Tyranny of Steel

Lt. Julian Weber gazed across the construction project his unit was responsible for. As the U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan came to a close, he was stuck building a bridge in the middle of nowhere for some god-forsaken country. If there was one thing he had learned during his four years as an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it was unwise to criticize the high command ’s stupidity openly.

Thus he kept his mouth shut as he and the other officer ’s mapped out the construction project while the enlisted personnel was hard at work building the massive bridge that served virtually no purpose whatsoever to U.S. forces who were already fleeing the country in large numbers. That ’s right, ”fleeing. ” Julian may not care for a hellhole like Afghanistan. Still, he considered it a monumental loss to pull out of the country when the Afghan National Army was clearly incapable of contending with the Taliban without U.S. support.

In his mind, the U.S. had invested over 2.2 trillion dollars in the war and thousands of lives, yet before their mission was complete, they were pulling out. Leaving a fledgling democratic country like Afghanistan, which the US had installed as a puppet state to fend for themselves. This was Iraq and Vietnam all over again, and we all know how that turned out.

Despite his internal protests over the geopolitical situation, he was glad to be out of the region on a personal level. He was much more comfortable sitting in the barracks of some base in the homeland playing strategy games, city builders, and agricultural simulators. When he wasn ’t working, he played such games or educated himself on history, philosophy, politics, economics, and old technology.

After all, he was a fairly educated individual, having graduated at the top of his class in Civil Engineering from Westpoint. During his youth, he always had a fascination with Engineering. If you gave him a toy, he was more interested in taking it apart and putting it back together than he was playing with it.

As he grew into adolescence, he had spent most of his time on the web or in a library researching history and how the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions came to be; The significant improvements in technology, and how to replicate them. With a photographic memory and an above-average IQ, he could commit these things to his permanent memory.