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THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, SEpTEmbER 11, 2021
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
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GUEST COLUMN
A tragic failure
I
n the end, there is exhaustion. And
grief.
“I have to tell our families who
were left behind that there is nothing left
to do,” wrote a friend and former mil-
itary reporter on Facebook. “I told one
last night but could not
bring myself to tell the
three others just yet.
I need to do that this
morning because the Tal-
iban are already hunt-
ing people down. They
need to scrub any trace
MIKE
of contact with me.”
FRANCIS
Now we know the
answer to Gen. David
Petraeus’ famous question, posed in
2003: “Tell me how this ends.”
It ends, sir, with all the good inten-
tions a mighty nation could muster piled
in a steaming heap at the Bagram air-
port. It ends, 20 years after it started,
with too much blood spilled, too many
lives upended and too many people
desperate.
In that sense, it resembles the begin-
ning, on Sept. 11, 2001, when hijacked
commercial aircraft plowed into the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon and tum-
bled from the sky into a field in Penn-
sylvania. It didn’t look like exhaustion
then, but we saw the grief right away.
Now, what is left, apart from our nec-
essary and inevitable political and mili-
tary postmortem, is to do all we can for
the ones left behind.
I know people who were actively
involved in helping Afghan people flee
their country before the Taliban could
smother the fragile liberties they had
grown to embrace. Some succeeded —
“This is a great day,” one told me, after
getting his unit’s Afghan interpreter
on a plane to Qatar — but others did
not. Tens of thousands of Afghans who
assisted America and its allies remain in
the country, blocked by the raised draw-
bridge of an American exit.
This is a tragic failure. Blame for the
deadly, inconclusive wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan should be shared among
four presidential administrations, but the
heart-wrenching scenes that unfolded
over the final weeks of August put an
exclamation point on the tragically mis-
guided 20-year episode.
It took America a generation to grap-
ple with the tragedy of the Vietnam War,
our nation’s first large-scale failed mili-
tary venture. That war killed more than
58,000 U.S. troops and 1.4 million peo-
ple total. It grew deeply unpopular at
home and returning veterans were cast
aside and left to reintegrate — or suf-
fer — individually. In some ways, every-
thing the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs has done since is to compensate
for the nation’s failings in Vietnam.
But the legacy of Vietnam will pale
next to the shadows cast by the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even in remote Oregon, where the
military footprint is relatively small, the
wars have spawned cycles of heartbreak
and anxiety, as families waited to learn
whether and when their loved ones would
U.S. Central Command
Marines honor their fallen during a ramp ceremony at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
THANK GOd, AT LEAST, u.S. TROOpS ARE NO
LONGER FIGHTING. WE mAy HOpE ANd pRAy THAT
FAmILIES IN OREGON ANd ACROSS THE COuNTRy
— THE SINGuLAR 1% THAT SERVE IN uNIFORm
— CAN ENJOy A pERIOd OF RELATIVE pEACE
AbROAd, WHILE WE WORK OuT OuR pOLITICAL
ANd pSyCHOLOGICAL TRAumAS AT HOmE.
deploy and for how long. Most Oregon
troops served with distinction, but almost
every major deployment of the Oregon
National Guard was punctuated by funer-
als, memorial services and periods of
anger and grief. The divorce rate from the
guard’s first large-scale deployment, in
Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004 to 2005,
was above 90%. Decades later, every vet-
eran who deployed seems to know some-
one who has taken his own life or drunk
himself into oblivion or worse. Oregon
will be reckoning with the effects of these
wars for generations, in towns from Asto-
ria to Ontario.
But at least most of the U.S. troops
came home. The tragedy of those who
were left behind endures to the present
moment. Chief among these unseen vic-
tims of the war are those who served
as military contractors, particularly
interpreters.
To those who haven’t been in a com-
bat theater, it’s difficult to appreciate just
how critical a role was played by the
local civilians who serve as interpreters
and fixers. An entire company of Amer-
ican soldiers, riding armored vehicles
bristling with weapons, can be rendered
useless if nobody is available to translate
the local language or explain the local
behaviors. And the unarmed people who
did this dangerous work often were des-
perately insecure, risking their own lives
and the lives of their family members to
work for the American military. I know
Iraqi interpreters whose children were
abducted and killed by people opposed to
the U.S. initiative. The insurgents were
trying to force them to quit. Often, they
succeeded.
It’s for these people that the U.S.
