Van of Valor

By L. Wright Wallace
Van of Valor

NORTH PORT, Fla. – The progression of conversation is constant on nearly every interview: Operation Enduring Freedom veterans, particularly those who shed blood and had friends die in combat, nearly entirely disagree with the events during the withdrawal of NATO and U.S. forces.

The Van of Valor team heard the same ending unfold over and over, recalled Dr. Kevin P. Wallace, Van of Valor co-founder and the recipient of a Purple Heart himself earned in Afghanistan.

To understand this constant lingering pain, I began to deep-dive research into the history, prompted by the Taliban’s Orwellian tactics on four young men who decided to dress like their favorite TV show, Peaky F****** Blinders.  

“In conflict with Afghan and Islamic values,” declared Saiful Islam Kyber of the Taliban’s Department of Vice and Virtue.  

The crime?  

Four Afghan men appeared in public dressed in three-piece suits, flat caps, and ties – a deliberate homage to the British series Peaky Blinders.  For this sartorial rebellion, they were summoned, interrogated, and forced to post public apologies for sharing content “against Sharia.” 

To the Taliban, the offense was clear: not just Western clothing, but the values of a British drama – rooted in pre-World War I Birmingham’s gangster lore – were deemed incompatible with Afghan culture.  “Even jeans would have been acceptable,” the spokesman conceded, revealing a startling hierarchy of transgressions.  The real sin was cultural imitation: “If we are to follow or imitate someone, we should follow our righteous religious predecessors.” 

But what happens when a state polishes identity into a weapon? 

When Fiction Becomes Resistance 

There is something electrically symbolic about adopting the uniform of Peaky Blinders in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.  The series romanticises rebellion, cunning, and style under oppression – themes not lost on these four men.  Their choice was neither accidental nor purely aesthetic.  It was a flicker of defiance, a razor blade tucked into the brim of a flat cap. 

“At first we were hesitant,” one admitted, “but once we went outside, people liked our style, stopped us in the streets, and wanted to take photos with us.” 

Here, cultural expression becomes quiet insurrection.  In a landscape dominated by prescribed beards and sharia-compliant attire, the sharp silhouette of a three-piece suit is more than clothing – it is a statement of individuality, a reach across time and space toward a different story. 

The Ministry of Truth, Taliban-Style 

George Orwell’s 1984 imagined a Ministry of Truth that rewrote history to suit the Party’s narrative.  In post-2021 Afghanistan, the Department of Vice and Virtue fulfills a similar role: defining permissible culture, policing thought, and staging public contrition.  The men’s scripted apology – “I have innocently been sharing content that was against Sharia” – could have been pulled from Orwell’s pages: coerced confession as performance, a spectacle of obedience. 

This isn’t cultural preservation. 

 It’s a cultural imposition. 

Afghanistan has never been a monolith.  From the conquests of Alexander the Great in 330 BC to the Silk Road exchanges, from the neutral stance in both World Wars to the Soviet occupation in 1979, Afghan identity has been woven from countless influences – Persian, Buddhist, Hellenic, Islamic, and nomadic.  The Kuchi tribes, for instance, have maintained distinct ways of life for centuries, regardless of who ruled Kabul. 

What, then, is Afghan culture? 

Is it the static, fossilized version enforced by the Taliban, or is it the living, adaptive tapestry of history? 

 Peter Burke, in What is Cultural History?, defines culture as “a way of life” – fluid, contested, and constantly evolving.  By that measure, the Peaky Blinders homage is not foreign; it is simply another thread in Afghanistan’s long story of cultural negotiation. 

The Van of Valor and the Long Shadow of Withdrawal 

The modern world did not simply watch this unfold – it participated.  For many veterans who served in Afghanistan, especially those who received Purple Hearts for their wounds, the return of the Taliban felt like a gut punch, a dark prophecy fulfilled.  They had shed blood, lost friends, and believed in building a different future, only to see it dissolve overnight. 

