Nearly a decade ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly and painfully drawing to a close, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of immaculate graves, the dead of all the just and unjust wars that built and remade this country. The relative told us he was deeply moved. He hadn't expected it — he'd probably imagined a more bombastic, overtly militaristic cemetery — and was entranced by the beauty, serenity, and quiet dignity of the place.
So we took him to Section 60 to show him some of the newest graves of kids born in the 90s, and I told him that the sight made me angry, that these young lives thrown into a poorly managed war, and even their deaths in its final stages, were being largely ignored. It was just the background buzz of a global superpower.
A few years later, in 2021, the Afghanistan war finally ended, but at the expense of several American children who served in the 2000s, and the military failures, combined with moral failures, put tens of thousands of Afghans who served alongside us at risk in a country now entirely controlled by the Taliban. The last Marine to die was killed in a suicide bombing at the gates of Kabul airport. The explosion killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier, and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to deal with the chaos of an unplanned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul. It was essentially a humanitarian mission, an attempt to help the people we had abandoned. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sergeant Nicole Gee, posted a photo of herself cradling a baby in Kabul, captioning it, “I love my job.”
The US responded to these deaths with a drone strike on a vehicle in Kabul that the military claimed was transporting ISIS members preparing for their next attack, but in a grotesque turn of events that symbolizes our many failures, the vehicle turned out to be transporting Afghan aid workers. The explosion killed the aid workers and their relatives, seven of them children – the same people the Marines lost their lives trying to save.
How do we commemorate the dead of a failed war? In Arlington, it's easy to feel your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes who ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We see them as inseparable from the causes for which they gave their lives. The same can't be said for the more morally questionable wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for those who died in my generation's wars, people I knew, the reasons they died and the honor I owe them are placed side by side, awkwardly.
I've seen a lot of Marines go to Afghanistan. I could have gone to that war, but I chose not to. Most of them were young men. The thing Hollywood gets wrong about war the most is when they cast grown men as America's best killers. Look at a Marine infantry platoon. Many of the guys enlisted at 17 or 18, and there are boys there. Boys who haven't yet grown into cynicism. Some realize it mid-service, some keep that flame of idealism burning through multiple deployments, and some die before the flame goes out.
For many of the kids I saw, their mission was important to them. So as we remember their deaths, their mission should be important to all of us. And that mission was harrowing. Memorial Day should be marked by sorrow and patriotism, but also, of course, shame. And for me, it also carries with it, although that has faded over the years, anger.
A few months after the fall of Kabul, I went to the Bronx to meet my beloved war photographer, Peter Van Agtmael, who was guiding a group of adult students through an exhibition of his photographs from 9/11 to the present at the Bronx Documentary Center, which are now being compiled into a book called Look at the USA.
“I just came back from Afghanistan, and this is going to be controversial to say, but it's beautiful,” he told the group. “It's beautiful to see Afghanistan at peace.”
Beautiful. I remember a blank-eyed Marine who'd just returned from Afghanistan in 2009, talking in a monotone about his best friend who'd been shot in the head in a beautiful part of our now-peaceful country. I wondered what he'd think of that. On the walls around me, I could see burned soldiers in a combat hospital, the arms of Trump supporters scaling the walls of the Capitol on January 6, clouds of dust from improvised explosive devices exploding in Iraq.
There was a huge print hanging high at the end of the gallery. If you craned your neck you could see the homeless encampments in Las Vegas, and if you craned your neck even further you could see million-dollar F-16 fighter jets flying overhead. There was something powerful about seeing this kind of talk about the state of America in the South Bronx, a community whose struggles have been forgotten, erased, and ignored, while the rest of the country is forgetting the war. And it was really painful.
Until now, when I thought about those who have died recently, I have told myself that service to country, service to death, is such a significant sacrifice that it overshadows all other questions. The cause would not be so important if the fallen men I knew served bravely, cared for their fellow Marines, and maintained honor. But I have come to feel that erasing the complexity of their wars is, ultimately, an insult to the dead. We have an obligation to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, and how those ideals were betrayed or did not match reality.
This Memorial Day, as I prepare to take my sons to our local Memorial Day parade, the country is in the midst of the most divisive anti-war protests since the early days of the Iraq War, which my friends have described as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or “against undeniable genocide.” Long-dormant questions about how we use force and who we help kill feel politically raw again (though I'm not talking much about actual U.S. troop deployments or the soldiers who have recently lost their lives at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is raw, and it's angry.
Thank goodness. The mood of the nation as we mourn our dead was so uncomfortable and painful. This year, when we remember them, we're not going to remember who they were, just the fragments of memory dug up over the past few decades. We're going to remember why they died, all the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America had forgotten them. Because they were trying to force a different way of life on people of a different country and culture. Because they wanted to take care of their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't have a big plan. Because the world is dangerous and someone has to kill. For college funds. Because Marines are the coolest. Because they watched “Full Metal Jacket” and wanted to be the Joker. Or Animal Mother. Because war might give new hope to Iraq and Afghanistan. Because we earned the hatred of others with our cruelty, indifference, carelessness and arrogance. Because America is still worth dying for.
