Much Ado About... Something

Alben Osaki

Sep 11

An Afghan child sleeps on the cargo floor of a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, kept warm by the uniform of the C-17 loadmaster, during an evacuation flight from Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 15, 2021. (US Air Force courtesy photo)

By Alben Osaki

I stare at my computer in silence as I sip from my French-pressed coffee. Leaning back into my comfortable computer chair, I hear the central AC kick in. A sharp juxtaposition from the images I see on my screen; men and women scrambling in Kabul to escape the Taliban in a far off country. Literally the other side of the world. I probably couldn’t be physically further away.

Yet I can’t help but stare at the screen and feel a sense of… something. Sadness? Anger? Something in between? I definitely feel connected somehow, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Not unlike an itch that can’t be scratched.

To offer some context, I joined the US Navy on June 25th, 2007. If you want to be technical about it, I suppose I joined while I was still in high school, three days after my 17th birthday, back in November 2006. I just didn’t leave for bootcamp until that morning in late June, 2007. A skinny seventeen year old kid fresh outta high school, headed to Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois. And though I would eventually deploy, it wasn’t to Afghanistan.

STG2 Peter Baehler (left) and I, somewhere off the coast of Somalia during a Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) training exercise in support of Combined Task Force 151's counter-piracy operations. Our ship, the USS Chosin (CG-65), was the flagship for CTF-151 at the time.

I tend to marginalize my own experience in the military a lot. I was “just” in the Navy; I was “just” deployed on a ship, etc. Even though I know I shouldn’t. But that’s why I’m so surprised I feel so affected by everything that’s been going on. It’s been years since I last wore the uniform of the United States; I left Active Duty in 2011 and then the Reserves a few years later. I do wonder how I would feel had I never been in the military. If I would feel any different.

A U.S. Marine with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) carries a baby as the familiy processes through the Evacuation Control Center (ECC) during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 28. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla)

Back then, 9/11 was still pretty fresh on my mind. On a lot of people’s minds. We were still very much in the middle of wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Though it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, in many ways it was an eon ago. A whole different world than the one that we live in today.

But more recently, there have been kids going to war who weren’t even born when the events of 9/11 occurred. Isn’t that wild?

I remember being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic as my mom was driving me to school that day when the world changed. There was an Army base, Tripler Army Medical Center, about a half mile down the road from my middle school. A trip that should have taken less than ten minutes took over an hour.

On the drive over, my mom simply told me that a plane hit a building in New York. In my seventh grade head, I imagined a Cessna. It still didn’t explain all the traffic. I didn’t find out the full truth until I finally got to school, later that morning.

I don’t think anyone at that time could have predicted how the next twenty years would unravel.

*PO3 G.P. Scheppler during an open water search and rescue exercise. Despite the two of us being stationed in Pearl Harbor, Schep and I met only after we had left the Navy.*

I know a lot of veterans are wondering if it was all for naught. As my friend and fellow Navy veteran, G.P. Scheppler said, “We spent twenty years raising a generation of Afghans to think things could be different, that they should stand with us, and then when it became politically and economically advantageous we cast them aside.”

It’s easy to start placing blame on one thing or another. A politician, a figurehead, something or someone that we can lay all of this at the feet of. I think that’s probably most people’s first reaction. Something bad happened? Well, it’s so-and-so’s fault. It’s human nature.

*HM3 (FMF) Charlie Lochner. Lochner and I met each other during boot camp in June, 2007 at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Illinois. Division 939.*

I spoke with another veteran friend, Charlie Lochner, who currently works as a therapist but did deploy to Afghanistan in 2010 as a Navy Fleet Marine Force (FMF) Corpsman. “Trying to lay blame at any given politician’s feet isn’t really going to do any good.” he told me, “I work in mental health and in the group I run, we sometimes talk about blame as a coping mechanism. It only leads to a temporary feeling of moral superiority and only serves to propagate animosity between groups.”

A U.S. Air Force aircrew, assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, assists qualified evacuees aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft in support of the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Afghanistan, Aug. 21, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Taylor Crul)

Listen, I get it. The world definitely doesn’t need another veteran giving his thoughts on the United States leaving Afghanistan. Especially one who has never deployed there, let alone set foot in the country. But I can’t help but feel like I’m a part of this whole thing, despite not being able to put into words why.

The last thing I want to do is cheapen this whole thing for the veterans who did serve there. I’m sure that whatever I’m feeling, they feel it exponentially more. It’s easy to see. Look at any comment section of an article about the pull-out of Afghanistan. Veterans of every branch chiming in with opinions that vary of every flavor from disgust to relief.

“That’s what I see online,” Lochner told me, “and yes, it is bothersome to see other vets jump into that pool. That’s their choice. But as for me, I would rather do something constructive to aid in the improvement of a once-oppressed country. After all, is that not what we joined for in the first place?”

I don’t have the right answer to any of this. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m nowhere near smart enough to claim that I could have done a better job. As you’ve probably noticed by now, I can barely vocalize my own opinion, let alone a viable solution.

*(U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Brandon Cribelar)*

But at the end of the day, this isn’t about me. This is about the human beings on the other side of my computer screen. On the other side of the world. The locals who put their lives on the line by helping the United States and our allies. The locals who are fighting for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights in a place where traditionally those rights haven't existed. I donate to causes and try to raise awareness, but outside of that, I’m not sure what more I can do. Just sip my French-pressed coffee, sit in my comfortable computer chair in my temperature-controlled office, safely on the other side of the planet, and stare at the screen as I ponder about the point of it all.

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.