Yesterday the last US military transport jet lifted from Kabul airport packed to the brim with last-minute American departees. Hundreds of thousands of Afghanis hoped to join the exodus from the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. The new government had ordered its fighters to not shell the refugees, although an ISIS-K suicide bombing killed 90 civilians and 9 US Marines. Joe Biden OKed a drone strike and the missile struck the militants, but also a family car with ten children aboard. Typical of the CIA and Pentagon. Kill kill kill.
Americans complained about the speedy pull-out, but the president weighed out the options.
Going back in was never one of them and after twenty years not a single American has his boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
The last soldier out of Kabul was Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who departed on the final C-17 Globemaster III. Something heroic to be the last to go.
General Boris Gromov walked over the Friendship Bridge crossing the the Amu-Daria river on 15 February 1989 with thirty to forty trucks loaded with Afghani treasures as well as an antique Tekke carpet stolen from Darul Aman Palace, which he cut into several pieces, and gave it to his fellow comrades.
Otlichnaya rabota.
Major General Homer D. Smith is generally regarded as the last US soldier out of Vietnam, evacuating more than 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese before finally retreating himself. A true hero of his times and all that follows and went before.
Back in 2007 Nik Reiter and I waited for a ferry across the Meleleuk River in Cambodia. I was surprised to find a shack selling wurst and frikadelle. The owner was an old German. He was happy to speak German, even though mine was strictly Hoch Schule Deutshe. Oskar had been in the Orient ever since the fall of the 3rd Reich. He explained tht he had been with the Luftwaffe at Stalingrad.
“I was there at the last flights. We loaded the wounded onto the Junkers one of top of the other. There was no heat and one by one they froze in their berths. None of them got out alive. Only my Kamraden and me and some SS. I was never so happy, when the plane lifted from Stalingradskaya airfield. Three Heinkel 111s left as we landed. The flight officer was a major general. Hellmuth Mader. Over fifty years ago. Have you been to Germany recently?”
“Not since 1982.” I had been just as happy to flee Hamburg ahead of the pimps of the Reeperbahn as any soldier from the 3rd Reich flying from the doom of the 6th Army.”
We crossed the river and I never saw the man again.
On the opposite bank Nik looked back and said, “That could have been bullshit, but it didn’t sound like it.”
“No, it didn’t.”
It ain’t easy to be the first and it is very hard to be the last, walking away without a backward glance, just thinking Thank the Heavens we ain’t there no more.