Dream becomes Afghan park

Russell Bartholow owned a company. He lived in a four-bedroom house south of downtown Lincoln. He drove a BMW.

And yet late at night, when most 30-something men slept, he devoured books and articles and blog posts about the faraway country of Afghanistan, strange midnight snacks that only made him hungrier. A whisper became a conversation became a scream inside Bartholow's head. I have to do something, it said. This is the story of what Russell Bartholow did.

How he became Lt. Bartholow and shipped to Afghanistan. How he stayed there longer than any other Nebraska National Guardsman — longer than any other American soldier — to build schools and dig wells in the country's all-but-forgotten northern provinces.

How he got ambushed in a dusty village in the middle of nowhere, survived a Taliban attack that almost ended the reconstruction work — almost killed the new husband of Julie Rogers and the father of her unborn baby.

And most of all, it is the story of a strange dream Bartholow had for an abandoned junkyard, a dusty plot of land littered with burned-out tanks and old land mines.

Everyone else looked at this place and saw the scars of three decades of war.

Bartholow could see something else.

“I knew that these sort of things just don't happen in Afghanistan,” Bartholow said. “But we needed something big. We needed to try.”

The journey started small, started in 2002 and 2003 as Bartholow stayed up late into the night in Lincoln.

His friends and neighbors were returning to life as normal after the shock of 9/11. Bartholow wasn't. He read books about the Taliban. He learned Afghanistan's recent history: a brutal Soviet invasion followed by an even more brutal civil war followed by the rise of extremists who banned photography, education for girls and even kite flying.

Sometimes he would get up and open his refrigerator and wonder why it was crammed with food while 15 percent of Afghan newborns died before their first birthdays, many from malnutrition.

At first when Bartholow mentioned doing something in Afghanistan, Rogers, then his girlfriend, brushed it away as mere talk. Some friends thought him the victim of a midlife crisis. Others called him nuts.

Bartholow was undeterred. He talked to Nebraska veterans of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan less than four weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He checked into positions with the U.S. State Department and nonprofit groups doing work there.

He sold the four-bedroom house. He shut down his Internet-based distribution company.

He decided to join the Nebraska National Guard and go to Afghanistan and try to help.

“He felt he had to do this,” Rogers said. “He didn't want to live with any regrets.”

There was one problem: At 38, Bartholow was too old to join the Guard. After weeks of phone calls, Guard leaders agreed to waive the age restriction and allow him to go through officer training.

OK, two problems: There was no sure way for Bartholow to get to Afghanistan.

So he made another round of calls after finishing his training, asking other states' Guards scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan, “Do you need an extra man?”

The South Dakota National Guard did. By April 2008, Bartholow found himself in Mazar-e Sharif, a city about the size of Omaha in northern Afghanistan.

The men there had fought the Soviets, each other and the Taliban for large chunks of the previous three decades. Many didn't trust one another. Many didn't trust the Americans.

The women were rarely seen and never heard. Bartholow marveled at them floating silently past in blue burqas, prohibited by local cultural norms from speaking to any nonrelative male.

But Bartholow couldn't worry about this too long. He soon found himself with too many other problems to count.

He was put in charge of northern Afghanistan's reconstruction projects — a job he got by promising to stay in the country an extra nine months beyond his original nine-month deployment.

At the outset, his reconstruction team didn't always know which current projects were real and which existed only on paper.

In some cases, an Afghan or foreign contractor had taken money to build a school or dig a well and then simply disappeared, said 1st Lt. Kepler Knott, a Georgia National Guardsman who served as an intelligence officer on Bartholow's reconstruction team.

In other cases, the reconstruction team didn't have vehicles that could reach an isolated Afghan village where a project supposedly was under way.

In still other cases, the team couldn't even find the right village on a map. Some villages shared names, at least to the American ear. Others simply didn't appear on maps.

In this environment, Bartholow's big dreams — such as finding a safe place for Afghan children to play — seemed pure fantasy.

“I didn't realize how hard it would be,” Bartholow said. “What I perceived as simple things became difficult, if not impossible.”

Slowly, though, Bartholow started to unwind his Afghan web.

He got control of the project list, venturing to villages few Americans had ever seen. His team took photographic evidence of projects under way and shut down some when it became clear they weren't progressing.

The guardsmen he had come to Afghanistan with left. Bartholow stayed.

He started to gain the trust of the region's village elders — trust forged over many cups of hot tea.

