It took me a few seconds to understand that the object falling from the plane was a person. By the time the second body fell I had a reasonable grasp of what I was witnessing and was subsequently prepared for the third and final falling man. I later saw pictures of the young man whose mangled body landed on a residential rooftop. I was one among the many thousands who observed these acts of desperation at the climax of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Like many other Americans at Hamid Karzai International Airport that day, I had stayed up all night after thousands of Afghan civilians swarmed the airfield with clamoring hopes to escape the Taliban’s final advance. But my firsthand experience in Afghanistan began many years earlier.
By the time I participated in the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan I needed more than two hands to count the number of my combat deployments in support of America’s post-9/11 wars and global counterterrorism operations. While certainly not the oldest nor most experienced soldier on the battlefield, I counted myself lucky to have personal context and history to help in my understanding and execution of this final mission. Connecting the threads of my own history in this war has become the greatest challenge of my military career.
Like many other service members, my relationship with the war in Afghanistan is complex. The breadth and longevity of the war created a tapestry of experiences across the American military. Very few individuals, if any, have experienced enough of the conflict to shape anything more than a snapshot, or series of snapshots, frozen in time. My relationship with Afghanistan started out simpler than it eventually became—a development that arguably mirrors the trajectory of our national attitude. I joined the military prior to the Afghanistan surge during President Barack Obama’s first term, and my deployments have always been characterized by short, rapid forays into different battlefields. This gave me a unique perspective that is oftentimes at odds with the experiences of other service members. Combat deployments were windows on a fast-moving train, offering brief glimpses of a vast nation without meaningful context of the land or people.
After my experience during the withdrawal from Kabul, I was driven to consume. I read as much as I could about Afghanistan, its people, and our war, adding context to my involvement with the words and experiences of others. I had been processing my unique place within this conflict for as long as I had been participating in it. The withdrawal from Kabul had been the closing of a book, but my concluding chapter was missing, and my final scene a fever dream. My reflection over the past three years has been an effort to write that final chapter, a task many individual service members are similarly engaged in. It is a necessary task for each of us as individuals. But it is equally necessary for the US military as a body and for the nation.
The evacuation was at that point the greatest crisis of my military career. And if nothing else it stands as a testament to the American military’s logistical capability. While many stateside service members watching through media channels back home might have had thoughts of their past experiences in Afghanistan, perhaps remembering the names of partners they have worked with or teammates they have lost, I had little time to focus on anything other than the calamity at hand.
Once the American embassy relocated to the airport and the emergency withdrawal began in earnest, I was contacted by an Afghan man to help get the rest of his family out of the country. He worked at high levels between the American and Afghan government apparatus. Despite this, his last recourse was to contact not his countrymen nor his powerful political contacts, but rather me, a foreigner, and as unfolding events would prove, his only hope. I can no more reconcile this turn of events than I can reconcile the death of a partner Afghan soldier more than a decade earlier—he was shot in the head in the first room into which his squad had made entry during a clearance operation. I had met him a few days prior and marveled at his fluency in the English language and his motivation to improve his country. No Americans were harmed during the mission. So it goes.
There is much to say about the lack of a whole-of-government continuity throughout the conflict or the feasibility of an effective nation-building strategy enacted by an occupying force that never fully understood the land it was occupying or the people within it. But the long, slow deflagration of the Afghanistan war ended in an explosion, the pieces of which have embedded themselves in anyone who has served in the conflict. The completion of the withdrawal itself, like the bulk of the war, was planned by senior leaders with expansive staffs, but relied on lower enlisted service members, noncommissioned officers, and junior officers. It was young specialists, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains who bore witness to the last dying gasp of the war at their feet. In some ways, this faceless sea of interchangeable American patriots, the middle management of the military, will retain culture and ideas for far longer than its constituent members retain their positions within it.
Telling our stories is a necessary means of processing the Afghanistan conflict, both as a nation and as a military. What institutional mechanisms do we have to enable our collective reckoning with the end of such a protracted conflict? How do we encourage and grow a civil-military relationship that can bridge this discourse? Do the answers to these questions matter in how we process this event and contend with its legacy? I believe that they do. In the telling of our stories, we are contributing the individual bricks with which to build a monument of truthful remembrance—a vital act if this war is to be placed properly in our national conscience and collective memory.
In our stories, there are the both the broad contours and the fine details of moral injury—and moral repair. Much has been written about moral injury in the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal, but the discussion began even before the fateful summer of 2021. David Wood’s significant What Have We Done, for example, was published nearly five years prior. Wood’s work recognizes that the length of the Afghanistan war is fundamentally disorienting. It should go without question that war causes moral injury within the armies that wage it. The difficulty lies in identifying the source of the moral injury and in dealing with it appropriately. Not all wars are created equal, and we must create anew the intellectual and psychological frameworks within our ranks to reconcile our experiences. T. R. Fehrenbach’s eponymous quote from his classic work on the Korean War remains true: “This kind of war, however necessary, is dirty business, first to last.”
