by Oliver North
“You know, Uncle Mack,” Seth said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “my dad has never talked about what happened in Afghanistan. He and Mom have told me how my father was killed saving Dad’s life in Egypt back in 2020—and about getting married two years later and how he adopted me before Josh was born. But neither of them ever mentioned anything about what happened in 2025 at Shindand or the congressional hearings the following year. All I know about those things is from reading books and articles on the MESH.”
Caperton thought for a moment, then said, “Well, it’s time you know more of the story. In 2024, during his reelection campaign, our president backed a United Nations plan for reestablishing a Sunni Caliphate to govern in the Middle East. Advocates of this idea thought it would help keep the price and availability of oil down and keep the Iranians in check because the mostly Sunni Arabs supposedly hate the Shiite Persians. The president won by a landslide among the Americans who bothered to vote—about twenty percent of those eligible to do so.”
“Do Arabs really hate Persians?”
“When it’s convenient. And Sunnis generally don’t get along with Shiites. But again, only to a point. They also have an ancient axiom: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ At the United Nations and in countries dependent on Arab oil—the Europeans, China, Japan, Korea, and the United States—political leaders claimed a Sunni Caliph would bring stability to the Middle East—and the price of oil—so they ignored that little piece of history.”
“But I thought we have plenty of oil in America. Is that wrong?”
“No. You’re correct. We have more than enough coal, oil, and natural gas to supply our own needs—and even export those products to others. But long before you were born, Seth, the ‘Progressives’ decided to ban any further exploitation of what they called our carbon resources, because doing so supposedly threatened the global environment. At first they claimed using hydrocarbon fuels caused temperatures to rise and would melt the polar ice caps. When ‘global warming’ was disproved they said fossil fuels cause climate change, hurricanes, cyclones, and tornadoes. The ‘Progressive’ slogan, ‘Earth would be a great place to live except for the people,’ resulted in a complete ban on new U.S. coal, oil, or gas exploration in 2024. That’s when motor fuel went to six dollars a gallon.
“The day after his inauguration in January 2025, the president began what he called a World Changing Global Tour, pushing the UN Caliphate plan, apologizing for his predecessors who backed Israel, and pledging ‘equal dialogue and fairness for all.’ He even made his State of the Union address to Congress that year from Saudi Arabia—and called it his ‘State of the World Report.’ I was one of just twenty-three members of Congress who objected because we believe he violated Article Two, Section Three of our Constitution.”
“Did anyone pay attention?”
“No. In February, when the president finally returned to Washington, first the UN and then our Congress overwhelmingly supported reestablishing a Caliphate—with Jerusalem as its capital. By then there were so few Jews remaining in what was left of Israel, putting the capital of the Islamic Caliphate in Jerusalem didn’t matter to the rest of the world. And of course, nobody in Europe, the UN, or Washington paid any heed to the Shiites in Tehran and elsewhere screaming about how they would never tolerate a Sunni Caliph in Jerusalem.
“On June 6, 2025, at the end of the Muslim Hajj, the Supreme Islamic Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia, called the Majlis al-Qaeda al-a’la, selected Sheikh Yusef Al-Rahaman Shihab—an Egyptian cleric and member of the Muslim Brotherhood—as the First Modern Caliph.
“That same day, the Shiite government in Iraq announced they were allied with Tehran against the Sunni Caliph. And the next morning, June seventh, Iranian ‘volunteers’ from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked Afghanistan to seize the city of Herat, claiming they were ‘liberating the region to protect the indigenous Persian population.’ It was the same rationale Hitler used to occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.”
“Didn’t Afghanistan’s army fight back?” Seth asked.
“They tried. But it wasn’t enough. The Afghans did the best they could, but they didn’t have much to fight with.”
“Why?”
