Dear Editor,
A blank stare of disbelief with a side of ugly premonition. The major news stories have fizzled out – for now – but that’s how I’ve digested the United States’ final stages of military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover that ensued this summer. The suicide attacks that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and the chaotic evacuation of Americans and Afghan refugees made me feel like punching my laptop screen.
As a former military reporter and civilian journalist for more than ten years, the circus sideshow made me want to share a few of my experiences and observations in the country. Hopefully, this will help the general public understand one of many experiences of the war’s veterans. This will also contain some of my thoughts and feelings on religious fanaticism – the core of today’s Afghan struggles – the achievements of our occupation, and how Afghanistan under Taliban control will dissolve the freedoms gained over the last two decades.
Keep in mind that every veteran has a different story, has different experiences, holds different opinions of the 20-year war and our withdrawal. I do not speak for all veterans and I won’t claim to be an expert on other’s experiences.
I deployed to Afghanistan from June 2012 to April 2013 with the Oregon Army National Guard’s 115th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment (MPAD) as a public affairs combat correspondent. As a broadcast and print journalist, I produced nearly 80 videos, photos, and print news stories during the 9-month excursion, some of which were published in national, state, and local newspapers and broadcasts.
The MPAD consisted of about 20 soldiers, men and women, many of them with prior media experience but some with none. We were based out of Bagram Airfield which was the center of our unit’s operations and close to a brigade-level public affairs command. Bagram was also the processing center for civilian media in the regional command area.
An officer, another enlisted soldier, and I were dispatched to Forward Operating Base Lightning in the Paktia Province. My commander at Lightning was a woman, as was about half our unit. Most of the Afghans were used to seeing women in positions of authority and having equal rights and opportunities as men. Their body language and chatter often proved otherwise.
Our specific mission was to train and mentor the Afghan National Army’s 203rd Thunder Corps public affairs team in the workings of a free press, mostly to include basic journalism instruction such as writing, photography, and videography styles. Lightning was adjacent to FOB Thunder the Thunder Corps headquarters, and the garrison the size of a community college. Most of our stories originated or were contained within those areas but we also found plenty of material during our excursions to other bases.
The ANA media team was almost another family on its own.
The Afghans I remember the most (names are removed but descriptions intact) are the colonel, a man in his late 60s to early 70s (many Afghans have no birth certificates) and bore a striking resemblance to actor Sean Connery; his assistant colonel or major (depending on his mood that day) who was Sesame Street’s Animal in human form; two ANA sergeants in their mid-20s to early 30s, most of them widely curious about American culture and our women serving as superiors and equals; two Mohammads (a common name in Islamic culture), one we nicknamed ‘GQ’ for his model-caliber looks and another who seemed spaced out a lot, and a few others who I can’t remember to the detail I’d like to. Our FOB Lighting interpreter was an Afghan native and U.S. citizen. Other interpreters, both U.S. citizens and Afghan nationals hoping for citizenship, worked with our teams in Bagram and other FOBs.
The Afghans came from different ethnic backgrounds. Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and many others whose lineage ascends from ages of foreign invasions and occupations. Some looked like the rugged, bearded, brown-skinned pictures we see on TV or could be pail, red-headed Irishmen, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans, and even some of Asian descent.
Interacting with a Muslim culture isn’t as expedient as with Americans. Rather than sharing a few pleasantries, small talk and on to business, there’s a lot of time talking about family, life, and a handful of other topics. We rarely accomplished much beyond chatter.
Our week consisted of a stroll across the wall to FOB Thunder each morning to join our counterparts and try to teach them something useful while also learning about each other’s cultures. We enlisted soldiers who rarely got to teach the ANA public affairs guys anything they would use productively. There were a few excursions where they brought cameras to shoot photos and video but made little to no effort to make an actual newsworthy product.
We rarely interacted with the female Afghan population and could easily spot women in public covered from head to toe in the blue burqas. There were women mentorship teams for numerous occupations throughout the country, but I never got the opportunity to work with them.
Three major accomplishments stick out the most: expansive access to education and increased literacy rates, expansion of women’s rights, and press freedom. We were the architects and witnesses to these in some form during our deployment
One of my first stories reported from Afghanistan was about ANA troops learning to read. Grown men for the first time in their lives understanding print language. I could see the looks of astonishment (and often boredom) when these men grasped the power to read and write. Literacy is a power that can be used for progress or wielded as a tool for manipulation anywhere in the world.
According to USAID—an independent agency of the federal government that leads international development and humanitarian efforts—student enrollment grew from 900,000 male students in 2001 to more than 9.5 million students—39% of whom are women—in 2020.
