Afghanistan- Memeory Hole, Equipment Hole, People Hole

Mentioned at the end of my previous post this deserves some comment in a new post.

The Forgotten War
12 Years in Afghanistan Down the Memory Hole
By Ann Jones

"Seven billion dollars worth of equipment -- about 20% of what the U.S. sent in to that distant land -- is simply being torn up, chopped down, split, shredded, stomped, and, when possible, sold off for scrap at pennies a pound. "

I unloaded cargo ships for a year in Danang.  In that year we only sent two shipments back.  I botched both of them.  We had no experience in backload only offload.  One shipment was 105mm expended brass.  The other was a bunch of SeaBee junk vehicles that the unit commander said they came with and by the rules must return with regardless of the state of equipment.

Looking back at it I think I was the fall guy chosen to fail in the backload.  Maybe nobody could have done better.  The entire task was a nightmare nobody would believe and total waste of time and effort that would qualify for a chapter in Catch 22.

In 1996 I rode from Hanoi to Saigon.  All the stuff we ever sent to Vietnam is still there, one way or the other.  We never brought back much more than living and dead bodies and the stuff they purchased at the Base Exchange.

I can't image the scope of a retrograde shipment effort from Afghanistan.  Much or most of that stuff will go down the Equipment Hole.  It will be designed to do that.  It benefits the replacement with new stuff......I am sure.

Afghanistan was ultimately the place where good men and women went down the War Hole.  Again coming back dead or alive and those returning alive diminished so sadly and returning to a land that forgets they were there or why.  Afghans also went down the same hole.

"For American taxpayers, the war will continue at least until midcentury. Think of all the families of the dead soldiers to be compensated for their loss, all the wounded with their health care bills, all the brain damaged veterans at the VA.  Think of the ongoing cost of their drugs and prosthetics and benefits. Medical and disability costs alone are projected to reach $754 billion. Not to mention the hefty retirement pay of all those generals who issued all those reports of progress as they so ambitiously fought more than one war leading nowhere."

"Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006) and War Is Not Over When It’s Over (Metropolitan 2010), among other books. She wraps up a trilogy on war with publication next month of a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books: They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars -- the Untold Story, which Andrew Bacevich has already described this way: “Read this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account -- the war Washington doesn’t want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans ‘support the troops.’”

My sincerest thanks again to Ann Jones and Tom Engelhardt