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a story so often told that it's passed into Legend around the hills of Northwest Georgia It's A Tale Of Love loss and liquor a story folks have been telling each other for almost a hundred years but unlike a lot of old myths and legends that you hear around these parts this one is 100% true and they got the documentation down in Carterville to prove it ladies and gentlemen this is the story of fast Eddie pedmore according to his birth certificate Edward Lee pedmore Jr was born on July 13th of 1904 and a little town called
Varnell just off of Route 2 his daddy was a mechanic worked his way into fixing automobiles after they came commercially available and could have ended up quite a wealthy man but unfortunately for his family Eddie Lee senior was a drunk and sometimes only brought home maybe one or two days wages a week but then in early 1920 the federal government instituted the Volstead Act which banned the sale and manufacturer Of alcoholic beverages and the era of prohibition had begun now Eddie senior could have taken the opportunity to dry himself out and find his way back
to Jesus but he didn't want to live in a world where he couldn't get a drink even if it meant living beyond his means yet in doing so Eddie senior ended up owing money to the kind of folks you really don't want to owe money to they gave him a choice make weekly liquor runs up to Chattanooga Across the Tennessee State Line or be found hanging from a popler tree Eddie senior chose the former and after getting his hands on an old model te he chopped that thing down and souped up its engine until it
was nothing short of Hell on Wheels Eddie senior's old Ford was now fit to outrun any cop car in America the only problem was he wasn't nearly as gifted a driver as he was a mechanic one night following a Blistering Pursuit by a state revenue man Eddie Senor lost control of his vehicle kened off the highway and smashed into an oak tree doing almost 100 m an hour the revenue men following him didn't bother trying to put out the fireball they let that Bootlegger burn and then simply waited to see who showed up missing the
crash left 17-year-old Eddie Jr and his mama lady named Mary with only one way of providing for themselves And that involved Eddie Jr approaching the bootleggers and offering to work on their automobiles you see to Eddie Jr his dad had always been his hero because from where he was standing his dead beat Lush of a father had one day cleaned up his act at least partially anyway and had suddenly started bringing home hundreds of dollars a month Eddie Jr also noticed how skilled his daddy was at fixing up Automobiles and was something that he Paid
attention to from a very early age he might not have been anywhere near as experienced as his father but he was the Natural Choice for the Bootleggers who wanted someone who'd stay quiet and stay loyal Eddie was obviously very eager to follow in his Father's Footsteps not just because it meant providing for his family but because he felt that Eddie senior would have been proud the money was never an attraction most of it went to his mom anyway Working with the Bootleggers meant Eddie got to work on cars all day and that's what made him
happy but what made him even happier was getting to drive them once he was a respected member of the bootlegging operation Eddie's bosses started letting him test drive the cars that he worked on just to make sure that they could handle being taken to Full Throttle and that ladies and gentlemen is how they discovered Eddie was a goddamned Natural the Bootleggers had carved out a kind of racetrack out there in the woods and Eddie was was beating the track times of some of their very best Runners so when Eddie was around 19 or 20 they
asked him to start running liquor to Chattanooga for him using almost the exact same route on which his father had lost his life every night when Eddie told his mama that he was heading out and not to wait up for him she'd worry herself sick But she was just about the only one that did rumors started to run wild through local and state law enforcement the bootleg had a new driver and he seemed nigh Unstoppable some officers had never seen anything like it and wondered how in the hell they were going to catch someone with
such high levels of confidence and skill this new guy did things no one else dared and the cops started to think that the Bootleggers had drafted in some Kind of professional from out of state little did they know it was young Eddie Jor behind the wheel and before long Eddie's nickname was upgraded from Junior to fast Eddie fast Eddie was bringing home money hand over fist with most of it going to his mom but without a taste for the liquor that made him holler rich as you might say he didn't have much which to spend
his personal portion of the treasure he kept squirreling it away some place Letting it accumulate and only occasionally taking some out to buy new shoes or a birthday present for his mama automobiles were his whole life so fast that he didn't concern himself with much else but then one day some of his fellow Runners decided it was time for a little Bootlegger Bar Mitzvah which involved driving him over to a cat house over near kadaa to get him acquainted with some of the ladies there fast Eddie had never been with a woman before and it
Said that he looked like a deer cotton headlights as all those peaches lined up in front of him each looking fine as wine Eddie had the cash to pick two maybe even three girls but he only chose one a girl around the same age as him named Lily may not much is known about young Lily may only that she was an orphan and then spent most of her life in an infamously unfit Reformatory before finding employment at the kohada cat house Lily may had Experience in such matters and fast Eddie did not then true to
the nickname he'd so deservedly earned Eddie felt deeply and madly in love according to folks who knew him Eddie talked of nothing else but Lily for a week straight until finally he drove on back to kohad cat house and told Lily may that he wanted to marry her the cat house Madame laughed when she heard the news and said it would take $500 to buy Lily may out of service Folks say that she looked just about Plum speechless when Eddie pulled out a w of bills from his pocket and then he and Lily may left
hand in hand that very same day as The Story Goes Eddie moved his mama and LLY May into a place on Alpharetta drive just across from where Maple Grove Baptist Church stands today and for about a year or two they Liv there in peace with Eddie's identity as the Bootlegger's Ace Runner being a closely guarded Secret but then one night a rainstorm left the highway slicker than a greased Pig and for the first time in his career fast Eddie had lost control of his vehicle and was sent kening off the road he managed to bring
