My neighbor, the prisoner of war: The holidays feel oddly bittersweet in the Idaho valley thats home to Bowe Bergdahl, our only POW in Afghanistan. By ALEXANDER MAKSIK I have been returning to Idaho’s Wood River Valley for 20 years, always to the same house on the river where my parents live. I’m older, my parents are older, but mostly little has changed. Each holiday season, I come home from different cities, different countries, and everything is still beautiful. The air is still clean. We leave the front door unlocked. The propeller plane glides up the valley and lands at the little airport. My mother and father pick me up. We eat dinners together. We take walks in the snow. We ski. I see my friends. And then I return to my life, wherever that is. Two years ago I came home to yellow ribbons tied on trees. A young man who grew up in this valley had vanished from his base in Afghanistan. Not long after that the Taliban released a video of him sitting on a floor, eating the way a child eats when he’s being made to finish his dinner. Bowe Bergdahl has been in Taliban captivity now since June 2009; he is our only prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Read more: salon/2011/11/24/my_neighbor_the_prisoner_of_war/
Posted on: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 07:01:04 +0000
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