HESGETH, GENERAL BONESPUR CONTINUE THE DECAPITATION OF OUR HONORABLE ARMED FORCES AND REAL WARRIORS

The Other 98%

Christopher Donahue was the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan. This week Pete Hegseth pushed him out of the Army. 

Donahue is not a marginal figure. He ran Delta Force. He commanded the 82nd Airborne. 

Across 34 years he fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, armed Ukraine against the Russian invasion, and was considered a leading candidate to run the entire Army.

 
Brett McGurk, who directed the campaign against ISIS under both Obama and Trump, said few people are more responsible for ISIS's defeat than Chris Donahue.

On August 30, 2021, it was Donahue who held Kabul's airport as the evacuation collapsed around him, and Donahue who walked up the ramp of the last C-17 after twenty years of war. The photo became one of the defining images of the withdrawal.

Trump and Hegseth have spent years using that withdrawal as their favorite proof of Democratic weakness. They invoke it constantly. They ordered fresh reviews of it. And the withdrawal they keep pointing to was set in motion by a deal Trump's own first administration cut with the Taliban.

The soldier who was actually there, holding the line, last man on the last plane, is the one they forced out.

He had clashed with Hegseth. That was enough. Hegseth is stripping a star from Donahue's command and thinning the senior ranks, part of a clear-out of nearly two dozen top officers since Trump returned to power.

Among the discarded: the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the first woman ever to run the Navy. Competence is not the qualification. Loyalty is.

As Donahue was being shown the door, Katie Miller, the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, went on X to attack his character. A general who "becomes the story," she wrote, is "no longer serving his country but his own ego."

She sneered at the idea that he was a rising star.

Katie Miller is 34 years old and has never served a day in uniform. Christopher Donahue gave the Army 34 years and was the last man out of Kabul, the one who left only after everyone else was gone.

Hegseth likes to say he's bringing the warrior ethos back to the American military. But he only plays a warrior on television. Donahue was the real thing.