President Obama flew to Dover Air Force Base Tuesday to honor the 30 American troops killed in Afghanistan Saturday.
Yes, the war continues. We just don’t notice it very often. This time, we were shocked into remembering when Afghan insurgents apparently shot down a Chinook helicopter with seven Afghan soldiers and 30 American servicemen aboard — 22 of them Navy SEALs from the Team Six unit that had killed Osama bin Laden.
Among the dead was Chief Warrant Officer David Carter, a member of the Colorado National Guard and a helicopter pilot. There’s a Facebook page set up in his honor called “You Will Be Missed Dave Carter.” One of the people who posted on the page said he remembered asking Carter why he would return to Afghanistan, and Carter saying “that this is what he does.”
The troops were on a mission to rescue commandos who had been looking for a Taliban leader in the Tangi Valley, a place most of us have never heard of and few of us can even visualize. The commandos had come under fire. The Chinook, reportedly while trying to land, was apparently hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
None of the SEALs killed on this mission was on the bin Laden mission. But they could have been.
There is a powerful story in last week’s New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle, detailing what happened on the night of the Abbotabad raid.
A senior Defense Department official told Schmidle, “This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.”
On that night of May 1, he reported, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted 12 other missions.
The Saturday raid was simply one more dangerous night raid — but one that went terribly wrong. Some of the bodies that came home to Dover had not yet been identified by the time Obama arrived. Van Williams, the public affairs chief for Dover’s mortuary affairs operations, told reporters that the crash “was so horrific” that some of the bodies were unrecognizable.
This, they tell us, is the price of war. And these troops, who risk their lives daily, were paying the ultimate price for a war that most Americans, according to the polls, no longer wish to fight.
In a speech just after the killing of bin Laden, Barack Obama announced the end of the surge and the withdrawal of 30,000 U.S. troops.
For many Americans, killing bin Laden means that the mission was accomplished. But there are still 100,000 troops remaining and a timetable to bring most of them home.
The Taliban like to say, “The Americans have a clock, but we have the time.” The real timeless truth is that, as long as war continues, brave men and women will die.
