Chris Manning
During his deployment to Afghanistan as a member of the Arizona National Guard in 2007, Chris Manning started to question the federal government.
He was part of surge of troops sent to the Middle East. Manning had assumed his mission was to hunt for Osama bin Laden and try to dismantle al-Qaida.
Instead, he and his platoon spent most of their deployment providing security for civil engineers who were meeting with Afghan leaders and government officials to discuss how the U.S. could help them with road construction, water treatment facilities and other projects.
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“I started to see foreign policy firsthand, and I saw a lot of things the government was doing didn’t make sense,” Manning said in an interview. “There was a lot of ‘mission creep,’ what we call it when the military takes on tasks that the military shouldn’t be doing.”