◆ Most Americans who died in attack never knew nation at peace.
Many were just babies when 9/11 terror attacks lit fires of war
They had signed up to do their part, to heal a country — their own — that had not known a moment of peace in their entire lives. Rylee McCollum wanted to become a history teacher, but only after doing what he could as a Marine to serve his country. Hunter Lopez knew this was what he wanted since he was 11 years old. Ryan Knauss knew it in second grade.
The 13 American service members killed in Kabul on Thursday died in gruesome violence, victims of a terrorist bombing. They were, with one exception, 9/11 babies, born within a few years of the terrorist attacks that led the United States into a military conflict that stretched across four presidencies and throughout the lives of these 11 men and two women.
They never knew a United States that was not at war, never lived in the world before the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, a country without ID checks in office buildings, metal detectors at schools, shoes X-rayed at the airport.
Instead, they grew up keenly conscious of security concerns, in a culture now sometimes fixated on safety, always aware of a war on terrorism that men and women in uniform were fighting thousands of miles from home.
They were in Afghanistan this month not to fight, but to help finally end a war that has lasted two decades. In the pictures they posted, the videos they sent home, they held Afghan babies and guided fleeing families and stood guard in a hectic, precarious place. The stories of battles and bombs they heard in their training had seemed to some like tales of another time, the kind of lore their superiors liked to pass along to the next generation.
On Saturday, as the Pentagon released the names and biographies of those who were killed, their families groped to make some sense of the ultimate loss. Parents and other relatives spoke of these deaths as searing reminders that these young people had lived in the shadow of wars that took place an ocean away, conflicts strangely detached from most Americans’ daily existence.
“Our generation of Marines has been listening to the Iraq/ Afghan vets tell their war stories for years,” wrote Mallory Harrison, Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole Gee’s friend and roommate first in the barracks and later at their shared house in North Carolina. “It’s easy for that war & those stories to sound like something so distant — something that you feel like you’re never going to experience since you joined the Marine Corps during peacetime.
“You know it can happen,” Harrison wrote on Facebook. “You raise your hand for all of the deployments, you put in the work. But it’s hard to truly relate to those stories when most of the deployments nowadays involve a trip to [Okinawa] or a boring 6 months on ship. Then bad people do bad things.”
Gee’s car, Harrison wrote, is still “parked in our lot. It’s so mundane. Simple. But it’s there. My very best friend, my person, my sister forever. My other half.”
The bombing killed Gee six days after Pentagon officials had tweeted a picture of her cradling an Afghan infant in her arms in Kabul. Gee had reposted that photo on Instagram, adding a caption: “I love my job.”
Gee’s father, Richard Herrera, told the Washington Post she had texted him from Afghanistan a few days before she died. She had just been in Kuwait and now was helping women and children who sought to flee from the Taliban.
Gee, who was from Roseville, Calif., had set out to become an air traffic controller, but an irregular heartbeat steered her into a position as a maintenance technician. Her father said he had “never expected her to be on the front lines in Afghanistan,” but she told him that “she was having the experience of her life,” he recalled. “And I told her I was proud of her.”
Gee, who was promoted to sergeant last month, was 23 when she died.
So was Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss of Corryton, Tenn. “I want to be a Marine,” he wrote in his second grade yearbook, drawing himself in uniform.
Five of the 13 were 20 years old, as old as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
One 20-year-old, Marine Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, had called his mother from Kabul on Wednesday.
“I love you,” he told Elizabeth Holguin before they hung up. Becoming a Marine had always been Espinoza’s dream, his mother told the Post, and he enlisted right after finishing high school in Rio Bravo, Texas, a small, mostly Hispanic town near Laredo.
“It was his calling, and he died a hero,” Holguin said. She said her heart has “a David-sized hole nobody can fill.”
Another of the 20-year-olds, Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, was a baby on 9/11 and had wanted to join the armed forces since he was 2 years old, according to his sister Roice. Another sister recalled Rylee as a toddler, carrying around a toy rifle and wearing his sister’s pink princess snow boots.
“He signed up the day he turned 18,” she said. “That was his plan his whole life.”