We, the rank and file of the American military, cannot afford the discussion of this conflict and its conclusion to take place without us. Nor can the nation. The experiences of those who participated throughout its long duration must be accounted for, all the way through to those of the young Marines and soldiers who did phenomenal jobs in a dynamic and kinetic environment in the summer of 2021, whose work resulted in tens of thousands of Afghans retrieved through the various gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
War is messy and unclean in a variety of ways, but there is at least one clarity in death—it is a bow shock that polarizes as it passes through you. It crystallizes complex uncertainties into a grief both shared and personal. In previous deployments I have been impacted in such ways by the deaths of both compatriots and the enemy. But what clarity is there in the yawning chasm of desperation that characterized the overrunning of the Kabul airport by its citizens and their families? There is no crystallization of purpose in such an event. After the withdrawal, I felt myself adrift. Like many others, I was able to regather myself through reflection, conversations with longtime peers and friends, and occasional therapy.
Like most things in war, the accounting of this conflict and its finale will probably not resolve in the way that we hope. We, as both a civilian society and a military culture, must be proactive in shaping the internal legacy that we leave within ourselves and our nation. It won’t suffice to await a satisfying reckoning from those at the national policymaking level or from the top ranks of the armed services. In the military we have a confounding habit of demanding accountability at all levels of our operations while wringing our hands and blaming ephemeral constructs for frustrating results. A commander might argue that his or her brief stint in a combat tour was a notable contribution, while simultaneously lamenting being hamstrung by a lack of strategic coherence in long-term planning. It allows us to play the part of demanding responsibility while simultaneously relinquishing it to the ethereal realm of higher powers, thus safeguarding our individual morality.
Of course, this is not to argue that such attempts at accountability or reconciliation at the higher levels of government are not warranted or appropriate. The office of the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published a variety of reports and lessons learned to document both American and Afghan shortcomings throughout the course of the war. The SIGAR report from November 2022, examining “why the Afghan government collapsed,” is especially thought provoking. It is a document best viewed through the lens of the complicated, unique relationship between the United States and Afghanistan, with special consideration given to the conditions that arose as a consequence of this relationship, ultimately enabling the Taliban’s success and precipitating the chaos of the withdrawal.
In fairness, if war is indeed an extension of policy by other means, then any proper conversation on the war in Afghanistan is incomplete without the inclusion of diplomatic efforts and the contributions of the Department of State. Perhaps uncharacteristically scathing, the State Department’s “After Action Review on Afghanistan” delineates a number a significant failures or shortcomings during the process of the withdrawal, while also speaking truth to the herculean effort otherwise undertaken by its members on the ground. For those who participated directly in the evacuation of Kabul, findings such as this are both revelatory and achingly self-evident: “U.S. military planning for a possible NEO [noncombatant evacuation operation] had been underway with post for some time, but the Department’s participation in the NEO planning process was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead. Coordination with DoD worked better on the ground in Kabul.”
I am at least capable, in my own small way and to my own small benefit and detriment, of taking some measure of responsibility. Like so many others who, when acting as the extension of America’s foreign policy, have accumulated a list of lives lost and lives gained, I step backward through time and into flawed memories to recall the deeds of the dead and the faces of the affected, and experience a turmoil of thought trying to connect it all together. Like many others I have met and worked with throughout the years, and soldiers of all types before and after me, I leave the light on at my campsite so that others may come and together we can extract a bartered peace within ourselves through a pulling of threads and a sharing of experience. This internal peace is necessary for warfighters as individuals. After all, I will have another objective tomorrow, and there is always another raid or ambush or killing field on the horizon, and these thoughts won’t be on my mind or the mind of other service members quietly continuing their warfighting. But it is equally necessary for us as a collective.
The conversation around the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, and consequently around the entirety of our experience within that country, is not yet over. Not only does the American citizenry deserve an accounting of its expenditures in human and financial capital, but we owe it to ourselves as service members to make sense of our experiences and hold ourselves responsible for our rights and our wrongs. We must write, we must read, we must share, we must listen.
Calvin Richards is a master sergeant in the US Army. A veteran of more than a dozen combat deployments, he was a senior noncommissioned officer during the American withdrawal from Kabul and was present on the ground prior to and during its execution.
Editor’s note: Due to operational security and the sensitivity of the author’s work in the special operations community, MWI has elected to publish this article under pseudonyms rather than their true names.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Andrea Salgado Rivera, US Army