We can check out any time we like, but we can never leave

The one and only letter I’ve written to my congressman was really sort of a team effort. It came in May 1975, when some of my sixth grade buddies and I gathered beneath a tree at school.

This gathering, as you might imagine, was not a socratic think tank. On most days, we’d argue whether Roger Staubach was a better quarterback than Terry Bradshaw — or if there was a pretty girl alive who’d actually talk to any of us (the answer: no, not for several years).

But on that warm Arizona afternoon, we turned our attention to what we’d seen on TV the past few days: the fall of Saigon; the indelible images of U.S. personnel and frantic Vietnamese being plucked from an embassy rooftop; American choppers being shoved off carrier decks to make room for landings of more helicopters, most swollen with bewildered allies who would soon become refugees.

For reasons I don’t think we fully understood, my buds and I were angry.

And we wanted to tell our congressman about it. We decided to write him a letter.

I was drafted as the scribe for the group, asked to turn incomplete thoughts and junior high rationale into something approaching intelligible sentences for U.S. Rep. Morris Udall to read.

I don’t recall the exact contents of what we wrote, just the tone, which was: What was all that sacrifice for?

It’s a couple generations later, and I still don’t know. We lost more than 58,000 service members in Vietnam, spent God knows how much money, and all I’m really sure of is that some of my clothes now have a tag that says: Made in Vietnam.

A couple generations from now, I doubt anyone will be able to explain to people in 2061 what America’s 20 years in Afghanistan really did for our country — and theirs.

A week ago, New Mexican reporter Robert Nott spoke to several New Mexico veterans of the Afghan war, the people who sacrificed much of themselves to keep that country out of the hands of the Taliban.

Like so many of their vintage, it’s clear they were torn — both by what was required while they fought there, and the seeming futility of it all as they watched Americans and Afghans flee the country just a few steps ahead of the enemy.

Add that to Thursday’s images of bombs killing American soldiers and Afghan civilians outside the Kabul airport, and you can almost feel the heat of the frustration and sadness they must feel.

I hope we — the lucky ones who didn’t have to go, or thought better of volunteering to go — never forget, though the skeptic in me worries that someday we will.

Of course we will.

There are times when I think that’s what policymakers must depend upon — our collective inability to remember history and the inevitable truth about U.S. power. Yes, we can land anywhere we want, install any government we like, kill anyone we please, plus build runways and naval bases and armories that can back an army for decades.

But when we decide to leave, it’s almost as if we’d never been there at all.

The reality hit me again last week, waking an echo that had been silent nearly 50 years.

As I viewed the photos of Afghans running alongside U.S. transport planes, and later, the carnage at Kabul’s airport, I was brought back to that afternoon in ‘75. Then and now, it made me wonder about the collision of geopolitics and

human life, and how the mess seems to last forever.

It also made me think about the boys with whom I wrote that letter to Mo Udall. For the most part, I’ve lost track of them, though I hear most are doing well, with wives and kids and grandkids in Tucson or Phoenix.

In a way, I laugh at the memory. Certainly, we weren’t aspiring political scientists. We were just children in a copper mining town — the kind of big-hearted, scraped-knuckle locale where patriotism takes deep breaths and nourishes every corpuscle. Surely, anyone here can relate: New Mexico is filled with just those kinds of places.

Mostly we were just asking a question of our government.

I wish I’d been smart enough to think about that — write about that — in 2001. When our leaders told us our soldiers, airmen and Marines were headed to Afghanistan, promising eventual success and a safer America, I should have kicked the tires much harder.

I should’ve written a letter to my congresswoman at the time and asked her: Do we ever learn?

We can check out any time we like. But we can never leave.