We can’t have our Soldiers smoking in a combat zone, smoking is hazardous to their health. (Sarcasm)
For some here it started as a family tradition, for others it was a college rite of passage and for a few, it’s something they do only while deployed.
Rich Giero, 58, a retired Army master sergeant, said he started smoking cigars when he was 14 because an older cousin did it and he thought it was cool.
“Plus, Clint Eastwood smoked cigars, and that was definitely cool,” said Giero, the intelligence section operations chief at the NATO-led Resolute Support mission’s headquarters.
Whatever their reasons for starting, military, civilian and contractor members of the Tali-banned Cigar Aficionado Club here say it’s more than a nicotine fix. It’s a bond of friendship, an escape from the drudgery of deployed life and a taste of home.
The group takes its name from the fact that the Islamist Taliban had once forbidden smoking, among a list of social ills including television and the internet. But the Kabul club revels in the vice, which builds community and remains popular among the troops despite efforts by military brass to snuff it out.
Army Chief Warrant Officer Carl Tenbrink said he started soon after arriving in Kabul earlier this year, when he got cigars in a care package from his father.
“He’s an old-school Army guy,” he said. “He was in Korea years ago. That was the thing then, so he sent me [some].”
Tenbrink was urged to join the club by Capt. Cory Weiss, an Army colleague who said he first lit up a stick while a cadet at the Citadel. First-year “knobs” buy stogies for the upperclassmen in their companies and smoke with them as part of the South Carolina military college’s Thanksgiving tradition.
It’s not clear how or when cigars became such a part of military life, but Storm Boen of Operation: Cigars for Warriors, a Florida nonprofit that sends care packages of free premium smokes to deployed U.S. servicemembers, said the charity’s research found that they were requested more than any other item.
Since May 2012, the group of 389 volunteers, which had relied on donated cigars from manufacturers before the practice was outlawed this year, has sent more than 700,000 free cigars to deployed troops — all by request.
“That right there shows you we’re fulfilling a need,” he said. “We’re not fulfilling a hobby.”
Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida and Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, are seeking to exempt donations to troops from new Food and Drug Administration regulations that bar tobacco companies from giving away their products — part of the latest U.S. efforts to curb the vice. In a letter to the FDA calling a prohibition affecting the troops “unacceptable,” Hunter said the donations boost morale and help relieve stress.
In the meantime, tobacco companies have suspended their contributions to Cigars for Warriors, Boen said, hampering the charity’s ability to continue sending packages downrange.