Today marks five years since thirteen American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan.
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The highly pressurized, reckless, and irresponsible demands and policy decisions made by the Biden administration, which forced a relaxed level of security to be sacrificed for speed in meeting Biden’s artificial deadlines, contributed directly, without a doubt, to their deaths.
Biden had announced a full withdrawal by September 11, 2021. He later moved the date up to August 31, compressing the timeline even further. That artificial deadline forced commanders to sacrifice troop safety and force protection for the sake of speed.
In July of 2021, the U.S. had already quietly abandoned Bagram Air Base, a foolish geo-strategic decision which could have been easily defended, much like Guantanamo Bay. Bagram would have given the U.S. a permanent forward deployed deterrent and strike capability deep into Central Asia and against communist China.
But Biden wasn’t interested in keeping the spoils of war after victory. Instead, he focused on abandonment.
The foolishness of abandoning Bagram aside, from a safety standpoint, with the evacuation of Afghanistan not nearly complete, America surrendered the main, more defensible hub, which could have been used for an evacuation, forcing the final evacuation through the far more vulnerable Kabul airport under Taliban control of the surrounding area.
It was the equivalent of abandoning Fort Bragg and trying to evacuate everyone through Raleigh-Durham Airport instead.
With Biden’s obsession with withdrawal deadlines, foolishness piled upon foolishness, and danger stacked upon more danger.
Meanwhile, intelligence reports surfaced that ISIS had returned with plans to launch an attack against United States forces as the coup de grâce before Biden’s cowardly withdrawal. If anything, American troop security should have been beefed up. But the Democrat-controlled Pentagon did just the opposite.
These young Marines and their Navy and Army compatriots, sent to the perimeter of the civilian Kabul airport, were instructed to interact with the throng desperately seeking to escape Afghanistan. The ability to vet or check for safety the hundreds of desperate Afghans pleading to cross into the airport perimeter and jump on an American military plane to leave collapsed. The situation created by Biden, and his cronies, secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, was essentially the death warrant of the service members who would give their lives for their country.
On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated in a dense crowd outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The blast killed eleven Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier. It remains the second-deadliest single day for U.S. forces in the entire Afghanistan war — surpassed only by the shoot-down of Extortion 17 a decade earlier.
These were young Americans with names, faces, families, and futures that ended in a sewage canal while they tried to help strangers escape.
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Sgt. Nicole Gee was 23. Days before the attack, she was photographed holding an Afghan infant, the caption simply reading, “I love my job.” That image captured the humanity these Marines showed even in chaos. She was killed doing the same work — processing desperate people, searching them, and trying to bring order to an impossible situation.
At twenty years old, Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum had recently married. His wife was pregnant with their first child. Rylee never got to meet his daughter.
One of the more senior Marines at the gate, Staff Sgt. Darin “Taylor” Hoover, 31, became a steady presence to his younger comrades. Darin’s parents have spent the years since seeking answers and accountability so that no other family has to endure what they have.
Cpl. Hunter Lopez was 22. Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola was 20. Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui was 20. Several others were the same age. Five of the thirteen were only twenty years old. Most of the rest were barely older. They were still kids in many ways — sons and daughters who had volunteered to serve — and they were the ones ordered to stand in the open, shoulder to shoulder with a raucous, largely unvetted crowd, conducting hands-on searches under known terrorist threat.
These young men and women did not fail at the gate. They executed the mission they were given under constraints imposed from far above them. Their deaths stand as a stark example of civilian control of the military, exercised without sufficient regard for the realities on the ground. In the long history of the republic, it is difficult to find a clearer case of a fixed political deadline overriding military judgment and basic force protection.
The official investigations concluded that the attack was not preventable at the tactical level without changing the mission itself. That finding only underscores the larger point: The mission parameters and the timeline that created them were set by political leadership. The troops paid the price.
Five years later, the Gold Star families still carry the weight every day. They buried children who should still be alive. Some never got to watch their sons become fathers. Others lost a daughter who had already shown the world, in a simple photograph, how much she cared about the people she was trying to help.
We should remember their names. We should remember how young they were. We should remember what they were asked to do in the final chaotic days of a twenty-year war. And we should pray for the families left behind — the parents, the spouses, the children who will grow up without them.
Tomorrow, on the fifth anniversary, pause for a moment. Say their names. Honor the fact that they stood their post until the end.
I have often quoted General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing in remembering the lost Americans who died on Extortion 17 ten years earlier, as he said of American service members who fell in an earlier war: “Time will not diminish the glory of their deeds.”
So it is with the heroes of Abbey Gate.
Their glory remains. Their sacrifice remains. And the questions about the decisions that put them in that position remain as well.
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Remember them, always.
Image: United States Navy via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.