Welcome to the Civil Air Patrol America 250 series. We will be highlighting American hero members and their service leading up to the America 250 celebration. This is the sixth feature of that series: Lt. Col. Phil Kost of CAP’s Texas Wing. Catch up on the entire series here.
It was 2012 and coalition forces spearheaded by the United States, were transferring Camp Alamo to Afghan troops.
The departing Americans had refurbished the former Soviet base — abandoned after the failed Communist invasion of that country — as part of the war on terror. On one courtyard wall, a large mural of The Alamo grabbed Afghan attention.
Unlike the Soviets, Americans would leave the base better than they found it.
“We asked if they wanted us to paint it over,” said Lt. Col. Phil Kost, who received a Bronze Star, two Meritorious Service Medals, and two Army Commendation Medals and other awards for his service. “They asked the importance of the mural.”
Kost, a Texan to his bones and others from the Lone Star State, soon regaled their Afghan allies with stories of the 1836 stand and its heroes — Jim Bowie, William Travis, Davy Crockett, and others lesser known — who with their courage would transform the future of the North American continent.
The Afghan response spoke volumes about the reach and resonance of 250 years of American history.
“Don’t touch it. Leave it there,” the Afghans said.
The story of Camp Alamo is just one from Kost’s nearly 30 years of active-duty military service. Those years took him to Bosnia, the Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan. the Czech Republic, and Japan, along with a number of stateside assignments.
“I’ve always wrapped my arms around a nomadic existence,” he said.
But regardless of the assignment, his heart of service — the same heart beating in the defenders of the Alamo — is unchanged.
As a 17-year-old still in high school, Phil Kost enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves and attended basic training (pictured) the summer before his senior year. He was commissioned as an ROTC student at the University of Texas-Pan American, what’s now the University of Texas-Rio Grand Valley, in 1998. Soon after, his unit was deployed to Bosnia.
‘A Helluva Career’
Kost grew up on the Texas coast and lived in the same house for the first 20 years of his life, first attending Del Mar College, what’s now the University of Texas-Rio Grand Valley.
A ROTC student, Kost received his commission in 1998.
“I enlisted when I was 17 in the U.S. Army Reserves and did my basic training between my junior and senior year of high school,” he said.
After basic, his perspective changed.
“Spending the entire summer at Fort Jackson, South Carolina is definitely a different experience from all my classmates. I came back a little more focused, a little bit more disciplined.”
In the reserves, he made maps.
‘I always joke with people that my original military occupation specialty was replaced with satellites and plotters. When I was in, it was surveyors and draftsmen,” he said. “We were the printing press.”
The First Deployment, 9/11 and a Changed World
In college, he won a two-year scholarship from the Texas Army National Guard. Upon graduation and commissioning, he would serve as a lieutenant with the same unit he served with as a cadet. By April 2000, he learned that his guard unit would be deployed to Bosnia.
As a first lieutenant, he and his unit touched down in the Balkans.
The date? Sept. 11, 2001.
“It was supposed to be a peacekeeping operation. A lot of people didn’t realize that it was a big terrorist training ground. We were still doing peacekeeping operations, but because of 9/11, some of our mission sets changed.”
He returned home in 2002.
“The world had changed,” he said.
With the help of a translator, then-Maj. Phil Kost participates in mission planning with his Japanese Defense Forces counterparts during Orient Shield.
He helped process units from Camp Mabry in Austin to go overseas. He would later supervise the training on new equipment. Later, he was sent to the Sinai, then home for several years before being sent overseas again to Japan as part of Operation Orient Shield, as part of the Third Battalion, 141st Infantry as operations officer.
At the end of 2012, he was sent to Afghanistan, where he served as deputy director of public works for the Kabul Base Cluster. Hopping from base to base, Kost was part of the base transition team, as the U.S. began to reduce its footprint in country.
“We would go to a base, complete the transition procedures, work with the [Afghans} and we were the last Americans out of that post. I embraced the life of a Bedouin.”
For the last six years of duty, he served as base operations supervisor at Camp Swift in Bastrop, Texas, stateside. He would retire in 2021 as a lieutenant colonel after 29 years and six months of service.
“I always said I’d stick around ‘til the Army said I gotta go. The Army said I had to go, so I went. It was a helluva career.”
And it was not one he thought he’d have.
“When I was that 17-year-old kid raising my right hand, I tell people, I’m just a kid from Corpus trying to make the world a better place.”
Then-Maj. Phil Kost conducts operations in Afghanistan in 2013 from the pack of an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle).
Rockets and Mortar Fire
As part of the base transition teams, Kost’s convoys were considered “soft targets,” vulnerable to Taliban attack as they traveled across Kabul. He also worked with more than a dozen international partners in the transitions.
“There are probably some countries where I wouldn’t be welcome because I couldn’t get them all they wanted,” Kost said laughing.
