The Valediction

Book One, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond – A Novelized Memoir – After 20 years of occupation, America’s silent retreat from Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night on July 5, 2021 marked the end of an era. Born out of an obsession to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam at the start of the Carter administration in 1977, Afghanistan grew over a decade into a neoconservative cause célèbre and the CIA’s largest covert operation in history. President Reagan’s crusade against the Evil Empire set the stage for endless war by privatizing covert action and spawning an independent financial network that put the planet up for grabs to the highest bidder. And with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. believed it had won control of the future.

In the summer of 1979 Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould entered this epic story as journalists, and for over forty years witnessed first-hand how the U.S. transformed its Afghan trap “victory” into trapping itself in a second Vietnam.

Without realizing Afghanistan’s mythic dimension as the graveyard of empires the United States must now come to grips with a whole new reality that is not just undoing the foundation of  the American empire but undoing the concept of empire, itself.

Read more about Book Two, The Valediction: Resurrection, here.

The authors take you on an amazing journey back to 1970 where they started in the rock musical HAIR and the anti-Vietnam War movement that led to Afghanistan behind Soviet lines in 1981 and a four-decade odyssey to discover how America ended up in its second Vietnam quagmire in Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires. Watch their interview with Bruce de Torres (aka “the next Joe Rogan”) above!

The authors’ 1981 documentary from behind Soviet Lines covering those first moments of a conflict that still rocks the world. It stands as a witness to a great tragedy of the 20th century and to what might have been had diplomacy and common sense prevailed.