My fallen Marines will always be my heroes: Opinion

"There is no greater honor for a Marine than to be called on to save Americans."

On Aug. 26, at around 5:30 p.m. ET, Ghost Company was rushing to save as many people as possible at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport before we were required to cease processing evacuees. We were supposed to have stopped an hour earlier, but we decided to keep working in the hopes of finding more passport holders or green cards. Alongside many other members of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine, the Army and British paratroopers, the Marines and sailors of Ghost were pulling families out of the canal when a suicide bomber detonated his device from the other side of the water. All those working to save Afghans and Americans were fully exposed to the blast. Nine of my Marines and a sailor gave their lives so that others may live, and almost 20 other members of the company were wounded by their side. Until that moment, I did not believe I could ever be more proud of their efforts by how they handled the surging crowds and chaos all week, but they proved me wrong. A mass casualty event is something we prepared and trained for, especially our incredible corpsmen. It is defined by having fewer resources than necessary to process and handle those wounded. In our case, we had a third of our entire force to care for in a split second. But in less than 20 minutes after the bomb detonated, we had our first wounded at the airport hospital, which included a 10-minute drive time.