Timothy Griffin has been having a lot of long nights.

“I probably have not slept since it happened,” Griffin says, “since I woke up and the headline was Afghan president flees the country, Taliban are in Kabul.”

Griffin did a tour in Afghanistan under an Obama-era program where he learned Pashto to help the Americans better communicate with Afghans. He was stationed out of Fort Campbell.

He says he hasn’t slept so that he can bridge the time difference between him and the translators he worked with during his tour.

“Some of them are trapped in Kabul trying to get on one of those planes,” he says. “Some of them are unfortunately too far away from Kabul to even attempt to get out.”

Griffin has been trying to put their names in front of politicians and the U.S. State Department — anyone who could help them escape.

‘We decided to completely abandon them’

He says his heartbreak about what is happening in Afghanistan is eclipsed by worry for those translators.

Even though he believes it was time to withdraw, he wishes more could have been done for the people being left behind.

“There’s this weird duality that I really don’t like, that there’s only two options with Afghanistan. One: we stay there for 20 more years. Or two: we just completely abandon them,” Griffin says. “We decided to completely abandon them. The reality is there’s a million other options that could have been done in between.”

Courtesy of Timothy Griffin

Timothy Griffin on an Afghan outpost, overlooking the eastern province of Khost.

This is a familiar refrain for American soldiers who served in Afghanistan: More could have been done.

They walk around with constant reminders of their service — a list of physical injuries from what they did or emotional scars from what they saw and who they lost. And now those wounds feel fresh again as they watch two decades of work unravel within mere days.

“It’s a little hard not to be cynical,” says Alex Dudley, a veteran who spent six months in Zabul Province in 2010.

Dudley lives in Nashville now. When he heard the news, his thoughts turned to one of his friends and fellow soldiers who died years ago.

“If we hadn’t been over there, he’d still be alive,” Dudley says. “It’s kind of hard to talk about.”

He tears up, apologizing, and says his friend didn’t die in combat.

“He did end up taking his own life,” Dudley says. “The situation he was in, he would not have been there if we had not been in Afghanistan.”

Remembering the good

Healthcare providers worry the government collapse in Afghanistan might push more veterans into crisis. They are encouraging those who served to seek help, and to check in with one another.

That’s what Dudley has been doing. If his friend were still alive, he believes he would probably feel the same way he does — let down.

“You feel like there was something else we could have done,” he says. “But at the same time we’ve been there for 20 years, and I don’t think another 20 years would have necessarily made a difference.”

During his time in Afghanistan, Dudley carried his camera with him, taking photos. His images show little girls in brightly colored clothing, staring inquisitively at the camera. Their small hands grip the green pencils he handed out.

He laughs as he remembers helping one girl fend off a bully who was trying to take her pencil from her.

Photo by Alex Dudley

One of Dudley’s favorite images he captured during his time in Afghanistan.

“Helping to provide those opportunities for those young girls…I definitely from time to time still think about that experience and wonder where those girls are,” Dudley says. “Especially within recent events.”

Those memories were once comforting, but now they’re also a source of worry.

That’s why veteran Ross Schambon prefers not to think about Afghanistan at all.

Leaving Afghanistan behind

“It was a complete waste,” he says.

He criticizes President Biden for the withdrawal, saying he should have left more troops in place to stand up to the Taliban.

“They just kind of lay down. They’re laying down for everything,” Schambon says. “It’s just like all this kneeling crap and everything — it’s OK to them. Whereas the previous president, he actually had a backbone.”

Schambon is hard-edged and unsentimental. He says he has to be.

He served in Afghanistan with the Rakkasans out of Fort Campbell and moved back to Glasgow, Kentucky, after his service. In his brigade combat team, he was a military sniper. He remembers watching from a mountain top as one of his fellow soldiers took a mortar to the face and died.

He is reminded of the things he saw with every step he takes — he has stress fractures in his legs, bone fragments in his knees, damage to his lower back and more. But he tries to ignore the pain and the memories, and move forward.

“I’ve got my kids to think about,” he says. One is 6 and the other is 10 months. They are his future, he says.

The war is over, and no matter the outcome, he says he just wants to leave it in the past.