I could justify fighting in Afghanistan — until the Boston bombing
So says Thomas Gibbons-Neff in this piece in today's Washington Post. WHy should we care that he says that? 13 at the time of the September 11 attacks that justified our going into Afghanistan, he served two tours there as a Marine rifleman. His family home is a few blocks from the blast site in Boston. As he writes,
When a relative told me, his voice brimming with anger, that he wanted to kill those responsible, I couldn’t help feeling that I had somehow failed. My family sounded like any of the Marines I’d met after a comrade stepped on an improvised explosive device: angry, confused, spiteful. War had seeped through my front door, and now my five-foot-tall flower child of a mother wanted revenge served cold.Let's back up a bit. Because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev supposedly told investigators that the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the reason he and his brother did the bombing, Gibbons-Neff had asked himself
Had my war brought the horrors of battle home?Gibbons-Neff is now a student at Georgetown, where he had the occasion to ask Hamid Karzai a question for which he did not get a satisfactory answer. He has offered us a remarkable piece. Someone who served, who experienced the horrors of war to supposedly
