Army PFC. Markie T. Sims wasn't even 10 years old when agents from the CIA and Army special operators touched down in Northern Afghanistan.
The year was 2001.
Ostensibly the American units were there to oust the Taliban, and (primarily?) to hunt for bin Laden in the process. Notably though, Sims' death in Afghanistan, the last of 2012, comes almost a full two years following the storied raid on the Osama compound ... in Pakistan.
Fred Hiers of the Ocala Star-Banner wrote an absolutely crushing piece, published on the last day of last year, which chronicled the death notification process through the eyes of Sims' family.
“They didn't have to tell me,” said Wanda Thompson, Sims' mother, from Dover Air Force Base, where she identified the body. “I watch television. It's the only time the Army comes to your house.”
“I didn't want him to go,” Thompson told Hiers, “because of the stuff that happens there. That's my baby. He was a boy. I didn't want him to go.”
Indeed, if Sims ever had a drink, it wasn't a legal one — he was only 20 years old when an improvised explosive device killed him in Panjwal, Afghanistan, thousands of miles from home and eleven years removed from the source of the war, 9/11, which Sims watched erupt on television as a child.
Hiers writes:
“He made his decision about joining the Army. That's what he wanted to do,” [Randolph] Thompson, [Sims' grandfather,] said, sitting in his living room, his eyes beginning to tear. “I don't know why they're fighting over there,” he said, looking at his wife, as if waiting for an answer.
American officials and that "Coalition of the Willing" kicked off the Afghanistan War, dubbed "Operation Enduring Freedom," more than 11 years ago under the auspices of finding the terrorists responsible for 9/11. Even though the vast majority of the perpetrators and planning stemmed from Saudi Arabia, western intelligence opted for Afghanistan as the primary target.
Just as the CIA nearly clipped Osama in the almost mythological engagement at Tora Bora, the Coalition decided to throw serious boots on the ground — eventually 100 thousand boots — in a country that had gone unconquered since Alexander the Great, more than 2,000 years ago.
Several historical reasons not to engage in protracted war screamed for recognition: Israel's ill begotten three year foray into Lebanon in the early 80s which was supposed to last a "few days," and then immediately following that, Russia's expedition into Afghanistan, what some credit as the final stroke in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Osama himself said that his plan was to lure the Americans into Afghanistan in order to 'bleed the beast dry in a war of a thousand cuts.'
In eleven years, the war has cost approximately $600 billion and 2,043 American lives. Increasingly though, the citizens sacrificing their lives have the foggiest memory of America's reasons for going in the first place.
The average age of KIA's in Afghanistan is 26, putting most of them at 14 or 15 when the war began. Indeed, Afghanistan's become a hand-me-down conflict, carried on the backs of people too young to have taken an active part in the decision to go.
Among other family members, Sims leaves behind his pregnant wife Shakeli, and an Army-bound little brother, Demarrio.
Sims brother was in the front yard with his mother when the soldiers came. He decided to delay his enlistment to attend Markie's funeral.
SEE ALSO: The Week That Changed Everything I Thought I Knew About Afghanistan >
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