the car to a stop before it crashed into anything but after coming to a halt in a patch of deep mud Eddie realized that there was no getting the tires unstuck before the cops caught up with him he jumped out of the driver's seat and then ran off into An orchard before the law saw where he went once he was at a safe distance Eddie stopped caught his breath and reflected with relief on what a close call had been at least until we remembered that he'd left something behind because has stuck to the dash of
the old model T stock car was a photograph of his darling Lily may fast Eddie knew that he had to go into hiding because now the county Sheriff knew where he lay his head and that same county sheriff happened to be the meanest son of a this side of the Mississippi Sheriff William Little Bill Harding was the grandson of a South Carolina slave catcher who ran for the hills come the end of the Civil War then his father had been a Lawman who went by Big Bill Big Bill was tough but he was fair little
bill on the other hand was neither in fact I'd go so far as to say That he was a downright bully no one around Whitfield County liked him and even fewer people respected him but folks learned quickly that to anger Little Bill or even worse to bruise his ego was to invite a world of hurt upon yourself by that point fast Edy had been humiliating the law for years on end so when Little Bill found out who'd been driving those stock cars and making them look like jackasses for so long he was Ready to rain
fire and brimstone down on old fast Eddy pedmore Sheriff Harding and his boys showed up to Eddie's place at the break of dawn and turned the house upside down in the hopes of finding him they trashed the place terrorized his wife and Mama but Eddie had long since departed he was still doing liquor runs for his bootlegging buddies and he still stopped by the house from time to time but where he lay his head and where he Kept his money remained a mystery to the county sheriff as well as the state revenue men who were
breathing down his neck night after night Harding and his boys patrolled the highways Northwest of Georgia waiting and watching for any sign of fast Eddy then in the Twilight of a summer's evening back in 1924 two of Harding's Pursuit Vehicles were involved in a high-speed crash one of his deputies lost his life Eddie saw the crash unfolding Behind him and he knew it was a bad one but he kept on driving towards the state line and made his delivery all the same according to the Bootlegger's routine Eddie would make the delivery to Chattanooga in one
vehicle and then return in another much less conspicuous one and never via the same route this meant that he didn't return home until daylight the next morning at which point he'd retire to his Hideout to sleep until late after noon but upon his Return to Woodfield County that morning fast Eddie had a bad feeling in his gut and decided to stop by the house to check on his mama as well as his sweetheart Lily may whenever Eddie rolled up to the house in the morning following a run he'd always smell the fixings of a hearty
southern breakfast there'd be the aroma of sizzling sausage and bacon fat floating on the breeze maybe the sweet scent of fried apples in there too but On this particular morning morning all fast Eddie could smell when he opened up the door of his mama's house was the sour metallic stink of spilled blood Eddie's mama was nowhere to be found but in the bathroom lying in a white porcelain tub now stained with her blood was the dead body of his darling Lily may her head had been bashed in with one of Eddie's lug wrenches and sitting
on a nearby bath mat was a note that simply Said I didn't mean to her her signed Edward pedmore Jr Little Bill Harding had Avenged his Fallen deputy and in doing so had framed fast Eddie for the murder of his one true love Eddie was accustomed to being a wanted man but with words spreading that he was Lily May's killer the young Bootlegger had no idea who he could and could not trust I've also no doubt that sheriff and his boys anticipated some kind of retaliation hell maybe some of Them were even a little scared
but as the days went by and there was no sign of fast steady on any of Georgia's highways local lawmen started to believe that he'd simply turned tail and fled although not everyone believed that Eddie murdered Lily may enough people bought it for him to lose his status as a Plucky folk hero and without being able to hide among the sympathetic Eddie had no choice but to go on the Run many months later on a lazy Sunday Afternoon a couple of deputies were sitting in the Varnell sheriff's department when a car pulled into the parking
lot and started honking its horn they weren't expecting anyone so they figured the honking was for someone in the city office on the other side of the parking lot but then the driver kept honking and honking and honking until eventually Sheriff Harding barged out of his office and ordered the two deputies to silence the driver under pain of Arrest but when the two deputies walked out inside they saw the car idling in the parking lot and that it was no ordinary vehicle it was a stripped down Buick Master 6 refitted with a state-of-the-art V8 engine
and sitting in the driver's seat was fast Eddie pedmore the two deputies turned on their heels ran back into the office and yelled to the sheriff that none other than Edward Lee pedmore Jr was sitting in the parking lot Outside the sheriff ran out just in time to see fast Eddy taking off southbound towards Tunnel Hill Road and then after running to his own car he and the two deputies took off after him driving three different vehicles in the past Sheriff Harding knew that he and his boys could never catch up with fast Eddy but
over the previous few months They too had been chopping down their Pursuit Vehicles making them lighter and lighter until They were just about ready to compete with the kind of greased lightning bolts that fast Edy drove meaning this time they were ready for him the sheriff and his boys were tearing down the highway at close to 100 m an hour intent on keeping the pedal to the metal until they caught sight of fast Edd's Buick they must have gone for 15 to 20 mil each time they'd see a car ahead of them and it turned