Access to education and international efforts to build schools and provide teachers and the introduction of educational programs from literacy to agriculture have helped bring Afghanistan closer to the 21st century.
A free press and the idea of being able to report a story without fear of retribution was another idea that our Afghan counterparts found alien. Not being arrested, tortured, or murdered for seeking out the truth and exposing evil was a freedom that caught a quick breath before being smothered by the Taliban.
Journalists have been and are now even more targets of the Taliban’s crusade. The Afghans we trained to exercise and enjoy a free press are now running and hiding for their lives. Most disturbing is the uncomfortable number of Americans cheering for the idea of dead journalists. Having been manipulated to despise information they can’t mentally digest, they have no idea the important role of a free press. The words I have for them are unprintable in this publication.
Women have benefited from our occupation. They’ve been given the chance to go to school, find jobs – some as teachers and journalists—and began to gradually escape the control of men.
Afghan women will suffer the most. They’ve already been tools of Islamic fundamentalism for decades and forced out of public life. Since the U.S. occupation, they’ve gained better access to education, employment, and inclusion in public life. The new Taliban has made promises to continue to allow women these freedoms, but they’ve already reneged on some and begun enforcing violations under their strict religious interpretations.
These fundamental human rights are too often undervalued, ridiculed, or demonized in the U.S. We have a growing segment of the American population who would be happy to let their religion infiltrate government, schools, and press. Afghans barely began to understand freedom. Religious fundamentalism will once again be the sole source of policy.
After watching the final flights tear out of Afghanistan and still reading about refugees hoping to find a new home in the U.S., I wonder what horrors the people stranded there will have to endure now.
The iconic images of a Chinook helicopter landing on the U.S Embassy in Kabul and terrified and hopeful Afghans scrambling and clawing their way onto civilian and military airlifts will be the image generations will come to know as another example of America entangling itself in a messy foreign war.
The effects on veterans and their families have been and will continue to ripple through their communities and lives. Personal battles with PTSD, alcoholism, suicide, and the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy will continue for decades
I could list comparisons to the Vietnam War, but they’ve already been made on other platforms across the country and both generations of veterans have a mixed sense of sentiments of our involvement, purpose, realities of war, and the struggles after coming home.
The goal of this article was to be as non-political as possible (aside from the religious comparisons). I’m sure I accomplished it. Four presidential administrations had hands in this war with successes and failures on minor and major levels. This is a sad but overdue end to a long and unwinnable conflict.
I’ve been sifting and sighing through the traffic jam of opinions from social media foreign policy experts – mostly uninformed garbage. Some of the more positive and intelligent comments resembled what I’ve been thinking for years: millions of Afghans were able to live more, laugh more, and sleep more. They enjoyed freedoms that they never knew existed and may not again in their lifetimes. An entire generation now knows freedom despite hundreds of years of war. The seeds of freedom are planted, and they’ll continue to grow despite religious occupation.
In the last decade, many of the bases and outposts I visited have been abandoned by the U.S., turned over to the ANA, and now the Taliban. FOB Lightning was closed in March 2020. I often wonder what might be left of the tents, generators, weight rooms, and concrete office buildings that were in place before our arrival. I think about what some Taliban militants are doing in or with those spaces right now. I can see pictures online and dig deeper for other stories. But the smells, the shoddy architecture, the art, the filth, the characteristics of how the Afghans rigged some of those facilities to work better for them when they couldn’t figure out the right way to make them as comfortable and effective as we do.
And all I can think about is how religious extremism is the center of this humanitarian calamity. It exists in Afghanistan and exists in America.
Kingman is my hometown. I grew up here, graduated from Kingman High School in 1994 and moved on. After more than 20 years of military service, college, and other adventures throughout the country, I moved back in 2015 to see that many extreme religious sentiments are alive and well in Mohave County. The similarities between religious fanatics in Afghanistan and here in America are uncomfortably common.
I could expand this article and easily compare how certain political and religious groups at home convulse and choke over the idea of women’s rights, free press, and religious freedom (for religions other than their own). I’ve already braced for the snide comments from the couch rangers and ‘Would’ve joined, but…’ folks who don’t understand the complexities of Muslim culture and our involvement in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ll take a crack next time I read someone say, ‘America needs God back in our country’. There’s never a shortage of religious fanatics to report on.
Defense Visual Information Distribution System (DVIDS), the military media database, recently removed all videos and photographs directly depicting Afghans to protect the identities of thousands of subjects whose safety could be compromised. For security and safety reasons, none of the pictures submitted show the members of the Afghan National Army I served with.
To view the rest of Aaron Ricca’s military stories and videos, visit his media portfolio at https://www.dvidshub.net/search?q=Aaron+Ricca&view=grid.
Aaron Ricca
Kingman
