US soldier fights Taliban, 3 decades after his father fought for Red Army in Afghanistan

Father and son: a legacy of war in Afghanistan

BADULA QULP, Afghanistan — His father fought for the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the early 1980s. Now he is also in Afghanistan, fighting for the U.S. Army in another war, in a new generation.

“It’s the same thing,” said Staff Sgt. Aleksey Butkov, a resident of Portland, Ore. who was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated as a child. “Twenty-seven years later, it’s the same thing.”

By that, Butkov is not talking about the big picture. The Soviet invasion during the Cold War, and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that unleashed U.S. retaliation against al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts were “two different sides, two different approaches,” he said.

What he is really talking about is personal experience — that of his father in wartime, and his own, now.

“We’re pretty much there to do someone else’s work, and when you are on the ground, you only care about your buddies, left and right,” said Butkov, a squad leader with the 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment from the 5th Stryker Brigade, which is supporting Marine operations against the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in southern Afghanistan.

Many children follow their parents into a military career, and Butkov is no exception. But he is a rarity, fighting in the same country as his father, but for a different superpower. The common denominator is a lethal, inventive enemy that cannot defeat a big military force head-on, but seeks to harass, striking and slipping away in a country where warfare has been a way of life for centuries.

Aleksey Ivanovich Butkov, the elder, fought in Afghanistan between 1982 and 1984, driving an armored personnel carrier that his son described as the “Russian version of a Stryker,” a U.S. infantry carrier. The son, Aleksey Alekseyevich Butkov, travels in Strykers, which are routinely targeted by insurgents who plant roadside bombs in culverts and packed earth or other hiding places.

In the south, where the junior Butkov is on a mission, the land is dry and flat, desert that stretches to the horizon. The elder Butkov was based in Mazar-i-Sharif during the Soviet occupation, patrolling a northern border area where mujahedeen, U.S.-backed Islamic guerrillas, used mountain passes to ambush Red Army vehicles.

Even today, the wrecks of Soviet military vehicles sit on the side of some roads in Afghanistan.

“We don’t have to worry about someone crawling up high and throwing something down on us,” said the younger Butkov, who said the Soviet soldiers were “sitting ducks” in mountainous terrain.

Roadside bombs are the problem for American troops in the south. In September, Butkov had dismounted from a Stryker and was walking ahead of it when it hit a concealed bomb near a creek.

“As I was flying forward from the blast, I looked back, and I saw the Stryker rise up,” said Butkov, who turns 24 on Feb. 18. Two men were injured.

Butkov’s father moved to the United States in the early 1990s after his native Ukraine became independent during the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the son, as a curious teen-ager, used to ask him about Afghanistan. His father told him that his armored personnel carrier was once burned up, though Butkov doesn’t know the details of what happened.

“Now that I’ve gotten older, I really don’t ask anymore, because I’ve seen it for myself,” said Butkov, who became a U.S. citizen and is married with a young child. “It’s one of those things you don’t want to discuss.”

He said he has a “silent agreement” with his father, now a truck driver, not to talk about their Afghan wars, though the stories he heard made the country seem familiar when he first deployed. It is his second tour in Afghanistan.

Butkov said he has walked into areas in Afghanistan where isolated residents thought his American unit was Russian, as though the Soviet occupation had never ended. “‘Are you still here?’” the residents asked.

Once, he told an Afghan soldier, an older man who surely remembered or even fought during the Soviet occupation, that his father was on the Russian side decades ago. The Afghan’s reaction was hard to read, possibly hostile, Butkov said.

“He didn’t say anything. Then he said: ‘I don’t believe you,’” he said. “He had a cigarette and walked off.”