- Messages
- 46,101
- Location
- United states
"I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to die alone."
"This was a guy who was shot through the face protecting US Green Berets from a Taliban ambush."
"Steve, they are beating my wife. My children are watching this, for God's sakes. What can I do?"
"My daughter has been trampled sir, I know we're going to miss our chance to escape, but she's unconscious and barely breathing."
"I never imagined I would witness the kind of gross abandonment followed by career-preserving silence of senior leaders, military and civilian. As a result of the way we left Afghanistan, we're on the front end of a national security crisis as 27 violent extremist groups are now operating on former NATO security bases with Taliban top-cover. And I think we're on the front-end of a mental-health tsunami, as 73% of our Afghan war veterans say they feel betrayed by how this war ended.
Calls to the VA hotline have spiked 81% in the first year since the Afghan withdrawal and they keep coming. My friend Brad - was found dead - a few months ago in a Mississippi hotel room. His wife Dana confirmed to me that the Afghan abandonment reactivated all the demons he managed to put behind him from our time in Afghanistan together and he just couldn't find his way out of the darkness of that moral injury.
America is building a nasty reputation for multigenerational systemic abandonment of our allies that we use as smoldering human wreckage from the the Montagnards of Vietnam to the Kurds in Syria. Our veterans know something else that this committee might do well to consider. We might be done with Afghanistan, but it's not done with us.
The enemy has a vote. If we don't set politics aside and pursue accountability and lessons learned to address this grievous moral injury on our military community and right the wrongs that have been inflicted on our most at-risk Afghan allies this colossal foreign policy failure will follow us home and ultimately draw us right back into the graveyard of the empires where it all started."
"This was a guy who was shot through the face protecting US Green Berets from a Taliban ambush."
"Steve, they are beating my wife. My children are watching this, for God's sakes. What can I do?"
"My daughter has been trampled sir, I know we're going to miss our chance to escape, but she's unconscious and barely breathing."
"I never imagined I would witness the kind of gross abandonment followed by career-preserving silence of senior leaders, military and civilian. As a result of the way we left Afghanistan, we're on the front end of a national security crisis as 27 violent extremist groups are now operating on former NATO security bases with Taliban top-cover. And I think we're on the front-end of a mental-health tsunami, as 73% of our Afghan war veterans say they feel betrayed by how this war ended.
Calls to the VA hotline have spiked 81% in the first year since the Afghan withdrawal and they keep coming. My friend Brad - was found dead - a few months ago in a Mississippi hotel room. His wife Dana confirmed to me that the Afghan abandonment reactivated all the demons he managed to put behind him from our time in Afghanistan together and he just couldn't find his way out of the darkness of that moral injury.
America is building a nasty reputation for multigenerational systemic abandonment of our allies that we use as smoldering human wreckage from the the Montagnards of Vietnam to the Kurds in Syria. Our veterans know something else that this committee might do well to consider. We might be done with Afghanistan, but it's not done with us.
The enemy has a vote. If we don't set politics aside and pursue accountability and lessons learned to address this grievous moral injury on our military community and right the wrongs that have been inflicted on our most at-risk Afghan allies this colossal foreign policy failure will follow us home and ultimately draw us right back into the graveyard of the empires where it all started."
