San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
VETERANS PROCESS WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. FROM AFGHANISTAN
For some, guilt and anger; for others, ‘it was inevitable’
Jeff Le went to Afghanistan twice as a civilian to hire locals to work with the United States. Watching the Taliban’s swift takeover has left him consumed with remorse over promises unkept in the country.
“I feel tremendous guilt in the pit of my stomach,” Le said. “I hired them — I was making significant pitches about making a better world. I’m directly involved with them having a target on their back.”
Others were processing the chaotic end to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan with heavy resignation.
Ed Hiner, a retired Navy SEAL commander, said he’d concluded more than a decade ago that the objectives in the country were impossible to achieve.
“Everyone who was working with us knew it was a fruitless battle,” said Hiner, who deployed in 2010 working with Afghan special forces as a commando adviser.
For two decades, the length of an entire generation, the military service of San Diego’s roughly 100,000 active-duty troops has revolved around wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now veterans are grappling with the sight of their Afghan allies desperate to flee, prompting questions of whether the sacrifices of so many were in vain.
“To see a country fall to instability so quickly, knowing how many thousands of lives, both Afghan and American, have been sacrificed, it’s disturbing on so many levels that I don’t think any words can articulate the various layers and complexity of one’s feelings,” said Carlsbad resident Jodie Grenier, now a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve.
Grenier said that her time in Kabul as a security analyst allowed her to work alongside and develop friendships with Afghan nationals and interpreters,
many of whom were women in male-dominated fields just like herself.
“To know that (during the) 20 years that we were in Afghanistan, young girls became young women, they became lawyers, and had access to education, and became educators and had a life that otherwise was not available to them during the Taliban rule that now has been ripped away from them — it’s crushing.”
Others who served are keeping to themselves.
“They are trying to get away from all the anger and the negativity,” said Lori Boody, executive director of the Veterans Association of North County.
Locally, some service members who served in Afghanistan said they couldn’t yet share their thoughts about the war and withdrawal.
“Everyone is processing it differently,” said Joe Reagan, a Colorado Springs resident and director of military and veteran outreach for Wreaths Across America who has spoken to about 20 Afghanistan veterans. Many shared the same emotion.
“There’s a sense of moral injury,” he said. “Our country asked us to do a mission and we did it as best we could. It raises the question, ‘Was it worth it?’”
In a letter to Marines Wednesday, Marine Corps commandant Gen. David Berger told troops struggling with those questions it was.
“You fought for the liberty of young Afghan girls, women, boys and men who want the same individual freedoms we enjoy as Americans,” Berger wrote. “Was it worth it? Yes. Does it still hurt? Yes.”
On Friday, Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, published a similar letter to sailors.
“I want to be very clear: your service was not in vain, and it made a difference,” Gilday wrote.
Few places in the United States have been as greatly affected by the war in Afghanistan as San Diego.
San Diego County has the largest concentration of military personnel and dependents anywhere in California, and California has the largest concentration of military personnel in the United States.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have the strongest local presence, and many of those service members over the last two decades found themselves in Afghanistan at some point in their careers.
On Saturday, the county’s deep military roots were on display at two events, one in Oceanside and another in Point Loma, which paid tribute to active-duty troops and their families. There was free food, giveaways and entertainment.
But the timing — just days after the fall of Kabul — was not lost on local dignitaries who attempted to soften the blow with encouraging words.
“I know there will be ample time to examine all that’s happened in Afghanistan over the last 20-plus years leading to this moment,” Rep. Mike Levin, D-san Juan Capistrano, said during the opening ceremony at Oceanside’s Operation Appreciation event, significantly smaller than the celebrations of years past. “Please know that I stand with our men and women, many of whom risked their lives, continue to risk their lives, in the line of duty in Afghanistan and abroad.”
One of them, Patrick Batten, said he is devastated by what is happening there now.
The married father of four served 17 years in the Marines, including 10 years of active duty that put him in Afghanistan from January through November of 2013. He also served as a reservist in Iraq in 2016.
Batten, 45, said that in 2013 he and a group of Marines lived in the provincial police headquarters in Lashkargah.
They advised the provincial police on a daily basis, he said, meeting with local counterparts and going through training exercises, shooting, patrols and maneuvering.
Since then, the building where they stayed was destroyed.
“The pictures I’ve seen sent to us of where we lived, showed us how it was gutted,” Batten said. “I am devastated seeing that. I have friends in Afghanistan and when Lashkargah was lost, I couldn’t have anticipated seeing it that way. I haven’t seen videos but it is going to be a little bit painful.”
He recalled having a chat with one of his Afghan counterparts, asking him, “What happens when the Marines leave?”
“He said, ‘It will happen like it happens all the time, the way it always has been. We will work with whoever comes in, our allegiance is to whoever is here. But whoever comes in, we will survive.’”
Le, a UC San Diego graduate now working as a national security expert in Washington, D.C., went to Afghanistan in 2010 with USAID to work on infrastructure projects and again in 2012 to work on human rights issues. He has been pressed into action to try to get out as many Afghan allies as possible through an extensive network built over the duration of the war.
