It was not long after former Army Capt. Erik Edstrom landed in Afghanistan in 2009 that he recognized the futility of the United States’ military efforts overseas. “It only took days of being on the ground to realize that this was unwinnable and a circular movement,” he said.
Edstrom, who grew up in Stoughton, Massachusetts, joined Boston Public Radio on Veterans Day to talk about his deployment, the culture toward those who have served, and how he thinks the U.S. government has failed both its military and Afghan citizens.
Graduating high school in 2003 in the wake of 9/11, Edstrom found himself wanting to serve the country. He graduated from West Point military academy in 2007, then deployed to Afghanistan.
“We were in Kandahar, which at the time, was one of the most bombed-out areas in terms of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in the country,” Edstrom said. “It was one of the hardest times in my life, absolutely. … There isn't time for grieving. There isn't much time for anything other than just to continue doing the patrolling.”
After his deployment, Edstrom served in the Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. In that role, he buried one of his closest friends from West Point: Tyler Parten, who was killed in action on Sept. 10, 2009. It was circumstance that he met former President Barack Obama at Arlington Cemetery, on the anniversary of Parten's death. At his grave, Obama asked about his life. “On the one hand, I found that this was incredibly endearing,” Edstrom said. “And yet, on the other hand, here is a guy who scaled up drone warfare, who committed to the surge — which is why soldiers like myself were there in Afghanistan, and part of the reason why soldiers like [my good friend] Tyler were killed.”
To him, this interaction underscored one of the problems with how the government treats members of the military. “Doing nice things after people have been broken isn't the answer,” he said. “The answer is to go upstream and stop making those terrible decisions that breaks people in the first place. And our country has not figured out how to do that.”
Edstrom also criticized the current administration for its withdrawal from Afghanistan, and its lack of care for both U.S. military and citizens overseas. “Our government has abdicated any sort of responsibility to taking care of our Afghan allies,” he said. “It's a deep national embarrassment not only in my mind, but in the mind of many other veterans who are supporting these efforts.”
Having worked personally to help get his former translator out of the country, Edstrom called the United States’ promise to get people out “a complete farce.”
“I regularly get videos and photographs of murdered Afghan commandos, people that are being hung from vehicles and driven through town,” Edstrom said. “Our federal government has failed — so incredibly poorly — for some, incredibly badly.”
For Edstrom, the United States’ problems with the military extend to the entire relationship between the state and its armed forces. “American culture turned a blind eye towards what the military is doing instead of a much more critical eye,” he said. “We need a complete overhaul in the way that the U.S. thinks about its relationship with the military.”
Throughout the country, Edstrom sees these underlying problems everywhere, even in the ways people show reverence to veterans.
“We're very quick as a culture to thank soldiers and pat them on the shoulder at the airport and say 'Thank you for your service,' while sending them to their fourth yearlong deployment to a self-defeating, negative-sum war that's not yielding any results,” he said. “To me, that isn't patriotism — that's betrayal.”
Edstrom is a former Army captain. His latest book is “Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of our Longest War.”
