Uncertainty as Taliban take charge
For Texas veterans, fall of Afghanistan a punch to the gut
Chris Hernandez, a Houston-area veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt his stomach turn Sunday as news broke that Kabul had collapsed at the end of a sweeping Taliban offensive.
A police officer who runs a part-time photography business, he drove to a wedding in tears while trying to sort through what had happened over the weekend as Afghanistan’s capital city fell without a fight.
Hernandez, 50, listened to the radio and watched video of events unfolding in Kabul this week that included three people falling out of the wheel well of an Air Force C-17 cargo plane that left Kabul carrying hundreds of refugees.
“In some ways, it’s really worse than the fall of Saigon, isn’t it?” he asked.
If they weren’t surprised at how America’s longest war ended, Americans who served in Afghanistan still felt shock.
They included Hernandez and Todd Plybon, 50, of Taylor, a Texas Army National Guard soldier who was seriously injured in
a 2009 roadside bomb attack that killed two others. They had gone to Afghanistan to improve Afghan animal husbandry and agriculture, among other missions.
Like many in the Texas Guard, they were patriotic and sacrificed even before deploying. One fellow GI, Spc. Anthony G. Green, 28, of Yorktown, north of Victoria, came to Afghanistan with a 70 percent VA disability rating from a roadside bomb in his second tour of Iraq.
He didn’t survive the IED blast that left Plybon, a University of Texas graduate with a degree in chemistry, with traumatic brain injury, daily chronic pain and weekly visits to specialists.
Every soldier who served in Afghanistan made an investment there and many left a part of themselves — or someone else — behind.
The war, in turn, reverberated at home.
‘Sense of betrayal’
As the week began, Houston Police Commander Dan Harris, who commanded the Texas National Guard agribusiness development team, was still taking stock of the nation’s 20-year effort in Afghanistan. Like other veterans, his evaluation is a work in progress.
“I think I’m probably like most Americans. The first thing was surprise at how quickly the Taliban was able to gain ground and gain control,” Harris said.
There was also “a sadness thinking about … the Afghan people themselves and what they are going through now and what they probably will be going through in the immediate future,” he said. “And then also thinking about the costs to America, and it’s not just America, there are other allies that were there with us.
“The only bright side I can think of — until now we were successful preventing Afghanistan from being a launching base, a recruiting base, a training base for more terrorist attacks against the U.S. or other countries,” added Harris, 61, of Conroe. “Now, I don’t know what’s going to become of that mission, what’s going to happen to Afghanistan.”
The costs were stark — 2,452 American dead, including Green and a fellow guardsman, Staff Sgt. Christopher Staats, 32, of Boerne. Both served with Harris and Plybon on Texas Agribusiness Development Team 2 at Ghazni.
Altogether, 3,596 troops from a 46-nation coalition had died in Afghanistan through Monday.
At home in Fredericksburg on Tuesday afternoon, Staats’ father, Bobby Staats, 71, himself a former soldier in the Texas Guard,said he was watching the news.
“I’m feeling pretty bad about it,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of people left behind that supported the United States. But this administration doesn’t give a damn. They don’t care. They do not care about nothing except their power.”
In all, the Defense Department said 832,000 American troops served in Afghanistan. The highest death toll came in 2010, the year of President Barack Obama’s surge, with 498 killed. The lowest, 11 dead, was last year, Along the way, the United States spent $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan, out of $6.4 trillion in all its post-9/11 wars, which include Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, among others, said Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Cost of War Project.
The project estimates the death toll in Afghanistan and related fighting in Pakistan, including allied and combatant fighters and civilians who were killed in combat, at 241,000.
Paul Rieckhoff, founder and former chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said he’d heard an earful from veterans stunned at how an American-trained and equipped military vanished as the Taliban closed on Kabul.
“I think the overall mood is outrage and frustration and anger, and a sense of betrayal,” he said, adding the callers were angry “mostly at Washington and I think increasingly at the president. I think the more nuanced folks want to talk about the (Authorization for Use of Military Force) and how it’s gone this long but I think everybody is focused on — pretty much a consensus — that whether we were going to leave or not, we didn’t have to leave like this.”
