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Fort Campbell - Fort Campbell, KY Fort Campbell - Fort Campbell, KY

To get to a place where the Afghanistan war is something not yet forgotten, drive from civilian America onto this 164-square-mile military base. Pass the armed guards who check for military identification and the four-story Warrior Transition building that houses wounded soldiers, and keep going into one of the bases residential neighborhoods of identical two-story houses.

Inside one of those homes, Lt. Col. Chris Hossfeld is in the family room reviewing a video from his first combat tour 10 years ago.

Watch right there, he says, pointing at a sandbagged window on the second floor of his old combat outpost in Iraq. Theres a spurt of gunfire from the spot where one of Hossfelds soldiers, Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, 19, was standing guard duty. A split second later a dump truck, containing more than 1,500 pounds of explosives and speeding toward the outpost, disappears in a fireball. The blast sheared off the buildings front, wounded 11 Americans, and killed Sanchez, the first of Hossfelds troops to die in combat.

That was the war in 2004. Now, in a few days, Hossfeld, 41, will be going to war again, this time in command of a 700-soldier battalion headed to Afghanistan. In much of America, the war in Afghanistan may be regarded as over, if its thought of at all. But to Hossfeld and his soldiers, who are likely to be among the last to deploy to the country on a combat mission, the war is very much ongoing and present tense.

They will be entering a fight thats very different from the one captured on the video. That was President Bushs war, launched three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when what would turn into 13 years of war with nearly 7,000 American deaths, 60,000 injuries and a cost in excess of $2 trillion was just beginning.

To all the men and women in our military, Bush said from the White House as the first American bombs fell on Afghanistan, your mission is defined. The objectives are clear. Your goal is just. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty.

Now as Hossfeld prepares to leave for Afghanistan, hes fighting for a different commander-in-chief with a different focus: ending a war rather than beginning one. President Obama has set hard limits on U.S. troop levels and a firm timeline for the withdrawal of the remaining American forces. Obamas effort to constrain his militarys ambitions reflects his own doubts about whether the mission is worth any more American lives. Hes thinking very hard about what it would feel like to have casualties in Afghanistan next year, said a senior White House official involved in Afghanistan policy. Hes thinking about this more than anyone else in the debate. Hes considering what he would feel like.

With his deployment just days away, Hossfeld has his own questions: What exactly will his men be doing? How long will they stay? Will one of his soldiers be the wars last casualty? How different will this last deployment be from his first one?

It was a gut fight, said Hossfeld of that first combat tour. That was a visceral thing that soldiers could grasp. It was easier for soldiers to truly identify the problem. They could see their demons. It was either him or me.

Continued here:
Troops bound for Afghanistan find new uncertainty