“Bearing the Head of the Spear”

by Evan Strohman

*Names have been changed for anonymity

“My foot is, is one inch away from the side of the air airframe. And I’m trying to buckle my seatbelt on and, you know, the flight crew, like you would think that they would wait for everybody to get buckled up before they take off. Right? But hell no. I mean, hell no, they got places to go, right? So the helicopter has taken off and I’ve only got like one of the buckles in. I’m holding this stupid encryption device between my knees, desperately trying to buckle all the rest of my seatbelt and you know, the helicopter is banking and pulling up.” This is Felix Foster, a former chief of engineering in the U.S. military. During his 25 years in the military, he worked as a platoon leader, deployed to Kosovo and Bosnia in the 1990s, and more recently joined the reserves and worked on communications technology in the Middle East for the last two decades. 

I have known Felix since I was little, roughly seven years old. I knew that he had served in the military for many years, but that is where my knowledge of his service ended. When I was assigned this project for my Literature of Witness class last month, I quickly planned an interview with him over Thanksgiving break. Leading up to the interview, I was quite nervous, even to the point where I was a little bit scared. I view Felix as a pretty no-nonsense person with a dry sense of humor whom I had not spoken to in over a year, so I had no idea what to expect. We both joined a Zoom call on a late Sunday afternoon, and after a few technical difficulties, his face finally popped up on my screen. He was standing over what I assume to be his phone, with silver-gray Bose headphones on his head. We exchanged hellos and broke the ice with some friendly conversation. He asked to turn off his camera so that he could walk around the house while answering my questions, and I agreed. I imagined him in his kitchen, washing dishes while reminiscing about war, but from this point onwards I could only guess what he was doing.

“Since I don’t really know about your history in the military, I was thinking we could start with that and then move on to some of the more specific questions?” I said. He wasted no time, describing his induction into the army through the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) program, his original plans to become a member of the navy getting derailed due to a problem with his medical records, his first deployment to Kosovo, and so on. He detailed his exit from the military after four short years and how he re-joined because he missed the camaraderie of the army in his day-to-day life. Finally, he talked about his time in the Middle East, from his first deployment to Afghanistan to his work on long-distance communications as the U.S. was preparing to exit its 20-year war in the Middle East.

“And while you’re in those places, you were doing IT work?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, you know, at this point I’m a pretty senior dude, you know, in the army,” he clarified. “I had about 80 engineers working for me. Some of them contractors, you know, mostly IT folks. Right. So, we had a section that dealt with, um, kind of long haul transmission. So people that would run fiber optic cables.” I was slightly surprised by this, as I had never really considered that IT work was even a job you could have in the military, let alone commanding a team of 80 people to do it.

 I was not expecting this answer, so I asked, “Have you ever been in highly dangerous situations? Well, I mean… y’know….” The question seemed to fall out of my mouth and quickly devolved into incoherent mumbling. I felt like it was an improper question to ask, implying that I only cared to hear about the dangerous fighting that a stereotypical soldier would be doing. However, he didn’t seem fazed by this question at all and quickly replied with, “That’s a good question. I would say the answer to that is no, I mean, I have never, although I have practiced many times, no. You know, drawn my weapon and sighted in, on another human being and pulled the trigger. Right. But there was only a very short period of time in my career where that would have been my job, probably like the first eight months, maybe when I was a platoon leader.” 

He then explained that “if, as an officer you’re, you know, in some kind of cat fight with somebody or a knife fight, you’re not doing your job right.” He said this matter of factly; his voice didn’t waver for a moment. Then he hesitated, rethinking his answer to the question, and then said, “I mean, I’ve certainly been shot at before… you know, that was a dangerous, yeah. I think the answer to that is absolutely.” 

It was almost like he had not considered these situations to be particularly dangerous, even though a person like me would have been scared half to death already if I was put in the same situation. As if he could hear my thoughts, he said, “One of the things I’ll tell you, human beings can become used to almost any type of situation.” He talked about a group of “knuckleheads called the mad mortarmen” in Kosovo who would run out of their encampment and shoot harassing mortar shells at the U.S. soldiers stationed there. These shells landed pretty close to their target most of the time, and he said he could hear them exploding outside almost regularly. He also talked about UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) strikes that were somewhat common while he was stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 

“On the value on the face of it. Yeah. That’s, that’s pretty dangerous, right? I mean, but on the other hand, you know, that happens for week after week and month after month, it kind of becomes routine, right? So it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a situation where I really felt, you know, worried for myself.” I sat there, trying to process all of the things he had just said. The scenario he was describing was so totally alien to me it was hard to wrap my head around. He continued by saying that “most of the stress comes from being worried. You’re going to make a bad decision, that’s going to impact somebody else.” I nodded in agreement, though I still do not fully understand how stressful it must have been for him to make those tough decisions.