At Camp Phoenix near Kabul, as a staff meeting was about to begin, “the whole earth shook,” Kost said. “To the point that the light fixture above me was dangling. We discovered that a 500-lb. vehicle-borne improvised device had gone off. Luckily, there were no coalition casualties.”
Later, at Bagram Airfield, some 37 miles south of Kabul, a tent where Kost and other soldiers were in twilight between sleeping and waking.
“All of a sudden, you hear this thump, thump, thump. It didn’t take us long to realize what that was. We were being mortared.”
Unfortunately, at every base he went to in Afghanistan, he heard, “the big voice” warning of incoming fire.
But he survived each incident unhurt.
A Place in American History
From Bosnia on 9/11 to his involvement in the transition in Afghanistan in 2012, Kost, eventual historian for the Texas Wing of CAP and the Southwest Region deputy chief of staff – cadet programs, had a unique perspective.
“We were part of that,” he said.
How will history view America’s involvement in Afghanistan? For Kost, time will tell.
“It will depend on what happens in the next couple of generations. The reason I say that is when we were preparing to go into Afghanistan, there were a lot of comparisons to Vietnam. We left Vietnam. It was a little ugly. The same thing happened when we left Afghanistan. It wasn’t the cleanest exit. But you look back to the {Vietnam] period and there is a generation of Vietnamese who saw there was the potential for something better. That to me is one of the things we’ll look for [in Afghanistan] if the next generation or two start to take the country back.”
Then-Maj. Philip A. Kost, left, of Joint Force Headquarters, Texas Army National Guard, and Richard B. Winders, Ph.D., curator and historian of the Alamo, ring a bell in a small room of the Alamo in San Antonio, Nov. 8, 2013. After Camp Alamo was transferred to the Afghan National Army, Kost brought the bell to Texas and offered it as a gift to the Alamo, on behalf of the Texas Army National Guard soldiers who served at Camp Alamo. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Capt. Martha C. Nigrelle/ Released)
Camp Alamo’s Bell
Before Kost began his work at Camp Alamo, a previous unit placed a large silver bell on the base, in honor of the police and firefighters lost on 9/11. On each sad anniversary of the attack, a service would be held and the bell rung.
But as the camp was turned over to the Afghans, the question came, what to do with the bell.
Kost reached out to the Alamo. There, the bell permanently resides, along with a dark blue tablecloth bearing the silhouette of the storied Texas post and the words, “Camp Alamo.’
From the Alamo to Afghanistan, it seems, the thread of history continues.
“I think in many ways, from the Afghan perspective, it could be seen as a mirror of their own fight against the Soviet Union and pushing them out.”
Lt. Col. Phil Kost conducts range surveys during his Texas Army National Guard tenure at Camp Swift Training Center. He retired in 2021 after nearly 30 years of active-duty military service that included a series of overseas deployments, including his stint at Camp Alamo in Afghanistan.
Service and CAP
Kost, a seminary graduate and former youth pastor, joined CAP in 2011. Ironically, a corps of cadets at a Winter Encampment drew him to the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary. As he likes to say, “Everything happens for a reason.”
Kost was working at Camp Mabry on a weekend. He began to hear cadence.
“I look out my office window, and I see this group of [Civil Air Patrol] cadets marching down the avenue with a guidon.”
Kost, who was about to take over at nearby Camp Swift, walked down to a CAP meeting, and offered to help. The next day, he received an email from the Texas director of Cadet Programs who asked about Camp Swift.
The following December at encampment, after watching cadets and senior members interact, Kost was hooked.
“This is an organization I could support,” he thought. He quickly recalled the mentors who had shaped him.
“Any organization that can help guide and mentor the next generation and help them not make the same mistakes we made, I’m all on board.”
The rest, like the Alamo, is history. Kost worked with CAP’s national historian emeritus, Col. Frank Blazich, to help ensure a standard of uniformity and decorum in CAP heraldry, the insignias that are a squadron and wing’s symbolic identity.
“Phil was the grandaddy of all that,” Blazich said. “Without him, I don’t think we’d be in the position we are now. It’s something we never had before. But since then, we have an appearance that aligns more closely … with the Air Force. Now we can do that with our insignia.
Now Civil Air Patrol Lt. Col. Phil Kost, he serves as historian for the Texas Wing and as the Southwest Region deputy chief of staff – cadet programs.
He takes joy in his CAP service. He’s now working in emergency services, and with small unmanned aircraft systems (drones), near his home in Waxahachie.
“While I’m not wearing the Army uniform, I can still put on [my CAP uniform] and still serve. It’s another way to give back. At the end of the day, it’s about service.”
Opportunities Abound in CAP
As America celebrates its 250th birthday today, Lt. Col. Kost’s story serves as a reminder that leadership is measured not only by accomplishments, but by the commitment to touch the lives of others.
Civil Air Patrol offers the opportunity to lead others, as he has as a wing historian and as an emergency services officer. CAP’s adult members consist of volunteers from all backgrounds, including the military.
To learn more about CAP membership and find a local unit, visit gocivilairpatrol.com.
