Graeme Wood
Fifty years ago, John Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a question that is probably occurring to many Americans right now: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Yesterday, at least 13 U.S. service members died in an attack on a crowd of Afghans seeking evacuation from Kabul’s airport. They died saving their allies from persecution or murder by the Taliban. This was no mistake, although their deaths were the result of a war in which the United States made just about every mistake possible. It was among the noblest moments of the war, and because it killed them and nearly a hundred Afghans, also one of its most tragic.