“I’m doing everything possible to make sure my former staff gets to safety,” he said. “It’s been hard — one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
Retired Navy Adm. Leon “Bud” Edney has been following the news about Afghanistan from his Coronado home.
“I’m watching the disaster President Biden has created,” he said Friday.
Edney served as NATO’S supreme allied commander for the Atlantic from 1990 to 1992 and flew more than 350 combat missions in the Vietnam War, earning 38 air medals and five distinguished flying cross awards.
He doesn’t know if the war in Afghanistan was worth it and isn’t sure how it will be remembered in history, but he has strong opinions about other wars.
“In my career, the most dangerous people were the ones who influence the president,” he said. “Mcnamara got us into the Vietnam War and Rumsfeld got us into the Iraq War. Neither one of those were wars that we should have participated in.”
Edney sees some certainties in all wars.
“The cost of war is people,” he said. “Fifty thousand U.S. military died in Vietnam and 300,000 were injured for life. I don’t know between the North and South (Vietnam). It’s probably 2.3 million civilians killed. War is a difficult thing.”
Ken Curtis, 48, is a retired Marine major who went to Afghanistan as an intelligence officer with the First Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton in 2010 as part of the “Obama surge.” They were sent to stabilize and train, “trying to get our Afghan national partners involved.”
The rapid collapse of Afghanistan didn’t surprise him at all, he said. Even 11 years ago, he said, the systemic corruption was evident.
“The U.S. was the strongest tribe in the region and when we left, the next strongest was the Taliban,” Curtis said. “And unless you can fight the Taliban, you do what they say.”
Marine veteran Dan Lopez of Vista was a squad leader with an infantry unit stationed in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. He said many Americans have the wrong impression about the country.
“There’s great people there, and it’s a beautiful country,” Lopez said.
He was not surprised by what is happening in Afghanistan, and he questioned some of the United States’ actions in the country.
“We were told to knock down their crops right before harvest,” he said, recalling orders to destroy marijuana and poppy crops. Troops directed farmers to instead grow wheat, which Lopez said they couldn’t sell for a profit.
“It’s no damn wonder they wanted us out of their country,” he said.
Lopez called the Taliban “freedom fighters” and said Afghanistan will never change.
“They’re very strong,” he said. “They ran the Russians out of there, and they ran us out of there.”
While many veterans have refrained from discussing the “negativity,” others said they saw benefits from the war.
Retired Marine Gunnery Sgt. Brian Meyer, 40, lost his right arm and leg, as well as fingers on his left hand while taking apart an improvised explosive device in March 2011 while in Afghanistan. To him, “the true victor of the war is the medical community. They pioneered a lot of stuff. I was able to survive and continue to thrive.”
Every war is difficult for those who experience it. Many veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam kept their combat experiences bottled up inside.
Ramona resident Dave Patterson served in Vietnam and these days speaks out against all war as a member of Veterans for Peace.
“The whole thing was ridiculous,” he said about the war in Afghanistan. “Look at the mess 20 years later. What could you have expected?”
He wonders if the country will learn any lessons from the 20-year intervention and withdrawal.
“How much more chaos are we going to cause for these poor people?” he said. “How many deaths are we going to cause before we learn to keep our nose out of other people’s business?”
Retired Marine Maj. Nico Marcolongo, a staff member at San Diego’s Challenged Athletes Foundation, also had strong feelings about the withdrawal.
“It was disappointing to see, after all that time and effort, blood and treasure ... for it to end the way it did,” he said.
Marcolongo did his combat duty in Iraq. But like most military veterans in San Diego County, he’s well aware of the long history of the war in Afghanistan.
“Obviously, we made some mistakes,” Marcolongo said. “We tried to build a cohesive national government in a country that is divided among tribes. But we did a good job of keeping people secure ... we made sure girls could go to school ... and that’s a noble cause.”
He’s also seen the war ebb and flow in the minds of the American people over the last 20 years.
“When 9/11 happened, there was a lot of attention placed on Afghanistan because they were harboring al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden,” he said. “Then eventually it became part of our everyday lives and not something people focused on.”
The way the war ended should be no surprise, said Marine Staff Sgt. Mark Zambon, whose two legs were amputated above the knee after he stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan.
Zambon, who trained at Camp Pendleton, served three combat tours in Afghanistan as part of an explosive ordinance disposal team that disarmed as many as 11 devices in one day.
He was “blown up” five times while on duty, he said by telephone Thursday from his home in Sacramento.
The first three times he was inside a vehicle that drove over explosives and he was not badly injured. The fourth time, an IED detonated in his hand and took off parts of some fingers. The fifth time, in 2011, he stepped on an IED, and he credits Navy corpsmen with reviving him and saving his life.
Despite his life-altering injuries, he holds no apparent bitterness about Afghanistan.
“It was inevitable that it would happen when we pull out,” Zambon said.
Like the Soviets and the English before them, he said, the Americans took control of Kabul but they never conquered the tribal people who held most of the largely rural country. Each time the foreigners left, Afghanistan returned to its former ways.
“I’m glad that we as a country have made that move instead of continuing to waste money, time and people’s lives,” he said.