by Christopher L. Izant
I stir in the darkness on Memorial Day morning. I have forgone my semi-nightly dose of melatonin because it’s my turn “on duty” with the girls and I’ve got the monitor on my nightstand. A wail at 4:45 a.m. tells me I am needed. I shuffle into the nursery, get down on my hands and knees, and rake the carpet with my fingers to find the pacifier she’s tossed over the edge of the crib. Then I follow the sound of sobbing and return it to its home. At seven months now, it’s about time for her to lose the bink, but she’s cutting her first tooth and I don’t have the heart to make her self-soothe through that. Once she settles, I sneak out of her room and back into my own. On an ordinary night, this kind of disruption might aggravate me. But in these early hours, I’m thankful for something to do. I’ve been up since three-something. Ruminating.
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Two days earlier, I met my father and older brother in the visitor’s parking lot at Arlington National Cemetery. My brother took his six-month-old out of the carseat and strapped her to his chest and we set out toward Section 12. Stepping down from Grant Avenue into the grass, we read the numbers on the back of the headstones like a map to locate our long lost relative: my father’s uncle, Jonathan Goulder Izant, who had been killed-in-action battling the Nazis as a young second lieutenant in Germany. For a few minutes, we just stood in silence at the grave. I laid a peony from my garden and my father laid a bouquet of red-white-and-blue carnations. I said a silent prayer. We snapped a few pictures and sent them to our relatives. Then we charted a course downhill to Section 60.
I started west toward Grant Avenue. My brother pointed east and asked, “isn’t it that way?” I’m not sure whether it was an innate sense of cemetery etiquette or Marine Corps indoctrination that told me we do NOT cut across the lawn. As much as I wanted to believe that the dead would appreciate the presence of any passerby who trod above and glanced at their names, I also knew that if anyone were to take issue with such a harmless transgression it would be the crusty Old Breed of warriors resting there. I didn’t need the ghost of some sergeant-major haunting me with cries to “get off the grass, devil dog!” so I told my brother there was some graveyard rule against it and we took the long way around.
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Section 60, where the finest of my generation are buried, is among the most beautiful and the most sorrowful places on earth. Here, my heart aches with tension, as much torn by anger and grief as mended by the communion of collective remembrance. The real party would be on Monday, but already there were families tailgating with camp chairs and coolers, gathered to tell stories, share laughs, shed tears, and spend time with their loved ones beneath.
Near the center we located Kyle Schneider. He had grown up in a suburb on the opposite side of my hometown, but we had never gotten the chance to meet before the Taliban killed him in Helmand Province in 2011. Still, I feel connected to this hero, whose parents had been a constant source of strength to my own when I deployed there the following year. My dad, sporting his Syracuse Marine Parents hat, posed with me for a picture to send to Kyle’s parents. Another peony from my garden, another bouquet of carnations from my dad, some more prayers, then we continued east. I had one more peony from my garden and my dad had one more bouquet. I stopped looking at the numbers on the back of the headstones because I knew where I was going: all the way down to the last row, the most recent casualties. Here at the front of the formation I found my friend, Moises Abraham Navas.
Mo died in 2020, leading Marines into battle against ISIS fighters in the caves of northern Iraq. The same Iraq we invaded in 2003 and withdrew from in 2011. The same Iraq overrun by ISIS in the years that followed. The same Iraq where we redeployed troops in 2014 at the start of Operation Inherent Resolve. The same Operation our military has been at for over a decade.
One of the things that upsets me most about Mo’s death is how few Americans seemed to realize we had troops conducting combat operations in Iraq in 2020. Even fewer realize this remains true today. Because the “forever war” was over, right? Three years ago, after American warplanes carried our last remaining troops out of Afghanistan, the President announced as much. We were made to believe that the Global War on Terrorism had come to an end.
From all the oppression, starvation, and violence that characterize the Taliban rule of Afghanistan; the drone strike that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in the comfort of his Kabul safe-house in 2022; the attacks by Iranian proxies in Syria that killed three U.S. National Guardsmen stationed across the border in Jordan this past January; the U.S. intelligence community’s recent public warnings of an imminent terrorist attack on the homeland; one thing is clear: this war will not end by pronouncement.
American service members and their families do not have the luxury of pretending that rhetoric matches reality. Continued deployments to remote bases on the opposite ends of the earth only add geographical distance and physical seclusion to the social isolation felt among the military community at home. I personally experienced this in 2012, while I was deployed as an advisor to Afghan forces at the beginning of our withdrawal from their country. There I read, from my soon-to-be-demolished combat outpost, an Onion article titled, Nation Horrified to Learn about War in Afghanistan While Reading up on Petraeus Sex Scandal. With the dark sense of humor so common among Marines, we laughed at the time. We watched as the generals all claimed victory to the press and the public, while the Afghans we fought alongside showed themselves to be woefully unprepared for our departure. The rhetorical departures from reality were comedic in the same way as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22; we laughed at the tragic absurdity of it all. But no one is laughing anymore. The detachment, disengagement, and disinterest have enabled a lack of accountability for all the failures and lies. Is it any wonder how our wars end when so few take notice of how they are fought?
