The Afghan War: Up close and personal

In my Best of 2010 list, there was one item conspicuously missing: Sebastian Junger's gripping book, "WAR: As Soldiers Really Live It."

My friend Colleen gave me the book last summer and I read it voraciously. While I've read outstanding pieces of reporting about the Afghan War in The New York Times and Esquire by C.J. Chivers, this was by far the best treatment I've seen in book form. In fact, the movie "Restrepo" -- co-directed by Junger with photographer Tim Hetherington -- was based on this book. It played in Portland movie theaters for just a few weeks, but I missed it.  Had I seen it, I imagine the book and film would have landed on my Best of 2010 list. You can bet I'll be ordering it soon on Netflix.

So what was so good about the book?
-- The reporting: It's one thing to debate U.S. policy objectives, as so many pundits do, but another entirely to devote yourself to immersion reporting on the front lines. Starting in the spring of 2007, Junger and Hetherington spent 15 months with a single platoon at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The proximity to those troops resulted in first-hand observations and descriptions of the soldiers' thoughts, fears and actions, both risky and heroic. It's harrowing stuff, reading about the sound of gunfire and the physics of a single bullet's speed and lethality, let alone the hidden dangers of roadside bombs and the punishing climate and mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley.

Misha Pemble-Belkin, left

-- The writing: Junger, the author of "The Perfect Storm," does a great job describing the hostile environment of Afghanistan, the brotherhood among the troops, and their genuine respect for the enemy (impoverished Taliban fighters who were outnumbered and under-resourced yet gave their American foes all they could handle in a firefight). He also tells the stories of a few individuals, including Oregon's Misha Pemble-Belkin, to paint the larger picture of a platoon made up of unique personalities and backgrounds.

It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here -- or your son was -- the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones -- there were some -- saw almost completely eye to eye. Misha Pemble-Belkin's father was a labor organizer who had protested every American war of the past forty years, yet he and his wife were wildly proud of their son.

Pemble-Belkin wasn't allowed to have toy guns when he was young, even squirt guns, so he and his brother picked up crooked sticks and pretended to shoot those instead. The men of Second Platoon shortened Pemble-Belkin's name to "PB," which inevitably became "Peanut Butter" and then just "Butters."

He spoke slowly and very softly, particularly on the platoon radio, and he played guitar and drew pictures of the valley on a sketch pad. He claimed it was the only thing he knew how to draw. Butters could easily have been an art major in college except that he was a paratrooper in the Korengal Valley. He joined the Army after spending a year living in his car, snowboarding.

-- The insight: Junger is a great conduit for the thoughts and motivations that keep these young men on task, whether coping with the boredom and oppressive heat of a summer day or the adrenalin-fueled sensation of coming under attack from an unseen enemy. In one passage, he overhears one soldier complain to his sergeant about a man in another squad falling out during an uphill climb after a 20-hour operation.

The idea that you're not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you're not prepared to walk for someone you're certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.

Toward the end of the book, Junger writes about war's "all-embracing fog of uncertainty" and how it binds combat troops.

Combat fog obscures your fate -- obscures when and where you might die -- and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time.

The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.

I don't remember dog-earing as many pages in a book as I did this one. And as I plowed through it, my youngest son, Jordan, was ever-present in my mind. He doesn't talk much about the harshness of training exercises or the camaraderie amongst the troops, nor do I push him to reveal what he'd prefer to keep to himself -- although he and I did talk about the book at one point last year. Still, Junger's book -- like Chivers' newspaper and magazine articles -- added to my understanding of the realities that Jordan might someday face if he is deployed.

He's training with a Stryker Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and possibly could be deployed sometime in 2012. He hopes to go so he can finally put into practice all that he's learned to do. We get that -- he wants to perform the job he's trained to do. But as parents, Lori and I of course hope that day will never come. With the U.S. presence there pretty much assured until 2014, we'll have to see how things unfold.

Photograph by Tim Hetherington

Boomer$

Just finished watching a Tom Brokaw special report on Boomer$ (the dollar sign is intentional) and had to write about it while the images and my thoughts are relatively fresh.

The two-hour program debuted last Thursday and had its first repeat showing tonight on CNBC. Additional broadcasts are scheduled March 15, 18 and 21. I stumbled across it purely by chance and found it to be a reasonably good retrospective, though slanted a bit toward the educated, the affluent and the famous. Perspectives from the working class are few and far between, but more on that later...

Brokaw labels those of us born between 1948 and 1964 "history's wealthiest and most influential generation" -- a distinction that arises mostly from the demographic fact that we're the largest generation in world history and the good fortune we had to have parents who were part of what Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation."