“Well, when we pulled the last of our troops out of Afghanistan in 2014, we promised to continue helping them build their army, air force, and security services. But in 2019, Congress cut off all military aid to other countries. The president told us it would ‘save billions for the American taxpayers.’ By 2025 Afghanistan’s military looked okay on paper—but they had old weapons, only a few airplanes that worked, and very little ammunition. They were a pushover for the Iranians—who declared Herat to be a ‘liberated Shiite enclave’ on June tenth, just four days after the invasion.
“That afternoon, the new Caliph made a big speech in Jerusalem, demanding a UN Security Council resolution authorizing an international intervention force to ‘save innocent Sunni women and children from being massacred by Shiite butchers.’ To the surprise of some, the Russian and Chinese UN ambassadors who had threatened to veto the resolution boycotted the meeting and the resolution passed.”
“Were you surprised, Uncle Mack?”
“No. The Russians deliberately did the same thing in 1950 when their ally North Korea invaded South Korea. They could have vetoed that resolution but they boycotted the Security Council meeting then, too. The result was that we lost more than seventy-eight thousand Americans in the four-year-long Korean War. And just like that fight eighty-two years ago, we were caught flatfooted in 2025. But in the Second Afghanistan campaign, it was even worse because our military was so much smaller than it was five years after World War II.
“The only troops we had available to help Afghanistan were Special Operations units—like your dad’s half-strength MARSOC detachment. That’s how he ended up in Afghanistan during the long hot summer of 2025. He and his Marines deployed to Helmand Province on June eighteenth, two days after Congress passed a resolution approving the use of U.S. military force in what the president called ‘Operation Protect Freedom.’”
“Did you vote in favor or against the resolution?”
“I voted no, because I believe if we’re going to war—not simply conducting a raid, or a hostage rescue—Congress ought to declare war, just like it says in the Constitution. But it didn’t matter. The president’s ‘Progressives’ had a sixty percent majority in the House and all but thirty-one seats in the Senate. They all voted to support what the president called a ‘brief overseas contingency operation led by the United Nations.’
“By the first week of August, your dad’s MARSOC unit—just ninety-four Marines—had equipped and partially trained a force of more than one thousand Afghan irregulars who were willing to fight for their country—or at least their part of it. Many of them were just ten or fifteen years old when the Americans pulled out in 2014.
“Because they had to move on foot—mostly at night—it took them over a month to fight their way north to an old U.S. base near Shindand, about a hundred and twenty kilometers south of Herat. Just after dark on Wednesday, September third, he and his men broke through to allied troops defending the Shindand airstrip—a company of Canadian Rangers and two hundred seventy-five Afghan soldiers—the remnants of a regular Afghan Army battalion.
“The senior Canadian advisor—a major—was killed by an Iranian rocket, along with his Afghan counterpart. The wounded Canadian XO—a captain—told your dad they had not been resupplied for more than a week and were desperately low on ammunition, food, water, and medical supplies. Nearly half the Canadian-Afghan force was already dead or wounded by near-constant Iranian artillery and air strikes.
“On Thursday, September fourth, UN ‘mediators,’ meeting with Iranians in Ankara, Turkey, negotiated what they called a ‘Twenty-four-Hour Sabbath-Holiday Truce’ to coincide with the Muslim holiday Mawlid al-Nabi—it means ‘Birthday of the Prophet.’”
“Muhammad, right?”
> “Right. A message was sent out to all UN units in the field to ‘cease fire unless fired upon’ and ‘hold in present positions.’ When enemy fire stopped at around one in the morning on Friday, the fifth of September—the Muslim Sabbath, and the birthday of Muhammad—your dad made a satellite radio call requesting evacuation of their most seriously wounded and an emergency resupply. The UN Command at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul dispatched nine RH-85, remotely piloted, twin-rotor helos to deliver pallets of food, water, ammo, and medical supplies. On the way out of Shindand, they evacuated twenty-five seriously wounded American, Canadian, and Afghan casualties.
