‘No greater love than … to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn 15:13). This past week, we as a nation had our last combat service member step onto an aircraft and leave Kabul Airport after nearly 20 years of combat operations in Afghanistan. This moment has particular importance to me since on September 11th, 2001, I was serving as a U.S. Marine and attached to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) on a six-month deployment to the Middle East. Interestingly enough, on that fateful day, I was training alongside Australian service members in Darwin, Australia – the real outback with kangaroos and all!
What a difference a day would make? A world that knew relative peace was now thrust into war. My battalion became the first American unit with boots on the ground in southern Afghanistan, just south of Kandahar. Prior to 9/11, I don’t even know if I could have pointed out Afghanistan on a world map. Now cities like Kabul, Khandar, Herat, and Lashkar Gah are commonly leading the nightly news.
Nineteen years later, just last year at this exact time, I was serving again in Afghanistan, not as a Marine, but as an Air Force Chaplain at Bagram Air Force Base. Not only did I already know where that base was located, but also had the weather app downloaded to my phone so I could prepare myself for the weather each day. Being a Catholic Chaplain, I often flew around the country to offer Catholic Mass and support our men and women, both military and civilian, serving our great nation and desiring to bring peace to Afghanistan. One of my trips took me back to Kandahar Airport, the place I had been 19 years earlier. What has changed? Nearly 20 years of war has left families of our great nation with empty chairs at their dining room tables, shadow boxes with American flags presented at funerals and countless veterans with wounds of battle both seen and unseen.
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The commitment of our men and women who wore the uniform with the desire of never allowing another 9/11 to happen and to give hope to the Afghanistan people must never be forgotten. We must support our veterans, all of our veterans, who were willing to go to a country they knew not, fight an enemy they had never heard of because of love for their country, their freedoms and each of us.
We do not know how the last chapter will be written on Afghanistan, but I can assure you, the kind people that I was able to meet were thankful for the nearly 20 years of the American presence. A presence where human dignity for all people, male and female, was recognized and hope for a better life was first realized. Let us continue to pray for the people of Afghanistan, our military service members and those who were willing to, and so many that did, lay down their lives for their friends.
