Afghanistan Hearing Witness Reveals ‘Mental-Health Tsunami’ Crashing over Service Members

The testimony of a Marine sergeant wounded in a suicide-bombing attack during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might have been the most significant takeaway from yesterday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the pullout. Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a Marine sniper, said that he was ordered not to take a shot that could have prevented the attack, in which 13 American soldiers and over 170 Afghans were killed.

In addition to the potentially avoidable loss of life at the airport’s Abbey Gate, the hearing shed light on the further toll that the withdrawal has taken on service members. NPR’s writeup outlines testimony by David Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret who led a private operation that facilitated the escape of around 1,000 Afghan allies since the 2021 withdrawal:

Retired Lt. Col. David Scott Mann, the founder of Task Force Pineapple, a volunteer network of veterans who served in Afghanistan, told the committee the experience working to get allies — often translators and former Afghan military fighters — was “gutting.” He warned that the U.S. is on the “front end of a mental-health tsunami.” He said calls to the VA hotline spiked 81% in the first year since the withdrawal. Mann reported a friend whom he served with was found dead in a hotel room in the aftermath and his wife told Mann the incident reignited trauma about his experience in Afghanistan and the way allies were treated as the U.S. left.

“We might be done with Afghanistan, but it is not done with us. The enemy has a vote. If we don’t set politics aside and pursue accountability and lessons learned to address this grievous moral injury on our military community and right the wrongs that have been inflicted in our most at risk Afghan allies, this colossal foreign policy failure will follow us home,” Mann said.

The point of yesterday’s hearing was to kick off an extensive investigation by the committee, building on a report issued last year by committee Republicans. Previous efforts to scrutinize the withdrawal in significant detail were blocked last year by the committee’s chairman, a Democrat at the time. But a series of hearings building on this initial one is now positioned to bring new facts to light.