James Hatch

James Hatch is a Special Operations Veteran, the founder of Spike’s K9 Fund, and an Undergraduate at Yale University. 

OPINION — I was in Bethesda Naval Medical Center in July of 2009, when then-Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates visited me. I had, a few days earlier, been wounded in a gunfight in Afghanistan.

Secretary Gates came into my room, looked at my wife, and asked if she was happy with the way I was being treated. After he was satisfied with her answer, he looked at me and asked where I’d been wounded and how long it had taken me to get to a field medical unit. I told him twenty-eight-minutes. He smiled and said “we are trying to make sure that we have field hospitals set up in such a way that no matter where a service-person is wounded in Afghanistan, they can be in a field hospital inside of the “golden hour.”

Secretary Gates was a soft-spoken and intense man, who was very humble and one could surmise that he was very concerned about all of the people who worked for him. To me, he seemed to live that commitment.

My first deployment to Afghanistan was in the Spring of 2005. I did several other deployments there until my last one in 2009. I saw firsthand how hard many Americans, and our allies, worked for Afghanistan. Many of my friends and my beloved dogs were killed in Afghanistan fighting to make that place something better than what it was. Did we make mistakes? Yes. Were we (myself included) arrogant? Yes. But those two errors do not outweigh the massive commitment that we, our allied partners, and the rest of the American people, whether they cared to know about it or not, made for the people of Afghanistan.

When President Biden came out a few weeks ago and announced an immediate pullout from Afghanistan, I agreed with him.

Today, as I see the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, I still agree with the President. Today’s situation saddens me and I have gone through a gamut of emotions regarding the horrors that the Afghans face. I have finally come to the conclusion though, that the onus for this failure is not only on us, the United States but in a greater part, it is on the Afghan people.

As I watched humans holding on to the sides of a U.S. C-17 cargo jet and then falling to their death as it took off, I found myself wondering why that type of commitment wasn’t demonstrated by picking up a rifle and fighting the Taliban?

We spent trillions of US dollars in Afghanistan, and of course, the argument could and should be made, that those dollars were probably not allocated in the best way all the time, but it was still free money to help an entire nation. We fought the Taliban, and we kicked their ass nearly all the time. The Taliban were effective at using civilians to shield themselves, they were ok at ambushes when they used IEDs, but when I visited their strongholds in the middle of the night, they were cowardly creatures who hid behind their wives and children. Yes, they would fight occasionally, but when they did fight us, not on their terms, like the night I was wounded, they sprayed bullets wildly and had no regard for each other or the innocent civilians in their midst.