He started to see tangible results from this trust: Schools got finished, though the Taliban burned one to the ground; health clinics opened; wells produced water. Bartholow's team completed 31 projects at a cost of $12 million, according to military records.

The crazy idea began to form in his mind around May of last year.

What if the kids around Shaheen Base in Mazar-e Sharif didn't have to play in the clogged streets and dirty ditches? What if a group of Afghans donated money and time, cleaned up the junkyard next to the base and built a park there?

Before he could pursue this idea, Bartholow needed to go back to Nebraska on leave in June. He put on a tuxedo, married Rogers in July, and then headed back to Afghanistan.

Only one, wonderful problem: He called Rogers a month later, and she blurted out the news. “Guess what? I'm pregnant.”

And then one horrific problem.

It happened when Bartholow and a convoy of soldiers were traveling south, a trip of about 10 miles to a village. They started taking serious fire several miles outside the village — mortars and heavy guns that Bartholow hadn't before faced in Afghanistan.

Once the convoy raced into the village, it became clear that the only way out was the way it had come in. As gunfire rained around them, the drivers of the heavily armored American vehicles struggled to turn around in the cramped and chaotic village. Bartholow jumped out, grabbed an important-looking man fleeing into a house and pulled him to safety behind a well.

Bartholow, speaking the conversational Dari he'd picked up, learned that the man was a mullah, an important religious leader in the village. The Nebraska lieutenant summoned his 18 months of Afghan experience and hired the man on the spot: $20 to provide him with intelligence on the enemy forces and $20 more if the mullah did a good job.

In this way, Bartholow learned that dozens more Taliban were assembling several miles outside the village and preparing for an all-out assault on the Americans. He sprinted through the enemy fire up to the convoy's commander and relayed the news.

He sprinted back to talk more to the mullah. Sprinted again up to the front line, ducking and shielding his face, trying and failing to push thoughts of his new wife and unborn child out of his mind.

At last — after the mullah separated Bartholow from his second $20 — the convoy raced out of the village, moving quickly because the soldiers had learned of the looming, larger attack.

Outside the village, they ran into the advancing Taliban. One of the convoy's vehicles took a blow from a rocket-propelled grenade, shuddered and stopped. The Americans pulled the injured soldiers out of the damaged vehicle, threw them into other trucks and sped off.

Bartholow, who received the Bronze Star for his valor during the firefight, will re-enact it for a visitor while sitting in his kitchen in Lincoln. He will jump up, use the kitchen counter as cover and fire at imaginary enemies running down the hallway.

He will laugh. He will shake. He will stop suddenly and stare unblinking into space.

“It's still pretty raw,” he said, a week after returning to Nebraska. “I just opened more Christmas presents than I could ever use. And I just left a country where the people are barely surviving. That transition of realities ... it's hard to handle.”

Bartholow does have something to hang onto. He hangs onto his wife, due to deliver in April. And he hangs onto the photos of his crazy dream, evidence that it came true during his last week in Afghanistan.

Before the firefight and after it, he spent his nights and weekends cajoling rich Afghan businessmen and Afghan military leaders to work.

He would work until 10 p.m., go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night to work some more, according to Knott, his one-time intelligence officer.

Things almost fell apart, again and again, but Bartholow finally organized the meeting of his dreams inside an Afghan general's office.

The first Afghan businessman took out a stack of money, held it over his head and announced ceremoniously that he was giving it for the construction of a park. The second businessman did the same. And then the third, and fourth.

All told, a dozen influential Afghans and the Afghan military donated $100,000 to the project. Not a single American cent was spent.

Soon, dump trucks were clearing away the burned-out tanks and old land mines, and bulldozers were smoothing the land. Afghan construction crews were installing a merry-go-round, a swing set and a picnic spot. They put up a monument inscribed with a small English dedication on one side.

“This park was donated to the children of Afghanistan by people and soldiers who care,” the dedication's first line says.

The ceremony took place during Thanksgiving week.

The politicians spoke. An Afghan military marching band played. Dignitaries raised the Afghan flag, cut the official ribbon — “and then the kids took over the park,” Bartholow said.

Afghanistan has so many problems today, Bartholow knows, problems that can overwhelm you when you open your refrigerator in the middle of the night and stare at the vegetables and the three flavors of juice.

But that is why you have to boil Afghanistan down, he thinks. Shrink it, for a moment, to one Nebraska soldier who stands in Mazar-e Sharif and sobs as he watches children run and scream and chase each other across Shaheen Park.

“In a country that's otherwise dusty, we built an oasis of hope,” Bartholow said. “That's what this is all about. Hope.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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