FTA

 About the time I enlisted, the recruiting posters for the army were displaying the slogan, "Fun, Travel, Adventure".  I don't know who started it, but the guys in our outfit were fond of making fun of this slogan by saying the initials "FTA" really stood for "Fuck The Army!".  Another popular epithet was, "The Army Sucks!" Whenever somebody would shout out one of these slogans, some other smart aleck would always reply, "You know, it's not the army, it's the people in it."

The difference between what the Russians and Americans were doing in Afghanistan was that the Russians were fighting to defend Communism and the Americans were not.  Since Russian Communism was out of business by the time the Americans got there, I'm not sure what they were fighting to defend.  I might say "democracy", but the Afghanis had never known democracy.  Maybe they were trying to teach democracy to them.  If so, it obviously didn't work.  As they used to say in the army,  "If the student fails to learn, the instructor failed to teach."