In one of my saddest childhood memories, it is very cold, and my father is pulling me on a sled across the snow. Instead of enjoying it, I am heartbroken and terrified. We have just finished visiting my mother at the hospital, and nothing is OK. I want to talk to my dad, but I am afraid that I will make him mad. I just see his broad back, retreating from me in the snow, as he tugs on the rope and pulls me along.
It was many years later that I realized that my mother was hospitalized with a full on breakdown during the lengthy Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. My father had deployed there on a covert mission I will never know the full extent of and had come back a fundamentally changed man. Then, the country that had changed him was simply no longer a priority for a dying USSR. My parents’ relationship deteriorated rapidly. My mother had to go to the hospital. My father barely trusted himself around me, and his pain was infectious.
I have vivid scraps of his recollections that I carry around inside me as a tribute to his memory, after he became more honest with me about it in the last years of his life, occasionally dropping phrases like: “We found headless bodies and cocaine,” “People were burning alive in the caves,” “I was a father — I did not need to be there,” “I dream about the dead a lot.”
When pressed for more information, he usually just shut down and poured us more drinks.
I know that the Soviet withdrawal and its aftermath affected my father and his friends deeply. It wasn’t like today, when the American withdrawal is extensively covered and the ongoing tragedy is readily accessible via social media. The Soviets were encouraged to buck up and stay silent.
It didn’t do my father and his friends or society in general many favors. By the time we buried dad, at just 67 years of age, only one man who had firsthand knowledge of what he had seen and done on deployment was able to come. The rest, I believe, are all dead.
Many died from suicide, or from drugs, or from behavior that might as well have been suicidal. One guy my father missed especially was gored to death on a hunt for wild boar. I thought it was a respectable way to go out, until my father pointed out that his friend was always taking too many risks. Chasing death while making it seem to his loved ones that he was just fine.
In the stupid world of soundbytes and social media dunks, veterans are either flawless heroes or monstrous villains. It’s all breathless “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE” or, from our awesomely bone-headed and irrelevant left, it’s all “FUCK YOU, I WISH YOU’D DIED OVER THERE” or else a quasi-religious and somehow even more pathetic, “ATONE FOR YOUR SINS IF YOU WANT TO SIT WITH US.
We fail as a society when we let our politics thus reduce people — let alone when we spectacularly bungle a withdrawal. And I can guarantee you that in the months and years to come, our failures will continue to reverberate in ways that are great and small.
Most of us are not cut out for fixing massive foreign policy blunders, though we can opine about them all we want. But what we can always do is be there for each other — whether that means being there for that veteran you know, or for that refugee, or for anyone else affected. Looking back, the lesson of the Soviet withdrawal that I internalized most readily was this:
Don’t be silent. Allow yourself to matter. Allow yourself to love and be loved. Love is the only magic we have, the only fairy tale element that exists in our lives. Love cannot be quantified. It just is. That’s what makes it more powerful than death itself.
Through the years, I have loved my father. This is why even now, in the depths of my grief for him and in the depths of my grief for this strange world, I can feel him out there, beyond the wall of static like snow. Pulling me, always pulling me, in the direction that I need to go — and allowing me, therefore, some measure of strength to pull others.
Image credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by 1st Lt. Mark Andries/U.S. Central Command Public Affairs and Air Mobility Command Public Affairs, USAF
