Chrenkoff's Good News From Afghanistan, Part 5

In my earliest political memory my father and I are hunching over a radio set, listening with the sound turned down to Radio Free Europe and the news of armed resistance against the Soviet invaders springing up around Afghanistan. The year is 1979, I am 7 years old, and this is the first time I'm hearing about the mysterious and romantic mudjahedin and their struggle against the Red Army...

I remember similar broadcasts, though I was a quarter of a world away, and I too thought the Afghan Mujahadeen romantic freedom fighters.

I don't have much to add to that. I was a kid. Things turned out a lot less dazzling than I had hoped for, to understate by several orders of magnitude.

I always wished the US could have gone in after the Soviet withdrawal and done what they are doing now, but that was impossible. Moving into a nation on the Soviet border would have been tantamount to declaring war, and we know the Soviets had nukes.

But at last we have done it, and it is going well.