This Is What We Do in America. We Pause. We Forget. Then We Begin the Next War.
MARCH 15, 2023| M. TABAR
My stepfather, brother, and I served in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are still there, frozen in the suck—a boomer, a Gen Xer, and a millennial—ducking mortars, mourning dead colleagues, and waiting for care packages curated by Mom. For seven years, I was an aid worker outside the wire and embedded with the U.S. military inside the wire. In the mid-2000s, I overlapped with one or both of my family members in each war zone. We rarely speak of it.
In my multigenerational, vast military family, “the suck” strained the bonds of love and commitment. Our individual experiences, worldview, and the impact of the wars upon us differed such that only silence maintains family cohesion. In sleep, we cry out what we cannot express in daylight, fighting our way out of the same village, the same valley, the same unarmored aid project pickup truck, again and again.
M. Tabar works inside a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle while serving as an aid worker in Iraq. Two decades after the U.S. invasion of that country, she writes, “I am not over it. My family is not over it. The United States is not over it.” Photo courtesy of the author.
M. Tabar works inside a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle while serving as an aid worker in Iraq. Two decades after the U.S. invasion of that country, she writes, “I am not over it. My family is not over it. The United States is not over it.” Photo courtesy of the author.
In the summer of 2021, bearded Taliban fighters swaggered from the shadows where they’d been governing secretly for decades and into the presidential palace to make their takeover official. Commentators in America lamented, “How did we come to this?” I didn’t ask that question. I sat alone in the dark sipping bourbon, staring out the window of my house in the African country where I now work. No one I served with asked that question as we texted our heartbreak. How else could the suck have possibly concluded? Yet still, the callouses of our collective cynicism didn’t buffer the gut punch of watching it unfold in real-time.
https://thewarhorse.org/american-legacy-of-forever-wars-lives-on-in-its-casualties/
