I remember August 25, 1982, well. I was one of about 50 reporters standing on a south Beirut beach as the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment came ashore. I still remember Colonel James Meade in the lead amphibious craft. He was a dashing figure; movie star handsome. Meade, a marine aviator, wore a blue pilot’s scarf as he came ashore. It was flapping in the brisk Lebanese coastal wind.

Meade led the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU). Lt. Colonel Robert Johnston commanded 2/8 Battalion Landing Team (BLT), the Marines who would actually serve as a peace keeping force based out of Beirut International Airport.…

River Liberty (also called Khanjar) was described as an operation. However, it had the feel of an invasion. U.S. Marines were moving, as an expeditionary force, into the homeland of their enemy, the Taliban.

At 4:30 am, the company with whom my son, Carlos, and I were embedded, Golf Company, 2/8 Marines, stepped out of the U.S base at Hassan Abad, in southern Helmand province, and headed south into certain trouble.

The Taliban were determined not to let Golf Company just walk south through the Helmand river Valley unchallenged.…

The sound of gunfire and explosions fill the air, summer has come, and once more war has come to Helmand Province. In one of the largest military operations seen in Afghanistan since the start of the war, Marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade have launched a wide ranging operation deep into the Helmand River Valley, a major poppy producing region, and a hotbed of Taliban activity.

Operation Khanjar

The operation has been dubbed, “Khanjar,” and commanders are calling it the largest Marine action since the 2006′s battle of Fallujah, and the largest Marine airlift since Vietnam.…

I sit in a broken green lawnchair, writing. It is hot here: the sunlight is overwhelming, and even in shade the temperature is easily in triple digits; nightfall-the only respite anyone can hope for-is a long way off, and in the meantime there is little to do except sweat, and wait. Everything takes longer than it should: sand trickles through the hourglass in fitful spurts: the sky is swollen with the day’s heat, throbbing with its own pulse. I sit in a dusty, broken hell; I sit in the Helmand River Valley.…

People often call the conflict in Afghanistan “The Forgotten War,” a broad statement that misses the point on why the going has been so slow, 8 years this October, and why, until recently, there has been little spoken of it. Afghanistan was not forgotten so much as poorly-remembered; picked up and dusted off whenever pundits and politicians saw use in it: whether to compare it to its brother-war in Iraq,  held up as an example of International Cooperation, or used as a simple prop by those in need of a beacon of “success” in the region.…