The Bravest Thing Col. Randy Hoffman Ever Did Was to Stop Fighting
Enmeshed in Afghanistan for much of his adult life, the officer spurred the Marine Corps to confront the traumas of America’s longest war.
www.wsj.com
Don't get the wrong idea from reading the title. Col. Hoffman didn't "spur" the Marine Corps. (I assume they meant "spurn." I swear, the quality of editing has plummeted in the age of spell check and online news media). He simply had the courage to turn down a prestigious command position out of concern for his own ability to properly lead. The article is excellent, plotting Col. Hoffman's Marine Corps career along the timeline of US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
WSJ has a paywall. If you cannot get through, PM me your email and I can send it to you, in which case WSJ will let you read a couple of articles/month. I promise not to sell your email address to spam.com
It is a lengthy piece with numerous pictures so it is too large to copy/paste in its entirety, but I will copy the first portion:
Marine commando Randy Hoffman’s plane took off from Kabul, climbed over the jagged mountains and turned toward home.
Somewhere down there was his tent, a piece of canvas stretched across a pit he had carved into a high-altitude ridge. Randy had spent most of the previous 2½ years in the mountains along the Pakistan border, turning Afghan villagers into soldiers.
Rugs covered the tent’s dirt floor. He had a wood stove for heat and collected catalogs of farm equipment and RVs to remind him of home in Indiana. A metal thermos stored the goat’s milk and cucumber drink delivered each morning by the mountain men who fought alongside him. He and the Afghans would sit on a dirt bench, talking about poetry, faith and honor, and how to make it through the next day alive.
Randy’s camp watched over the narrow passes and smuggling paths used by al Qaeda and Taliban militants to sneak into Afghanistan from Pakistan. He kept mortars aimed at likely approaches. At times, he was the only American for miles.
On Randy’s last trip down the mountains, a caravan of Afghan fighters in Toyota pickups escorted him on the seven-hour drive to a U.S. base. From there, he caught a helicopter to Kabul and trimmed the beard he had grown so he wouldn’t stand out as a target during gunfights.
It was July 2005. As Randy headed home, he couldn’t escape one thought. U.S. troops had been in Afghanistan for three years and nine months—as long as they had fought in World War II. Yet the Afghan war wasn’t close to won.
On the flight home, Randy pictured the many villagers lost in combat, men he had come to admire for their courage and strict sense of right and wrong. He thought about those left legless by militant bombings and now facing a life ahead in mud-brick compounds perched on mountainsides.
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