FORT MILL --
A Rock Hill lady with a son in Afghanistan clearing highways of bombs is not a happy mother this week.
Her name is Eve Hawthorne, and her son is with the Fort Mill-based Army National Guard 1222nd Combat Engineers.
She put it bluntly about the leak of 91,000 classified Afghan war documents.
"This is not a bunch of teens messing around on Facebook telling secrets," Hawthorne said. "This is about the safety of my son and every other son over there. Every soldier has to feel betrayed.
"Whose side are these people on, anyway?"
The document leak over the weekend that has spun into an international uproar is about what happened with the U.S. military in Afghanistan from 2004 to late 2009.
There is little news in it: Most people know the war is not going well, certainly not as well as military leaders and politicians would like the rest of us to believe.
But in York and Chester counties, these documents are not about other people. The 1222nd Combat Engineers have been in Afghanistan since January.
For seven months, about 105 soldiers whose families live and work and pray here every day have cleared roads and swept bombs and tried to stay alive. For most of them, it is their second or third deployment.
"Right now, my husband and every husband there is doing the most dangerous job in the world," said Kelly White, wife of a 1222nd soldier.
As a military wife, White wants to know more facts, appreciates the idea that more exposure to the truth of the war is important.
But above all, she said, is this: Her husband and others could be hurt by this release.
"They are on a mission that is so dangerous," White said, "and the documents could rile people up over there - maybe turn some of the locals to the other side."
This is not a news story about leaked documents. It is a story about frightened, angry, worried families who wonder what could happen to their loved ones until they come home in October or November.
"If these documents going out there gets somebody killed, that guy who leaked them is the first one I'm coming for," said Bonnie Hoagland of Chester, with two sons and a husband in the unit, another son in the guard who was wounded in Afghanistan in 2008 and another son on active duty who has been to both Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I can't believe it, the ignorance of the idiots who did this."
Wanda Bennett of Richburg, with a son in the unit, called the release "crazy and irresponsible."
"It makes me mad," she said.
Bill Muetze of Fort Mill, two sons in the unit, put it this way concerning what he would do to whomever leaked the documents: "Hang 'em."
No matter a person's politics or view of the war, Muetze said, the release can have nothing but a negative effect on American soldiers and their relationship with Afghan supporters - and their ongoing battles with Taliban foes.
The concern resonating through York County right now is what happens to real people - men and women from here - who are the soldiers caught in the middle of leaked documents.
Soldiers do not have political debates. They do not flinch when deployed and ordered to travel those treacherous Afghan roads. They just go. It is the safety of all of them that most concerns everyone from spouses to superiors in the unit.
It is common knowledge - unclassified - talked about by families, even at public ceremonies like July 4 in Fort Mill, where the unit was honored, that the 1222nd soldiers' job clearing roads and protecting convoys is treacherous.
Now they worry the danger will get worse as Afghans, Pakistanis and others get all worked up over the documents, which show more civilian casualties than known before, Pakistan's involvement with the Taliban, and the general difficulties of real soldiers fighting the war.
Including soldiers from right here in Rock Hill and Fort Mill and Chester and York.
"This is definitely an unfortunate series of events; I hope that the possible damage from this reckless behavior proves to be minimal," said Joe Medlin, the command sergeant major for the entire 178th Battalion that includes the Fort Mill soldiers, 100 more from Spartanburg in Afghanistan, plus other area armories.
The leaked documents also bother the families of soldiers already killed. Carlton Butler Sr. of Rock Hill, whose Marine grandson Kenneth James Butler was killed in Iraq in 2005, called the leak "despicable."
"James gave his life, and it seems that some don't appreciate that," said Butler, a Navy veteran. "I know the war isn't going so great. But men go fight it because that is their duty and their job.
"They don't become a bunch of tattletales."
Dianne Massey of Fort Mill, whose son Josh Blaney was killed in 2007 in Afghanistan, is an outspoken opponent of the war there and in Iraq - but she makes clear her support for the soldiers who fight it. She is worried that the information could undermine support for the soldiers doing their jobs.
Massey knows the war in Afghanistan is not going well, and she said the released documents tell her nothing she doesn't know already. But the idea that the Taliban could be emboldened - or the Afghan locals offer less help to American soldiers or change sides - is what troubles Massey most.
"The locals are who the soldiers need for intelligence, to find out who is on our side and who is on the other side," Massey said. "Josh's friends from his unit are back there now. I love them all like my own sons.
"I want them to come home to their mothers and wives."
And as the war drags on, and these documents get talked about and read by Americans and Afghanis and the whole world, Dianne Massey thinks about the armory about five miles from her Fort Mill home.
Her son was on his fourth deployment when he was killed by a roadside bomb - a bomb just like the bombs the Fort Mill soldiers are clearing today and every day.
"I have been through what death in war is like," Massey said. "I can't imagine what it is like for those families of the Fort Mill soldiers today, as they wonder about when their son will come home.
"Or if he will come home, because of this."
