A former Marine officer on the rapid takeover by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
In 2010, during his first weeks as a company executive officer with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment in northern Helmand Province in Afghanistan, Timothy Kudo fielded a question from two of his Marines over the radio: "There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?" |
"I wanted confirmation from a higher authority to do the abhorrent," Kudo wrote in a 2015 essay for Times Opinion, "something I'd spent my entire life believing was evil." But he was that authority. For him, it was a moment into which all the brutal moral calculus of war was distilled. |
Kudo, then a first lieutenant, gave the order to shoot and within a few seconds the two men on the side of the road were dead. |
In the months that followed, Kudo supervised combat operations at the edge of the Musa Qala district. His company conducted counterinsurgency and clearing operations in Taliban hot spots throughout the area. He was there for less than a year, but the memories of his service, and the painful costs of war on all sides, have stayed with him. |
In a new guest essay for Opinion, Kudo charts his reaction to the rapid and violent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in the past few weeks, and the chaos it has unleashed. For him, the Taliban resurgence has taken the form of a decade-long nightmare that has suddenly become real. |
The timing and swiftness of the fall of Afghanistan has forced many of the nearly 800,000 Americans who served in that war into an unexpected moral reckoning. How could they have sacrificed so thoroughly for something that could be dismantled and swept away in a matter of weeks? Was their belief in their service a lie? |
Wars never end on the battlefield. They go on raging in the hearts and minds of those who fight them and those whose lives are shattered by them on the ground. |
We know that no history of war is ever complete without the accounts of its soldiers. Kudo's is just one of many we will hear in the coming years. |
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