When I learned that I would deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, my daughter was two weeks old and I was on leave. I remember holding her while my mind began shifting to an operational mode, considering what the Marines and Sailors of 1st Battalion 1st Marines would need from me, what preparations remained, and how I would fulfill my responsibilities as a Battalion Surgeon. What I could not readily reconcile was how to inhabit that role while remaining present as a husband and father. 

That compartmentalization was not unique to me. Military service often requires people to hold competing realities at once: fear and resolve, violence and compassion, separation and belonging. For those who served after September 11, 2001, it also required us to locate our individual sacrifices within a larger national story. 

The attacks on September 11 gave a generation of service members a powerful organizing narrative. Al-Qaeda had attacked the United States, and service offered a way to answer. In the years that followed, national leaders placed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq within that organizing narrative, and many of us understood sacrifice through the language of defense, duty, and national purpose. 

Twenty-five years later and five years after the last American military aircraft departed Kabul, that story has become much harder to tell. 

On deployment, we understood our immediate purpose. In a kinetic environment, mission success depended on focus, simplicity, and communication. As the Battalion Surgeon, I quickly learned that our Corpsmen bore the most direct responsibility for the health and lives of the Marines and Sailors in our care. They were not physicians, but they taught me more about medicine and leadership than I had learned in medical school. Our duty to one another was clear. Only later did I learn to distinguish the clarity of that duty from the coherence of the larger strategy. 

While still on active duty and studying strategy, I wrote that war does not occur in a political vacuum. National leaders must connect political purpose to military strategy, operational objectives, and ultimately the missions they assign to those on the ground. Without that alignment, I argued, commanders may win battles but never wars. 

At the time, I understood that primarily as a lesson from Carl von Clausewitz and military history. I understand it differently now, as a description of what many of us experienced. 

General James Mattis framed one of his habits of leadership through three questions: “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” As a junior officer, I understood those questions as an obligation to share information up and down the chain of command so that others could act with clarity. As a veteran, I now hear something more in them. What have I come to understand about the war in which I served? Who needs to understand it? And have I been willing to say it plainly? 

For many veterans, the work of reconciling war begins with what they experienced and endured during deployment and continues through the difficult process of reintegration at home. That work follows no linear path and does not end when a veteran comes home. Later events can reopen old wounds by changing the meaning of earlier experiences. For me, the withdrawal from Afghanistan did exactly that. It did not diminish or displace what had happened during deployment; it changed the context in which I had to make sense of it. 

We knew how to execute missions and adapt under pressure. What became increasingly unclear was how those missions accumulated toward an attainable political end. That uncertainty raised a broader question: could the national narrative surrounding our service withstand scrutiny? 

Military force does not operate only on physical terrain. It also operates on the terrain of legitimacy, trust, and popular allegiance. Tactical actions that degrade those conditions may produce immediate gains while moving the political objective farther away. Courage and ingenuity can compensate for imperfect plans. They cannot manufacture a national strategy from below. 

My training as a physician supplies another way of understanding this failure. In medicine, we cannot justify continuing an intervention merely because it once appeared necessary or because we have already invested considerable resources in it. We must reassess. We must ask whether the original diagnosis remains accurate, whether the intervention produces its intended result, what harms continue to accumulate, and whether we can still achieve the desired outcome. 

We should demand at least the same discipline when our nation employs military force. 

I can examine my own decisions. I can consider what the Battalion did well, where we may have caused harm, and what responsibilities endure because of our actions. I struggle more with whether the country that sent us subjected its own decisions to comparable scrutiny. 

I can ask that question without diminishing my service or the people with whom I served. Pride and moral scrutiny can coexist. People can act courageously within an incoherent mission. Service can be honorable even when policy is misguided. Respect for sacrifice should not require preserving a national story that no longer withstands honest examination. 

These questions reach beyond Afghanistan. They should guide every debate about employing American military power: What political objective are we seeking? Can military force achieve it? Do the strategy, operational design, and tactical missions align? What would constitute success? What are the limits of the mission? What obligations will remain after military action achieves its immediate objective? 

Wars can acquire an aura of inevitability once they begin. Each escalation becomes the justification for the next. But what later appears inevitable often results from choices and assumptions that leaders failed to challenge as events unfolded. 

Twenty-five years after September 11, remembrance should demand more of us than gratitude and grief. The nation owes those it sends to war a purpose worthy of their sacrifice, one capable of surviving honest examination. Those who served owe themselves permission to undertake that examination without surrendering either their pride or the truth.