The Martyred Generals

It was never clear to me why General Christopher Donahue arranged to have himself pictured, complete with green-tinted night vision style special effects, on the tarmac as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan. (According to a friend with intimate knowledge of what happened on the plane, the picture was “less than candid”) The performance was apparently intended to evoke the precedent of the Soviet general, Boris Gromov, who similarly cast himself as the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan. Gromov did it on foot, walking across a bridge into Uzbekistan in February, 1989. As a civilian, he subsequently enjoyed a successful political career in Moscow, though it’s not yet clear if Donahue’s referencing of Gromov extends that far.

The general’s staged exit certainly made an impression, not least among denizens of the Washington defense intellectual blob who nestle at the feet of the uniformed high command and are aghast at War Secretary Hegseth’s loutish assaults on the medal-bedecked general officer corps, notably the recent abrupt displacement of Donahue from his four-star post as U.S. Army commander in Europe and Africa. The general’s forced retirement inspired an eloquent threnody in the New York Times from opinioneer David French, which opens with an evocation of the “iconic image of the war on terrorism” - that Kabul airport picture - and summarizes Donahue’s military career as a string of military triumphs, including command of Delta Force, the Army’s elite team of dedicated assassins as well as directing operations against ISIS in Iraq and Russia in the Ukraine war.