Thanks For The Life

I was twenty-one, finishing a degree under a special deal with the school that let me hang around the apartment all day, just reading and taking notes. But I had pissed off my dad and needed money, so I sent a resume to the address in the paper. One day the phone rings and it’s Cumberland Farms convenience store. Some old lady on the other end, maybe fifty, seems to be having the worst day of her life. It’s all in the tone: “Is this John Kilgore?” like she’s troubleshooting a bad smell. We decide pretty quick that Cumberland Farms is not the path to my future.

But ten minutes later she calls back, pleasant enough. Come on down, ask for Dollie.

It turned out her supervisor made her make that second call. She didn’t want no spoiled college boy messing up the store she’d worked so hard to turn around. But he insisted, lucky for me.

When I get there there’s no old lady, just a pretty girl on a ladder, putting up a sign on the back cooler. “I need to speak to Dollie,” I tell her. She says, “That would be me, love,” like she’s British. That week or that month she was going through some phase where she called almost everyone “love.” Little kids from the neighborhood, old winos, her boss. Or maybe there was a little more to it. After that first one popped out when she saw me, she had to cover for it, so she used it on everyone while I was around. 

In a month we were staying mostly at her place, three exits down I-95 and a couple of right turns. Even in those days sleeping with the help was not a good career move, so she had the supervisor rotate me to another store a few miles away. We would stand at the registers in our separate stores, phones cradled on our shoulders, smoking 100-millimeter cigarettes, and just talk and talk. But we rang up customers with such speed and accuracy that no one ever complained. We were even a little competitive about it. We both memorized common combinations of items and rang them as one figure to save time, explaining if we had to. 

We went back to look at that first store maybe four decades later and couldn’t find it at first. We both remembered it as a barn, a gym, a Walmart, because it stood for so much I guess. In fact it was hardly a shack, sitting there closed on the corner in a bombed-out looking neighborhood with trash in the streets. Impossible to figure how so much experience had ever fit into that small space.

Back then I was too self-centered to get anyone’s story, but I gradually got hers. She grew up early and quick, hungry sometimes, family living in a car sometimes. Polio as a baby, left her with a slight limp. A drunk loser mother, no dad, monster stepfather. Tight as a tick with a brother, a sister, cousins, a grandmother who was the only adult who ever looked out for her. Out of the house at fifteen and the next year into a cushy government job, top secret actually, where she made glass for infrared gunsights for Vietnam. Got badly hurt doing that and wouldn’t go back, so then into the manager trainee program at Cumberland Farms, where she was a real star. Management loved her, the neighborhood loved her. She took over the wrecked Ferry Street store, cleaned it up, and instantly tripled sales. 

By the time I came aboard she was making a killer commission, plenty for a car, the apartment, cigarettes (no booze), and being a soft touch. Feminism was just starting to be a thing, and without question she was on the track to upper management. Until she met a guy and deserted her own life to work on his. Back then I had problems with drugs, depression, and mainly just a huge lack of common sense. Couldn’t seem to connect with the world or take anything real from it. Book smart and life stupid. Crazy ideas would take hold of me every so often and I would have to see them through, even knowing I shouldn't.

She didn’t care about any of that, all that mattered was that we were together. Where she came from men hit women, cheated on them, drank the grocery money. Just avoid any of that and I would be golden. A low bar, to use a phrase we didn’t have then. We had a sort of secret deal where we both pretended I was the one who knew things, when really it was always her.

I couldn’t seem to piss her off, no matter how many kinds of jerk I was being. Until I finally did piss her off, and then it would be like fighting a badger, a rainstorm, a swarm of bees. You didn’t want to go there.

After New Haven we headed out to California for my grad school. Got married after two years, started family the year after, way sooner than we’d planned. Then up to Washington briefly and on back here to Illinois for a college teaching job that in the first years paid like it was an internship. She didn’t mind any of it, knew how to stretch a short paycheck from here to Sunday. Garage sales, specials, refinancing, budget recipes. She did some more glass-blowing at one point, drove school buses, ran a daycare in our home. Finally she hit on what really worked, going back to school at forty to become a nurse. Three hard years and too much drama, but after that it was Easy Street. She went off to work every day with a big smile. 

So forty-nine years on from that phone call, here I am, still sleeping with the boss. What do you two find to talk about, people sometimes asked in the old days, and I would think, everything under the sun. We’ve made it to all fifty states, mostly hauling a big camper that I sometimes smash into things (she doesn’t mind too much). We got to Korea for a while, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines for a year, England briefly, France barely. We’ve ridden motorcycles and flown hang gliders and camped a whole lot. Had more than one night where I look back and think, God, was that really us? It’s been a great run. 