 For example, he pictured the final days of the U.S. occupation of the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan. He said, “I had to make the decision to, to send a team of, of engineers down there. Um, to, you know, to do some work, uh, on their, their comm systems and, you know, it’s decisions like that that kind of weigh on you, right? Because you know what happens, right? What if they go down and they don’t come back? You know, I mean, that’s always a possibility, um, you know, that you, you, you find yourself when you get in it at the senior levels, you know, you’re kind of making these decisions every day that are putting other people at risk.” The stress associated with this kind of decision is hard to comprehend. It’s the aspect of war that people don’t consider as often, the people making the tough decisions, not just risking their own lives but also the lives of others. 

“Sort of on that note, is there anything that you super vividly remember about serving in the military?” I asked.

“Oh my gosh. Yeah, I got a couple,” he exclaimed.

Bagram Air Base, a preposterously large airstrip located in Bagram, Afghanistan. Built by the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan, it is nestled between the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu-Kush mountain range. Fifty years after its construction, it was being used as a U.S. military base to aid the war effort in Afghanistan. Among the soldiers stationed there was Colonel Foster. He had flown down to Kabul, the Afghan capital, for the day to attend some meetings with other army officials. He said, “I was with my deputy, who was this crusty old chief warrant officer, Chief Armstrong. The guy had been in the army like 230 years as far as I could tell.” In contrast to the massive scale of Bagram Air Base, the compound in Kabul is tiny by comparison. “In fact, it’s so small that their heli-pad doubles as their soccer fields. So, you know, people will play soccer. Helicopter comes in, they got to stop the soccer game. They’re off the field. Helicopter leaves. And then once the helicopter is gone, they go back and start playing, start playing soccer,” he said with a small smile in his voice, perhaps a bit of nostalgia from the memory of those days. 

“Chief Armstrong was an old special forces guy, you know, years and years ago. And he’s like, ‘Hey, sir, sir, I’m going to ask him to leave the doors open when they fly back.’ And typically you would not leave the doors open on a helicopter unless you were doing, you know, like an air assault operation.” As Chief Armstrong was getting the helicopter ready, Felix had to go pick up an encryption device per a special request from a colleague back in Kuwait. “Super secret, you know, can’t lose it at all costs. You know, it has to be hand carried. It has to physically, uh, be held by a person from point A to point B. So they had a need for this somewhere else and they called me and said, ‘Normally we wouldn’t ask this of a Colonel, but, uh, could you possibly pick this up?’” 

As he told me this, I slowly started to put the pieces of the story together. As I did, a small smile appeared on my face. I imagine that he was probably smiling too: I could hear a bit of it in his voice as he spoke. He kept this lighthearted tone as he described the situation unfold. Many small problems had come together at once, the encryption device was too big, the seatbelt in the helicopter was hard to buckle, the helicopter pilots were in a rush, the helicopter doors were open. 

“The best thing that could happen is I’ll just fall out of the helicopter and die. Right. And then it’ll be embarrassing because they’ll be like, ‘Oh, what happened to Colonel Foster? Oh, he’s the guy that fell out of the helicopter,’ but at least I don’t have to suffer any shame. But worse than that, I’m going to drop this stupid encryption device over the middle of Afghanistan. Had I done so, what they would’ve done is they would have had to call in an airstrike to blow it up!” We both laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Of course, it’s easy to laugh about things like this when you are far removed from the event. In the event, it must have been incredibly stressful, not just because his life was on the line. More than that, the integrity of an entire communications grid was riding on that helicopter and at that point, you’re responsible for more than just your own life. Thankfully, both he and the encryption device made it back in one piece, but that story highlights the stress that high-level officials in the army have to go through, and it is precisely what makes their job so difficult. 

“How do you think your time in the military has changed you?” I asked apprehensively. I was getting into the more somber questions now, and I worried that some of them might not be received well.

He replied, “I’ll say two things. Number one, I feel, and I hope that it’s given me a much healthier sense of perspective. I think that a lot of people I know, um, you know, there’s, there’s all sorts of stress in life, right? I mean, stress is real and, and, you know, people want to do a good job. Uh, you know, your, you know, your dad gets stressed at work. I get stressed at my civilian job. I don’t want to discount that. But on the other hand, you know, to me, true stress is, is like when the, you know, the vehicle behind you blows up, right? I mean, that’s really, that’s really stressful. Anything short of that is, is manageable. And I think, um, my time in the military has made me a little, uh, better dealing with that.