Among them is Prince Harry, who served as an Apache helicopter pilot in Kandahar.  In his memoir, he recalls the distinct sulfuric scent of the region, a smell of rotten eggs – a visceral, human detail that transcends politics.  

If you were to tell him, “Kandahar smells like eggs,” he would agree instantly.  Here is a man whose royal lineage is interwoven with the very empire Peaky Blinders often defies, yet his own story is marked by the dust and danger of Kandahar and Helmand.  

The same bloodlines that fought for empire, not returning not as rulers but as soldiers in a complex, unwinnable war. 

Smell is culture.  Memory is culture.  The scent of a place can evoke more history than any decree from the Department of Vice and Virtue.  

And while consensus is rare, there is a shared, grim understanding among those who fought there: the withdrawal did not just end a war; it created a vacuum.  Into that vacuum stepped the Taliban, not as defeated insurgents but as rulers – armed with the weapons left behind, funded by the economy they now control, and empowered by the perception of victory.  The “Van of Valor,” the unspoken community of veterans and survivors, carries this knowledge – a bitter residue as persistent as the smell of Kandahar.  

Whose Culture?  Whose Virtue? 

The Taliban spokesman insists the men’s attire “has no Afghan identity at all.”  But this raises a haunting question:  Is this Taliban culture or Afghan culture? 

The answer lies in the gap between the two.  Afghan culture, in its rich and pluralistic history, has embraced diversity – in dress, thought, and trade.  Taliban “culture” is a political project, an ideological lockdown disguised as tradition.  It ignores, for instance, Afghanistan’s pragmatic neutrality during World War 1, when the country navigated pressures from the British Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Caliphate – a moment of strategic subtlety far removed from today’s absolutism. 

Even the soviet occupation, devastating as it was, created cultural intersections – Russian language, music, and ideas filtering into Afghan life, for better or worse.  Culture, in short, has always been a conversation.  The Taliban seek to make it a monologue. 

The Spirit That Cannot Be Tamed 

There is an old adage, popularized in films like Rambo III, that warns: “May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan.”  It speaks to a perceived ferocity, an indomitable will forged through centuries of invasion and resistance. 

That spirit is why the current reality is so perilous.  It is not that the Afghan people are terrorists – far from it.  It is that their legendary resilience has now been harnessed by a regime that is, at its core, a terrorist organization.  An Afghan Taliban fighter is not just a militant; they are the product of a land that has outlasted empires, armed with the certainty of divine mandate.  It is one of the most formidable and deadly combinations on the planet. 

And yet – that same spirit lives in the men who dared to wear flat caps.  It lives in the women who secretly run schools.  It lives in the artists, the poets, the shepherds of Panjshir.  It is a spirit that predates the Taliban and will outlast them. 

A Question for the World

At the heart of this conflict lies a fundamental confusion – deliberately cultivated – between religious piety and political control.  The spokesperson’s reference to “righteous religious predecessors” obscures a more immediate reality: this is not about preserving Islam, but about enforcing a specific, rigid interpretation that serves those in power. 

An outsider to the religion might ask: Why is the most recent chapter of the Quran read before the teachings of Muhammad? 

The query lingers like a shadow.  It challenges the sequencing of tradition, the cherry-picking of doctrine, and the weaponization of faith.  It asks whether we are witnessing cultural difference or outright oppression. 

The world must look closely.  When four men in flat caps can summon the machinery of the state, when clothing becomes heresy and a TV series becomes a threat, we are no longer in the realm of cultural debate.  We are in the realm of thought policing – where identity is dictated, history is erased, and resistance is dressed in a three-piece suit. 

The Peaky Blinders tribute was small.  

A gesture.  

But in a society where every gesture is monitored, even small sparks cast long shadows.  And sometimes, all it takes is a spark to remind people that culture cannot be contained – it adapts, it rebels, and like the Afghan spirit itself, it endures.  Even – especially – when it smells like eggs, feels like desert dust, and wears the sharp, defiant silhouette of a borrowed suit.