Losing Grip: The Overlooked Casualties of our Actions and Inactions

by Calder M. Serba

What does it mean to be an American soldier in a forgotten corner of a global conflict?

This question lingered in my mind as our platoon trudged through the arid expanse of Djibouti’s Wadi Ambuli. It was late August 2021, and the African sun bore down mercilessly, turning the sky into a molten canvas of oranges and reds. Our uniforms were soaked in sweat and clung to our bodies. We maneuvered our heavy vehicles through a landscape littered with ancient boulders and the remnants of a once-flowing river, now just a memory etched into the parched earth.

It had been nearly twenty years since the Pentagon escalated its campaign against militant Islamic terrorism. Our platoon was just one of many in a long list of units that have shared this expeditionary stage—where scenes like this have played out thousands of times since that sunny Tuesday morning in September 2001. 

Our mission was straightforward: occupy key defensive positions around a modest, almost forgotten airstrip in the Horn of Africa. This airstrip, unassumingly nestled between a sprawling landfill and an open burn pit, was perpetually cloaked in the pungent stench of decay. The air was thick with toxic, peanut butter-colored smoke. The whole place was low-rent, making it an unlikely setting for any operation deemed classified or high-tech.

The U.S. Military’s expansion into Africa, a quiet yet significant move amidst more extensive engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, led to the establishment of a discreet archipelago of bases and airstrips. Our location was one such base, a critical node in the network for deploying drones for offensive strikes and gathering intelligence.

Our platoon was a mosaic of about thirty men, including riflemen, machine-gunners, and scouts, and blend of original members and replacements. To be clear, we were not the tip of any spear. The job was force protection or ForcePro, safeguarding people and the exotic hardware that most definitely was used to support the actual tip of the spear, such as JSOC and the like. 

The mission was nonetheless an important one. 

Our taskings were simple in theory, yet often compromised tactical soundness for a minimal footprint. Like the few other veterans of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in our unit, I viewed these tactics with seasoned skepticism. The lax security measures, justified under the guise of maintaining a low profile, felt like an echo of past errors, now threatening to repeat with potentially disastrous outcomes. I realized this was an AFRICOM modus operandi; there seemed to be the same cardinal sins in this AOR, and successive commands passed on no institutional lessons to follow on forces and rotations. 

Our bodies rocked violently amid the heat and rugged terrain on our movement for our duty rotation. After a particularly violent jolt of the vehicle, my frustrations boiled over. Our approach disregarded costly lessons learned through sacrifice. I let out a tirade listing recent AFRICOM disasters in a grim litany of what could go wrong. My blood was up, and the air was full of “God Damns.”

SSG G, a comrade since 2016, shook his head and flashed his gap-toothed grin. “Serbs,” he said with love and bewilderment at my moment of candor. The months spent confined to this narrow strip of land, surrounded by poverty-stricken villages in a region rife with conflict began to wear on my mind. 

Reflecting on my journey from a post-9/11 enlistee to a soldier forever touched by the realities of war, I saw a stark contrast between the military’s public narrative and our daily struggles. My idealism evolved into hardened realism in Afghanistan. My skepticism about the war’s strategy and our role only deepened with time.

We’re Americans, though, and I feel that means something different now than it once did. Past operations often didn’t make sense and hardly felt like winning. But we built bridges of empathy in a landscape devoid of it. Absent of victory, I felt pride that our enduring legacy would be one of endurance and conduct, values, and promises kept. The moral high ground was secured, at least. It was imperfect but necessary, yet we discarded valuable lessons and past mistakes.

Now, eleven years later, I found myself deployed once more. This time in the Horn of Africa. The tools and organization were the same, but the setting was different. We have no real partners or relationships with the locals at the tactical level. This new iteration of our old struggle has some merits. Gone are the endless patrols interloping in centuries-old ethnic or tribal politics. The difference is stark, and my mind wrestles with the fact that this altered posture, too, is also “American.” I felt unsure how I felt about that. 

