‘No One Quite Knows What to Say’: A War Easily Ignored Ends With Few Answers

At any Army base in Colorado, little acknowledgment as the war in Afghanistan comes to an abrupt and chaotic end.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — At the main gate of this busy Army post is a sandstone slab etched with the names of Fort Carson soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The slab ran out of room for names in 2005, so the Army added another. And another. And another. Nine slabs now stand by the gate with the names of 407 dead, including the final one, Sgt. Maj. James G. Sartor, who enlisted in the Army in 2001 and was killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan in 2019, on his seventh combat deployment. Despite so many slabs put up over so many years, this week there was no ceremony at Fort Carson to recognize that the nation’s longest war had come to an abrupt and chaotic end. There was no civilians waving homemade signs like there were at the war’s start, no pause for a moment of silence.