{"id":5269,"date":"2026-08-27T04:13:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5269"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:13:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:13:28","slug":"remembering-the-heroes-of-abbey-gate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5269","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the heroes of Abbey Gate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Today marks five years since thirteen American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan.<\/p>

Read more Hollywood blights<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s artificial deadlines, contributed directly, without a doubt, to their deaths.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0Bagram would have given the U.S. a permanent forward deployed deterrent and strike capability deep into Central Asia and against communist China.<\/p>\n

But Biden wasn\u2019t interested in keeping the spoils of war after victory.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, he focused on abandonment.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It was the equivalent of abandoning Fort Bragg and trying to evacuate everyone through Raleigh-Durham Airport instead.<\/p>\n

With Biden’s obsession with withdrawal deadlines, foolishness piled upon foolishness, and danger stacked upon more danger.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, intelligence reports surfaced that ISIS had returned with plans to launch an attack against United States forces as the coup de gr\u00e2ce<\/em> before Biden’s cowardly withdrawal.\u00a0\u00a0If anything, American troop security should have been beefed up.\u00a0\u00a0But the Democrat-controlled Pentagon did just the opposite.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated in a dense crowd outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.\u00a0\u00a0The blast killed eleven Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier.\u00a0\u00a0It remains the second-deadliest single day for U.S. forces in the entire Afghanistan war \u2014 surpassed only by the shoot-down of Extortion 17 a decade earlier.<\/p>\n

These were young Americans with names, faces, families, and futures that ended in a sewage canal while they tried to help strangers escape.<\/p>

Read more Young People, Listen to Your Gen-X Elders: Communism Sucks!<\/a><\/p>\n

Sgt. Nicole Gee was 23.\u00a0\u00a0Days before the attack, she was photographed holding an Afghan infant, the caption simply reading, \u201cI love my job.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0That image captured the humanity these Marines showed even in chaos.\u00a0\u00a0She was killed doing the same work \u2014 processing desperate people, searching them, and trying to bring order to an impossible situation.<\/p>\n

At twenty years old, Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum had recently married.\u00a0\u00a0His wife was pregnant with their first child.\u00a0\u00a0Rylee never got to meet his daughter.<\/p>\n

One of the more senior Marines at the gate, Staff Sgt. Darin \u201cTaylor\u201d Hoover, 31, became a steady presence to his younger comrades.\u00a0\u00a0Darin\u2019s parents have spent the years since seeking answers and accountability so that no other family has to endure what they have.<\/p>\n

Cpl. Hunter Lopez was 22.\u00a0\u00a0Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola was 20.\u00a0\u00a0Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui was 20.\u00a0\u00a0Several others were the same age.\u00a0\u00a0Five of the thirteen were only twenty years old.\u00a0\u00a0Most of the rest were barely older.\u00a0\u00a0They were still kids in many ways \u2014 sons and daughters who had volunteered to serve \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

These young men and women did not fail at the gate.\u00a0\u00a0They executed the mission they were given under constraints imposed from far above them.\u00a0\u00a0Their deaths stand as a stark example of civilian control of the military, exercised without sufficient regard for the realities on the ground.\u00a0\u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n

The official investigations concluded that the attack was not preventable at the tactical level without changing the mission itself.\u00a0\u00a0That finding only underscores the larger point: The mission parameters and the timeline that created them were set by political leadership.\u00a0\u00a0The troops paid the price.<\/p>\n

Five years later, the Gold Star families still carry the weight every day. They buried children who should still be alive.\u00a0\u00a0Some never got to watch their sons become fathers.\u00a0\u00a0Others 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.<\/p>\n

We should remember their names.\u00a0\u00a0We should remember how young they were.\u00a0\u00a0We should remember what they were asked to do in the final chaotic days of a twenty-year war.\u00a0\u00a0And we should pray for the families left behind \u2014 the parents, the spouses, the children who will grow up without them.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, on the fifth anniversary, pause for a moment.\u00a0\u00a0Say their names.\u00a0\u00a0Honor the fact that they stood their post until the end.<\/p>\n

I have often quoted General John J. \u201cBlackjack\u201d 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: \u201cTime will not diminish the glory of their deeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it is with the heroes of Abbey Gate.<\/p>\n

Their glory remains.\u00a0\u00a0Their sacrifice remains.\u00a0\u00a0And the questions about the decisions that put them in that position remain as well.<\/p>

Read more Was Fox News\u2019 Jesse Watters seduced by the dark side?<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember them, always.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Image: United States Navy via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Read more Hollywood blights 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\u2019s artificial deadlines, contributed directly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2093,5],"tags":[2094],"class_list":["post-5269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-foreign-policy","tag-related-topics-afghanistan"],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering the heroes of Abbey Gate - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5269\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Remembering the heroes of Abbey Gate - Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today marks five years since thirteen American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan. 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