But the Marines at Abbey Gate were also witnesses to the end of America’s longest war. During the frenzied last days of August, these Marines were left to determine who would be evacuated from Afghanistan, and who would be left behind. Young men and women just out of their teens became visa officers, forced to make Solomonic decisions that would determine the path of life of thousands of men, women and children.

“War is young men dying and old men talking,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once said. The final act of the Afghanistan war was certainly that — negotiated by old men in Doha, Qatar, under the direction of two septuagenarian American presidents.

But it was the young who faced the fallout in what would become the largest noncombatant evacuation ever conducted by the U.S. military. Of the 13 American service members — 11 of them Marines — killed in the suicide bombing on Aug. 26, five were 20 years old, and seven more were in their early 20s. One was 31. Their platoonmates, young men and women themselves, are still sifting through the emotional repercussions of those extraordinary last 10 days.