NASHVILLE, Ind — I never met Marine Sgt. Jeremy R. McQueary, but anyone traveling on State Road 46 heading into this town crosses a bridge named in his honor.
On Feb. 18, 2010, while on combat support mission in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, McQueary was killed by an improvised explosive device in the midst of a war that, at that point, was going on nine years.
Sgt. McQueary had been inspired by his father, Dallas, to serve. He graduated from Columbus East High School in 2002, just months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the citizen patriot downing of Flight 93 that had been aimed at the U.S. Capitol.
Less than three months after Sgt. McQueary's death, U.S. Special Forces found and terminated the life of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda mastermind of those Sept. 11 attacks.
One could make the case that it was at that point that the United States achieved its mission; that was the time we should have exited Afghanistan, the so-called "graveyard of empires."
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed on Wednesday, "For more than 20 years ... " it was American warriors like Sgt. McQueary who helped "prevent an attack on the homeland."
"This is personal," Gen. Milley said. "To each of them, I want you to know personally, your service mattered."
In dedicating that State Road 46 bridge in Sgt. McQueary's honor, then Indiana Gov. Mike Pence observed on Nov. 11, 2013, "Sgt. McQueary demonstrated what it means to be a true family man. His contributions to this community and nation are invaluable. And so, for his service, for putting on the uniform, wearing it with pride and serving under circumstances so few can understand, we owe a debt of gratitude to Sgt. McQueary which can never be repaid."
I choose to remember Sgt. McQueary this week because of the U.S. military pullout of Afghanistan, and then the stunning collapse of the Asian nation's 300,000-man army while its government fled. This "forever war" had been designated for termination by President Trump, who set a May 1 deadline for the U.S. to leave before he left office last January.
President Biden delayed the May 1 deadline for several months, and has taken extraordinary criticism from across the political spectrum when chaos ensued the American pullout. Seared into the public memory this week were the terrible optics of a hollow, rotted government collapsing, conjuring comparisons to the demise of South Vietnam in April 1975, and U.S. helicopters off the roof of the Saigon embassy to the C-17 cargo plane rolling down the Afghan runway with hundreds of people running along side, some latching on to their ultimate doom.
In early July, Biden had said, "It is not at all comparable [to Vietnam]. The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Gen. Milley told the press on Wednesday that U.S. military and intelligence assessments on a potential Afghan government collapse "ranged from weeks, to months, or even years. There was nothing I saw that indicated the collapse of this government and army in 11 days.
"I've never seen a collapse of an army that size in 11 days," Milley said.
Nobody has. Rotted regime collapse is never predictable; never tidy; always chaotic; always fueling the temptation to second guess.
"Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building," Biden said in an address to the nation last Monday afternoon. "The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. I am president of the United States of America and the buck stops with me. I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision. We gave them every tool they could need. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. [What] we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future. Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country."
Biden continued, "If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
On the nation building tangent, former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Mike Jason writes in The Atlantic that for two decades, the U.S. military was tasked with building an Afghan national police force, something it was ill-equipped to accomplish. There’s a huge difference between military and police departments. "We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 incoherent wars, one year at a time, without a sense of direction," he said of U.S. military trainers who were deployed for a year.
It had been 7,252 days since the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
As for Sgt. McQueary, his 2,448 comrades and 3,846 U.S. contractors who did not walk out of Afghanistan alive, the echoes of history find President Lincoln on the Gettysburg battlefield: "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
