The latest casualty of our 18-year war in Afghanistan, Army Green Beret Sgt. 1st Class Jeremy Griffin, died in a gun battle in Wardak Province on Monday. His death brings to 2,430 the number of American service members who lost their lives in Operations Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel.
Despite yearly promises that the war is coming to a close, the conflict muddles on with no end in sight.
I have studied the complicated nature of the war in Afghanistan for over a decade, first researching our nation-building and counterinsurgency endeavors as a congressional intern and a student at the College of William and Mary. Between 2010 and 2013, I worked as a civilian intelligence analyst, providing policy makers with the information necessary to bring the floundering war to a successful conclusion. Like the other idealists in my cubicle farm, I was devastated to watch our post-surge progress squandered as we headed ever closer to a stalemate.
I finally saw the human toll of the war I fought to prolong after I left government service, when I began writing a novel about the intersection of love and war. Having never stepped foot in Afghanistan, I spent the last six years devouring podcasts, sending out questionnaires, and conducting interviews with service members and veterans who were deployed there.
Their first-hand experiences taught me that the conflict’s devastating body count is misleading. Many more than 2,430 Americans have left pieces of themselves in Afghanistan’s graveyard of empires.
For some veterans, the loss was physical. In October 2011, Marine Staff Sgt. Jose Sanchez was on patrol in Helmand Province when the blast from an improvised explosive device sheared off his left leg. As Sanchez explained in an episode of the “Team Never Quit” Podcast, while he was being moved to safety on a stretcher, his severed leg rolled down a hill, never to be retrieved. Displaying typical dark veteran humor, Sanchez admitted that he “always wondered what … happened to [his] leg” and mused that it was “probably some [expletive] Afghan’s [expletive] dining room table” or hanging on a wall like a hunting trophy.
Sanchez is one of 20,615 American service members to be wounded in action in Afghanistan. Their precious blood was shed in fields and irrigation ditches, in mountains and valleys, in scraggly patches of forest, inside mud-walled compounds, and on dusty Afghan roads. The nature of our enemy’s preferred weapon, the IED, left many service members without one or more limbs. Some lost all four. On returning home, all had to find a way to compensate for what they lost to Afghanistan.
For other veterans, the piece that remained in the war zone was intangible. In 2015, I interviewed Carter, a young Army reservist, who shared haunting memories of his deployment to Kabul in July 2010.
For Carter, fear set in the moment the C-130 transport plane carrying him entered Afghan airspace. He recalled with disgust working daily with Afghan truck drivers, who brought young boys on the road to use for sex. He claimed he grew to mistrust even young Afghan children, fearing they might attempt to wound or kill himself and his teammates. He spoke about taking shelter with his twin brother whenever the Taliban mortared their base. Carter was both guarded and aggressive as he shared a touching detail he had previously kept to himself, that he had held his brother’s hand while they huddled together in their bunker.
Carter admitted that, on returning home, he struggled to decompress from the conflict zone. On waking, he said he would sometimes “drink a fifth [of liquor] until [he was] silly” to help him “feel better.” Not surprisingly, the effects did not last. When Carter finally sought help at the Department of Veterans Affairs, he received pills and a manic depressive diagnosis.
On difficult days, Carter’s father drove him to the VA hospital to speak with a therapist. Because he had no appointment on the books, Carter was told on arrival that, unless he said he was suicidal, he could simply schedule an appointment with a therapist in a few weeks’ time. He did not need help in a few weeks, he later explained to me. He needed it right away.
Carter told me without equivocation that he had overcome his post-Afghanistan demons. In spite of my internal doubts, I chose to believe him.
Eighteen months later, I got the terrible news that Carter had committed suicide. I can never be certain of why he decided to end his life, but I believe that some parts of Carter’s mind never made it home from Afghanistan.
Ten years ago, I maintained hope that the war in Afghanistan could be won. Those hopes have been dashed as I witnessed repeated acts of ineptitude from senior leadership, who have utterly depleted the gains our war fighters have made at great personal expense.
Let it not go unstated that the efforts of our war fighters are the highlight of our Afghanistan legacy. No matter the instructions from on high, our war fighters carried them out to the very best of their ability. Any progress we made was at their hands.
The failures lie squarely with the leaders making policy.
After almost two decades, the task is left to those strategists to determine how to bring our time in Afghanistan to a close without damaging the future of, and the promises we made to, our Afghan allies. Each year the conflict continues on, more Americans like Griffin will lose their lives. Others, like Sanchez and Carter, will leave parts of themselves in a country where our leaders fell short.
Whatever exit strategy our policymakers pursue, they should be certain that it honors the sacrifices made by the men and women they sent to do their fighting.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
