At the National Press Club on Tuesday evening, Gold Star parent Darin Hoover — whose son, also named Darin, was one of the 13 U.S. servicemen and women killed in the August 26, 2021, Abbey Gate bombing — had choice words for President Joe Biden.
“If I had the opportunity to speak to [Biden], I’d tell him to resign,” Hoover, who spoke to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday afternoon, told National Review. “I’m not backing off from that. The debacle is on his head, and there’s no other way of saying it. There can be no mincing of words.”
That outrage over the conduct of the U.S. government did not end with those who served in Afghanistan. Speaking with National Review, House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Representative Michael McCaul (R., Texas) explained the reasons behind his displeasure with the executive branch.
“We’ve been stonewalled by the administration in this investigation. I’ve had to subpoena and I’ve had to threaten to hold secretaries in contempt,” McCaul told NR before launching into an overview of all the failures involved in the lead-up to the bombing.
“Why was permission denied to take out the suicide bomber? The sniper team all saw him, and they’re all consistent. The psychological operations came in and they looked at the photographs, and [the Department of Defense] won’t turn them in. They all swear it matched the description, but permission denied,” McCaul said. “ISIS-K was plotting this bombing attack in a hotel in Kabul, and [American soldiers] had to go to the Taliban to beg them to take out this ISIS-K threat. They wouldn’t do it. So then they go to the intelligence community and military leaders and asked permission for an air strike. That was denied.”
McCaul went on to note that the Department of Defense did not request the authorization of noncombatant evacuation operations until two days after Kabul fell to the Taliban, “and that doesn’t do any good.”
The sniper McCaul mentioned is named Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who was stationed in a tower at Hamid Karzai International Airport (now Kabul International Airport). Vargas-Andrews testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March of this year, saying he and other Marines at Abbey Gate reported an IED test run to their superiors. The troops later received intelligence including bomb threats and descriptions of the suspected attacker. The day of the bombing, as McCaul said, the Marines saw someone who matched that description perfectly, requested permission to neutralize the target, and had that request denied.
“To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews told the committee.
At the National Press Club, a potent combination of grief and determination hung in the air. The Washington, D.C., meeting hall played host to the Moral Compass Federation and Operation Allies Refuge’s remembrance dinner, with the Gold Star parents as the guests of honor. The two organizations behind the event work to provide safe havens for Afghan refugees within the United States.
The evening’s speakers, which included Moral Compass Federation executive director Timothy Torres, veteran and podcast host Shawn Ryan, and CNN’s Jake Tapper, highlighted the role that bereaving families — many members of which spoke in Tuesday afternoon’s House Foreign Affairs Committee round table — can play in shedding light on the decision-making process behind the U.S.’s ill-fated withdrawal and evacuation process from Afghanistan. The anger and betrayal those service members’ loved ones feel, many in attendance believe, can be harnessed toward lasting change.
“I remember the day the withdrawal happened; the videos are ingrained in my head forever — watching innocent Afghan people fall from a C-17 plane onto the tarmac because of piss-poor leadership in this country, and it enraged me,” Ryan said in his remarks.
The Pentagon’s own investigation “found that military leadership on the ground was appropriately engaged in force protection measures throughout the operation of Abbey Gate.” But contemporaneous assessments painted a starkly different picture of conditions on that day, as NR’s Noah Rothman pointed out earlier this month.
Fewer than 24 hours prior to that deadly bombing, [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin instructed Defense Department leaders to prepare for an imminent “mass casualty event.” The heightened state of alert was justified by what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said was “significant” intelligence indicating that Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate had prepared to mount a “complex attack” on NATO forces and their Afghan allies. “I don’t believe people get the incredible amount of risk on the ground,” Austin said at the time.
Despite the unspeakable pain and loss the heroes’ families feel, they believe they can play a part in holding the administration accountable for the disaster that was the U.S.’s exit from Afghanistan.
“The best thing going forward is transparency and honesty,” Hoover said. “Being put in this position of speaking for our son, I’m not going to look past that. I’m not going to let it slide with the opportunities that we’ve got.”
Others in attendance also believe the fallen service members’ families are well positioned to spur meaningful action on the part of the government. McCaul told NR that “these Gold Star families are the most powerful voices. I may be chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but these families — when they speak out, the administration understands they have a problem.” Ryan said in his prepared speech that “thanks to the Gold Stars out there . . . a lot more truth is going to come out, and a lot of it is going to be inconvenient for the people in power.”
Ryan concluded his remarks by addressing what he called “the elephant in the room”: The idea that maybe, somehow, the U.S. was in Afghanistan for 20 years for nothing. That is not true, Ryan said to applause, because “for 20 years, we took the fight over there, and the people back here were safe.” And because of the selflessness of the American soldiers who died from the beginning of the war through the end, “every major city in Afghanistan got a small taste of what real democracy is like, and that’s because we showed up.”
Despite the fact that their deaths could very well have been avoided, Ryan said, the sacrifices of the 13 servicemen and women who lost their lives at Abbey Gate — Lance Corporal David Espinoza, Sergeant Nicole Gee, Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, Staff Sergeant Ryan Knauss, Corporal Hunter Lopez, Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, Lance Corporal Dylan R. Merola, Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, Corporal Daegan William-Tyeler Page, Sergeant Johanny Rosario, Corporal Humberto Sanchez, Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz, and Hospital Corpsman Max Soviak — were not in vain.