out to be some innocent citizen clinging to their wheel In Terror as a bunch of siren screeching stock cars burn past them on the highway they kept on going praying they hadn't wasted their opportunity until sudden suddenly Sheriff Harding saw a dark Speck on the horizon believing it to be fast steady Harding pushed the engine of his stock car to the very limit in the hopes of catching up to him and he didn't have to wait long what happened next took place over the course of maybe 2 or 3 seconds Harding spotted Eddie and as
the dark Speck on the horizon grew larger there was a split second when the sheriff believed that he was rapidly catching up the only problem was Eddie was wasn't speeding away from him Eddie was speeding towards him but by the time Sheriff Harding realized what was happening it was far too late to save himself fast Edie smashed that Buick into Harding's Model T at almost 110 milph and with the sheriff's own vehicle Scraping triple digit speeds the impact was catastrophic both cars erupted into a firestorm of Steel shrapnel and broken glass which which instantly ended
the lives of both fast Eddie and Sheriff Harding while secondary impacts caused such serious injuries to one Deputy that both of his legs required amputation when the news hit that Harding had been murdered and that fast Eddie had been the one to do it it sent Shock waves through the whole of Whitfield County some said Eddie was a delinquent who'd murdered his wife murdered the sheriff and probably murdered his mama too since she was still missing others said that it must have been some kind of crazy accident cuz while Eddie was many things a bad
driver he was most certainly not but while all agreed that the income was completely unexpected there's another thing folks are certain Of too and that's how fast Eddie pedor's funeral enjoyed a much larger audience than Little Bill Hardings those that knew him I mean really knew him didn't believe for a second that Eddie had murdered Lily may but the folks who didn't know Eddie believ the headlines to them he was a no Good Wife Slayer and a cop killer most people didn't give a good godamn what anyone had to say about Eddie but there was
one person who cared enough to do Something to salvage his reputation sometime later A Night Train hailing all the way from Washington DC rolled into Atlanta's Terminal Station and from the First Class Car emerged one of the most accomplished Prosecuting attorneys on the entire Eastern Seaboard he was there to talk face to face with an old classmate from Yale who'd since taken a high position in the Georgia state government over lunch the two men shared shrimp cocktails and pan Fried chap Bon at the Capitol City Club one of the most elite fine dining establishments in
the entire country and we know that because a copy of the bill exists in the state archives over in Maro then that very same afternoon a team of Agents from the Bureau of Investigation which was only 10 years away from becoming the FBI arrived in Varnell and began interviewing the new sheriff as well as the deputies who' once served under Harding regarding the Murder of one Lily may McDermot they reviewed evidence reinterviewed the deputies and sought out character Witnesses for both fast Eddy and Sheriff Harding then by month's end they turned up the heat so
bad that one of the deputies finally cracked and agreed to testify against his fellow officers in exchange for avoiding the state's brand new method of execution the electric chair and Legend has it that this is how Those Boi boys got the deputy to crack the governor claimed the electric chair was the bleeding edge in dispatching murderers both quickly and painlessly and after a rigorous testing phase don't ask the chair became the state's primary method of execution but some devious Boi agent starts telling the deputies how that's all a bunch of horse crap how he seen
the electric chair in action with his own eyes and how even with all the crap He saw in the trenches over in France it was still the most ugly haunting and horrifying thing he's ever seen in his whole life he terrorized those deputies by telling him how the chair Cooks men alive how they shriek and wail for their mamas to make it stop as their skin blisters and their eyes boil he said he'd seen a man burst into flames another who cried tears of blood and a third who endured hours upon hours of almost constant
Agony pissing in his Britches and soiling himself until his heart finally gave up and exploded in his chest if one of the deputies didn't do the right thing and told the truth about what happened to Lily may then all of them would be headed to the electric chair and all of them were going to burn I guess it only took so much of that kind of box talk before one of them cracked and when he did the whole rotten house came tumbling down around them no One ended up going to the electric chair not since
all attested that it was Sheriff Harding that had wielded the lug wrench and written the false confession but at their sentencing the judge made no bones regarding their Associated guilt and wondered aloud how men who'd sworn to uphold the law had so suddenly seen fit to break it what he also wanted allow was who exactly had prompted the Hot Shot prosecutor to come all the way down from Washington DC to Work on a case that no one believed would bear fruit that's when the attorney informed the judge that his wealthy benefactor was in fact sitting
in that very same courtroom with them and directed his attention to the gallery where a woman in black sat with a long black veil covering her face as the court turned to look at her the woman lifted her veil and although not all those in attendance recognized her the Revelation Drew gas from those That did it was the Widow Mary pedmore Fast Eddie's grieving mother much like her son Mary had lived frugally especially considering that she was set on a nest egg of almost half a million dollars which would be worth almost 10 million in
today's money her attitude to it was very much easy come easy go so instead of spending it and risking alerting people to her family's vast hidden riches she let the cash pile up for years on end until the day Arrived when she finally had a reason to spend it and spend it she did and that's how she ended up in DC greasing the wheels of Power with all her accumulated wealth until she found herself sitting in the office of that hot shot prosecutor who brought the hammer down on the Whitfield County Sheriffs she tasked him
with clearing the name of her first and only child and it was a task that he went on to Accomplish with style it meant a lot to those who cared but in the grand scheme of things it didn't change much those that loved Eddie carried on loving him and those that didn't carried on doing just the same Little Bill Harding was now officially a murderer but he was dead hated in life and then hated in death and Eddie was dead too the news hit state law enforcement hard but it made barely a ripple in Whitfield