“The last bird out—with a wounded Marine, the Canadian XO, and a severely burned Afghan soldier aboard—took off just after dawn on Friday morning. About a kilometer outside the perimeter, the RH-85 was hit by a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile and went down in a wadi east of the base. Without hesitation or waiting for UN ‘permission,’ your dad immediately launched a twelve-man QRF led by Sergeant Major Dan Doan in three up-armored AATVs with the mission of recovering the wounded and destroying the UAV.
“Before they reached the site of the downed bird, Doan and his little QRF were engaged by hundreds of Iranians and had to dismount from their disabled vehicles. When he heard the gunfire and the radio calls, your dad immediately authorized Marine snipers to engage any visible enemy combatants, told the four mortar crews in their pits around the base to fire in support of Doan’s unit, and then personally led a second QRF—just nine Marines in four AATVs—where Doan and his men were pinned down, battling for their lives. The fight went on until well after dark.
“By the time they fought their way back inside the Shindand base just before dawn Saturday morning, every Marine had been wounded at least once. Your dad was hit twice by Iranian bullets and three times by shrapnel from Iranian RPGs, rockets, and artillery. All their vehicles were destroyed. Despite very heavy enemy fire and carrying all the casualties, they fought their way back into the base. The only ones who didn’t make it out alive were the three casualties who went down on the unmanned helo. The wounded MARSOC Marines carried the bodies of the dead Marine, the Canadian officer, and the Afghan soldier all the way back to the base under fire so the bodies of the dead couldn’t be desecrated by the Iranians.
“Just after sunrise on Saturday, six September, three U.S. Air Force MH-70, long-range rescue choppers flew from Bagram all the way to Shindand. Though the Shindand base was being plastered by Iranian artillery and rocket fire, the Air Force ‘Pedros’ and ‘PJs’ succeeded in evacuating eighteen of the most seriously wounded Marine, Canadian, and Afghan casualties—including a wounded Afghan civilian woman about to give birth.
“By then, your dad was unconscious from loss of blood, so his XO, Captain Paul Goodwin, put your dad on the last cas-evac bird. Three days later—September ninth—he arrived at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. I went with your mom, granddad, and grandmother to see him. He was still unconscious.”
Seth shook his head and said, “Uncle Mack, I’ve never heard any of this before. But I don’t understand, how did anything you just told me get my dad in trouble?”
“Well, son, that should have been the end of the story—but it wasn’t. The day your dad arrived more dead than alive at Bethesda, the Iranians claimed the Shindand incident was a violation of a UN-negotiated Sabbath-Holiday Truce. They said the resupply/cas-evac RH-85s at Shindand were delivering reinforcements in violation of a UN-sponsored cease-fire and insisted ‘American Marines and other foreign warmongers’—meaning the Canadian Rangers—assassinated an Iranian diplomat. Turns out the last allegation was almost true. A Marine sniper—armed with a Barrett .50-cal sniper rifle—shot and killed the commander of the IRGC Quds Force early in the gunfight on the fifth. The Quds Force commander was apparently the only son of a very senior ayatollah on the Spiritual Council in Tehran.
“Iran’s ambassador to the UN charged ‘American invaders’ in Afghanistan with assassinating a diplomat and precipitating a wider war. That afternoon IRGC maritime units, using corvettes they bought from Spain and a flotilla of speedboats, dropped mines in the Hormuz Strait as an ‘act of self-defense’ under the UN Charter. On the night of September ten, a high-altitude Global Search RPA caught imagery of the Iranians putting what looked like warheads on five ICBMs at their Nantez Space Research Site. The next morning our UN ambassador showed the imagery at an emergency meeting of the Security Council and everyone at the UN and the White House panicked.”
“Why?”
“Mostly because of oil. The price had already jumped from $195 per barrel before the Caliphate was declared to $315 per barrel. On September 11, 2025, it went to $550 per barrel—and we were already draining our Strategic Petroleum Reserves. So, at our request, the British introduced a resolution authorizing NATO and the Caliphate to use military force under the UN Charter to take out Iran’s missile sites and nuclear facilities.”