Five years ago, give or take, we were talking and she said, “I never understood why your folks liked me so quick and so much, the way they did.” I gave a big guffaw. “Are you kidding? They knew I was crazy and didn’t want me living in their basement in my forties.” One of those moments when the truth suddenly just hits you.

It turned out she really did love almost everyone. My whole family. Her own of course, except the mom and the stepdad. Cranky old ladies who reminded her of her grandma. Kids on the Special Ed bus she drove for years, one who died of spinal bifida, one who got killed by a drunk driver. Patients, sometimes the worst ones best. Many friends. Me, inexplicably. Our own kids, so fiercely it just took her over, which is the main reason they grew into the adults I'm so proud of. When my dad was dying she lived with him and Mom for months, running the house and changing his diapers, and never complained. When our granddaughter died she screamed like she’d been shot, and that was maybe the worst moment ever. She still spends most of her day fretting over other people’s needs, driving me a little nuts with it sometimes. She gets everybody’s story at the first meeting, if I’m wondering later I just ask.

Now we’re both old and a little lazy, and too many of the people we care about are gone. She’s sick, I’m cranky and arthritic and more forgetful than ever, but we still get along just great. Since the pandemic sometimes days go by when she’s the only person I see, but mostly she’s the only person I want to see. When we’re out in company I miss half of what gets said, even with the hearing aids she found, but sometimes I check her expression and then I can tell. At home I look puzzled and she tells me, “It’s in the middle cabinet, third shelf on the right,” pissing me off slightly because I haven’t even asked. She always wants to watch TV but never cares what’s on, as long as I’m sitting there with her. 

So happy anniversary, my darling. I don’t know how many more we’ll have, but I know where I want to be. Thanks for all the hard work and tenderness and for fixing my life, again and again. 

 

The Danger Now

 

 

1

After several days of compulsive news following, I think I get it, sort of: how we could be here yet again: how after twenty years of investment and effort and planning, some of it not unintelligent, much of it basically well-meaning, “the greatest military on earth” (as we keep telling ourselves) can find itself unmistakably defeated by a comic opera foe: a bunch of pimply teens and their fatso uncles, in gowns and vests, variously bearded, toting a hodgepodge of Soviet and American weaponry, scowling at the cameras as they settle into the chairs of the former presidential office. How at the bitter end, cruelest of all, we find ourselves powerless even to protect our late friends and allies, constrained to beg for their lives (basically) from the Taliban, those nice guys who always pray, long and heartily, before they shoot a prisoner or rape a child. 

How, how, how? Start with the basics of “exit strategy.” Since the first moments of the invasion in 2001, it has always been official American policy to depart Afghanistan ASAP; the unanswerable questions have always been exactly when, exactly how. How to evacuate an untenable position under fire is a classic textbook problem in military strategy: the trick of letting go of the tiger's tail, when the tiger knows what you want and is just as smart as you are. An open-ended invasion was never an option; failing to assure the world that we were leaving would have undermined other alliances, perhaps even brought on a wider conflict. But a foe who knows your plans already has a huge advantage, and how, exactly, do you let go of that tiger?

So of course the right moment never came. Over the years our expedition morphed and grew from a righteous drive-by focused on catching Osama bin Laden (it never did) and dismantling Al Qaeda (check that, but it’s like eradicating Kudzu or toe fungus), to a mercy mission aimed at jerry-rigging some kind of government to replace the Taliban 1.0 regime we had swept aside, to an exercise in full-out nation building, replete with roads, schools, clinics, elections, and entirely unrealistic promises, explicit and implied.  

So, okay, the mission crept. Could we not simply have gone with that, opportunistically harvesting whatever strange fruit history might offer in this unlikely backwater? I will be haunted by this question. I spent a semester teaching in Korea, a year in the Philippines. In either country, an American visitor readily sees that nation building does not have to fail. Our engagement in the archipelago began as a spasmodic, bloody, late leap into the already discredited European game of colonialism (Mark Twain excoriated McKinley for it in a classic essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”). Over time the power grab evolved into something much more like a partnership, especially during World War II, and the mood there in 1988-89 was on balance firmly pro-American, albeit with some inevitable and bitter family grudges.

And Korea has been a huge success story, though the American public, addicted to set notions of victory, never seems to grasp this. Absent our massive intervention and continued presence over 71 years, the South, overrun by the North in 1950, would have been annexed to a nightmare slave state. Now, instead, it is a vibrant democracy and a keystone of our own national security. The investment has paid off handsomely and keeps on doing so. In 1984 my family and I experienced that rarest of phenomena, gratitude, wherever we went on the peninsula, and it was a wonderful thing.

Then in the yonder, past Vietnam’s huge shadow, are shining examples of spectacular success in rebuilding postwar Germany and Japan. 

