Still though I can't imagine just how painful watching the pullout was for them.
It was fine, at the start. We all knew how it would go down and just wanted to see the whole thing done with. The ANA crumbled because of course they did, we left a ton of beat to shit equipment (some nice stuff too), whatever. Get our guys out, go home, learn lessons. At that point we mostly viewed the pentagon as stupid, but at least in a basically impossible situation. We signed up for it too, so whatever.
Then that squad got wiped out by a suicide bomber. 13.
That does not fucking happen. FORCEPRO at checkpoints is 20 plus years of institutional knowledge for the Corps. You would get punched at school of infantry if you bunched a squad together like that, dispersion and how to set up check points is drilled into everyone. That squad was forced into a nightmare situation to be set up like this. This does not fucking happening unless it is the only choice.
Once it came out that Milley had testified before the Armed Forces Committee that they didn't feel they needed Bagram AB, the largest Air Base in the country only 25 miles away earlier that spring, it became clear they weren't just stupid,
they didn't give a shit. They couldn't even be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to what they were asking young men to put their lives at stake for. This all could have been avoided if they thought for a second that obviously you run your evacuation from the heavily fortified air base in the middle of empty desert a ten minute helicopter ride from Kabul, not the civilian airport that forms the border of the city.
And what did we do in retaliation? We bombed the guy who planned it, go America. Except we didn't do that, we bombed a fleeing aide worker and his whole family. Clearly as a PR move we gibbed a guy who worked with us and his children across the street. That shook a lot of guys. We hadn't taken fatality in Afghanistan for over a year and most of us felt we could withdraw in orderly fashion with our honor intact. Instead we got the deadliest day in over ten years, rewarded an ally by killing his family in time for the evening news, and the rest of the shitshow. Once it became clear there would be no accountability,.. man. It's one thing to lose a war, it's quite another to realize your leadership weren't even trying.
So yeah, rough scene. Got and sent a few "Hey don't log into Minecraft" texts. Would not recommend going back in time to experience.