‘Iraq the success story’
A one-time San Antonian who graduated in 1989 from Central Catholic High School, Hernandez saw news accounts of Afghan government forces surrendering or abandoning posts across the country. While initially angry with President Joe Biden over his decision to pull out of Afghanistan, he adopted a different attitude after listening to Biden’s remarks to the nation Monday.
Part of the attitude change was based on something he had expected — a feckless Afghan government and shaky military force.
“Out of the two wars I served in, I never expected Iraq to be the success story,” he said.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired professor of international relations and history at Boston University who was critical of President George W. Bush’s handling of the conflict in Iraq, had said he wasn’t emotionally invested in the Afghan war.
Or so he thought.
“Ever since the Taliban offensive has gained momentum, I have been overcome by a sense of anger, humiliation, and embarrassment that I find hard to explain,” Bacevich, a Vietnam platoon leader and cavalry commander, said in an email. “It was clear to me that the Afghan government’s days were numbered. I just didn’t expect things to fall apart quite so abruptly.”
The war is intensely personal for Plybon and his wife, Tara. He takes a weekly infusion to help with the headaches that have plagued him since the blast. Now 50, Tara is his caregiver and hasn’t worked in 11 years. While they’ve made huge sacrifices at home that have become yet another forever war, she’ll insist they’re far more fortunate than Gold Star families.
Todd Plybon has taken up photography, shooting pictures of horses, old buildings and small towns, and has entered his work at shows, with some exhibited at a Georgetown museum. Proceeds go to the Ride On Center for Kids, a nonprofit that gives equine-assisted services to disabled children, adults, and veterans.
A nagging thought has tugged at Plybon over the years, the feeling that America didn’t effectively fight the war. He’s never forgotten a PowerPoint briefing slide displaying an icon marked “Taliban HQ” on a map of the Texas Guard’s area of operation, which was based outside Ghazni, an hour south of Kabul by helicopter.
“And so I wanted to raise my hand and say, ‘Excuse me, why is that there?’ ” he said, wondering why it wasn’t bombed, if identified.
No one asked the question. The Texas Guard’s task was to help introduce modern farming and ranching methods to Afghans.
The subsistence farming tradition, an ineffective government and Taliban threats made everything difficult, as did a mindset Plybon felt had set in among his own troops.
“It just seemed like we were not aggressive enough,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want to take away from the guys that were involved in those actions … But as an overall war mindset we just seemed to — at times it seemed as though we were trying to endure,” Plybon said. “I think a lot of guys looked at it as, ‘I’ll get through my year and then I’ll go home.’ ”
Hernandez was a human intelligence team leader and volunteered for missions from his base, typically two to three a week, sometimes more. He’d go out with the infantry as well and on occasion would find himself in big fights.
That, it turned out, is where he wanted to be.
His Texas Guard 636th Military Intelligence Battalion in Kapisa province, northeast of Bagram Air Base, didn’t lose any soldiers, but Hernandez said he operated with French, Afghan and American embedded military training teams that lost 20 coalition and Afghan troops from February through November 2009.
In a novel he later wrote, “Proof of Our Resolve,” the protagonist, a Texas Army National Guard soldier, talks with the wife of a slain soldier.
“In the novel, my protagonist is trying to explain to somebody who feels like she lost her husband for nothing … that he didn’t die for Afghanistan, he died for America and he died because what he believed about his country and himself was so strong he was willing to fight and die to defend it,” Hernandez said. “And when you’re willing to lay down your life for something you hold that dear, it has to be important.”
On Monday, a friend he’s never personally met, a Marine Corps special operations officer, posted a photo of an Afghan falling from a C-17 that flew 640 people out of the country.
“But I have to ask you to take just a minute and think about the kind of desperation it takes to cling to an airplane that is big enough to carry 800 people as it takes off,” the Marine wrote in his post. “Think about spending the last few seconds of your life falling from that plane.
“Think about the faith you have to have in America to have thought, even in your panic, that’s somehow going to work out. Then maybe think what little thing you can do to nudge us back a little closer, no matter how infinitesimal the movement, to that ideal as a nation.”