So why not stick with the nation-building option? Given the horrors now before us (child “marriage”; reprisal murders; Sharia law; our own humiliation before the world, at vast cost to other alliances), the status quo immediately ante looks  golden. Could we not simply have gone on shoring it up from year to year, playing for time, hoping to turn Afghanistan into Korea over the long haul? 

Richard Haass argued something of the sort last night on The Eleventh Hour. “Biden didn’t have to do anything,” he insisted. Our troop contingent in the country had already fallen to a mere 2500 souls, and we had taken no battlefield casualties for nearly two years. Even the money hemorrhage was slowing. 

I will, as I say, be haunted by this vision of slow continued nation building. But yesterday I heard Fareed Zakaria dismiss it as “fantasy” several times, and finally, reluctantly, I have to agree. Our casualties had fallen so low pursuant to what Barry McCaffrey calls “Trump’s farcical deal with the Taliban.” They were no longer attacking us because they knew we were leaving anyway, sooner not later. The deal let them concentrate on killing Afghans instead. The situation was deteriorating, not stable. But at the first signs that we meant to renege and remain, the gunslinging mullahs would have renewed their attacks. We would have to respond, and our commitment would begin spiraling back toward the 130,000 troops it was at zenith. 

We could stay, but only at huge cost. Three days ago Anthony Blinken, flanked by top advisors George Winken and Sally Nod, explained very uncomfortably that “This is not in our national interest.” As in: sorry, it’s not in my interest to save your life just now. The next day the president, surfing a tsunami of criticism in his stubbornly defiant speech, did rather better in parsing the grim strategic imperatives. We are menaced by terrorism not just in Afghanistan, but all over the globe, and we can’t keep pouring all our resources down this one hole, where their main fruits seem to be corruption and resentment. Honor requires only that we give our friends every tool needed to fight their own fight, and we have done that now several times over. Sayonara.

We were always going to leave. The questions were only when and how.

 

2

 

What, then, of the botched execution of the pull-out? Even friendly commentators have been competing to outdo one another in scorn for this aspect. Monday morning quarterbacking and despondent rue are the order of the day. Why abandon Bagram so early, leaving us with just the one hideously vulnerable airport to use in evacuating citizens and friends? Why the bureaucratic foot-dragging over visas? Why, for heaven’s sake, fail to evacuate our collaborators, all likely murder targets now, before removing any more troops? Why not heed the pessisimistic intelligence forecasts not the optimistic ones? Why, why, why?

These are questions that strike at the heart of the Biden presidency. The mess in toto is exactly the kind of fiasco one expected of Trump, but which he evaded rather miraculously through his years of buffoonery on the high-wire of international relations, till he finally achieved it in spades at home, leaving willful fingerprints all over American history’s second most lethal disaster. But Biden was supposed to have all the opposite strengths: caution, experience, expertise, professionalism, good sense, decency. Yet for the last month or so, he suddenly seems determined to prove out the silly nickname, Sleepy Joe, that Trump tried to hang on him in the election. Writers in The Atlantic, of all places, have been faulting him for hubris, procrastination, callousness (!) and consistently poor judgment. 

But the truth IMO is just this, that when in this case has determined how. Everything else -- the chaos, the heartbreaking TV images, even the seeming bad faith to our friends -- follows from the unforeseen speed of the Taliban’s takeover. When the smoke clears, the question I expect to hear asked with some bitterness is, who, exactly, has betrayed whom here? We were not the ones dickering and dealing, saving our own lives if nothing else, as the Taliban marched unopposed into village after village down-country, then city after city. 

As in Vietnam, the folkloric takeaway for Americans is likely to be, “Those guys just wouldn’t fight,” but that is mostly a foul slander. Casualty figures prove unmistakably that Afghans will fight like the very devil, courageously as you like. But they don’t fight in our ways or for our reasons. Not for home, country, service, distant comrades, our God, or even Mom raised to the level of grand abstraction. Instead they fight for family, tribe, neighborhood, revenge, pride, strictly personal honor, Allah, a vividly expected afterlife, and above all personal survival, adroitly cutting deals as they go, in ways that can strike us as cynical or craven. We knew this about them from the first but somehow never really absorbed the knowledge, never adjusted to what we knew.

