From The Wall Street Journal:
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 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.
He turned away from the others on the plane and cried.
Since the first U.S. troops arrived in 2001, Afghanistan has become a generational war. The youngest recruits stepping off the bus at boot camp today were born after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that ignited the war they may soon fight.
Col. Randy Hoffman served seven combat tours in Afghanistan, six of them highly classified missions, and one stint in Iraq. Afghanistan brought him promotions. It rewarded the rural boy from Danville, Ind., with a bronze star medal for valor. It transformed a middling student into a scholar of history and war.
Afghanistan also nearly cost Randy his sanity. It buried friends. It almost ended his career. It ripped ragged edges around a gentle personality.
It strained his marriage and frightened his children. The family began referring to itself as Hoffmanistan, a dark joke reflecting Afghanistan’s long reach into their daily lives.
Eighteen years after the Sept. 11 hijackings spurred the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies, American troops are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
Randy first kissed Dawn on the night before he left for boot camp in 1985.
She was the little sister of his best friend, and he had known her since she was 6 years old. They grew up during an era of skateboards and mullets in Danville, a town of 4,000 in the center of Indiana.
Dawn was an honor student at Danville High School. Randy brought up the rear. He gathered the nerve to ask her out when she was 15, and he was 18.
After Randy left for the Marines, Dawn waited for him. He earned a spot in an elite Force Reconnaissance platoon. She studied nursing.
They married in 1991, and the couple settled into an upstairs apartment in the house of Randy’s parents. They stocked it with furnishings salvaged from their childhood bedrooms.
Randy attended Indiana University and earned an officer’s commission. Military service was part of his heritage. His father and two uncles were Marines.
He was 2 years old in 1968 when his uncle Terry Hoffman, a helicopter crew chief, was shot down in Vietnam. The aircraft split in half, and Terry’s body was thrown far from the wreckage. He was still listed as missing in action after Saigon’s fall in 1975. Randy saw his grandmother cover her mouth in shock as she watched TV reports of the last Americans boarding helicopters, leaving her son behind.
A Vietnamese farmer found Terry’s remains and kept them. When the farmer died, his family gave a jawbone to authorities, who passed it along to a U.S. casualty-recovery team.
In 1994, Randy’s first duty as a second lieutenant was to escort Uncle Terry’s remains home. He knelt and handed his grandmother the American flag, folded tightly into a triangle, on behalf of “the president of the United States, the United States Marine Corps and a grateful nation.”
The day of the Sept. 11 attacks, Randy was at a Marine Corps school at the base near Quantico, Va. He had been having premonitions—a heads-up from God, he believed—about a terrible event.
Military officers asked students if any spoke Urdu, Arabic, Farsi or Pashto. Randy had studied Arabic in college, but he didn’t feel fluent enough to put up his hand. The military decided any Arabic was good enough.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (sorry if you encounter a paywall)
As has been mentioned before, TPV is not a political blog, but PG thought the first paragraphs of the OP were quite effectively written.
The article includes a lot of photos from Randy’s past and his present as a balding 56-year-old colonel with nearly 40 years of service and a “textbook case” of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) who is training recruits straight out of high school to be Marines. In part because of Randy’s experience, that training now includes teaching about the emotional and physical toll that combat imposes on soldiers and how to identify the symptoms of PTSD.
Randy’s wife, Dawn, says, “I don’t think that PTSD ever goes away.”
Another paragraph from the OP:
Dawn has turned her nurse’s training into a career helping troops come home. She fields calls at all hours from troubled vets and worried spouses. The wife of an Afghanistan vet phoned last year to say her husband had been on a bender for days. Dawn tracked down another veteran who went to the couple’s house, took the vet to an emergency room and then enrolled him in an alcohol-abuse program run by the VA.