The Final Departure

The Final Departure

Kabul Airport, 2021

The C-17's massive engines roared to full power as we lifted off the tarmac, and I pressed my face hard against the small, scratched window, watching Afghanistan disappear beneath us into dust and haze. Twenty years of American presence ending in chaos. Three of my own deployments spanning nearly two decades countless faces, shared meals, deep conversations, desperate prayers. What had it all actually meant? Had any of it mattered?

My final Afghan meal had been "Qabuli Palaw" shared with our remaining local staff just hours before the frantic evacuation began. The national dish of rice crowned with tender braised lamb, caramelized carrots, and sweet raisins, fragrant with cardamom and cumin, traditionally served at celebrations. We'd eaten mostly in heavy silence around the table, each person knowing with terrible certainty that this was goodbye, perhaps forever. Some would make it out. Others wouldn't. The lottery of survival seemed cruelly random.

Rashid, Hajji Ibrahim, little Zainab, the shepherd whose name I never learned, indomitable Bibi Fatima, they all stayed behind, their fates uncertain and terrifying. Many faced Taliban retribution. The grief felt crushing, physically painful in my chest. Had we accomplished anything lasting? Had their sacrifices and courage mattered? Had mine?

Then I remembered something Hajji Ibrahim had once told me in his impossible garden, kneeling in the soil: "You Westerners always measure success by the harvest you can see and count. But God measures success only by faithfulness to plant seeds, even in terrible soil. The harvest belongs to Him, not us."

We'd planted thousands of seeds of hope, friendship, dignity, human connection, faith in something better. Some fell on stony ground and withered. Some were choked by the thorns of violence and corruption. But others took deep root in ways we'd never see from our distant perspective, in hearts we'd touched, in children who'd remember kindness from foreign strangers, in widows who'd learned courage, in men who'd chosen peace over violence because someone believed in them.

The Master's hand had been there all along in Afghanistan, I finally understood, not preventing suffering or stopping bullets or making war disappear, but working through it all, mysteriously transforming pain into growth, planting gardens in ruins, sending shepherds in deadly storms, strengthening the weak, giving voice to children, making the powerless powerful.

Afghanistan taught me that true faith isn't about seeing the outcome or controlling results on the contrary it's about trusting the Gardener completely, even when the soil looks utterly impossible, even when the harvest seems to fail.

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." [Galatians 6:9]

Note: This is a story re-told by the Wayfarer and author Jonathan's solder friend Capt. Henry Rutherford, who served in Afghanistan in the Allied forces from 2001-2021, he was in and out of the country.