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the_grimm_reader's Reviews (242)
With all due honor and respect to the author and those involved in the efforts to rescue 17,000+ Afghans from the Taliban—thank you for facing these difficulties and for using your military training and deployment experience, even at great personal risk and loss, to help these people.
The stories and details of these rescue missions, and the poorly executed Afghanistan withdrawal that led to their necessity, are enlightening, painful, and raw—I am glad I now have more knowledge about these things.
Still, this book was a difficult read and I continued to struggle with keeping an open mind. It’s important to know that this book, while providing a narrative account of these rescue missions, is heavily populated with what read to be right-wing political jabs, conflicting and illogical statements regarding “God’s plan,” or “the burden God has placed” on individuals. Within the same paragraph the author will give God credit for providing resources, only to have those resources made irrelevant sentences laters by individuals with better gear. There is often a “God provides through prayer” message injected into the recollections juxtaposed with tales of gearing up to draw penises on the faces of potential detained Chinese soldiers (which the author seems to find humorous). It seemed a bit more than out of alignment with what I understand to be Christian values, but those are values that seem to get entangled with personal biases and preferences often.
Credit to Chad for taking action and doing this hard work. I may not appreciate his politics, nor adhere to the convoluted hit-and-miss accrediting of every success as “God’s plan” while overlooking the absence of “God’s plan” in the failures, but I trudged through to the end of the book and I am glad to have read it.
I may not adhere to Chad’s political views or religious practices and beliefs, but when I strip away those things I see in this book a presentation of ordinary human beings with skills, training, insight, power, and resources banding together to help rescue their human brothers and sisters from the strife of a war torn land living under the cloud of religious extremism and zealotry. All honor to those involved with this exhausting, difficult, compassionate work.
Perhaps I was not the audience this book was written for—as an American that harbors a mixed of conservative and liberal views, I found this book off putting. While it did inform me on the realities of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the ongoing rescue efforts, it also alienated me with the political and religious overtones. It’s fine—I am glad to live in a country where one can write a book like this filled with personal ideas and philosophies—freedom is a good thing and we should all be able to accept that one price of freedom is some degree of practicing peaceful tolerance.
May Chad and the NGOs he is involved with continue to do good works. Thank you for your service and patriotism.
The stories and details of these rescue missions, and the poorly executed Afghanistan withdrawal that led to their necessity, are enlightening, painful, and raw—I am glad I now have more knowledge about these things.
Still, this book was a difficult read and I continued to struggle with keeping an open mind. It’s important to know that this book, while providing a narrative account of these rescue missions, is heavily populated with what read to be right-wing political jabs, conflicting and illogical statements regarding “God’s plan,” or “the burden God has placed” on individuals. Within the same paragraph the author will give God credit for providing resources, only to have those resources made irrelevant sentences laters by individuals with better gear. There is often a “God provides through prayer” message injected into the recollections juxtaposed with tales of gearing up to draw penises on the faces of potential detained Chinese soldiers (which the author seems to find humorous). It seemed a bit more than out of alignment with what I understand to be Christian values, but those are values that seem to get entangled with personal biases and preferences often.
Credit to Chad for taking action and doing this hard work. I may not appreciate his politics, nor adhere to the convoluted hit-and-miss accrediting of every success as “God’s plan” while overlooking the absence of “God’s plan” in the failures, but I trudged through to the end of the book and I am glad to have read it.
I may not adhere to Chad’s political views or religious practices and beliefs, but when I strip away those things I see in this book a presentation of ordinary human beings with skills, training, insight, power, and resources banding together to help rescue their human brothers and sisters from the strife of a war torn land living under the cloud of religious extremism and zealotry. All honor to those involved with this exhausting, difficult, compassionate work.
Perhaps I was not the audience this book was written for—as an American that harbors a mixed of conservative and liberal views, I found this book off putting. While it did inform me on the realities of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the ongoing rescue efforts, it also alienated me with the political and religious overtones. It’s fine—I am glad to live in a country where one can write a book like this filled with personal ideas and philosophies—freedom is a good thing and we should all be able to accept that one price of freedom is some degree of practicing peaceful tolerance.
May Chad and the NGOs he is involved with continue to do good works. Thank you for your service and patriotism.