“Could NATO and the Caliph do that?”
“No. Only the U.S. had the means—but the president wanted to have the cover of a UN resolution because he was a big proponent of ‘collective security.’ It didn’t matter anyway because the Russians and Chinese vetoed the resolution. So that night the president finally issued orders for unilateral U.S. strikes using nonnuclear, AHW munitions against all known Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nuclear weapons and long-range missile installations.”
“What are AHW munitions?”
“Air-, ground-, and sea-launched Advanced Hypersonic Weapons. They are precision-guided missiles with extremely high-explosive—called EHE—conventional warheads. AHWs hit their targets at better than mach twenty—about sixteen thousand miles per hour. The fuses can be set for an airburst over the target, to explode on impact, or to penetrate up to four hundred feet underground before detonating. The president ordered more than thirteen hundred air-, sea-, and ground-launched AWHs fired in less than an hour on the night of September 11, 2025. They hit every confirmed missile assembly complex and nuclear weapons site in Iran—most of them multiple times.”
“If our military was so small, how did we fire so many at once?”
“Well, the attack required nearly half our entire inventory of AHW weapons. The sea-launched missiles came from our submarines and surface vessels in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Ground-based missiles were fired from Kuwait, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia—and some from as far away as Sicily and Diego Garcia. The air-launched missiles were launched from USAF flights scrambled from Kuwait, Turkey, and Diego Garcia and carrier-based Navy and Marine attack aircraft in the Indian Ocean.”
Seth, wide-eyed, asked, “Did they knock out all the Iranian nuclear weapons?”
“We thought so at the time. But we were wrong. All the Iranian missile assembly sites were destroyed—but not their nuclear weapons facilities. We just didn’t have enough AWH weapons to go after other locations deemed to be suspicious. As it turned out, at least five of their most advanced nuclear installations were untouched.”
The boy shook his head and said, “So what did the Iranians do then?”
“The morning after the AHW attack, Iran’s Supreme Leader called for an immediate cease-fire in Afghanistan and direct peace talks with the United States. Against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of National Intelligence, and some of us in Congress, the president refused to back a covert plan for supporting an armed opposition movement to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Instead he agreed to the cease-fire and direct talks in Berlin with the ayatollahs. That’s what created the problem for your dad.”
“How?”
“The so-called peace talks began on October first. During the first meeting, the Iranians handed the president a long list of grievances against us. At the top of their list was a demand to immediately lift all economic sanctions. The second item was a requirement to apologize and punish all responsible for ‘violating the UN’s Sabbath-
Holiday Truce’ at Shindand on September fifth. In what he called ‘a show of good faith,’ the president agreed to these terms. That afternoon, ‘Progressives’ in Congress introduced a resolution lifting all economic sanctions against Iran and announced formation of a ‘special, nonpartisan, Joint House-Senate Committee to immediately investigate and punish all responsible’ for what they called the Tragic Incident at Shindand.”
“Did they mean the one where my dad was wounded?”
“That’s what they meant—but they didn’t know then your dad was the senior American officer at the Shindand base during the gunfight. That didn’t come out until about three weeks later, when congressional investigators leaked his name to reporters and blamed him for breaking the Holiday-Sabbath Truce. On the morning of October nineteenth, every newspaper, television, and MESH news outlet on the planet had pictures of Major James Stuart Newman in news stories about ‘the renegade Marine’ who started a war . . .”
“I remember that,” Seth said. “I was only five years old, but I recall Mom taking us to see Dad in the hospital. There were a lot of reporters with cameras waiting for us at Bethesda that morning. They chased us all the way from the parking garage into the hospital shouting questions at her about being married to the man who caused a war. Josh was crying and so was she . . .”
Caperton patted Seth on the shoulder as tears welled up in the boy’s eyes. After a moment the senator quietly asked, “Do you remember what happened next?”