Decades of War Dissolved
Watching Afghanistan fall through the eyes of a Marine veteran
I watched Afghanistan’s stunningly swift fall to the Taliban through the eyes of Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a New York Times Pentagon reporter stationed in Kabul who is covering the debacle. He knows Afghanistan, the warlords, Afghan soldiers and interpreters, the Taliban, the American military equipment, the corruption and deception, the longest war in American history that once seemed endless. But decades of war have just dissolved in the span of a few weeks.
Gibbons-Neff, or TM, as I know him, is a Marine veteran, my former student, and a friend. When I was writing Stoic Wisdom and the trilogy of books that preceded it, TM and others like him were foremost in my mind — the Stoic mindset, how it tries to keep psychic and moral injury at bay, and the military that projects so well that image of unflappable Stoic grit.
But is bulletproof Stoic grit what U.S. veterans are now feeling as they watch institutions that they spilled blood for in deployment after deployment in post-9/11 Afghanistan collapse like a house of cards? Do they feel grit and military “can-do” when their minds get stuck on lost buddies and limbs, when they watch Afghan locals with whom they’ve partnered and become friends — interpreters to whom they made promises for safe haven who are now at grave risk of reprisal beheadings by the Taliban?
I doubt it. A sense of helplessness, lost hope, moral doubt, anger, grief, and guilt are what many veterans are turning to each other to talk about on social media and in print. An ill-planned exit strategy rattles them. Their nightmares come back, as it does for another Marine veteran, Timothy Kudo, who is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war and wrote an essay in the New York Times on the day Kabul fell.
There’s enough blame to go round. But service members, those like TM and so many others I have interviewed over the years, tend to feel an acute sense of personal responsibility — what they could have and should have done if only they moved an inch this way or held back fire at the checkpoint or saw that bump in the road for what it was, an implanted IED (improvised explosive device). Personal responsibility fills the gaps.
Those who fight war want to see clarity despite the moral fog of war. But the moral weight they bear is way too heavy and disproportionate as too many others give themselves passes — commanders in chief, political leaders on both sides of the aisle, most of us. Fewer than 1% of the American population has served in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The draft military of the Vietnam era, my era, is gone. And with it, a greater sense of sacrifice or, at least, of needing to have one’s voice heard as it was in anti-war protests. The moral outsourcing of the U.S. military, the predominance of troops drawn from the South and the Midwest, have kept too many of us too insulated from the realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was true in my class at Georgetown more than a decade ago.
TM came to Georgetown, a Marine rifleman fresh back from serving two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He lost three of his closest buddies in war, their names engraved on a black bracelet he often twirled around his wrist, a way to remind himself of the hurt. A college campus sheltered from war despite being just miles from the Pentagon was a strange place for a Marine reeling from loss. TM knew I knew the military and worked closely with veterans. And so he found his way into a course I was into teaching about the inner war of war—a topic I had taken up in a book then just out, The Untold War. That was fall 2012.
It is now fall 2021. Nine years later and 13 years since TM deployed as part of the surge in the Helmand province in Afghanistan. I worry about his safety in Kabul. When will the journalists leave? I worry about so many I have written about, who’ve put their bodies and souls into wars whose missions they may have once believed in or had to believe in to keep fighting but so often feared betrayal by their own command, by politicians, and by themselves for promises they couldn’t keep.
Ancient Greco-Roman Stoicism is a remarkable resilience philosophy. But not if we distort it and turn Stoic endurance into Stoic invulnerability. Listen to our soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen. They know the sound of bullets. And they know that they are not bulletproof and that they live with psychic and moral wounds that need healing. They know that there are always cracks in the Stoic armor.
For more on Thomas Gibbons-Neff and other veterans and spouses who were in that Georgetown class, check out Afterwar.
