The President’s Men At Work
Keith Nightingale
Lost in the strident rhetoric of the election season is the fact that the President has several thousand constituents laboring on his and our behalf. This is a snapshot of our Afghanistan constituency. Look at the precinct in which they work as they canvas the neighborhood on our behalf.
These are two low level precinct workers but they carry all of us on their already burdened shoulders and only wish for both a safe return and some regard for their campaign services. It is good we cannot see the faces for it is easier to think of them as all of us which truly they are. One has a name but that is only a formality. Both are Us.
They are posted into one of the continuously vertically challenging districts our Nation’s leadership has chosen to place our representatives. They have had a hard tough climb to this point and with a combination of exhaustion and duty, they begin to understand their neighborhood. They are looking for the opposition at a distance much farther than they can presently engage absent technical assistance but that is the idea-once detected, they can track the approach to where they can meaningfully engage. For this eventuality, they are fully prepared.
They have just recently arrived. The cold has not yet overcome the sweat of exertion to reach this point. They still wear all their gear and have a preponderance of lethality in various forms which Infantry are wont to do. Note the wide variety of M203 rounds carried by one and the spare belt of ammo carried by the other. They are freshly here, awaiting their bodies to recover in this high altitude oxygen thin sun scorched air and to begin the business of scouting and slaying. They are our Infantry and our most important constituency which we too easily either ignore or forget.
Between them they have a comprehensive booklet of call signs, frequencies and alternate support options. This is their election candidate handbook. These junior enlisted have vastly more firepower and technology at their fingertips than did many senior officers of past conflicts. Yet, like those that preceded them, they have little personal protection other than their uniform, training and spirit. Most importantly and most powerfully, they have each other. Their closeness is not only physical, it is emotional and it will bind them forever. A point they probably do not yet realize. These are the President’s and our constituents. They will not hear or see the debates and may not vote. What they may do is kill or be killed as a matter of our National policy.
We should take this image to our polling points and remember one of our greatest personal responsibilities which is to choose what is best for our people that cannot choose their duties-they live with them and by doing so, work for us.