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by Walter Herd ’83
From Young Hall to Afghanistan
I missed my 20th class reunion in Danville. I did not get to see my old roommates, classmates, and fraternity brothers or joke with them about who had gone gray or bald. Instead, I was in Afghanistan, where I spent most of last year as the commander of several thousand men from seven countries in the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force.
Afghanistan is about the size of Texas, or, for those with a more global perspective, slightly smaller than Germany. Running through the middle are the 24,000-foot Hindu Kush mountains. Around the perimeter of the country is the only major road network. “Major” is a relative term. At its best place, it’s a two-lane highway.
A poor nation with few raw materials, Afghanistan has been at war for 25 years. About three-quarters of its people are illiterate. Most will never see a real doctor, eat a Big Mac, go to a movie theater, or even see a stoplight. In the past 50 years, they’ve gone from a monarchy, to a communist dictatorship, to utter chaos, to an extremist Islamic state. Now, they’re fighting for something called “democracy.”
A major player in Afghanistan’s recent history was the Soviet Union, which attempted to run Afghanistan with a puppet government from 1979 to 1989. During that period, the Russians systematically destroyed what little infrastructure the country had. They also killed 1.3 million citizens and ran about three times that number out of their homeland into refugee camps in Pakistan.
After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the leadership vacuum was eventually filled by the Taliban government. (“Talib” means “student.”) Under the Taliban, women were not able to attend school, walk in public without being covered and escorted, have a job, or in any way choose their own fate. During my year in the country, I seldom saw an adult Afghan woman’s face.
Of course, it was this chaos of an uneducated, impoverished, and angry society that allowed the terrorist organization Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a safe haven to train their soldiers and to plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. They are still trying to resist any legitimate government, but they were unable to stop the Afghan people from choosing their first democratically elected president last fall.
My work in Afghanistan involved Special Forces “A-Camps” placed around the country. At these camps, made up of a few Special Forces soldiers and many indigenous soldiers, we were able to solve local problems at the most basic level. We built everything from schools to police stations. Our clinics saw hundreds of people every day. In every case, after coalition forces established a permanent presence in an area, the local nationals eventually began to support the process of reconstruction and establishment of a central democratic government.
My experiences in Afghanistan span a wide gamut of events. I’ve had tea with Afghan President Karzai and eaten goat meat with illiterate village elders. I’ve negotiated with warlords on the Pakistan border and dined with generals in the Afghan army. I’ve shivered in the high mountain snowstorms and overheated in the dusty desert lowlands. I have been observed through the scopes of countless weapons and viewed other men the same way. I’ve helped develop and execute national policy. And I’ve seen too many flag-draped coffins and awarded too many Purple Hearts. But this is the cost of freedom. Every night as I closed my eyes, I thanked God to have been born an American.
On the one hand, it seems like a lifetime since I left “Olde Centre.” On the other, it was only yesterday. The journey has taken me through Central America, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and most recently Afghanistan. Even now, I find myself thinking about what I learned at Centre: not what to think, but how to think.
I remember sitting in the classrooms of Young Hall studying history. By the grace of God, if we watch closely, we can see history being written.
If you get a chance, pass along to the next generation that “the price of freedom is high, but the price of slavery is unaffordable.”
Col. Walter M. Herd ’83 is deputy director of operations for the Army Special Operations Command, based at Fort Bragg, N.C. He will be reassigned this summer to Fort Knox, Ky., where he will again command an Army brigade. His e-mail address is walter.herd@us.army.mil.
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