Jeff Koeck was 21 and looking for direction when he walked into an Elizabeth recruiting office to sign up to become a Marine, like his dad.
It was August 2001. He had no idea that, in a few short weeks, the world would irrevocably change for him and his family back home.
“I figured it was my luck, you know,” he recalled. “I enlist just in time for the biggest war in American history.”
Two decades later, an Afghan man who resettled in New Jersey after risking his life to help U.S. soldiers as an interpreter in Afghanistan, sent a message to the pastor who helped find him a home.
It is August 2021. The man is grappling with how, in a few short weeks, the world has irrevocably changed for him and family back home.
“My brother in law got (an) email today to go to Kabul airport,” wrote the man, whom NJ Advance Media is not identifying because he fears retaliation, “but when he went to Kabul airport entrance the Taliban were shooting and not letting anyone to pass.”
The United States withdrawal from Afghanistan and the immediate collapse of city after city, including Kabul, to the Taliban forces has triggered an international crisis as thousands of Americans and Afghans frantically try to get secure passage out of the country.
Surprising even some top U.S. Military officials, the rapid fall of major cities after two decades of American troops on the ground has opened old wounds for New Jersey veterans and created new horrors for New Jersey Afghan residents, some of whom fled here after supporting the American war effort.
“Just a few years ago, we were looking at Afghanistan as a secure country,” said Harry Rhea, an associate professor at Rutgers-Camden with expertise in international law. “Women were being educated, boys and girls were being educated. Now women are not going to have access to education, boys, instead of playing in their backyards, are going to be under the rule of the Taliban.
“It’s right back to the way it was prior to 9/11.”
In recent days, NJ Advance Media spoke with former active duty service members, government officials and people involved in housing political refugees about the withdraw and the crisis it has sparked.
Their reactions ranged from puzzlement and resignation to anger and guilt.
“Nobody wants to see an end of a war more than somebody who’s fought in one,” said Koeck, 41, who now serves as a Bloomfield police officer.
Koeck served first in the U.S. Marine Corp. and then with the U.S. Army, where he was deployed to Afghanistan around 2012 and 2013, he said. An explosion severely damaged his neck and caused his brain to bleed, and he was eventually discharged as a sergeant. He doesn’t regret serving and deeply enjoyed time spent with other soldiers.
But the recent chaos in Kabul is humiliating.
“All my friends that are dead, they died for nothing?” he asked.
Chris Wilson, second from left, joined the Marine Corps after 9/11 and did two tours of duty.
Chris Wilson, 37, said he can’t help but shake his head at the news coming out of the region, but he looks at things as practically as he can.
“I couldn’t control what happened in Kabul,” he said this week, as television and social media beamed images of chaos at the capital city airport.
“What I could control was my 250-person unit in 2011 and what we did on the day to day basis.”
Wilson is from a generation of service members who felt called to join the effort after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
“Without 9/11 I don’t think I’d go into the Marines,” he said.
He served in the Marine Corps from 2007 to 2012, rising to the rank of captain, and looks back on his time in Afghanistan as a series of small, significant, hard-fought victories.
After a grueling three months of combat around Helmand province, Wilson can still remember the day he noticed large groups of people headed toward the a major district center, once a hub of commerce that had been reduced to “an old western, with tumbleweeds and people shooting in the streets” under Taliban control.
The Marines and other military in the area had driven the Taliban out of the district.
People were going shopping.
“Oh, my god, we’re doing it,” he remembers thinking. “What is winning? It’s just making the place a little bit better than how you found it, and you keep getting better, inch by inch.”
Still, terrors abounded.
On his second deployment, Wilson ran a command operations center as an executive officer, overseeing the activities of troops on the ground. A small patrol of Marines were walking past a large field when they noticed a group of children playing, Wilson recalled.
Then, suddenly, Taliban fighters emerged “from behind buildings, tall grass, trees, and they opened up fire.”
They weren’t shooting the soldiers, Wilson said, they were shooting at children.
“I was getting calls 10 minutes after that happening that the Taliban was telling people in the district center the Marines killed those children,” Wilson said.
It was a strategic lesson, he noted.
“I don’t think we appreciated their ability to spread misinformation and propaganda as well as they did,” he said.
Now married with two kids of his own, he is ambivalent about the drama unfolding.
“I’ve probably had a dozen people ask me in 48 hours, ‘Are you furious? Are you upset?’” he said. “If I were still in the military, I’d probably be really heated talking to you right now.
“I can’t impact Afghanistan anymore.”
Koeck said working as a police officer has been healing, he said.
“You can do a lot of good, help a lot of people,” he said. “It’s kind of like therapy.”
Wojtek Wolfe, another Rutgers-Camden professor who studies U.S. foreign policy, noted that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was “the longest nation-building attempt in modern history.”
“I think it’s important to separate the service that American men and women have given,” Wolfe said. “We need to honor and respect the people who sacrificed and gave their lives for that policy.”
He also said the Taliban’s takeover would further diminish the United State’s influence in a region already dominated by China and Iran.
Wilson and Koeck both agree a withdrawal was long overdue, but said they were horrified at what they saw as a lack of strategic planning across two administrations.
“We definitely should have pulled out, but maybe there could have been a way where you didn’t leave it to be a training ground for terrorists,” Koeck said.
Wilson said he supported a draw-down of troops but noted the U.S. maintains military bases in countries all over the world and expressed outrage at how the U.S. has treated “SIVs,” the shorthand for Afghans who received special immigrant visas for their work supporting the U.S. military effort.
“We 10,000 percent owe it to the people who fought along side us as interpreters,” he said.
“Interpreters can literally win or lose battles for you. Strategically, going forward, there’s going to be another conflict somewhere. We’re going to need interpreters there. Do those guys read the internet?” he said.
Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, the pastor of the Reformed Church of Highland Park and a leading member of the refugee resettlement group Interfaith-RISE, said he is ready to welcome as many SIVs as possible.
“This week hit so fast,” he said. “We’re really sad that things hadn’t happened faster and it had to be so ugly.”
Earlier in the day, he received that text message from one of the SIVs his group had previously settled. The situation at the Kabul airport was dire, he said in the message, sent Wednesday, with U.S. military personnel only permitting American citizens and green card holders into the front door.
“They tell the new SIV to enter the airport through the checkpoint,” the man wrote, “which (is) controlled by the Taliban.”
“Wow,” Kaper-Dale responded. “So sorry.”
“This is the type of communication (we’re getting) from the people we’ve resettled who are trying to make sense of things the same as we are,” he said.
For now, much of the work relies on phone trees and waiting games.
“If you told me to rent 20 apartments this week, I’d rent 20 apartments this week and we’ll figure out how to pay for it,” Kaper-Dale said.
“We’re ready.”
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S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter.
Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.
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