‘People will die to get here’

Wounded warrior reflects on enduring appeal of United States

As we watched the Senate hearings on the aftermath of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, there seemed to be an emphasis on placing blame on what went wrong in the last month and, in particular, the final days of stop-andstart evacuations.

I still can’t get the images out of my mind: young Afghan men clinging to the undercarriage of a massive C-17 transport plane as it lifts off from Kabul Airport, and then falling to their deaths as hundreds watch in horror.

The wails of shock and surprise from the crowd, the desperate crowd, waft into the air as the massive jet banks away slowly in the distance.

Since then, we’ve seen new horrors. How about hundreds of refugees from Haiti seeking shelter under an overpass in Texas, rain drenching down, trying to get here from Mexico, to where they had fled from their home country?

Maybe I am an optimist, but I can’t help but see that these desperate attempts to enter our great United States of America, the land of the free and home of the bravest, as a testimony of why this country is good. Despite all the partisan bickering, fingerpointing, name-calling and mudslinging, the fact remains, people are risking their lives to live a free life in our country.

We complain about the state of things here sometimes. We are Blue or Red. We are disappointed in our sports teams. Our children give us headaches.

But these images from Kabul and Texas, ghastly as they are, remind me of something else: People will die to get here, to have what we have.

I fought in Afghanistan, and I lost parts of both of my arms and both my legs when I set my roughsackdown on an IED.

I wish it didn’t happen. But it did and it can’t be undone. So now I work with similarly injured veterans, inviting them to my lodge in Maine to do the various types of physical activities they thought were in the past. I think often about what my loss represented, and what our country means to the rest of the world.

Our effort fighting for democracy was not in vain, even though the departure was a big fat mess.

We did good work in Afghanistan when we weren’t awaiting orders. Yes, we fought, but we dug wells and built hospitals, too. But we did something else, something that brings me back to that tragic young man on the C-17 and those Haitian refugees — we showed them what Democracy looks like.

One of the young men who fell from the plane was a trained dentist. He had the opportunity to go to medical school because we were there to keep the Taliban in check. Now that the Taliban was back, he feared for his future.

Let me be clear: We’d done all we could to stop the Taliban. In the end, unable to truly engage, we couldn’t win, and thus we had to leave. But we’d instilled in that young Afghan man the American dream of upward mobility. His father sold clothing with relatives for a living, according to The Washington Post, and struggled to survive. In time he sold his house and went into debt so his son could pursue a medical degree. His son was being paid $200 per patient the newspaper said, a huge amount for Afghanistan.

Have you ever heard of a more up-by-the-bootstraps American tale of upward mobility? And it was because of us.

Painful as the exit was, our work and sacrifice — even mine — did not go to waste.

AP file FINAL STOP: A forensics team buries a group of 15 migrants at the Guayabillo cemetery in Agua Fria, Panama, last month. The migrants died while crossing the Darien jungle trying to make their way to the United States.

PHOTOs cOurTesy TrAvis Mills STILL FIGHTING: Travis Mills, a quadruple amputee, is the author of ‘Tough as They Come.’ Mills, pictured left in Afghanistan, founded the Travis Mills Foundation, which runs a camp for injured post-9/11 veterans and their families in Maine.