County it's not like the sheriff's department wanted to go hollering about what had happened and there was no official apology or anything not like there there would be if it happened today I guess that's why folks started telling the story in the first place so people really know what happened between fast Eddy Little Bill and Lily may because a man doesn't die when he passes away not really his true death comes When there's no one left to remember him when that final memory of him flickers out and he's forever forgotten [Music] I don't know how
we lost Afghanistan as a former Army officer who served for 14 years with the 503d Infantry Regiment I feel like I should be able to provide some kind of cogent answer to the question of how one of the largest and most technologically advanced militaries on the planet just turned tail and ran One day but I can't and over the next decade you're going to see a hundred different books movies articles documentaries and tv specials all attempting to explain what happened during the summer of 2021 they'll talk about how rumors of a Taliban troop build up
bore fruit how they captur town after town as they slowly surrounded CLE and how what started with Innocent Americans falling from the h 100th floor of one World Trade Center ended with Innocent Afghans falling from the wheel wells of a soaring c17 but it'll take a long long time to be able to piece it all together and properly explain how the finest fighting force the world was ever known managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of Victory that's something I could never hope to achieve on my own but what I can do is tell you
how the United States managed to lose one very specific District nestled up in the mountains of kunar Province named asadabad asadabad is the smallest of are 16 administrative districts and consists of a small village from which it derives its name along with a 50m long strip of flat fertile Valley carved out by the kunar river it's home to around 35,000 people a third of which live in the village while the rest are scattered around the valley floor in mud brick compounds that Are almost a thousand years old it's a pretty unremarkable place in eastern Afghanistan
and if you don't know what I mean by that think Crystal Clear Blue Skies stunning semi Alpine Vistas and grinding subsistence poverty but what did make asadabad remarkable was the fact that its District Center was only 7 Mi away from the Pakistani border which made it a major smuggling route for the taliban's weapons as well as its Opium I know those guys waged a major PR campaign after they took over and made a big deal out of eradicating Afghanistan's poppy fields to show how antice they are but when they needed money for weapons and ammunition
the Taliban had no problem allowing opium traffickers to ply their trade just as long as they got a tasty cut of the profits via the heavy taxes they imposed they made a lot of money that way too so in the winter of 2008 we rolled into Asadabad with the goal of cutting off their smuggling routes the first problem we encountered was that Assad's chief of police was corrupt to the Core he was taking money from the Taliban to keep his officers away from certain areas he was taking money from the Smugglers to turn a blind
eye to their operators he was also taking money from a group of gorillas turned gangsters called the hakani network but try as we might we could never figure out why they Were paying him only that they were and so the first thing on the agenda was finding replacement the 503d might have been responsible for the combat and supply of things but all of the civilian Administration fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of State the Dos had an HQ over in cbble and every so often they'd fly over a representative on a chanuk to Lia
with our Battalion commander and then one day The Dos chinuk touches down at our Battalion HQ but the representative isn't alone he brought the chief of police's replacement with him and his name was naula Chief najoua belonged to a large family that for reasons that were never fully explained to us had been kicked out of asadabad many years earlier by the Taliban najoua and his boys hated those guys and we were very confident that they performed better than their Predecessors who had melted away whenever the Taliban launched attacks then with more of the taliban's fighters
tied down in the sad it would be much easier for the teams of Green Beret to swoop in on The Smuggler transport route and choke off the enemy's largest source of Revenue and Supply at least that was the plan but whenever I think of plans these days I'm reminded of a poem that I had memorized back at West Point but little mouse You're not alone and proving forite may be vain the best laid plans of mice and men go off arai and leave us only grief and pain for the first couple of weeks nji buul
and his boys performed exactly as expected and they were a huge upgrade compared to the police officers the previous regimental combat team had worked with having our Afghan National police officers actually doing their jobs added A very fragile but much needed layer of security to the district which meant the Taliban started to have problems maneuvering evacuating wounded Fighters and getting ammunition to their key firing points during firefights as you can imagine that made our offensive operations run much smoother and meant that we finally started to make some serious progress in terms of stopping the flow
of weapons and opium going back and forth across The border with Pakistan najoua was tough and he had an ego about him but the effect that he had on our area of operations was phenomenal and so for a while we were all his number one fans but then when the winter came to an end and as the spring fighting season started to approach we noticed that najah's methods of enforcing the law were becoming more and more robust for lack of a better word one morning around The middle of February word filtered down the chain of
command that a village Elder had approached Battalion HQ to make a complaint about najoua the chief along with some of his fellow officers had been searching a compound in the valley when a young boy began to talk back to him naola flew into a rage and started smacking this kid around then when the boy's father demanded that he stop najibullah ordered one of his officers to hold the father at gunpoint And then proceeded to beat the man's son even harder by the time the village Elder arrived at Battalion HQ the wounded kid who turned out
