She spoke Pashto so well, she seemed to read minds. Parson wished his old Army friend Sergeant Major Sophia Gold had already arrived. How will we ever airlift enough to make a difference? Oh yeah, and still fight the war. And Parson imagined the colonel was taking the thought a few steps further: These people will need everything-food, shelter, medicine. Parson didn’t understand a word, but he could guess what they were saying: What a fucking mess. Subdued tones on the interphone like whispers at a funeral. Rashid, the colonel, and the interpreter conversed in Pashto. Black flecks whipped through the air: soot from the fires on the ground. Not aircraft exhaust, but something closer to the smell of coal and charred wood. Wind from the helicopter’s open door rippled the sleeves of Parson’s tan desert flight suit. Up front, Captain Rashid commanded the aircraft, accompanied by his copilot and a flight engineer. Parson stood in the back of an Afghan chopper with an Afghan interpreter and an Afghan army colonel. Afghanistan’s construction standards were prehistoric. A smaller magnitude than the quake that had devastated northern Japan in 2011, but worse in its own way. Geological Survey rated it a preliminary 7.2. The quake had happened only about an hour ago, and the U.S. An untold number lay dead or dying beneath the rubble. Black columns of smoke seethed into the sky above a city of collapsed ceilings and crumpled walls. The slums of Mazar-i-Sharif stretched below the Mi-17 helicopter like a vast, disturbed hive.
NavyĮven from a thousand feet in the air, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Parson could see the earthquake had shaken Afghanistan to a new level of misery. A great teacher and friend, and veteran of the U.S.
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