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What was it all for? What does it mean?

The questions have come bubbling up in the support groups that Dan Cook oversees at the Southern ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ VA Health Care System. The VA here and elsewhere has started new groups in recent weeks for veterans upset or confused as they watched the collapse of the Afghan government they propped up, and the takeover by the Taliban they fought.

“The thing we’re hearing from a lot of the veterans and the ones coming in for our group is, ‘Does this mean that the service I gave doesn’t matter? Does this mean I was deployed for no reason?’� Cook said Friday. “They’re feeling a little bit let down and like their service was not as meaningful as it could have been.�

The feelings may be especially raw after the bombing Thursday that killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans outside the Kabul airport.

Nobody likes the chaotic way this withdrawal has gone in the last couple of weeks.

But there is also an undercurrent, among some veterans of the Afghan war, of expectations being fulfilled. They didn’t want it to end like this, but they knew it would. Sooner or later, we would leave and the Taliban would take over.

That doesn’t mean it’s not painful, but at least it has the familiarity of the inevitable.

I got a good taste of this perspective last week when listening to and author.

“I’ve had a lot of people in my life asking my what my opinion is. Am I upset about it? Am I in despair?� Peter Martin said to his online audience Aug. 16. “The reason why the current events are not affecting me as negatively as they probably should be is that all the way back in 2010, I knew this was going to happen. I knew this was an inevitable outcome of what was happening in Afghanistan.�

After I heard Martin calmly lay out his perspective, I sought him out. We spoke by Zoom on Wednesday and again by phone Friday.

Martin, whose father Doug Martin referred me to his video, told me he joined the Marine Corps right after graduating from Canyon del Oro High School in 2008. He went in wanting to fight for a cause.

“I’ve always had a perspective of just wanting to protect people or help people, and I don’t know if joining the military in peacetime would have meant as much to me as joining in war time,� he said.

After training to go into Fallujah in Iraq, Martin’s unit ended up shifting gears. The Obama administration, in its first year, was reducing the American presence in Iraq. At the last minute, in January 2010, Martin’s unit headed to the outskirts of Marjah, in southern Afghanistan.

They and another unit were assigned to take the city, in the middle of an opium-poppy-growing region.

“We were moving through the suburbs while the other unit was actually helicoptered into the center of the city,� he said. “So we circled the city and fought in. They were dropped in the middle of the city and they fought out, and we all met.�

“The push took about three days. And in those three days, we killed a lot of people, because we just had overwhelming air superiority.�

“The Taliban there weren’t hiding,� Martin said. “They had set up ambush positions where they were dug in with sandbags and they were ready to fight to the last man. And they did. They all died.�

Having changed plans at the last minute, his unit didn’t get a clear understanding of what the plan was beyond taking the town, but they felt like they could accomplish something for a while. They got to know local people, didn’t mess with the poppy crop, and kept the Taliban out.

“So about three months into the deployment, we started to realize what they (American leaders) were trying to do. And what they were trying to do was to build up the Afghan forces to such a level where we can get out. And I think that’s where a lot of the confusion comes from right now.�

In short, what Martin saw of the Afghan military convinced him there’s no way they could reliably take over from the Americans and hold off the Taliban. The soldiers he met from the north despised the people of the south and would rob, molest or even kill the local people, he said.

The local people, meanwhile, didn’t answer to lines of civil authority easily decipherable to outsiders, but to longstanding tribal power structures. And though some may have liked being rid of the Taliban, they didn’t trust it would last.

They were right not to trust. Outgunned for the moment, the Taliban hung back over the border in Pakistan, waiting.

It gradually dawned on Martin and his comrades that what the United States had been trying to achieve just wasn’t going to work. It would take way longer than the American public would ever tolerate to establish a strong, plural government and a reliable military.

“Maybe if we would have been there for another 50 years, they might have been able to fight off the Taliban,� Martin said. “But if the Taliban knew that we were going to be there for that long, they would have definitely harassed us a lot more.�

It was a no-win situation.

“When I came back in 2010, that’s when I started to wrestle with the thoughts of ‘This is useless. What did we even go over there for?’ All of us felt that way.�

Ten members of his approximately 500-man unit had died, and another 75 or so had earned purple hearts, Martin said.

“So coming back and realizing, like, we don’t have a plan to win, and our plan to get out is doomed for failure — we all knew that coming back home after our first deployment. And that’s why I was so angry. I was just very, very angry and I didn’t know who I was really angry with.�

For Martin, comfort eventually came from his Christian faith.

“If you accept the existence of a creator, everything you go through has meaning,� he said. “It has some sort of a point but that point exists independent of you.�

He accepted not knowing the meaning, but trusting God’s purpose.

That helped when, in summer 2011, his unit returned to Marjah. They returned wiser.

“The first time we deployed, it was very gung ho,� Martin said. “The second time we deployed, it was just kind of like, ‘Let’s just get home alive.’ That was our motto.�

They did make it back alive, but not unscathed. And in the decade since then, military and government leaders have continued to mislead the public about the outlook in Afghanistan.

In December 2019, a trove it called the Afghanistan Papers. They were government interviews of officials, done in secret, that showed they knew we were doomed even as military and government leaders kept touting “progress� to the public.

Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House Afghan war czar under Bush and Obama, said in a 2015 interview: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. … What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.�

Martin has gone on to a career as a biblical counselor at Calvary Christian Fellowship. He’s also written two books, the most recent of which is titled “The Fellowship of Suffering.�

Though he has long been reconciled to the current inevitability, he still sometimes wrestles with what could have been.

“What frustrated me the most back then and still does today is that we could have done something good in that country,� Martin said. “I think we did. I think that in a lot of ways we did something good, but it was something good that was always going to end.