Welcome to the Civil Air Patrol America 250 series. We highlight American hero members whose service somehow loops back to 250 years of history, even when that history involves leftover Soviet bases and courtyard art. This sixth installment features Lt. Col. Phil Kost of CAP’s Texas Wing.
It was 2012. Coalition forces led by the United States were handing Camp Alamo over to Afghan troops. The Americans had spruced up the old Soviet installation, abandoned after the Communists’ unsuccessful visit, as their contribution to the war on terror. One courtyard wall featured a large mural of The Alamo. The Afghans took notice.
Unlike the Soviets, who tended to leave things in worse shape, the Americans would depart having improved the property with a painting of a 19th-century Texas fort.
“We asked if they wanted us to paint it over,” said Lt. Col. Phil Kost, recipient of a Bronze Star, two Meritorious Service Medals, two Army Commendation Medals and assorted other decorations. “They asked the importance of the mural.”
Kost, Texan to his bones, along with fellow Lone Star State personnel, promptly launched into the 1836 tale. They covered Jim Bowie, William Travis, Davy Crockett and various lesser-known figures whose courage, they explained, transformed the future of the North American continent. The Afghans listened to this briefing on coonskin caps and doomed last stands.
Their reply said everything about the global reach of American history: “Don’t touch it. Leave it there.”
The Camp Alamo episode is merely one chapter in Kost’s nearly 30 years of active-duty service. Those years sent him to Bosnia, the Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan, the Czech Republic and Japan, plus assorted stateside postings.
“I’ve always wrapped my arms around a nomadic existence,” he said.
No matter the location, his heart of service—the same one that beat in the Alamo’s defenders—remained constant.
As a 17-year-old still in high school, Phil Kost enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves and completed basic training the summer before his senior year. He received his commission as an ROTC student at the University of Texas-Pan American, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, in 1998. Soon afterward his unit deployed to Bosnia.
A Helluva Career
Kost grew up on the Texas coast and spent the first 20 years of his life in the same house. He started at Del Mar College, which later folded into the same university.
An ROTC student, he was commissioned 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.
Basic training altered his outlook. 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. After graduation and commissioning he served as a lieutenant with the same unit he had known as a cadet. By April 2000 he learned the guard unit would deploy to Bosnia.
As a first lieutenant he and his unit arrived in the Balkans. The date was Sept. 11, 2001.
He returned home in 2002.
“The world had changed,” he said.
He helped process units from Camp Mabry in Austin for overseas movement and later supervised training on new equipment. After that came the Sinai, several years at home, then Japan for Operation Orient Shield as operations officer for the Third Battalion, 141st Infantry.
At the end of 2012 he went to Afghanistan as deputy director of public works for the Kabul Base Cluster. Moving from base to base, he served on the transition team as the United States reduced its footprint.
For his final six years he was base operations supervisor at Camp Swift in Bastrop, Texas. He retired in 2021 as a lieutenant colonel after 29 years and six months.
“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.”
It was not the path he had imagined.
“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.”
Rockets and Mortar Fire
On the base transition teams Kost’s convoys counted as “soft targets,” open to Taliban attack while crossing Kabul. He also coordinated with more than a dozen international partners during the handovers.
“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 start, “the whole earth shook,” Kost recalled. “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, about 37 miles south of Kabul, he and other soldiers occupied a tent in that hazy state between sleep and wakefulness.
At every Afghan base he visited he heard “the big voice” announcing incoming fire.
He emerged from each incident unhurt.
A Place in American History
From Bosnia on 9/11 through the Afghanistan transition in 2012, Kost—now historian for the Texas Wing of CAP and Southwest Region deputy chief of staff for cadet programs—possessed a distinctive vantage point.
“We were part of that,” he said.
How will history judge America’s involvement in Afghanistan? Kost believes time will decide.
“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.”
Camp Alamo’s Bell
Before Kost arrived at Camp Alamo, an earlier unit had installed a large silver bell to honor police and firefighters lost on 9/11. On each anniversary a service was held and the bell was rung.
When the camp transferred to Afghan control, the question arose of what to do with the bell.
Kost contacted the Alamo. The bell now resides there permanently, accompanied by a dark blue tablecloth bearing the silhouette of the famous Texas site and the words “Camp Alamo.”
From the Alamo to Afghanistan and back again, the historical thread apparently 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.”
Service and CAP
Kost, a seminary graduate and former youth pastor, joined CAP in 2011. A group of cadets at a Winter Encampment drew him into the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary. As he likes to observe, “Everything happens for a reason.”
He was working at Camp Mabry one weekend when he heard cadence.
“I look out my office window, and I see this group of [Civil Air Patrol] cadets marching down the avenue with a guidon.”
About to assume duties at nearby Camp Swift, he walked over to a CAP meeting and offered assistance. The next day an email arrived from the Texas director of Cadet Programs inquiring about Camp Swift.
That December, after watching cadets and senior members at encampment, Kost was convinced.
“This is an organization I could support,” he thought. He remembered 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 collaborated with CAP’s national historian emeritus, Col. Frank Blazich, to establish uniformity and decorum in CAP heraldry—the insignia that give squadrons and wings their 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 serves as historian for the Texas Wing and as Southwest Region deputy chief of staff for cadet programs.
He finds satisfaction in CAP service. He currently works in emergency services and with small unmanned aircraft systems 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 marks its 250th birthday, Lt. Col. Kost’s account illustrates that leadership is gauged not solely by medals and murals but by the determination to affect others’ lives.
Civil Air Patrol provides chances to lead, as Kost has done as a wing historian and emergency services officer. Its adult members are volunteers from every background, including the military.
To learn more about CAP membership and locate a nearby unit, visit gocivilairpatrol.com.