Opinion: I fought and bled in Afghanistan. I still think America is right to accept defeat.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Voices Across America

Opinion: I fought and bled in Afghanistan. I still think America is right to accept defeat.



Dan Berschinski, photographed in 2009 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, lost both his legs after stepping on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Opinion by Dan Berschinski
Yesterday at 10:21 a.m. EDT

Dan Berschinski is a retired U.S. Army infantry officer. He served and was severely wounded in Afghanistan in 2009.

When the twin towers fell, I was a high school senior deep in college applications. The United States Military Academy topped my list. Watching the devastation of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold, I knew the Army would be part of the response, though I figured that response would be over by the time I graduated from West Point. Never did I imagine that, eight years later, I would be leading soldiers in a war provoked by that one terrible day.

Yet lead them I did, across Afghanistan, witnessing horrors and enduring losses I still struggle to describe. What I saw there convinced me that the awful scenes we are now witnessing were inevitable — and that President Biden deserves credit for nonetheless braving the fallout to do the right thing by our troops.

I saw early warning signs as a U.S. Army infantry platoon leader on my first mission in Kandahar in 2009. In my very first conversation with a local, a shopkeeper told me: “Lieutenant, I met the previous American lieutenant 12 months prior, I will meet another American lieutenant in 12 months when you leave.” He did not like the Taliban, the shopkeeper told me, but it would be in Afghanistan long after I would — and so he had no choice but to deal with it.

If that first mission diminished my hopes for the United States’ success in Afghanistan, my last dashed them entirely. On Aug. 18, 2009, two days before a national election, I was supposed to partner with Afghan army forces to reconnoiter local polling sites. As I walked across our base that morning, I learned that my Afghan partners had fled overnight. They did not want to risk their lives to protect their own polling sites.

Instead of reconning the polling sites by ourselves, my soldiers and I patrolled some nearby orchards. Within ten hours, Sergeant Troy Tom, a 21-year-old from Shiprock, N.M., was killed by an improvised explosive device. My forward observer, Specialist Jonathan Yanney, 20, of Litchfield, Minn., was also killed by an IED. Several hours later I, too, stepped on an IED trigger. But my bomb was small. Instead of killing me, it only severed both of my legs above the knees.

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Over the past several days, veterans like me have been asked whether our service was in vain. My answer is that it won’t be if we draw the correct lesson from recent events and recognize that heartbreaking news footage, as awful as it is, is no justification for perpetuating an unwinnable war.

[tulipsandroses]

1. I bet MSM won't put him on tv. It doesn't fit

Their hair on fire narrative.