Jesus, that picture I shared a few days ago of a U.S. servicewoman at the Kabul airport escorting two Afghan women to a military transport? She was one of those killed in the suicide bombing: Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, of of Roseville, Calif.
The photo was from Tuesday:
News coverage Tuesday showed an armed U.S. servicewoman chatting with female Afghan evacuees as she escorted them to a transport in Kabul. Two worlds are separated only by barbed wire and walls around the airport: the medieval one these Afghan women are fleeing and the modern one the American soldier inhabits. On one side, women are men’s prisoners.
I can’t stop looking at it.
Nicole Gee died two days later.
One of the last photos that Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee shared with her family from Afghanistan shows her in dusty body armor with a rifle, her long blond hair pulled back, her hands in tactical gloves. Amid the chaos of Kabul, those hands are carefully cradling a baby.
It was a moment captured on the front lines of the airport, where Marines worked feverishly to shepherd tens of thousands of evacuees through chaotic and dangerous razor wire gates. It showed how, even in the tumult, many took time to comfort the families who made it through.
In a short message posted with the photo, the sergeant said, “I love my job🤘🏼”
Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. was killed as well, along with eleven more U.S. troops and almost 200 others.
The two female sergeants volunteered for a job that in culturally conservative Afghanistan could have been carried out only by women: searching other women and children as they passed through the gates. But the two sergeants were also standout Marines in a force that is slowly changing, putting more women in combat roles and positions of leadership.