to be the Elder's great nephew had been carried all the way to the small Medical Clinic in near Assad's District Center and was receiving treatment for a broken eye socket and a Severe concussion The Village Elder then said that he managed to convince the boy's Father not to kill najoua and his boys but that in order for a lasting peace he'd require ample monetary compensation if there was one thing that was never short of in Afghanistan it was cash so getting the Elder and his family their money was never going to be an issue but
on the other hand the amount of Goodwill we had with the local Afghans was at the very best minimal and so after arranging for a family representative to swim by to pick Up their cash a few officers went over to the district Center to talk to najoua about his conduct but when confronted he seemed confused through the translator Naji bulu explained that as part of his training he'd been told how he had to win the respect of the local population but how were the people going to respect him he asked if they didn't fear Him
by the time the spring fighting season commenced we'd convince Najibullah that his enemies should fear arrest and attention not corporal punishment or death he promised he and his officers would follow the procedural guidelines we provided and would arrest all future suspects instead of just kicking the crap out of them on the spot I heard one officer say that dealing with Naji bua was like pulling teeth but honestly I think it was more like hurting cats he gave the& guys all the guidance in the world and they still Just did their own thing sometimes their own
thing proved very effective like this one time when they rolled back into the district Center carrying several kilos of raw opium they'd confiscated from some Smugglers who they'd managed to Ambush forced to surrender without even a single shot being fired I remember asking najibullah why he'd planned such a risky operation and you know what he told me he was bored the Afghans were Often crazy Brave like that and it saved the lives of my soldiers many times over but then other times the crap they pulled almost got a lot of them killed one morning the
boys in second platoon performed a little Advan to contact Patrol at the Western end of the valley they were kind of like the Search and Destroy missions from Vietnam soldiers patrolled deeper and deeper into enemy territory until the enemy began shooting at them but then if the Soldiers were fired upon they knew that they were headed in the right direction at which point they'd Advance Under Fire destroy or route the Taliban then return to the operating bases for coffee and MREs there was a place where 99 times out of 100 we'd start taking AK fire
once we arrived but then on one particular morning an eerie silence hung over the landscape and the Taliban were nowhere to be found that marked the first time Ever that we'd reached that Western point in the valley and not been fired upon so naturally we were very keen on figuring out why that was my platoon made its way back to our fob then a Detachment consisting of myself and a few guys from second Squad walked all the way into the district Center to speak to the lieutenant colonel and give a full in-person report on what
had happened that morning or more accurately what hadn't happened that Morning the moment we walked into the compound which housed the district Center which consists of a whole bunch of administrative buildings we saw some of ni's boys hanging out smoking cigarettes and drinking chai this wasn't out of the ordinary because it was approaching the hottest part of the day when the Afghans traditionally took a break but as we walked past and said our salams one of them says in broken English Taliban Finish Captain today Taliban go home no fighting me and my guys stopped dead
in our tracks like wait what how did they know while najib's guys had these big grins on their faces it was possible that they too had noticed the absence of Taliban Fighters that morning but those big crap eating Grims made me suspect that they knew something we didn't the second we walked into the room that served as the lieutenant colonel's daytime office we Saw naib smiling like he just found an extra Fry at the bottom of his bag it turns out during the previous night he and his boys had gone out into the valley and
paid a visit to one of the compounds out there they didn't barge their way in and they didn't break anyone's skull either and in fact all they did was arrest a villager suspected of supplying information to the Taliban the lieutenant colonel was telling me all that which to me sounded like good News but the look of disquiet on his face told me that there was a little more to the story and boy was there ever the suspect najoua had arrested was the mother of the asadabad Taliban commanders and in all likelihood she had indeed provided
her son with some kind of material support but before before that day women and children were off limits a brother or father that helped build an IED they could expect to be shipped off to Cobble for a long spell In plyy prison but we knew that to mess with Afghan women or Worse mess with their children and you'd be asking for serious trouble but then if najib had just arrested some Commander's mom why wasn't the whole valley popping off with RPG and mortar fire well that's because nij had asked the woman's family to pass pass
a message on to the Taliban commander and that message was this if one single bullet is fired by a Taliban rifle or a single IID explodes anywhere In the valley then the Commander's mother would be tortured violated and then executed we asked if nij had proof of the mom's material support and in response he asked why we needed it he knew her son was Taliban everyone did and to him that was all the proof anyone needed if we wanted to beat the Taliban he said through the translator then we had to start hitting them where
it Hurt I had to then explain again through the translator how that was not at all what we wanted to do and we told neib that a 100 times we wanted to win hearts and minds and contribute to the cycle of violence as little as possible in our efforts to remove the Taliban so without any real evidence of her guilt he was going to have to release the Taliban Commander's mom and he had to do it immediately needless to say najibullah was not happy About being ordered to release his prisoner and accused us of undermining
