Reflections on Afghanistan
By: Roxanne Petraeus
Tags: Afghanistan, Veterans, War

The last few weeks, I either avoided the news out of Afghanistan, or obsessively followed it. I swung between these extremes, trying to process what it feels like to have fought in a lost war. I’ve struggled to think about how, if at all, to share that experience in my professional life, which is now far removed from military service.

I was having a sales call recently and our buyer happened to be a military veteran. He’s incredibly thoughtful and mentioned that he had recently held a meeting with his company’s veterans ERG to make space for veterans to process the loss of the war in Afghanistan, the recent death of 13 service members, and the memories these events were triggering. This was actually the first professional interaction I had that acknowledged my personal connection to the war, and I was surprised to realize how grateful I was to talk through a shared experience.

I’m the only veteran at my company, and I don’t have a great answer to how, if at all, I acknowledge the end of a 20 year war. While I think about the veteran’s perspective, I also know that the war had an even bigger impact on Afghans, the vast majority of whom remain to face a scary future, having just gone through a violent past.

But I believe it makes sense to make space for problems and reflections, even without solutions. In that spirit, I wanted to share a few short reflections:

Two of the 13 service members killed at the airport bombing were Marine Corps Sergeants Gee and Pichardo. They were searching Afghan women entering the airport to keep it safe for those who were leaving.

In 2010, when I was deployed to Afghanistan, I was involved in the early iteration of what later became the job they were doing. The idea was essentially that, given cultural gender norms, it was better to have women service members interact with Afghan women.

In seeing their passing, I thought about the additional challenges these women faced in a service struggling to protect its service members from assault and harassment. I don’t know them personally, but my sense is they endured a lot in their short lives, and still believed in the military’s ability to be a better version of itself.

Many of the last service members in Afghanistan were stationed in the U.S., and were recently activated to provide security for the hasty withdrawal. I cannot think of a more dangerous, volatile mission than being the last group to hold the line, hoping it holds long enough for you to leave too.

There’s a quote at Harvard’s Memorial Church where I commissioned that reads:

While a bright future beckoned

they freely gave their lives and fondest hopes

for us and our allies

that we might learn from them courage

in peace to spend

our lives making a better world for others

I can’t look at the war in Afghanistan and see ideas of “hope” or “freedom”, in the way that World War II presents a seemingly clearer idea of “good” versus “evil”. It’s hard to think about why lives were lost for a conflict that didn’t seem to make the world better.

The only idea that makes me hopeful is that seeing service members make the ultimate sacrifice reminds us all of sacrifice, of those who believe in serving others and giving all that they have. I hope it inspires those of us who live to spend some of our peace time serving others.