Book One – 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.