Charlie Wilsons war..

Today in class we saw a movie named "Charlie Wilson's war", a film I strongly recommend everyone to see! Charlie Wilson was born June 1 1933, and died last week, February 10, 2010. He was a politician who represented Texas in the House of Representatives from 1973 to 1996. He made a huge difference in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and in the cold war.

In 1980, Wilson read an article describing the refugees fleeing Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had taken over power during the Afghan Civil War and asked the Soviet Union to help suppress resistance from the mujahedeen. Wilson called the staff of the House Appropriations Committee dealing with "black appropriations" and requested a two-fold appropriation increase for Afghanistan. Because Wilson had just been named to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense (which is responsible for funding CIA operations), his request went through. By the end of the 1980s, Wilson was directing covert funding of about $750 million a year to arm mujahedeen fighters, including the Stinger missiles that effectively shot down Soviet helicopters. What he did made, as I mentioned above, a huge difference not only in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but also in the cold war between America and the Soviet Union. The soviet soldiers left the Afghan border in 1989, and a short madder of time later the cold war was over.

I’ve heard about this story before, both Charlie Wilson and what influence he had on the war in Afghanistan. What I didn’t know was that helping Afghanistan with weapons and winning the war may have had a large impact on the problems America has to day, by this I mean with Taliban. After Soviet was out of the picture, half of the people living in Afghanistan was under 14 years old. Wilson tried to say that the US had to help rebuild this destroyed country, with schools and so on. He saw the fact that these kids wouldn’t understand that America helped them winning the war, they had no access to newspaper or anything else to help them see the truth. When he tried to explain this to the others, most of them said that they where done in Afghanistan, and had to concentrate on Europe and the other projects they had going. I believe this was a big mistake. Raymond Smock, former House historian and director of the Robert C. Byrd center for legislative studies in Shepherdstown said the following about Wilson and his ideas of building up the country: “If we had kept up the work he had done, building those schools, maybe we wouldn’t have had the problems that we did”. By this he probably means with Taliban and tragedies like 9/11?

This movie really opened my eyes, and made me think twice about what America could have done differently in Afghanistan during the cold war. I think it’s terrible that they believed that when the war was over, they where done helping this destroyed country.

The Road

This semester our class got to choose a book to read in English. Most of us agreed on reading the book “The Road”, written by Cormac McCarthy. The story is about a father and his young son who walk alone through a burned and destroyed America. The two of them are heading for the coast, to be safe and warm, compared to their current situation. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the dangerous men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of food and each other.

I’ve now read the first 70 pages, and I’m still waiting for an explanation on why America is burning, and why the father and his son is so alone and scared. I am a very curious person, so I just had to do some research on the internet to find out what had happened to America in the book. Everywhere I read the explanation is that nuclear bombs has hit the country and destroyed it.

The author of this book writes in a very complicated way, and I thought it was hard to understand the story in the beginning. He does not use any comma most of the time, and each sentence is very long, so you really have to focus every second of the time you read. Here is an example: “He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup.”

The book starts with a father and his son (who actually remains nameless throughout the whole book) surveys the landscape, trying to decide where they will travel next. The father is unsure of the month and day, because “he hadn’t kept a calendar for years”. The scene before him reveals ash, probably from several nuclear bombs, falling from the sky and drifting across the landscape. The father and his son are survivors, fighting to live in a world that has been destroyed, with a result of chaos and confusion amongst the remaining people.

The boy and his father travel south for days and weeks to follow. They suffer from endless rain, snow and bitter cold. The father has flashbacks to his childhood, to fishing with his uncle, and to his wife, who likely killed herself because she could not bear living in this new and depressing world. They try to hide from the danger of cannibals and the other men who stalk “the road”.

I must admit that I disliked the book about the first 40 pages or so, but then it changed. Now it fascinates me, and the plot in this book has really caught my attention. It is a dark and almost depressing book, but when you “get to know” the two main characters you start to care about them, and now I really just want to know how the story of their lives ends.

I will post an entry about the book every week, but I really recommend that you read this fascinating story yourselves.