Rylee McCollum was a kid from Wyoming, just 20. He was planning to have a kid himself in a few weeks. His friends Regi and Kim Stone were hosting Rylee and another Marine for dinner one night when they suggested maybe the boys shouldn’t be too eager to volunteer for anything dangerous. Both of them rejected that idea out of hand. “If anything ever happens to us,” they said, “just know, we were doing what we loved.”
Regi calls Rylee “the definition of courage.”
And so he was, and so were all of the other 12 fine young people we lost at Kabul’s airport in a scene that presented some fine young Americans with bedlam.
Join the service, and you will serve America’s interests, no matter how far from home the mission may take you. “It’s kill or be killed, definitely trynna be on the kill side,” wrote Navy Corpsman Maxton Soviak in his final Instagram post, in June. “There is a large Maxton sized hole that will never be filled,” noted his sister Marilyn on Instagram. “My heart is in pieces and I don’t think they’ll ever fit back right again.” Maxton was from Ohio. He was 22.
Thirteen holes will never be filled. A lot of these families are understandably furious with the chaotic withdrawal. How did we come to rely upon the Taliban to form a security perimeter around our troops? “Biden turned his back on him,” said Steve Nikoui of Norco, California, who lost his son Kareem and noted that American forces are so overwhelmed that they had to funnel evacuees through a single, extremely vulnerable, entry point.
Kareem was born the same year the war on terror began, 2001. But so it always was; it’s our very youngest adults who do our very toughest jobs. My dad was 16 when he dropped out of school to join the Navy in 1944. Why? I used to ask him. “It was just something you did,” he said. I was a relative graybeard when I was commissioned as an Army lieutenant at 22, and wound up playing a very small part in a very small war, in the Persian Gulf in 1991.
The fighters you meet in the military (especially the Marine Corps) will quickly disabuse you of any notion that young people are necessarily unserious or unpatriotic. These folks may be, in many cases, too young to rent a car, but they have drive and focus. For some, the military is just a gig or a stepping stone, but for others the passion to represent our country is an overwhelming force. McCollum used to march around with a rifle when he was still in diapers. Taylor Hoover, a 31-year-old Marine from Utah, “spent his entire adult life as a Marine,” an uncle said on Facebook. “Doing the hard things that most of us can’t do.”
All of the troops met their fate with open eyes, but their families will rightly question the errors of judgment and planning that deposited them into a whirlwind. Mark Schmitz, the father of slain Marine Jared Schmitz of St. Charles County, Missouri, said in a radio interview, “Be afraid of our leadership, or lack thereof.”
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.
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