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The Bulwark: President Bush, Do the Right Thing: Endorse Harris
The Bulwark - President Bush, Do the Right Thing: Endorse Harris
You did much to defend America against international threats to freedom. You must now help us defeat the domestic threat.
Will Selber
Nov 02, 2024
I SERVED FOR NEARLY 1,500 DAYS in Iraq and Afghanistan under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. However, I spent the most time deployed—and, more importantly, in the field—under former President Bush’s administration.
I went downrange for the first time in 2006 as part of a police transition team tasked with training the Iraqi police. It turned out to be the most dangerous place on the battlefield. Iranian-backed Shia militants had infested the ranks of those we were meant to train, and our “partners” were openly trying to kill us. Even though we confiscated their phones before every patrol, we routinely got ambushed, and our “partners” fled each time. Those of us who survived bear visible and invisible scars, many of them the result of witnessing the sorts of things that one witnesses during a civil war: gang rapes, torture, complex suicide bombers, and some events that I still cannot write about because when I do, I break down and weep.
Despite the horrors of that deployment, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2008 as part of a provincial reconstruction team. By 2008, President Bush’s decision to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had yielded tangible results in Iraq. In Afghanistan, however, the storm clouds were on the horizon. The Taliban, with Pakistani ISI support, were inflicting casualties across the battlefield—and off it. At the beginning of that year, six people died when a hotel in Kabul was bombed; Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Taliban government’s first deputy leader and interior minister, planned the attack.
While my team tried mightily to expand the nascent Islamic Republic’s reach to the hinterlands, the Taliban responded by killing my contractors who were trying to improve roads for all Afghans. They also killed my good friend, Capt. Jesse Melton, and a member of my team, Senior Airman Jonathan Yelner, and they left my interpreter, Ritchie, who is now an American citizen, a double amputee. We endured unimaginable hardship because we believed in the mission—in freedom, security, and peace.
/snip
You did much to defend America against international threats to freedom. You must now help us defeat the domestic threat.
Will Selber
Nov 02, 2024
I SERVED FOR NEARLY 1,500 DAYS in Iraq and Afghanistan under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. However, I spent the most time deployed—and, more importantly, in the field—under former President Bush’s administration.
I went downrange for the first time in 2006 as part of a police transition team tasked with training the Iraqi police. It turned out to be the most dangerous place on the battlefield. Iranian-backed Shia militants had infested the ranks of those we were meant to train, and our “partners” were openly trying to kill us. Even though we confiscated their phones before every patrol, we routinely got ambushed, and our “partners” fled each time. Those of us who survived bear visible and invisible scars, many of them the result of witnessing the sorts of things that one witnesses during a civil war: gang rapes, torture, complex suicide bombers, and some events that I still cannot write about because when I do, I break down and weep.
Despite the horrors of that deployment, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2008 as part of a provincial reconstruction team. By 2008, President Bush’s decision to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had yielded tangible results in Iraq. In Afghanistan, however, the storm clouds were on the horizon. The Taliban, with Pakistani ISI support, were inflicting casualties across the battlefield—and off it. At the beginning of that year, six people died when a hotel in Kabul was bombed; Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Taliban government’s first deputy leader and interior minister, planned the attack.
While my team tried mightily to expand the nascent Islamic Republic’s reach to the hinterlands, the Taliban responded by killing my contractors who were trying to improve roads for all Afghans. They also killed my good friend, Capt. Jesse Melton, and a member of my team, Senior Airman Jonathan Yelner, and they left my interpreter, Ritchie, who is now an American citizen, a double amputee. We endured unimaginable hardship because we believed in the mission—in freedom, security, and peace.
/snip
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