Special Immigrant Visa program was
introduced in 2006 and subsequently
expanded, though never broadly enough.
It was crippled in its early years by dem-
agoguery from the likes of U.S. Sen.
Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who
said he saw Special Immigrant Visas as a
vehicle to bring terrorists into the United
States — never mind that the visa hold-
ers are among the most heavily vetted
people to seek entry to this country.
Thankfully, there has been less con-
troversy about the current surge of Spe-
cial Immigrant Visa applicants from
Afghanistan. And while the program is
woefully insufficient to accommodate
the thousands of people endangered
by the sudden collapse of Afghanistan,
it offers the very minimum protection
this grateful nation should extend. If
ever there was a time for this nation to
throw open its gates and welcome the
refugees of war, it’s now.
These blood-stained decades have
taken thousands of U.S. lives, as well
as the lives of allies, enemies and civil-
ian families who had the misfortune
of trying to live while a war convulsed
their country. It has drained the U.S.
treasury, eroded national credibility and
contributed to the polarization of the
American public.
Thank God, at least, U.S. troops are
no longer fighting. We may hope and
pray that families in Oregon and across
the country — the singular 1% that
serve in uniform — can enjoy a period
of relative peace abroad, while we
work out our political and psychologi-
cal traumas at home.
And we can salvage some meager
national virtue by working tirelessly to
rescue those on whom we relied while
conducting wars on the other side of
the world.
mike Francis is a longtime Oregon
journalist who has extensively covered
military and veterans issues. He resides
on Astoria’s South Slope.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Return the favor
n November 2020, millions of voters
like me went to the polls and cast a bal-
lot for Joe Biden.
Now, with a relentless GOP attack on
our voting rights underway, I’m asking
President Biden to return the favor. It’s
time for Biden to go further than talking
about supporting voting rights legislation.
We need him to come out and fully support
ending the filibuster so the U.S. Senate can
finally pass voting rights legislation like
the For the People Act and the John Lewis
Voting Rights Advancement Act.
With the filibuster intact, these bills
stand little chance of passing. We need the
president to use his power of office to pres-
sure the Senate to end the filibuster and
clear a path for voting rights reform.
We can’t out-organize voter suppres-
sion. History will remember how President
Biden handles these attacks on our right to
vote. I’m urging him to do the right thing.
DEBORAH ALBRECHT
Gearhart
I
Least we can do
egarding the article on booster shots
for COVID (The Astorian, Sept. 7), I
applaud Clatsop County for moving ahead
to reduce infections and protect citizens.
If it’s been safe enough to give boost-
R
ers to those with health risk factors (immu-
nocompromised, cancer, etc.) outside the
eight-month post-vaccination time frame,
and without Food and Drug Administra-
tion approval, why is it unsafe for those
with less health risk factors? This makes
no sense.
As a health care worker, a senior and
more than six months past my last vacci-
nation, I was refused a booster by a local
drugstore chain. Those who request a third
booster should get it without delay so we
can move our county out of double-digit
positivity rates and give local hospitals a
break.
It’s the least we can do. Desperate times
call for desperate measures. But this one
is a no-brainer — a judgment call I invite
local pharmacies to consider.
DELORES SULLIVAN
Gearhart
Mask-wearing visitors beware
In late August, my husband and I made
a much-anticipated and long-overdue trip
to Astoria to relax and reconnect with fam-
ily after not visiting there since before the
COVID-19 pandemic began.
Two hours before we departed the
chain hotel where we stayed, our visit
turned into an extremely negative expe-
rience as a result of our encounter with a
non-mask-wearing staff member work-
ing the front desk. A conversation with her
on mask-wearing policy quickly became
confrontational and ended with her shout-
ing as she informed us repeatedly that we
should be staying home and not traveling
because of our viewpoint that she should
be wearing a mask while on duty inside.
There was a sign on the entrance door
of this hotel that stated that masks were
required inside — as well as the statewide
mask mandate in effect. It was our expec-
tation that the staff would be observing
that protocol for their safety and the safety
of their guests.
This was the worst lodging experience
that we have ever had in 50 years of exten-
sive traveling and it happened in the city
that I used to call home. As a native Asto-
rian, I find it embarrassing for Astoria to
have someone like this person representing
the city and greeting and interacting with
people who are visiting. After spending
almost $800 to stay at this hotel for two
nights, we were then subjected to some-
thing that absolutely no one should have to
experience.
SUSAN TAKKO
Oregon City