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The black bracelet on my wrist is as much a public cry to take notice of these wars as it is a tangible way to keep Mo’s memory alive. But it is not the memory of my friend that’s keeping me up at night. It’s the Marine buried next to him. The headstone froze me in place on sight:
NICOLE
LEEANN
GEE
SGT
US MARINE CORPS
AFGHANISTAN
MAY 1 1998
AUG 26 2021
PURPLE HEART
I’m not sure for how long I stood paralyzed in front of Section 60, but at some point my father told me “take your time” and walked off with my brother to find shade for the baby. I nodded without looking away, awash in a flood of emotions and memories that my mind decided to process thirty-six hours later when I would be trying to sleep.
Lying awake the next night, I wonder how I failed to notice Nicole’s grave during my last visit. I check the pictures on my phone to realize that this was the first time I’d been to Arlington since the war in Afghanistan was so decisively lost. I remember visiting Mo with friends on a Memorial Day past, just not that it had been 2021. I feel ashamed—the drive takes less than an hour if I leave my house early—and I figure it’s been some kind of subconscious avoidance. Like part of me knew, deep down, that it would hurt more to walk among the men and women who died in Afghanistan after we abandoned the cause they died fighting for and surrendered to the Taliban.
It was in the final days of that surrender that Nicole gave her life. Like millions of Americans, I only came to know her through her penultimate Instagram post, which went viral in the days after her death. Sergeant Isaiah Campbell had captured the photograph amid the chaos of the non-combatant evacuation operation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, just five days before the ISIS-K suicide bomber attacked at Abbey Gate, killing Nicole, a dozen other American service members, and nearly two-hundred Afghan civilians. The image is impossible to forget: in sweat-soaked camouflage fatigues and battle-ready body armor, Nicole cradles a small, distraught Afghan child. She has laid her rifle to the side. She gazes down at her ward with an expression that is serious and serene. An accidental Madonna and child. Her caption: “I love my job.”
This was the impression that seized me at her graveside. This is the tragedy among tragedies that haunts me in these early morning hours.
The pacifier is out again and I’m back in the nursery for round two. This time the bink isn’t enough; she spits it out and cries some more, insisting I pick her up. I oblige. She drifts off as soon as I get her precious fat head nestled in the crook of my elbow, and I hold her. I feel the soft baby chick hair on my forearm; a mushy cheek pressing against my bicep; the perfect weight of her limp little body. I hold her for far longer than I need to ensure a successful transfer back into the crib. Because it’s comforting for both of us, to hold and to be held. Something tells me Nicole would have loved this job too.
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A week later it’s my three-year-old’s turn to torment me. She chooses to do so publicly.
“Dada, on Memorial Day you were crying.”
It takes me a few seconds to register what she said. We’re sitting around a crowded community pool and she hits me with it out of nowhere. “Memorial Day” was a rough pronunciation but I am an expert in her dialect of English and decipher it with a context clue; it was easy to recall when she saw me crying. My wife and I exchange smiles at the wonder of this child’s memory.
“Yes, I was feeling sad.”
“But why?” She asks this incessantly. The “why?” phase is the reason I didn’t bring her with me to Arlington. I can’t even give myself satisfactory answers for the questions raised by Section 60, much less my miniature Inquisitor. But this question I can handle. Why was I feeling so sad?
Because I barely slept the night before.
Because Nicole was your age on 9/11, and a girl born too late to have any memories of an attack should also have been born too late to be killed in the war that it spawned.
Because all the heroes I visited last weekend deserved better.
Because I was complicit in a broken promise.
Because so much was sacrificed and so little gained.
Because I volunteered to make the same sacrifice and I got away with it.
Because of all the suffering.
Because of the waste.
“Because I miss my friends.” I tell her. It’s not quite the truth, but it’s something she can understand.
“But you can see them again soon.” She offers such hope and reassurance. Such innocence. The world has not broken her yet.
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Christopher L. Izant is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of Final Engagement: A Marine’s Last Mission and the Surrender of Afghanistan. Chris’s writing has also been published in the Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Journal on Law and Technology, and Al-Noor: the Undergraduate Middle Eastern Studies Journal at Boston College. Chris is an FBI Special Agent in Maryland, where he lives with his family.
(The views expressed in this story are the author’s own and do not reflect any position of the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, or any other component of the United States government.)
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