Tag: Afghanistan

A Venn Diagram Play

Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers.
Rochelle asks that we use the photo prompt (©Jennifer Pendergrast)
and limit our words to 100 or less. 
Click on the frog to read more stories.

Genre: Realism
Word Count: 100

A Venn Diagram Play

Mommy plays Lego with me
I’m four and she’s thirty-three
But I make up the games we play
And she does exactly what I say.

We share the firetruck and the fireman
He’s my Daddy and he’s her husband
I get Santa for a party favor on my birthday
She gets a candy for baking a cake so gay.

I get a funny-shaped red Lego piece
And save two for Daddy when he says, “Please.”
The red truck is outside my diagram
It’s for the children killed in Afghanistan
By an unmanned drone, they’re in no one’s Venn.

Don’t cry.

The Pentagon confirmed on November 3, 2021, that after the disastrously chaotic withdrawal of American troops which resulted in billions of dollars of military weaponry, hardware, and aircraft left behind as well as the suicide bombing of thirteen young American soldiers, three days later, it carried out a deadly drone strike that mistakenly killed ten innocent civilians on August 29: three Afghan adults and seven children.

Not our “Betters”

After an absence of weeks from your midst, my first return post is a rant. Forgive me. I’ve just been reading about the barbaric custom of bacha bazi which is practiced in parts of the Mideast, northwestern Pakistan and most ubiquitously and flagrantly in Afghanistan. As a 2015 New York Times article reported and Tablet magazine reminds us today, during their twenty-year tenure there, our soldiers were told by their “woke” military commanders to disregard the practice among their Afghan “allies” even as it occurred under their very noses. One Special Forces officer was fired for preventing the rape of an Afghani boy. What an amoral, self-serving, dictatorial sham is the leadership in our country and the world! Meanwhile, we pray for the 15,000 Americans who are trapped in Afghanistan right now. May God help them, and the Afghani women and children.~d

Patronized by our inferiors
Elitists compromised by their behaviors
Say don’t you know the bacha bazi
“Dancing” little boys raped by Afghan “allies”
So we could stay spending our dollars
On defense contractors greasing legislators
To turn a blind eye to “indigenous customs”
Children enslaved to cowards
“Allies” rebranded as refugees
To soil the land with fresh blood of their victims
Here in the streets where Harley-Davidsons
Ride on the winds of freedom from oppression.
Let the monsters stay with the warlords of Pakistan
Or Qatar, or UAE with CCP camps of Uyghurs
Don’t let the elitists tell you “better.”


PHOTO PROMPT© Lisa Fox