Obama’s Afghanistan plan gets mixed reviews from grunts at Fort Campbell
By Kevin Sieff,
WashPost
Published: June 26
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — Pfc. Rob Nunez was gulping Miller Lite from a plastic cup when the subject of President Obama’s plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan came up: 10,000 troops were being pulled out this year, said a friend at a roadside bar on the fringes of the Fort Campbell Army base. The rest of the 33,000 “surge” troops would leave in 2012.
Nunez swallowed his beer, let out a stream of profanity before landing on a sentence that he repeats a lot these days. “It’s worthless, and it’s never going to end.”
He had just returned from one of the war’s most terrifying corners to a base that has shouldered much of the U.S. troop surge. In the past 18 months, more than 20,000 Fort Campbell soldiers have cycled through Afghanistan; 131 have been killed.
Nunez, 21, who spent about a year in Konar province near the Pakistani border, cared little that the commander in chief had declared Wednesday night that the “tide of war is receding.” He and his friends, some of the country’s youngest war veterans, have little interest in military policy anymore. Not after Konar.
(More here.)
WashPost
Published: June 26
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — Pfc. Rob Nunez was gulping Miller Lite from a plastic cup when the subject of President Obama’s plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan came up: 10,000 troops were being pulled out this year, said a friend at a roadside bar on the fringes of the Fort Campbell Army base. The rest of the 33,000 “surge” troops would leave in 2012.
Nunez swallowed his beer, let out a stream of profanity before landing on a sentence that he repeats a lot these days. “It’s worthless, and it’s never going to end.”
He had just returned from one of the war’s most terrifying corners to a base that has shouldered much of the U.S. troop surge. In the past 18 months, more than 20,000 Fort Campbell soldiers have cycled through Afghanistan; 131 have been killed.
Nunez, 21, who spent about a year in Konar province near the Pakistani border, cared little that the commander in chief had declared Wednesday night that the “tide of war is receding.” He and his friends, some of the country’s youngest war veterans, have little interest in military policy anymore. Not after Konar.
(More here.)
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