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Charlie Wilson's War
(2007)
by Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
Good-Time Charlie Wilson was a good ol' Texas boy who spent 24 years in the
United States House of Representatives drinkin', fornicatin' and havin' fun
unapologetically. He dated beautiful women, hung around with showgirls, hired
exceptional beauties ("Charlie's Angels") to work in his office, and maintained an
Austin Powers bachelor pad complete with hot tub and omnipresent mirrors. He
didn't give a fig for political correctness and had a wicked sense of humor, so
he would call serious women "babycakes" and "jailbait" just to get a reaction. On the
other hand, he took his responsibilities on the Hill seriously and was well read
on most issues. Charlie was the old-fashioned model of a successful American:
work hard, play harder. I knew plenty of Charlie Wilsons in my 15 years with a
large Texas corporation. The old smooth-talkin' Southern boys believed that
their personal entertainment habits were irrelevant to their job performance,
except to the extent that small-minded people chose to declare the two matters
correlated. In general, that was right. There is no reason why a guy can't get
drunk and laid and also succeed in an important career. In fact, the two may be positively
correlated. The single most important element which defines high-level success in business
and politics is one's ability to get results out of other people, and the
Charlie Wilsons of the world are extremely adroit at getting along with people
of both sexes. That's what gets them elected. That's what allows them to trade
favors so smoothly. That's what gets them laid. Those same skills are
universally useful. If Charlie had been in our corporate office, he would have
fit right in, and his nickname would have been "Slick." He wouldn't
have known which causes to champion, but once he found one he believed in, he
would have sold everyone on getting behind it.
The CIA's Gust Avrakotos was just as colorful in his own way. A very
different way. While Charlie was polished, Gust was direct and coarse. The son
of a Greek immigrant who became a successful soft drink bottler, Gust was an
outsider in the CIA's Ivy League culture, a hothead who poisoned his own career several
times with ragged insults to top-ranking officials. But Gust had something very
important going for him. He actually knew what the fuck he was doing. He had
been the valedictorian of his high school class and had graduated from college
summa cum laude. He made it a point to know what he was talking about and when
he lacked answers he found someone who had them. Unlike the many people in every
profession who come to work with an eye on the next job, Gust came to work with
an eye on doing his current job as well as it could be done. His job was
Afghanistan when he met Congressman Charlie
Wilson. Gust was trying to figure out what the United
States could do to help the Afghan freedom fighters, a poorly-armed, untrained
and rag-tag collection of warriors who were trying to win a war against the unlimited
resources of the high-tech Red Army. They were being slaughtered. A million
Afghanis were killed in the war. Five million were forced to take refuge across
the border. The population of Afghanistan's second largest city, Kandahar, had
been reduced from 200,000 before the war to no more than 25,000 inhabitants,
following a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by the Soviets
in 1987
Gust's budget to help the Afghani freedom fighters was a princely $5 million.
But Charlie held the purse strings. And Gus showed him why they should be
loosened.
Many people felt compassion for the Afghanis who were killed, maimed, raped,
and forced to flee into refugee camps, but Gust and Charlie were two of the very
few men who seemed to realize that the Afghanis might actually have a
chance to win if anyone lent them a hand. The fierce warriors were willing to
defend their land, but their big problem was that they were riding horses or
standing on the ground with AK-47s while the Russians were attacking them with
airpower and tanks. Mounting a campaign to acquire anti-tank and anti-aircraft
weaponry, Charlie and Gust managed to raise the regional budget from a few
million dollars per year to six hundred million, and they got the Gulf States to
match that amount dollar for dollar. They also managed to overcome a major
political problem. They could not just give the Afghanis a billion dollars worth
of American weapons, because that would escalate the Cold War into a real war.
In order to maintain America's deniability, the Russians had to be defeated with
Russian weapons. This dilemma required Charlie and Gust to forge an alliance
between Israelis (to provide the weapons) and Pakistanis (to deliver them into
Afghanistan).
Between the two of them, Gust and Charlie managed to pull off an anti-Soviet
miracle far greater than the one on ice. The mighty Soviets eventually lost 118
fixed-wing aircraft, 333 helicopters and 147 tanks. The war became so costly, financially
and psychologically, that the Soviet Union eventually pulled out entirely.
The film oversimplifies the situation. It has to in order to tell a good
story. It does not tell you that the Soviets had decided to leave long before
the events pictured in the film. It does not tell you how the Soviets really
lost personnel in Afghanistan. Over the course of the long war, they suffered
about a half million casualties:
- 14,000 ... killed
- 50,000 ... wounded
- 400,000 .. ill
Yes, "ill."
In many ways, it was the country of Afghanistan itself, not its citizens,
which really won the Russian war. (Ironically, that is essentially the same way
that Russia defeated its own greatest enemy, Napoleon.) The country's greatest
weakness - a total lack of modern sanitation - proved to be its greatest
strength in defeating the Russians. Altogether 620,000 Soviets served in
Afghanistan, and 415,000 of them came back with a serious disease, mostly
hepatitis and typhus. Add that fact to the fact that there didn't seem to be
anything gained by being in Afghanistan in the first place, and that Gorbachev
himself hated the war even before he took power, and you will see what
completely sapped the will of the Soviet people to pursue the war. But ol'
Charlie sure helped speed things along, and saved a lot of Afghan lives in the
process.
Good-Time Charlie Wilson and coarse Gust Avrakotos didn't cause the collapse
of the Soviet Union virtually unassisted, as the movie might lead you to
believe, but they did way more than their share, so much more that their story
needed to be told. And it's a great yarn. Tom Hanks showed a tremendous amount of savvy in
acquiring the rights to this book, because it will be a long time before there
will be another real-life story this good, with an equal balance of
entertainment, edification and emotional inspiration. Colorful characters like
Charlie and Gust are increasingly becoming relics of America's rough-hewn past,
and the Soviet Union is gone, and with it the last great symbol of monolithic
evil. Charlie Wilson's War is an astounding story, and it is told with great wit, relative
accuracy, and no padding. It's so funny and so interesting and so stirring that it seems to fly
by in five minutes and you won't even realize you have been educated.
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