his authority he also said that the moment the Commander's mother had reached safety the Taliban would attack our positions with everything they had then he was right we just had a hard time explaining how when that happened it'd be all his fault but continued to keep her prisoner and whatever consequences we had in Store would be much worse the second we delivered the Commander's mom back to her compound families started packing up and leaving the asadabad valley to seek shelter elsewhere they knew what was coming and so did we but when it came we were
ready for it and what amounted to an extremely Reckless attack the Taliban attacked every forward operating base we had all while dropping 82 and 120 mm mortars onto the district Center it was a Revenge attack but because because They rushed to mount it we scored exactly 33 Taliban Kia while suffering only one wounded soldier it was the largest multicon firefight we'd experienced thus far and it had been a complete turkey shoot but then who goes and takes the credit for it Naji godamn bua he claimed that it was he that had tricked the Taliban into
a hasty and disastrous attack all by merely pretending to arrest one of their Commander moms and the worst thing was All the villagers believed it that's not to say na and his boys didn't stand their ground and fight like tigers they did and all the civilians who hadn't evacuated the district Center saw them doing it but instead of just chalking one up for the visitors najib spun the whole thing into a huge PR victory for himself which in all fairness delighted everyone further up the chain of command they were relying on him to win the
villager's respect and having Finally done so regimental command didn't want anyone pissing on his parade they told us to back off let him do this thing and focus on consolidating the Strategic Advantage following our recent Victory so that's what we did but once he figured out that he was working unsupervised naib not only went back to his less scrupulous ways he got way way worse than before the first sign of it was when we took some of ni's A&P guys with us on a Patrol and while we were taking a break to hydrate they walked
away from the larger group they told the translator that they were going to the bathroom but maybe a minute later the very strong smell of marijuana came floating in on the breeze one of my soldiers then walks around the corner of the compound wall while we were Sheltering behind where he finds the two A&P soldiers sitting on the edge of an irrigation ditch High out Of their minds on what smelled like some very strong pot I asked them through the translator what would najala say if he found out about this but the officers just laughed
and told us that it was najala himself that had given them the marijuana I didn't believe them at first because the Afghans had this way of telling you pointless little lies as a way of saying either mind your own business or go f yourself like when one Of my soldiers Oakley sunglasses went missing after a patrol and we saw what looked like a 70-year-old farmer wearing an identical pair just a few days later I asked where he got his sunglasses then after looking me dead in the eye and thinking about it for a couple of
seconds he told me I made them and walked off it was such a huge lie that it was almost worth admiration just like a couple of police officers telling me their Chief gave them pot to smoke on Patrol but the crazy thing is naula really did give those two officers a bunch of pot and he did it as a reward for going out on patrol with us when we got back from Patrol we went to see Ni and tell him about his two pot smoking officers but when he walked into the old Soviet police building
he'd taken for his HQ it looked more like a Snoop Dog video than a police station a handful of A&P were sitting around a little satellite TV passing around a Hash Pipe and giggling like teenagers when we walked into ni's office office he was just sitting behind his desk with his eyes so pink they look infected staring at this big old pile of money then behind him in like an old timey cloth sack was the largest amount of marijuana I had ever seen we got the translator in and asked him where he got all the
marijuana officially speaking marijuana was illegal under the laws of the new Afghan government but Unofficially it was tolerated so we could focus on dealing with the Opium crop which was how the Taliban made most of their money plus marijuana had been part of the lives of everyday Afghans for literally thousands of years telling them to stop would have felt pointless and on top of that it would have been exceptionally rude for ni to refuse the farmer's gift but that wasn't our issue the issue was that ni couldn't allow his Officers to be smoking on duty
and neither should he for that matter naib just sort of rolled his eyes as the translator related our scolding repli then promised that they wouldn't smoke on duty anymore but just days later he went back on his word and explained that he needed to give his officers marijuana to smoke or they'd refuse to go out on patrol and that was complete horse crap but it wasn't really marijuana use that was bothering us it was all that money That he had on the table the money that was given to ni to pay his officers always came
perfectly stacked and Shrink wrapped and it was all brand new crisp clean bills but the in the pile of cash of aib's table looked old creased and used we asked if he was taxing the villagers or taking bribes of some description but he took terrible offense to that and insisted that it was his officer's pay We Were Soldiers not cops so there was only so much we could do in Terms of tracking down where the money came from and even if we could prove that he was taxing the local villagers which was well beyond his
authority he could just reframe the taxes as gifts and then intimidate the villagers into cooperating his story if it sounds like nij has a pretty solid grip on local power that's because he did but although he was helping keep the Taliban at Bay he was causing more and more problems as the power went more And more to his head but the thing that I have about power is it requires a hell of a lot of self-discipline because without it you don't just lose the men under you you lose yourself too about a week or so
later we were still trying in vain to get one of the vill ERS to admit that niib had been taxing them they were also scared of him at first and it seemed like no one was going to tell the truth then suddenly someone came forward with an incredible Accusation two farmers brothers whose families lived in the same compound finally confirmed other suspicions that niib had been taxing them yet they also claimed that after discovering his family was unable to pay na had kidnapped one of the farmer's 99-year-old twin Sons as a form of collateral since