Our parents' generation fought World War II and rode the successes of the G.I. Bill to widespread home ownership, advanced education and upward economic mobility. One could argue whether the Boomers have made good on their oft-stated ambition to change the world for the better or squandered the opportunity. Brokaw, who at age 70 is a bit older than his subjects, believes we are an "unrealized" generation, having fallen short of our own lofty ambitions. I'm inclined to agree.

Even in two hours, trying to review the signature events of a generation leaves you feeling you've barely scratched the surface. How could you not, given such defining events as Woodstock, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as more contemporary concerns over health care and unemployment. Brokaw interviews Tom Hanks, whose movies have generated the highest box office revenues of any actor of all time, and Bill Clinton, the first Boomer elected president. Both are earnest and admirable spokesmen but, IHMO, not nearly as engaging or memorable as Vietnam vet Don Nicholas (pictured above) or Chris and Maxine McNair, the parents of Denise McNair (pictured at right), one of four girls killed in the infamous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

Yes, Woodstock was the iconic cultural event of our generation. Even today, it retains a mystic appeal, as if all the world's ills could be cured by a few days of music in the midst of mud. I cringe at modern-day Boomers reliving their past at a Woodstock reunion concert. A tie-dyed T-shirt stretched over a beer belly is hardly an ideal fashion statement. (Now that I think about it, maybe it's more of a generational statement -- the fact that so many aging boomers are overweight and in declining health.) Yet there's no denying that music, more than television, has defined our generation.

Undeniably, Vietnam was the war that divided us. I was among the long-haired protesters who found it easy to criticize an unpopular war (55,000 lives lost for what?) but should have shown more respect for the U.S. troops who served and who came home to resentment and animosity. A former Marine, Don Nicholas, recounts his experiences in the final days of the South Vietnamese government and tears up as he explains that love of country is why he's signed up with the Army Reserves, in his mid-50s, and done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Contrast him with David Harris, the anti-war protester who once was married to the singer Joan Baez and did acouple years in federal prison for resisting the draft. Harris, who became a journalist and author after his release, remains staunchly opposed to America's foreign wars. He says we're making the same mistakes in the Middle East as we did in Vietnam, and who can argue? [Quick aside: I was pleasantly surprised to see Harris at home in his kitchen with his daughter, Sophie, who lives here in Portland and is a family friend.]

Finally, the Birmingham church bombing is presented as the event that awakened white northerners to the virulent racism that cost four little girls their lives and turned the tide in favor of Civil Rights for all Americans. We're treated to familiar black-and-white clips of Kennedy, Johnson and Dr. King but it's the interview with the McNairs that stays with you. Now in their 80s, they exhibit admirable dignity in mourning the loss of Denise, who at 11 was the youngest of the bombing victims, and acknowledging that the deaths of the four girls spurred long overdue legislation.

I meant to be concise, but once again I've rambled. Take it as a sign that the Brokaw program is well worth watching, especially if you're a Boomer and even if you're not.

Photos: CNBC

Making missiles on the Navajo Nation's farm

Making missiles on the Navajo Nation farm

By Brenda Norrell

Photos Photo 1: Food Not Bombs/Photo 2 Indymedia

This week in the news, Indian Country Today celebrated the war manufacturer Raytheon Missiles producing missile parts on the Navajo Nation's commercial farm.
Shortly before I was terminated in 2006, an ICT editor forbid me to expose the fact that Raytheon Missiles was operating on the same land where the Navajo Nation was growing corn and other crops for commercial sale at Navajo Agricultural Products Industry near Farmington, N.M.
It was during the same time that NAPI was negotiating a deal with Cuba for the sale of NAPI farm products to Cuba.I wanted to find out what toxins and byproducts might be produced by Raytheon Missiles there, which would endanger the health of people eating the crops, including corn, pinto beans and potatoes, which become commercial food products. I had been to NAPI before, while I was working for Navajo Times, during the 18 years that I lived on the Navajo Nation.
The Indian Country Today editor forbid me from even researching the matter. (Yes, he put it in writing.)
It comes as no surprise today that ICT is celebrating the missile maker being there on Navajoland.
One of ICT's primary advertisers on the ICT website, with a large ad revolving, has been the CIA Clandestine Services, recruiting for CIA spies, since the fall of 2008.
Advertisers always exert influence over newspapers. Further, the income from advertisers pays at least a portion of the salaries of the reporters and editors.
Native Americans activists, including Louise Benally, Navajo on Big Mountain resisting relocation, point out that the US colonizers indoctrinated Navajos to such an extent in boarding schools and public schools, that they are now manufacturing weapons which ultimately kill other Indigenous Peoples.
Navajo Agricultural Products Industry is located in the same area where Navajos who live on the land are fighting a third power plant, Desert Rock. It is power plant development driven by Navajo politicians.
It is the same area where the US government sent Navajos to their deaths with cancer and respiratory diseases from radiation exposure, during Cold War uranium mining.It is the same area where Utah Navajos with respiratory diseases have long fought the oil and gas wells around their homes.
It is the same area of the Navajo Place of Origin, Dinetah. Bahe Katenay, Navajo from Big Mountain, spoke out in defense of Dinetah, in northwest New Mexico. Katenay's comments came during the Bush energy exploitation of the land. Katenay opposed extensive oil and gas wells around Dinetah. Katenay was censored by Indian Country Today.
It is the same area where the land, water and air has been mined, desecrated and polluted by both the US government and Navajo politicians.
It is the Four Corners region.

