I recently visited my old hometown of Dysart, Iowa (population 1,379), to meet my adorable new niece and learn about hunting in preparation for a book I’m writing.
I’ve lived near Spokane, Washington, for a decade now, and although I know Iowa hosts the nation’s first presidential caucus, I’d forgotten just how ubiquitous the presidential campaigns there are. With a little less than a year to go until the next election, the state is already bombarded with political ads. My first reaction upon seeing them was a sort of exasperation. I almost wished we could skip the election and save ourselves from months and months of partisan bickering.
Then I remembered the presidential election of 2004. Not the contest between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, but Afghanistan’s first presidential election. It was a monumental endeavor that gave Afghan men and women their first chance to have a voice in government in a very long time.
The Taliban — I really hate the Taliban — despise freedom in general and freedom for women in particular. They threatened terrible violence to disrupt the election. That meant my fellow soldiers and I, along with Afghan police and the new Afghan National Army, had to work overtime to provide election security.
We checked polling places. We ran combat drills. My platoon went all over Farah Province in western Afghanistan, looking for the enemy. My squad covered Farah City and the surrounding villages.
On election day, Oct. 9, we rolled out into the cold morning. I rode behind a machine gun, my upper torso protruding from the top of our Humvee. Polls opened at 8 a.m. We reached the first voting station at about 8:10.
No voters.
“They’re not going for it,” I said. “Too afraid of the Taliban.”
We drove toward a second poll, passing ANA gun nests atop buildings, watching our helicopter gunships fly overhead.
At this station, the line of voters ran around the corner and down the block. It turned out that Afghans were willing to risk their lives to make a better future for their country. They waved their voter registration cards in the air.
“Thank you! Thank you!” they shouted in heavily accented English.
My eyes began to water (probably because of, you know, the dust or the cold morning wind). “Don’t thank me!” I shouted, knowing they couldn’t understand. “I have guns, armor, and a whole squad. You have only a voter card. Thank you!”
Soon, voters were everywhere.
On a muddy street in the Farah City bazaar, an English-speaking Afghan man shouted, “Karzai no good! No vote Karzai!”
“Yeah!” I said. “Vote as you wish and tell everybody what you think. I promise, I’ll do my best to keep you safe while you do.” The Taliban would not have been nearly so generous.
After supper, we tried to finally relax, but our handheld radios squawked. Mission time.
We geared up and drove to a village. The men of the village were claiming that the women’s votes had been tampered with and shouldn’t be counted. But the women had voted by secret ballot. How could the men know those votes had been tampered with? Our commanding officer, Maj. Herbokowitz, suspected it was a ploy to stop the women from voting.
“We take these allegations seriously. Your claim will be investigated,” Herbokowitz told the men. Then, he pointed to our Humvees and large machine guns. “But we’re gonna take the ballots with us.”
With our weapons on display, we didn’t need to act tough. We smiled, shook hands with the men, and sincerely thanked them for voting.
Oh, my campaign-weary fellow Americans! I wish you could’ve seen the looks of gratitude, excitement, and hope on the faces of those Afghans as they were finally allowed to vote. The 2020 presidential campaign will be a long and bitter one, but I pray that we never lose sight of how precious our freedom to vote truly is.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