that totally sounded like something naib would do me and the company first sergeant grabbed our translator and went over to the district Center to demand their release but when we arrived we were barred entry to the office two extremely ston looking A&P officers told us that niib was busy and that we should come back later through our translator we told them that niib didn't sound very busy because we could hear poshon pop music blaring from a stereo inside his office the officers kept insisting na wasn't taking any visitors and in the end we had to
threaten with having every single one of Them removed from their post before they stepped aside and allowed us into the office but when me and that first sergeant opened up the door and walked inside neither of us could believe what we were seeing we were looking for two missing boys right and I honestly figured niib was holding them in the old station's large undivided jail cell but when the first sergeant and I walked into his office and we saw in the je sitting behind his desk with his shirt Open while a small girl stood in
front of his desk dancing in time with the music I say little girl because the kid had a dress on little sandals with bells on and was wearing what appeared to be makeup the same could be said for what I thought was a second little girl who was lying under a blanket on the opposite side of the room wearing this dead-eyed expression on her face that all lasted for only about half a second because the second aib saw us He turned down the music and then started yelling at our translator I figured our translator would
wait to hear him out and then start translating but instead he started yelling back at najoua as he went over to grab the dancing girl the whole time I'm yelling at her translator ask him where the girls came from but he's still yelling at ni who's yelling back at him and then finally after screaming so loud at ni that I thought he was going to Shoot him our translator turns to me and says they not girls the boys the two missing boys he then asked me to help carry the kid lying in the corner who
turned out to be completely naked under that blanket now side note I just literally had to get up and pace around the room for a while because what I'm about to go into is possibly the most disturbing and upsetting thing I've ever learned in my whole life and for those of you that are About to be eternally scarred by what I'm about to tell you then I sincerely apologize and for those of you that don't believe me then I I implore you to look it up because every word of what I'm about to tell you
is true in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan certain men practice an ancient tradition that they refer to as bachabi bachabi is when older men take a young boy who hasn't gone through puberty yet and then they dress him up Like a little girl and make him Dance Now this might just sound a little goofy or perhaps a little cruel but it gets way worse than that because after the done making the boy dance the older men in attendants take turns doing things that no grown man should be doing with a child seeing it up close for
the first time but only seeing the dancing face the first sergeant and I had no idea what we were looking at but our translator did and after handing over The kid that he was carrying to the first sergeant we had to talk him out of walking back into the police HQ and shooting Naji bulla dead as you can imagine we reported what Naj had been doing to regimental command but what we were told was jaw-dropping we were told that it was an internal issue a problem only the Afghans had the remit to solve and since
najib was still coasting on the victory of the late spring none of his superiors Wanted to replace him and in so many words we were told to ignore it and hearing that made us feel physically sick but even worse we had no choice but to try and keep word from spreading among the soldiers and that is something that still keeps me up at night if I allowed the details of n's nightly activities to spread among the platoon one of my soldiers would end up fragging him and despite me also wanting to end his life If
ni ended up dead a veritable storm was sure to follow our only hope was that one of the higher up saw fit to replace him and sooner rather than later because ni's popularity among the villagers that didn't already hate him was starting to plummet we knew things were reaching a Breaking Point when some of the& officers started to Desert their posts not all of them were okay with him diddling kids in his office no matter How much cash or dope he offered them and he did end up diddling more kids in that office and so
one by one all of his guys just up and deserted in the middle of the night until all that were left were a handful of his brothers and cousins who for the record we're also taking part in the Bacha Bazi sessions we ended up pleading with our CEO to get on the horn to Cabo because we needed at least a dozen new A&P officers to maintain security around the Valley floor but before that could ever happen everything suddenly came to a head remember the guy who we delivered cash compensation to after his nephew talked back
to najiah and got his ass beat well we're out on patrol one day and he's out working one of his Fields as we're passing then when he sees us he comes running over and starts yelling at our translators saying he needs to talk to us the farmer and our translator then talk for a good few minutes before Finally they stopped talking and our translator turns to me it looked like he was struggling to find the words for a second then when he spoke all he said was I think you need to pull your guys out
of the district center tonight I asked him why and he tells me trust me take you guys out of the DC or the W be killed obviously I'm not taking orders from a damn translator no matter how much I like the guy so I order him to start making sense already and to tell Me what the farmer had said according to the translator the farmer was talking indirectly in riddles almost because he couldn't be heard giving Americans information on Taliban attacks but essentially what the guy was trying to tell us was that something big was
coming and it was coming that night and it was going to be bad not one to run from a fight I started asking our translator what exactly made him think that we couldn't Repel a night attack seeing as we had around $100,000 worth of night vision equipment with us I didn't think that posed a significant threat but the translator was insistent he told me we couldn't stop what was coming that from the way the farmer talked every Taliban fighter in kunar was headed our way probably to even the score for the losses they suffered back
