A Tale of Two Cities

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Charles Dickens’ epic story of the French Revolution was required reading when I was in Junior High. I don’t remember much more than the opening line, regarding the rest as very long and, in my adolescent judgment, tedious. But what did I know at 14? Since then I’ve often thought how each moment of our lives holds the possibility of it being the best or the worst of our times—or maybe both, or neither.  Like beauty, the appraisal of any day’s worth seems to reside in the eye of the beholder. Dickens apparently viewed his times that way.

This week’s headlines took me down a rabbit hole of reflection after I responded to a Facebook observation likening the Kabul evacuation with a similar debacle in Saigon many years ago. While not Dickensonian in detail, our story is another tale of two cities, separated by continents and decades, with characters both foreign and familiar, played out within our own lifetime. And as I watched people clamoring to find sanctuary on American cargo airships, and recalled those who reached, and fell, from American helicopters in 1975, it was hard not to apply the Yogiism, “It’s déjà vu all over again,” or to reach back even further to the wisdom of a prior millennium telling us, “There is nothing new under the sun.”*

Can it possibly be that the events unfolding in Afghanistan have thrust us into a time warp, setting the geopolitical clock back 46 years? Ironically my first exposure to Dickens’ Tale came when American soldiers waded en masse onto the beaches of SE Asia in 1965, escalating our presence after a decade of advising and supporting those we hoped would someday be able to stand on their own. While following Sidney Carton, Charles Carton and Lucie Manette on both sides of the English Channel, my ears and eyes were trained on the nightly body counts, military actions and civilian protests brought to me by Walter, Chet and David over dinner. Little did I know then that we were only midway through a twenty-year ordeal of search and destroy, fire fights, blockades and bombing runs that would test our resolve to wage a war in which victory never seemed our ultimate objective. Yet wars of attrition take their greatest toll on those with less to gain and more to lose, and in Vietnam, as in Afghanistan, that was the part we had elected to play.  When we left Saigon in 1975, the point was proved in ways that seemed an assurance we would never do this again.

I can’t know what Charles Dickens would think if he could compare what we are now reliving to what he portrayed of the violence that so entangled London and Paris when America was uttering its first infant cries. But I suspect his historical mind would be attuned to how, on a more global scale, two cities once again had become the focal point for both the aspirations and futilities of the people and nations that tied them together.

What we have witnessed and experienced over the past seven decades has few parallels to Dickens’ novel, yet is a tale of two cities whose fates bear remarkable similarities to each other.  Looked at side by side they provide us with what, I suspect, will become grist for the investigations, analyses, critiques, second-guessing and finger-pointing that will inevitably follow this most recent “worst of times” moment for our country.  In the Tale which we have helped author…

·      Both of our military engagements in Vietnam and Afghanistan followed the unsuccessful incursions of two other nations, France and Russia respectively, in these same theaters of operation, that ended in surrender and withdrawal;

·      Both of our decisions to send troops were the result of noble (to save them from the oppressive rule of communist and tribal terrorist regimes, both of which we accused of attacking us) and ignoble (to reap the benefits of greater access to and control over regions holding strategic and economic interest to our country) reasons.

·      Both of our military commitments exacted a horrific toll on American soldiers (more than 58,000 killed in Vietnam, more than 2,300 in Afghanistan), on those physically and emotionally scarred by combat, on their families, and on the native peoples of those lands who lost lives and livelihoods as a result of their being either allies or enemies, or just finding themselves collateral damage of war’s carnage.

·      Both Vietnam and Afghanistan proved to be political miscalculations about the feasibility of limited war and the wisdom of imposing our political agendas and values on people for whom our aspirations for them were never embraced nor could ever be sustained.

·      Both involvements ended in the hasty withdrawal of our military and political assets, creating a surge of desperate evacuees trying to flee from the reprisals that were certain to befall them for the cooperation they extended to us. Who can possibly know the extent of the sufferings endured by those we left behind in Saigon, and are now leaving to a dire fate in Kabul?

Our lengthy and costly commitments in Vietnam and Afghanistan have left us with many more questions than answers. The short- and long-term affects of these military and political incursions on our country and its reputation and on our leaders and their credibility will take years, if not lifetimes, to fully assess. More telling is the impact on the lives of those who fought for causes that now seem futile, many who bear the physical and emotional wounds from their service to our country. And who can fathom the lasting damage to the kith and kin of those who gave their last full measure of devotion, leaving them to drink of the cup of anguish and bitterness for what they and theirs have suffered in this, our latest tale of two cities.

My hope is that we will learn from this second global misadventure what we failed to appropriate from the one that so jolted our nation five decades ago. Times do change and technologies advance our civilization, but human nature is the constant that shapes history. Saigon and Kabul bear witness to the price we have paid—and are now paying—when the lessons of that history are forgotten or ignored, forcing us to live with the consequences of mistakes and misjudgments we have so regrettably repeated. That is, for me, and perhaps for you, the most compelling takeaway from this tale of two cities that we have rewritten in our times.