Author: Dylan Gresik

“To watch Kabul fall, some half a century later, resurrected old pains and revealed old scars. It was, in many ways, a far more tragic story than what I witnessed off the jade coasts of Vietnam.

“Remembrance is the key to learning from our mistakes, that we might never again conclude a conflict with such cavalier ignorance; that we might never again take for granted the lives of those who facilitate our mall-going way of life; that we might think of their families who wait for their return before we send our kids to war.”

“When we saw what was going on last year [in Afghanistan], I think a lot of veterans—myself included—really struggled because we saw a lot of the work we had put in go completely to waste.”

“[Veterans] deserve candid explanations from military officials involved in the withdrawal and a full accounting of the decisions they made that led to such a disastrous outcome.”

“We are putting resources toward things that we don’t need to be focusing on…. We need to start looking at things like updating our technology, modernizing the military, making sure our service members are prepared to go into combat and fight and win—regardless of their race or religion or gender or anything else.”

“We’re seeing distraction with these ‘woke’ policies that really started under the Obama Administration. He had eight years to really shift military culture—and it was successful.”