One day in August, I sat on duty. The sun peaked in the sky as I marinated in my own filth. Flies licked my sweat and I watched as they looted my last few bites of lunch. I looked outward from behind a machine gun in a defensive fighting position. Radio checks were complete, and we settled into the stillness. Suddenly, I became aware of another significant change afoot. 

A relentless barrage of information poured in. Our devices buzzed, beeped, and dinged with alerts. We glance at our screens. The Afghan withdrawal was on full display. I felt the cracks beginning to form in my moral and ethical foundation. I felt weird about the end of withdrawal. I knew I would, but it completely overwhelmed my mental circuitry. I hadn’t braced for a stream of images and videos animating the unfolding horror with scenes of chaos and despair. 

I saw our troops facing two decades of challenges compressed into days. Their courage and professionalism juxtaposed with our betrayal and abandonment of allies. I experienced a tumult of emotions – from pride to shame, denial to nostalgia. 

Their capacity to care for innocent strangers moved me. Across barriers of culture and language they of risked life giving aid and comforting mothers with children. This culminated of course with thirteen American service members and hundreds of Afghan civilians being killed in a tragic, but familiar scene to America’s 21st-century service members of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

I understood their sacrifice. It was the death I feared every time I climbed down from a vehicle and removed my helmet in a display of empathy. Placing ourselves between the enemy and the population was a calculated tactic but also showed our humanity. Small acts like these left positive memories in the minds of those watching our actions. Nonetheless, the old ways failed us plenty, and the withdrawal was no exception.

Above Kabul, an MQ-9 Reaper circled its target in what is to be our final publicly known offensive strike in the conflict. The aircraft released its Hellfire on an aid worker, killing him and the civilians he was helping. This explosive failure placed an exclamation point on our twenty-year struggle and slammed that book shut. 

In Africa, the buzzing propeller from one of our MQ-9s grabs my attention and brings me to the present. It whirls down the runway, lifts off, and disappears into the sunset on its way to kill. Here, the lack of cultural engagement starkly contrasted with official statements of partnership. We’re soldiers, not diplomats, but being reduced to mere tenants on the land disconnected from local society I knew fostered resentment on both sides of the perimeter. I’m a relic of an obsolete counterinsurgency, but I felt that not everything from that era was worth forgetting.

In a defining moment, a woman struggled across the desert to our camp, enduring 117-degree heat. Surviving without freshwater, her arrival seemed miraculous. As Americans, helping her felt like an unquestionable duty. She wasn’t alone. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) reported 23,000 refugees in Djibouti, including 11,000 Ethiopians fleeing Tigray’s conflict. In a country the size of New Jersey, these numbers were significant.

Our radios buzzed with observations and updates. A linguist identified her as an Ethiopian war refugee. Off the net, I had a face-to-face with the Sergeant of The Guard requesting to bend our “no aid” order but was met with silence. No help came, even as she repeatedly triggered our perimeter sensors. My frustration grew as she collapsed, ignored by those inside the temperature-controlled Ops Center. They slewed their cameras away from the scene and returned to watching movies. It wasn’t their call, but I hated their ability to look away. 

This apathy broke my heart. It contrasted sharply with the valorous images of American troops in Kabul and actions my friends and I took part in during previous deployments. Her unanswered pleas for water and her death while gripping our fence haunted me. it was ignored by the host nation and our forces. Nobody lifted a finger. 

This indifference shattered something within me. Have we become blind to the fact others witness our indifference to human suffering? The world watches our inaction as much as our actions. I believe that wholeheartedly. The actual price we’ll pay will far outweigh the cost of the aid we denied her and others—strategically, tactically, mentally, and spiritually. We lost our  grip across continents and years. She lost her grip because we’ve lost ours. 

The enduring metaphor of our post 9/11 conflicts is the slipping grip of human hands – from the Twin Towers, airborne C-17s over Kabul, mother and their babies in the hands of Marines, and to this woman at our perimeter fence in Africa. These hands symbolize the overlooked casualties of our actions and inactions. They remind us of the lasting impact and legacy of our global engagements, woven into the fabric of war’s human toll.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.