Bahe, the uncensored article about Dinetah:
http://bsnorrell.tripod.com/id104.html

Making missiles on the NAPI farm:
The work done at NAPI is for weapons currently in use by U.S. and allied armed forces: the Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided (TOW) missile; Javelin Close Combat/Anti-armor Weapon System; Stinger; Phalanx Close-In Weapon System and Excalibur Precision Guided Extended Range Artillery Projectile, according to Raytheon.
click on photos to enlarge

On the ground in Afghanistan

Results of Thursday's balloting in Afghanistan's second-ever presidential election may not be known for weeks -- and it will be no surprise if Hamid Karzai wins a second term as leader of "a nation burdened by warfare, pervasive corruption, a booming drug trade and seemingly intractable poverty," as characterized by Laura King of The Associated Press.

Granted, Afghanistan's weak central government reflects all the difficulties you'd expect in a region where there is no tradition of democracy, where a small fraction of adults can read, and the people have been governed for centuries by local tribes. So we shouldn't have great expectations about the pace or scope of positive change, no matter who emerges as president.

The ongoing, seemingly impossible, challenge of imposing order on a rugged and unruly country is hard to grasp for us, so many thousands of miles away. But if you'll invest 20-30 minutes, there's no better piece I've come across than C.J. Chivers' "The Long Walk" in conveying both the on-the-ground experience for U.S. troops and a big-picture explanation of just what we are trying to accomplish there.

Writing in the August issue of Esquire, Chivers describes 40 hellish hours with Company B, a column of 125 infantrymen, as they set out on a mission in the Korangal Valley, a mountainous region of forests and spires that passes as Afghanistan's jungle.

At the same time, he poses the fundamental question: What is the United States military doing in Afghanistan?

The question, when not framed as a pejorative, has many answers. Depending on the soldier and the unit, at any given moment the military is likely doing one of four things. It is hunting for, and hoping to capture or kill, the top-tier Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and their coteries. This is a direct extension of the original mission, the one that brought the United States back to Afghanistan in 2001 and that remains fired by the paired desires of justice and national security and, though the public-relations specialists do not frame it this way, a desire for revenge.

Simultaneously, the United States military is working with foreign governments, nongovernment organizations, and American agencies to build a nation where ten years ago a nation existed principally in name. This reconstituted Afghanistan, anointed a democracy by foreign influence as much as by domestic will, is supposed to develop with popular consent into a self-sufficient central government and provincial governments and district governments, with honest ministries serving all three, and courts, and a diverse economy, and passable roads and reliable electricity and potable water, and robust exports besides illicit drugs. To use the term now in favor — what one officer called the "flavor of the decade" for a nation that in recent decades has seen Islamism and warlordism and communism — this new nation is also supposed to recognize and run by rule of law, rather than by many other rules, opaque to most Westerners and largely unexplored by the United States, by which Afghanistan used to run, and often still runs, and might prefer to run if anyone were able to measure such things.

And as this reordered nation is assuming a shape that remains tentative and wormy with corruption, the United States is pursuing a third primary mission, which is to create foundations for indigenous security. This includes a national police force and an army with enough skilled soldiers to integrate fire support and operate an air corps and stand up to an insurgency in battle anywhere. It also includes an intelligence service that can penetrate and understand myriad groups — local, regional, and transnational — that make up that insurgency, as well as the drug networks that control the shadow economy, which fuels much of the war.

Last, or perhaps first, the United States military is doing what many people imagine it to be doing most: It is fighting that war. This is where Company B fits in. The long-term plan for Afghanistan is to build a competent and sturdy government and to hand off the country's affairs to this government in time. This will take many, many years. While those years pass, an essential military mission, year in and year out, is to keep the roads open and cities secure so commerce flows and Afghans can live their lives. As part of this, the military operates remote firebases and outposts far from the main roads and cities, with hopes of keeping insurgents busy away from much of the population. Each is home to squads, platoons, or companies — part of a defense-in-depth of blocking positions, or, as one colonel called them, Taliban magnets, with the organizing idea being that it is better to have the Taliban concentrating forces around a distant outpost than in Kabul, Jalalabad, or Kandahar. Company B, which occupies the Korangal Outpost and several small firebases nearby, is one of those magnets.

