Afghanistan veteran devastated over country's fate
TAMPA, Fla. - The moment the World Trade Center buildings came down, Bryan Stern found his calling.
"I remember looking behind me and not understanding what I was seeing," he said. "I remember wanting my pound of flesh. I am a New Yorker."
After responding to Ground Zero as a member of the Army, he deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy.
"I have been all over the world and I have never met a culture that was anything like an Afghan. They are salty and gritty."
After more trips on counter-insurgency missions than he can count, images of a country in chaos -- that he tried to bring order to -- are devastating.
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"There is a very good likelihood that some of the people in that imagery, I have a relationship with, one way or the other."
Even though Afghanistan has 38 million people, about the same as California, he says everyone knows everyone, which is why he's especially worried for those who lent helping hands to Americans, and what their new rulers, the Taliban, will do.
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"[They will] murder them, kill them, rape them, torture them," he said. "The Taliban always said they can't wait for us to leave, it's their country."
The war in Afghanistan did see the death of Osama bin Laden and the annihilation of his terrorist network. But it also saw the deaths of 175,000 Afghans and over 2,400 Americans.
It is ending with the thud of reality that a resurgent Taliban could not be stopped with the country's dissipating army.
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"It is called the empire graveyard for a reason."
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And now the experience he had at Ground Zero is bookended by what's happening in Afghanistan and the images of people falling from the wheel wells of planes.
"Weeks away from the 20th anniversary of 9/11, yet again, people are jumping to their deaths out of fear from these people, that's the parallel that I draw."
History repeats itself in Afghanistan.