“And number two, I, whatever self-confidence I have, especially in regards to like standing up in front of a group of people or, or trying to lead a group of people, that all came from the army, right?” He spoke about one of his first experiences in the army when he was tasked with commanding a platoon of other men through Bosnia. He describes it as this feeling of having an overwhelming sense of power, almost to the point where it was scary. This bears witness to the speed at which the military throws soldiers into situations that they are barely ready to handle. He also said that, thankfully, there were always people there to help him handle his responsibilities, but that “it’s a little bit stressful. But it was a good experience.”

“Alright, um…,” I paused. After the long pause, I finally asked, “Do you have any regrets?”

He sighed a little wistfully and then said, “Yeah, certainly. I mean, there’s, there’s, uh, uh, an endless amount of regretful things that I could have done better. Um, I’d say in particular, you know, you’ve probably watched the way things unfolded in Afghanistan.”

After another pause, he said, “I’m of two minds about that. Um, you know, number one, I’ve got things I would rather do with my life than go back to Afghanistan. Right. So, you know, I’m happy that I won’t have to go back there or my fellow soldiers, but you know, at the same time, I saw some of the improvements. Um, you know, some of the improvements in the quality of life and personal freedom. I saw that stuff with my own eyes. Right. Um, you know, women being able to go to school. Uh, and that’s all gone, right? That’s all gone. It’s all gone now. Um, and it’s, it’s probably gonna remain gone for, for fifty or a hundred years. Um, so that, you know, that kind of makes me sad. Um, and we put a lot of work in it.” 

He talked in detail about some of the improvements we had made to Afghanistan over the 20 years we fought there. This highlights another key takeaway from this interview, that leaving Afghanistan was indeed a double-edged sword. While it was a massive investment of time, and people, and resources, that investment was not entirely going to waste. All too often, we try to sweep failures under the rug, to try and say that Afghanistan was doing no good for anyone, but that is entirely untrue. At least in some aspects, we were helping the people there, improving their infrastructure and access to schools. It was a difficult situation that did not have any good answers, but we must not forget the way things turned out in Afghanistan so that we as a country do not end up repeating it. He said though that “it’s frustrating to think of all that, that work, um, basically being for nothing, but…what else are you going to do?”

“To hopefully end this off on a good note. What, um, are you the most proud of?” I said. I was pretty relieved that the previous question had succeeded. 

“Um, well, so we, uh, our, my boss, General Anita Daniels, her whole pitch was, there’s a lot of things we tried to do there, but, uh, but her pitch was, we have to allow the war fighters to communicate, right? Because the way that we fight these days, communicating is absolutely essential in a way that it wasn’t a hundred years ago. If people can’t talk on the phone or quite frankly, if they can’t have VTCs , if they can’t get orders across, through email, uh, people die. So we worked really, really hard and spent a lot of money on things that people from the outside would probably look at and say ‘Well, that’s kind of wasteful, right?’” During the end of the war in Afghanistan, near the end, the Taliban was attacking the communications networks pretty aggressively. Cutting fiber optic cables, knocking towers out of alignment so that they could no longer transmit a signal, and so on.

 “Despite all of those things, you know, happening there near the end, uh, the networks never went down, right. There was never a point where, uh, you know, they were degraded at times, but there was never a point where the information that needed to get across couldn’t get across.” I was incredibly impressed when I heard this, and this interview is so valuable as a work of witness because it highlights this, as Felix puts it, “unsexy” aspect of war. Yes, there were thousands of U.S. soldiers firing guns and throwing grenades, the sort of thing you would see in a documentary about Afghanistan. 

But, as he says, “If you have a look at the way our army is structured these days, for every one guy who’s got the body armor on, who’s got a rifle with a grenade launcher slung underneath it, for every one of those there’s about nine people behind him. They’re enabling him to be where he’s at, to understand what’s going on to get, you know, the beans and bullets so he can survive, to get the medical care so he can, uh, he can survive.” And that is the aspect of war that this highlights: the nine people standing behind and enabling every infantryman to do what they do best.

“The tip of the spear is important, but the rest of the spear is pretty long and it’s important too, so, yeah, no, absolutely. It’s like anything else, you know, there’s all this stuff that goes on in the background of your life, right, that you don’t pay a lot of attention to until it stops working.”

I was incredibly impressed with this answer, and I sat in silence for several seconds just taking it all in. I find this perspective to be incredibly meaningful because of how it bears witness to the rest of the spear, the vital parts of our military that do not get enough recognition and praise for the work they do. I am honored that Felix Foster was willing to share his experiences with me, and I am grateful that I have the privilege to share this interview.