That's just a sample of the intelligent reporting and clear writing you'll find in this compelling piece. Click here for the article and photos by Tyler Hicks.

Woodstock reconsidered

This past weekend signified the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, a defining event for baby boomers that either makes us smile with nostalgia for times marked by peace, love, mud and music -- or causes us to look back with embarrassment at an era where drug-addled self-indulgence obscured a raging conflict in Southeast Asia and a growing cultural schism at home.

The nostalgic view, I suppose, is the one you get through rose-colored glasses. The latter, on the other hand, strikes me as probably a little too harsh. Two articles I've read in recent days offer some valuable perspective.

I was 16 when the festival played out over three or four days (depending on who's counting) in August 1969. It wasn't until I saw the excellent 1970 documentary, "Woodstock," that the magnitude of the event sank in. (For the record, let me say that Santana's "Soul Sacrifice" and Ten Years After's "Going Home" remain my favorite, most electrifying performances.)

"As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace," Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times ("Woodstock: A Moment of Muddy Grace.") "It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center crowd — nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged L.S.D.-popping hippies — was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs."

Pareles also writes:

A cynic might see the festival as a prime example of how coddled the baby boomers were in an economy of abundance. The Woodstock crowd, which arrived with more drugs than camping supplies, got itself a free concert, and when the people responsible could no longer handle the logistics, the government bailed them out. Some people took it upon themselves to help others; many just freeloaded.

Still, Woodstock gave virtually everyone involved — ticketholders, gate crashers, musicians, doctors, the police — a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one another, which was only sensible. Musicians performed for the biggest audience of their lives. Townspeople and the National Guard pitched in to keep people fed and healthy. No one, The New York Times reported, called the cops “pigs.”

True, true...but for another perspective on those times, consider Richard K. Kolb 's piece in the September issue of VFW magazine. We reprinted it in The Oregonian under the headline "The chasm between Woodstock and the war."

While 400,000 mostly white, affluent young people were partying at Woodstock, Kolb writes, "8,429 miles around the other side of the world, 514,000 mostly young Americans were authentically serving the country that had raised them to place society over self. The casualties they sustained over those four days [Aug. 15-19] were genuine, yet none of the elite media outlets were praising their selflessness."

While three persons died at Woodstock, 109 Americans died in 'Nam over the same period, including 35 in a single day's fighting, Kolb notes.

"So," he concludes, "when you hear talk of the glories of Woodstock -- the so-called "defining event of a generation" -- keep in mind those 109 GIs who served nobly yet are never lauded by the illustrious spokesmen for the 'Sixties Generation.' "

I don't know that the comparison is a fair one -- why not compare combat deaths with homicides or highway deaths over the same four days? But I will concede his point. Back in the day, it was hippies, not soldiers, who captured our attention.

Photo: Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

"War is hell" (part 2)

For those of you who read yesterday's entry, there's more...

The soldier who, under the screen name of stalker15a, wrote that moving e-mail about his fallen buddies, sent a follow-up to my colleague Mike Francis, who once again has posted it on his Oregon at War blog.

Few things I've read have touched me as much as stalker15a's original account and, now, the follow-up, honoring his fellow infantryman.

"I appreciate the kind words from your readers and the opportunity to share with America what it is really like on the frontlines of a war..the objective unbiased account of an eyewitness..telling it like it is..without filter. The family has been notified and the DOD has published his name....This is my friend, my buddy, my trooper. His name is Thomas Edward Lee III and he was from Dalton, Georgia."

Why do I post this, when I have a son of my own, now in boot camp in Georgia and who, a few months from now, might find himself in the Middle East as well?

I suppose the answer lies in two things. One, I'll take truth and honesty over euphemism and obfuscation every time. It may be painful at times, but knowing how and why things go down is better than speculating. Two, if I'm going to blog, I'm going to share material that hopefully encourages you, as an occasional or regular reader, feel, think, consider and reflect on things that you might not otherwise. Isn't that one of the reasons we're here on Earth? To communicate?

If you'd rather not read about war and death and camaraderie, just skip down to the post below, touting the new blog by my friend, Pam.

"War is hell"

I meant for yesterday's post to strike a celebratory tone but, upon re-reading it, it felt like I veered into self-indulgence.

Today's entry is nothing like it. Mike Francis, an associate editor at The Oregonian, shared the featured post from his own blog, Oregon at War, with the rest of us in the Editorial Department. It's from a deployed soldier in Iraq and, as Mike says, it is a harrowing read.

If you have misgivings about reading about grief and death, don't go here.

If you have the fortitude to read about what it's like when soldiers lose one of their own -- and you can appreciate the incredible bond uniting those serving abroad and the sense of duty that propels them forward -- then read on. (Above right: Combat Infantry Badge)

http://blog.oregonlive.com/oregonatwar/