My relationship to Afghanistan and the US engagement there is a deeply foundational one for me as a person. I graduated West Point right before 9/11 and overnight reality went from looking at a career where some shorter deployments might have happened to one where warzones would become a major part of my life.
What's most painful when thinking about Afghanistan, and something this movie illustrates very clearly is how badly we let so many people down due to how we left. Closest to hear are all the soldiers, interpreters, informants, and others who directly assisted us. I can't go into details, but I ended up in a position where, much like the Green Berets in the movie I was deeply involved in the efforts to prepare the Afghans to be able to defend themselves and many of the men I interacted with became personal friends, most of whom I don't know what happened to, and in the cases I do know, I would rather not. Not because almost all of them are dead, but because most of them died badly.
But there's also others. There are the US and Coalition soldiers who died, all the way from men under my command, to close personal friends all the way back to Academy. One of my best friends lost both his legs, one eye and is almost deaf, a you female lieutenant who I mentored over a long time spends the rest of her life in a wheelchair after her back was broken. And then there are all those who never came home.
Finally it's the rest of the Afghan people, and I'm thinking specifically of the women. I recall the almost disbelieving joy of so many young women when we first drove the Talibans away and I watched over the years how girls who had earlier at best only to hope they were married off to a man that wasn't to unkind to where they could now dream of becoming teachers, doctors, writers and so on. And now, predictably, it's all being reversed at express speed, where women can now no longer attend any school after elementary school.
Of course there's also the billions of dollars spent. For what? When Biden gave his speech announcing the withdrawal he made it sound like getting Bin Ladin was what we came for. That's insulting to pretty much the entire effort. To me, all the people I mentioned above where betrayed. They made sacrifices, often the ultimate one, for nothing.
This movie is a monument over this betrayal and the waste. It's beautiful photography and score emphasizes the story of increasing desperation and hopelessness, where at the point the movie begins, 8 months before the withdrawal, there is hope, and the young general protagonist is confident, and he was probably right to be. At that point, the war effort had lead to a situation where the Afghan forces could be effective with the support of just a few thousand lightly equipped US forces supporting them and no one in their right mind could have expected that achievement would be thrown away so flippantly. The moment the withdrawal becomes a fact you see the commander and the men shrinking back with the realization that it was all over.
The movie impresses with how close it has been able to take the viewers to the events, and capturing the feel of events to a point where it becomes difficult to watch because of the emotions it awakens. I can't recommend enough that everyone watches this.
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