The contract with the military
Trent Reedy
Arlinn Booth read one of my books when he was in high school. He had questions about writing, and I had questions about his military and security service, so we spoke.
Booth grew up in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, a place he describes as a “red, white, and blue little town,” referencing the country song “May We All” by the duo Florida Georgia Line. He was in kindergarten on 9/11 and remembered patriotism being at an all-time high in the years that followed. He listened to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” His grandfather served two tours in Vietnam, and his grandmother was active with Vietnam Veterans of America. His uncle served in the Marines from 1996 to 2000. All of this made it inevitable that Arlinn Booth would become a Marine after graduating high school in 2014. “I wanted to sit down at the table at the VVA and be part of the conversation,” Booth said.
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His account of his upbringing and desire to serve in a righteous cause against America’s enemies reminded me of the way I used to feel before President Joe Biden threw away our mission in Afghanistan.
Booth worked communications for an armor unit. By then, America’s deployment tempo was winding down. Booth’s uncle served right before the war on terror. It seemed Arlinn had missed it, too.
He left the Marines in 2018. “I did not get the experience … that I wanted.” With the VVA, “All [he] could do was listen.”
But Booth didn’t give up. One modern military element that all service members will encounter, particularly on deployment, is the growing importance of civilian contractors. Many of my fellow soldiers in Afghanistan were jealous of the contractors’ much higher salaries. Booth saw an opportunity for a solid career and his desired deployment.
He took a job with a private security firm and spent seven months in 2019 on guard duty on a U.S. Army outpost in the southern Israeli desert. This gave him his first exposure to terrorism and war when a nearby city suffered three separate Hamas rocket attacks.
By July 2019, he worked as a private security contractor alongside U.S. Air Force security forces at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Serving on a coalition base was fascinating. He encountered people from 15 different countries. That December, a car bomb exploded at Bagram’s main gate, and the entire base was called to high alert while the enemy was destroyed. A building near the air base had been the enemy base for the attack. Booth had a front-row seat on guard duty that night as Apache helicopters leveled the building.
Booth returned home in late 2020. He’s modest about his experience, regretting not being in more action and expressing admiration for the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq that he grew up hearing about.
His kind of open, optimistic patriotism has been foreign to me since our Afghanistan mission was destroyed. “Man, you’re lucky you weren’t out there in Afghanistan, working hard and risking it all to build schools, secure the vote, and help rebuild. It kills seeing all of that thrown away,” I told him.
He still sees America as benevolent liberators. “I find it very hard to discredit the work that we put into Afghanistan. … We have taken the most steps, and we have done the most for the countries we’ve invaded, to help heal the wounds of the wars in which we fought.”
Arlinn Booth was a young child when I served in the war in Afghanistan. His respect for our mission helps heal my heartbroken disgust with the way that mission ended. “We didn’t get the result we wanted,” he said. But he believes the intent and effort counts more. He’s a brave patriot, proud of and dedicated to his fellow Americans. I think I’ve learned something, found some hope, by his example.
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Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.