Is the administration then guilty only of a huge intelligence failure? Arguably not even that. Some things are just inherently unpredictable: earthquakes, avalanches, tomorrow's stock market close, next year's Super Bowl winner, election results sometimes, the formation of traffic jams, the movement of crowds, and above all, the outcomes of battles, because they depend on the independent calculations and existential choices of countless individuals. Bottom line: absolutely no one could have predicted the speed with which Afghan armed resistance would collapse: not the Taliban, not Afghan troops, not Ashraf Ghani, not Lloyd Austin, not Kreskin. All those Afghanis we saw at the airport on Monday, desperately trying to force their way onto military transports  -- they must have made much the same miscalculation as U.S. Intelligence and everyone else, or they wouldn't have been there. They thought their government could win, or could hold out a little longer, so they stayed until it was too late. They were Asia experts by definition, right there on the ground, but in the end their predictions proved no better than yours or mine. 

In an alternative universe somewhere, government security forces are still gamely holding out. Afghan girls are still getting up in the morning and going to school, fingers crossed, though the nation’s condition is clearly precarious. In yet another universe, Ghani’s troops have routed the Taliban, to universal astonishment. Because all this was possible until suddenly, in our universe, it no longer was. Uncertainty is the essence of the case, the sine qua non of having armed conflict in the first place. If the outcome were already certain, the side destined to lose would simply capitulate with no shots fired. That, actually, is pretty close to what did happen, trapping us there with one finger still caught in the door. But nothing is ever really obvious except in retrospect. What the military calls “cascading failure,” which you and I might call “snowballing” or “the butterfly effect,” can always take any situation in radically different directions. 

Of course you must try to predict and foresee, even though no one is ever very good at it. The Biden administration's Plan A for withdrawal seems to have been premised on the not unreasonable guesstimate that the Afghan army -- three times as large as the Taliban and far better armed -- would hold out for a year or so and might even win. A year would be ample time to evacuate citizens, troops, and friendlies, checking papers zealously to prevent opportunistic visa fraud. Meanwhile, the Pentagon now claims, we kept planning for worse contingencies. But the trouble with such plans is that, taken a hair too far, they can become the signal that triggers panic and CAUSES the defeat we are still hoping to avoid. So they were clearly slow-walked to the back burner. 

The same logic is what often makes generals and statesmen such liars, bereft of the candor so often and piously demanded by the press. Candor in the upper echelons can be a prosecutable crime, because in these contexts words are deeds and make things happen. If you are going to tell a reporter, "This operation has little chance," you might as well start shooting your own people. 

Hence the much-denounced "failure" to evacuate friendlies soon enough: had we attempted it three months ago, the country might well have fallen that much earlier, amid dilemmas identical to those we see now. Anyway many of our former aides and translators, no more soothsayers than anyone else, still wanted to stay at that point. Or so the president says.

Everyone knew that there were grave structural problems in the edifice history and the U.S. and the Afghan people had built in the country. But no one knew if it would really fail, much less when. In the end it came down as suddenly as a Florida condo, in just eleven days, to universal surprise, leaving us in this changed universe. The inexorability of anticipation turns out to have been a huge part of what went wrong. Once Trump, ever hugely self-deceived about his own negotiating prowess, bargained troop levels down from 15,500 to an untenable 2500, the writing was on the airport wall. (Some argue that he was deliberately setting a booby-trap for his successor. That sounds like more strategic thinking than Trump could  muster.) When Biden announced he would honor the bargain, the message was underlined and boldfaced. 

So when collapse began to seem possible over the long term, everyone began to act precipitously in their own interest, and the future wrote itself back into the present with astonishing speed. Soldiers who had once fought bravely now made other arrangements. Cops, clerks, and shopkeepers stopped reporting for work, and guards left their stations. Suddenly next year was today, and the condo had come down around our ears.

So now here we are, as they say. Our bitterly cold comfort has to be that there was never really a choice, or at least no good one. We had to withdraw, it hardly mattered when, and the withdrawal was always going to be chaotic, humiliating, and too fast. A lesson to be deeply remembered the next time we are tempted to a foreign military adventure.

In the aftermath, like everyone else, I find myself riveted by our desperate struggle to get our people out, against long odds. The next act promises to be a continued unbearable train wreck, and our absurd new dependence on the good will (!) of the Taliban to let possible victims through their cordon salts one’s mental wounds. Even so, I have a worse nightmare for the long term. It is that, as Bret Stephens put it in a recent piece, “Failure will follow us home from Afghanistan,” cascading right on back to our own homes and neighborhoods. The whole episode has been an object lesson in the way a distant whiff of failure can transform into the thing itself, suddenly right in your face. 

What if the debacle destroys Biden’s fragile coalition, sinks the infrastructure bill, deep-sixes electoral reform, even keeps him from fighting Covid effectively? What if the much-studied handful of voters who now determine American elections swing back to the Republicans in 2022 and 2024? We have our own homegrown Taliban, well-armed, red-hatted, supremely intolerant, and lately self-goaded into a near ecstasy of vindictive rage. If they come back into power, there will be no C-17s to take us to safety.