlie Wilson's war. Now it's America's — though you'd hardly know it.
By Tom Kenworthy
The knock on our door in the foothills west of Denver came four nights before Christmas Eve. I thought it must be our next-door neighbor delivering homemade bread, as he often does. A greater gift awaited.
There on the porch stood our son, Max, bearing no bread, but sporting his trademark impish grin. A member of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Max had pulled a fast one on us, secretly buying a plane ticket home from his brigade's base in Vicenza, Italy. So began a joyous two-week reunion with our man child — and for me a conflicting collision of past and present.
Until shortly before Thanksgiving, when chronic knee problems sent him back to Europe for medical treatment, Max had been in eastern Afghanistan with the 173rd. We'd been more fortunate than many families of the deployed. In e-mails and infrequent phone calls, Max reassured us his assignment at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border was keeping him inside the wire. Each precious e-mail ended the same way: "I'll be home soon enough."
A few days into his leave, Max and I went to see Charlie Wilson's War, Hollywood's take on the then-Texas congressman's long struggle to arm the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet occupation. For me, it was a trip down memory lane. For Max, I'm not quite sure what it was. He's been focused on more immediate things than Afghanistan's tortured past.
In 1990, as a congressional correspondent for The Washington Post, I wrote a long profile of Charlie and his covert private war against the Soviets. Compared to the Capitol Hill routine, it was a holiday. By day, Charlie and I campaigned around his Bible Belt congressional district; by night we drank Chivas at his Lufkin home as he regaled me with rollicking tales of a storied life.
I eagerly recorded Charlie's rationale for using his appropriations committee influence to secretly send the mujahadeen Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry: so the Afghans could do "everything possible to kill Russians, as painfully as possible." At the time, it was no more than good newspaper copy. Little did I know that not so very far in the future, some of those same heroic warriors would be trying to do to my son's brigade what they did to the Soviets.
This past November, ABC aired a riveting Nightline segment on one of the 173rd's front-line combat units, a platoon in Battle Company of the 2nd battalion. I watched it at our home in Colorado, my wife at her hotel while in New York on business. Across time zones, we shared a fitful night. It's hard to imagine what nights must be like for the parents of those Battle Company paratroopers who are engaging the Taliban day in and day out from remote, exposed fire bases.
That Nightline report and stories on Battle Company in Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine have been an exception in an escalating conflict that gets scattered news coverage at best. Operating along the mountainous border with Pakistan, the Sky Soldiers of the 173rd have had a tough deployment. They've lost 30 men since May and they've still got almost six months left before they rotate out.
Maybe Charlie Wilson's War will shift some of our attention back to Afghanistan. Not just to the combat, but also to our soldiers' undermanned efforts to help the Afghans rebuild their shattered country. More likely not.
Actor Tom Hanks and the rest did a pretty fair job of capturing Charlie's outsized personality and his Cold War crusade. But the film didn't do justice to his record as an often serious, progressive member of Congress, and it glossed over how he tried to continue the humanitarian fight in Afghanistan after the Soviets fled in defeat.
I called Charlie not long ago, to talk about the movie and to catch up after being out of touch for a long time. He's 74 now and recently had a heart transplant. Like before, we had a few laughs, and I told him about our son. We really didn't need to talk about the ironic trajectory of history half a world away. But I got the feeling that Charlie hopes, as Max and I do, that the 173rd Airborne Brigade will have made a difference there. And that Afghanistan will see better days.
Tom Kenworthy, a former USA TODAY reporter, is a senior fellow at Western Progress, a non-partisan Rocky Mountain region policy institute.
March 5, 2008
Pg. 11
The fight in Afghanistan started as Charlie Wilson's war. Now it's America's — though you'd hardly know it.
By Tom Kenworthy
The knock on our door in the foothills west of Denver came four nights before Christmas Eve. I thought it must be our next-door neighbor delivering homemade bread, as he often does. A greater gift awaited.
There on the porch stood our son, Max, bearing no bread, but sporting his trademark impish grin. A member of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Max had pulled a fast one on us, secretly buying a plane ticket home from his brigade's base in Vicenza, Italy. So began a joyous two-week reunion with our man child — and for me a conflicting collision of past and present.
Until shortly before Thanksgiving, when chronic knee problems sent him back to Europe for medical treatment, Max had been in eastern Afghanistan with the 173rd. We'd been more fortunate than many families of the deployed. In e-mails and infrequent phone calls, Max reassured us his assignment at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border was keeping him inside the wire. Each precious e-mail ended the same way: "I'll be home soon enough."
A few days into his leave, Max and I went to see Charlie Wilson's War, Hollywood's take on the then-Texas congressman's long struggle to arm the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet occupation. For me, it was a trip down memory lane. For Max, I'm not quite sure what it was. He's been focused on more immediate things than Afghanistan's tortured past.
In 1990, as a congressional correspondent for The Washington Post, I wrote a long profile of Charlie and his covert private war against the Soviets. Compared to the Capitol Hill routine, it was a holiday. By day, Charlie and I campaigned around his Bible Belt congressional district; by night we drank Chivas at his Lufkin home as he regaled me with rollicking tales of a storied life.
I eagerly recorded Charlie's rationale for using his appropriations committee influence to secretly send the mujahadeen Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry: so the Afghans could do "everything possible to kill Russians, as painfully as possible." At the time, it was no more than good newspaper copy. Little did I know that not so very far in the future, some of those same heroic warriors would be trying to do to my son's brigade what they did to the Soviets.
This past November, ABC aired a riveting Nightline segment on one of the 173rd's front-line combat units, a platoon in Battle Company of the 2nd battalion. I watched it at our home in Colorado, my wife at her hotel while in New York on business. Across time zones, we shared a fitful night. It's hard to imagine what nights must be like for the parents of those Battle Company paratroopers who are engaging the Taliban day in and day out from remote, exposed fire bases.
That Nightline report and stories on Battle Company in Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine have been an exception in an escalating conflict that gets scattered news coverage at best. Operating along the mountainous border with Pakistan, the Sky Soldiers of the 173rd have had a tough deployment. They've lost 30 men since May and they've still got almost six months left before they rotate out.
Maybe Charlie Wilson's War will shift some of our attention back to Afghanistan. Not just to the combat, but also to our soldiers' undermanned efforts to help the Afghans rebuild their shattered country. More likely not.
Actor Tom Hanks and the rest did a pretty fair job of capturing Charlie's outsized personality and his Cold War crusade. But the film didn't do justice to his record as an often serious, progressive member of Congress, and it glossed over how he tried to continue the humanitarian fight in Afghanistan after the Soviets fled in defeat.
I called Charlie not long ago, to talk about the movie and to catch up after being out of touch for a long time. He's 74 now and recently had a heart transplant. Like before, we had a few laughs, and I told him about our son. We really didn't need to talk about the ironic trajectory of history half a world away. But I got the feeling that Charlie hopes, as Max and I do, that the 173rd Airborne Brigade will have made a difference there. And that Afghanistan will see better days.
Tom Kenworthy, a former USA TODAY reporter, is a senior fellow at Western Progress, a non-partisan Rocky Mountain region policy institute.