Demetrius Freeman The Washington Post
Dan Berschinski remembers the parade of dignitaries who stopped by his hospital room after his legs were blown off by a mine in Afghanistan in 2009: President Barack Obama, “basically everybody in my chain of command,” even the comedian Jon Stewart. But his dinner with Joe Biden in the kitchen of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center stands out.
Biden, Berschinski said, was one of the only people who went beyond respectful platitudes and listened to the injured soldier’s thoughts on what should happen in Afghanistan.
“I still had wounds open on my body from Afghanistan and he wanted to know what did you see? What did you think?”
A dozen years later, Berschinski still has fondness for the man who would become president and agrees with his impulse to get out of Afghanistan.
But as he watched Kabul fall to the Taliban amid a chaotic U.S. exit this week, he felt conflicted about how Biden handled the withdrawal from a war that has shaped most of his adult life.
“I am frustrated that our government did not have a plan in place,” said Berschinski, who was featured in a 2011 Washington Post story and later penned a CNN op-ed critical of former president Donald Trump. “And I think Biden deserves a fair amount of criticism, and they should have been better prepared to avoid these bad optics. And they should have been ready to help the [Afghan] people who helped us.”
The last week has complicated the relationship between Biden and the veterans of America’s longest war. While many veterans — like most Americans — support ending a war whose mission has become muddled, many also view the withdrawal as recklessly slipshod, risking the lives of Afghans who aided American interests and the additional troops recently deployed to clean up the messy exit. Others have blanched at the defiant, even detached tone coming from a president whose brand is rooted in empathy — a man whose late son was an Iraq War veteran and who ends most speeches praying “may God protect our troops.”
“Most of us, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, we thought Biden would be better than this, because Beau [Biden] served after 9/11 and [the president] spent time with Gold Star families, he spent time with veterans,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). “He should get this at a gut level. What is hitting really hard is Biden failing to realize the reality of the situation. It just feels like here we go again. . . . Will this be his version of [former vice president Dick] Cheney saying we’ll be greeted like liberators?”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement that the sacrifices veterans have made were one of the principal reasons the president elected to end the war.
“American service members and veterans were at the forefront of the President’s mind when he made this decision because of the profound respect he has for the sacrifices that they make in the line of duty and his conviction that it would be unjust to ask more of them to die in another country’s civil war that was not in our national interest,” Bates said.
Jen Burch, an Air Force veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011, said she was disappointed that Biden’s decision to send more troops to the country to help Americans leave a combustible situation came as he was ferried between D.C. and the presidential retreat at Camp David. She was even more upset at his tone as he defended the military exit.
“I was like ‘read the room,’ ” she said. “We’re not upset about ending this war. We’re upset about how it happened. I think a lot of us feel that yes, it was time to end the war. But there was a way to do this. I think of the people who have died, or the people who have been injured, or the families that have been torn apart because they have deployment after deployment and then they have PTSD. I think they owe it to us to do it right and they didn’t.”
In April, Biden announced that the United States would make a full withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11. The action would bring an end to a conflict that more than 800,000 U.S. service members have fought in since the war started in 2001. More than 2,400 have died there and hundreds of thousands have been injured.
Following movement on the Senate infrastructure package last week, Biden left for what was supposed to be a vacation split between Camp David in Maryland and his homes in Delaware.
He monitored the escalating debacle from Camp David. And over the weekend the White House released pictures of Biden meeting remotely with national security advisers as the situation in Afghanistan became increasingly desperate.
Meanwhile, the Taliban blitzed through the country, quickly gaining ground surrendered by Afghan army fighters. In the rush to escape, photos and videos showed desperate Afghan civilians clinging to — and in some cases falling from — American military planes. At least seven people were confirmed dead at the Kabul airport. Victorious Taliban fighters posed for selfies at some of the city’s landmarks. The American flag was taken down from the American Embassy.
On Thursday, the White House tried to communicate that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was proceeding apace. More than 5,200 troops were in Kabul, securing the airport and keeping it open. And a dozen C-17s have landed there, ferrying troops and equipment and evacuating American citizens, U.S. Embassy personnel and Afghan nationals eligible for special visas because they aided U.S. interests.
But White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC News that the United States was still negotiating with the Taliban to get safe passage for Americans out of the country, adding, “We can’t count on anything.”
In speeches from the White House and in interviews, Biden has spent the week defending the process of pulling out of Afghanistan, often by saying he doesn’t want any more American soldiers to die there.
In remarks aired Thursday, Biden again invoked the sacrifices of American service members as he justified the messy withdrawal to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“I ask you, you want me to stay,” he said. “You want us to stay and send your kids back to Afghanistan? How about it? Are you — if you had a son or daughter, would you send them in Afghanistan now? Or later?”
Tom Porter, the executive vice president of government affairs for IAVA, said he and other veterans have spent the past week reflecting on their legacy in Afghanistan — and how the rest of the country will view it.
Over the last 20 years, for example, service members’ efforts gave a generation of Afghans enough stability to attend school. And Porter still has a picture on his phone of his teenage daughter and the first female ambassador from Afghanistan, pixelated proof of the strides the country has made because of American servicemen and women.
But he’s also seen the meme that juxtaposes the airlift from Saigon in the waning days of the Vietnam War with a helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
“I remember seeing that one and thinking, ‘Wow, is that going to color the veterans and military families and what their service meant? Is it going to be that picture?’ Because that picture in Saigon is a picture of failure.”
Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, in a statement, acknowledged that for veterans it is “painful to see the images from Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan” but stressed their service had not been in vain. “When our country was attacked, you and your loved ones made the heroic choice to run towards the fight. That courageous sacrifice matters and has made us safer, no matter what happens today or any other day.”
A senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive ongoing conversations said both the White House and the National Security Council have briefed veterans groups to offer resources, communicate support and hear their perspectives.
Part of the enduring legacy of the war, Porter said, will be how the Biden administration treats Afghan interpreters and U.S. Embassy staff who aided the nation’s war effort at great personal risk to themselves and their families.
Thousands of special immigrant visa applicants have found themselves in limbo as their country deteriorates, submitting paperwork to dwindling embassy staff who are themselves trying to leave the country.
Biden has faced bipartisan pressure to get the visa applicants to safety and has said doing so is a priority. The White House says the process has been dogged by backlogs and delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but that efforts ramped up as summer approached.
“They’ve risked their lives. They risked the lives of their families. They have targets on their backs,” Porter said. “We can’t turn our backs on the people who we’ve made these promises to. So many service members like me have made promises to the people that we worked with.”
As the situation has devolved, Berschinski and a tight group of friends who served at the same time in Afghanistan have also reflected on the sacrifices they’ve made — and what the final days of the U.S. involvement means for their legacies.
A U.S. Military Academy graduate, Berschinski’s legs were severed after he triggered an IED in the summer of 2009, during some of the heaviest fighting. He endured four months of surgeries and hospitalization, followed by three years of daily physical therapy, but has since graduated from Stanford’s business school and started a small business in Atlanta.
Over time, the texts the group swapped included more than the war: messages about business schools and wives and babies. But over the last week, the exchanges pinging across the country have been almost all about Afghanistan.
Some of his war buddies argued that the war deserved a more honorable exit. But Berschinski said he just wanted it to be over and understood Biden’s haste.
“Yes, it was in vain,” he said. “Losing my legs was in vain. Losing my soldiers was in vain. But it’s done. It’s in the past. And it’s not a reason to sacrifice more. Could it have been done better? Yes. Does the administration deserve some criticism for [ending] it poorly? Yes.”
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