Free Republic

The London Sunday Times, May 19, 1996 LAST POST FOR A HAUNTED 'HERO' IT WAS probably the loneliest journey of his life. Admiral Jeremy "Mike" Boorda, the four-star chief of American naval operations, left his sandwiches untouched on his huge, mahogany desk, picked up his hat and ordered his driver to take him to his home in the Washington naval yard. Moments earlier he had heard the news that he had been expecting for a year. Rear Admiral Kendall Pease, the navy information chief, told him that two reporters from Newsweek magazine would be arriving in two hours to question...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...