in Spring without boring you with too much of the Strategic stuff let's just say That there was no way that we could adequately reinforce the DC against an attack that large without abandoning the operating bases in the surrounding Hills but if we abandon those bases the Taliban could simply move into our old positions concentrate their fire on the district Center and the whole company would be up creek without a paddle but then leave our soldiers at the DC and they suffer a concentrated attack they might Be Kia before the calvalry even gets there to relieve
them so as you can see we had no real choice but to pull them out which in turn left najoua and his boys just a little more vulnerable than before but still capable of Defending themselves should they need to that night up in one of the hillside outposts we watched and waited for the Taliban to attack there was no way that if they had numbers the Taliban would focus their Attack on the district Center that's just not how they operated they like to tie you down in as many places as possible then have assault teams
try and get closer to you once you're pinned so if they were going to attack the district Center they'd have to hold us in place at the hillside Outpost before they attacked the district Center then once we thought we'd figured that out it was just a matter of watching waiting And being ready for anything Taliban attacks usually came from the direction of the Setting Sun and they take advantage of the sun's glare to Blind you to their firing positions no shots were fired at sundown so we figured the attack was coming later and then sometime
after midnight we saw the headlights of a truck approaching Assad's District Center it was a lone vehicle so we didn't immediately suspect it was the Taliban Especially not if they were planning on attacking in large numbers then as we watch the vehicle roll past the district Center and towards ni's police HQ it stopped outside the compound's main gates we were up on the hillside so we could watch all this unfolding at a distance then as the truck's headlights started Illuminating the interior of the compound we figured okay it must have been an A&P vehicle or
something to be Allowed entry into the compound we all start to relax thinking the warning of the attack might have been a false alarm then out of nowhere Boom the flash of the explosion lit up the hillsides as this huge orange Fireball rose up from the valley floor we all got into position waiting for the Taliban to start firing on our Hillside positions but nothing came correctly assuming that it was a bomber that had just hit the police HQ We had a few guys from second platoon Rush down to the DC to defend against any
follow-up attack but again nothing happened in the morning after the attack we got to get a good look at the damage inflicted then started pulling out bodies from the police HQ which included naias his body was covered in purple and black contusions from the force of the explosion and his head had been half crushed presumably by Falling Rubble the explosive device the truck had been fitted with was so big that it had killed every one of the police officers guarding the HQ and killed all but one of those inside the force of the explosion had
thrown him off his feet and apparently he'd landed on his neck leaving him in a pretty bad way he could talk but when we asked him what had happened in the run up to the explosion he told us he had no idea but we didn't have to wait long to Find out what had happened back then the Taliban used these small cheap Motorola radios to communicate with each other called ioms but we love those little things because all you had to do to listen into their chatter was buy your own Icom radio than tune into
their frequency we had someone monitoring their radio traffic almost constantly and while it had been relatively quiet the night before they knew that we were Listening so they'd go tactically quiet before an attack the following day I'd Unleashed a beehive of activity the Taliban were proud of what they pulled off and they had a right to be because this was the their plan first off they'd spread rumors of a huge coordinated attack on asadabad then once we were all sitting in our positions waiting for set attack they simply drove a stolen A&P a vehicle right
up to the gates of the police Compound and asked to be L inside knowing the A&P guys wouldn't recognize the disguised Taliban driver they had to think of something that would have the A&P letting their guard down and that thing was this the driver rolled up to the compound then when questioned on who he was as well as what was in the truck the driver told the guard on duty that he brought three bota Bazi boys to najoua as a gift for defeating the Taliban back in the Spring this was all the guards needed to
hear then after parking his truck right next to the HQ building the driver simply grabbed his Detonator shouted God is great and then blew the whole compound the Kingdom Come killing Naji bullah along with those still loyal to him was a huge PR victory for the local Taliban and without officers to back us up and curtail the smuggling the Taliban had the upper Hand this made the remainder of our tour much much tougher than it had to be and I have no doubt in my mind that it contributed to the loss of American life during
our subsequent combat operations but without a doubt the most significant impact it had was turning the local population violently and irreversibly against us us under the watch of the United States military a sick evil man had been permitted to abuse little boys and not just on one Occasion either it's suspected that Naji bulah and his officers kidnapped more than a dozen children before abusing them in Li of illegal taxes he'd imposed on their families if someone did that to me and one of my kids I'd do just about anything to see them dead and I
wouldn't shed a tear if the people protecting the abuser died either especially if they'd come from some Far Away place and had long Outstayed their welcome like I said at the beginning I can't tell you exactly how or why we lost the war in Afghanistan I just know we wouldn't be the first great power to admit defeat there because as our own Society begins to display some subtle and not so subtle signs of decline perhaps Afghanistan will once again have earned its nickname as the graveyard of Empires hey friends thanks for listening Click that notification
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