Five years to the day, their names are spoken again. The White House marked the anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing on August 26 by posting a solemn roll call of the 13 US service members killed in the ISIS-K suicide attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul — a moment that became the bloodiest single day for American forces in a decade.

The post names those who died: Staff Sergeant Darin T. Hoover, USMC; Sergeant Johanny Rosario Pichardo, USMC; Sergeant Nicole L. Gee, USMC; Corporal Hunter Lopez, USMC; Corporal Daegan W. Page, USMC; Corporal Humberto A. Sanchez, USMC — and seven others whose names follow in the linked tribute. All were United States Marines or Army soldiers assigned to support the final, chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies from a city that had fallen to the Taliban days earlier.

The Day Abbey Gate Fell Silent

On August 26, 2021, as thousands of desperate evacuees pressed against the perimeter of Kabul's airport, an ISIS-K bomber detonated an explosive device at the Abbey Gate checkpoint. The blast killed 13 US troops and wounded dozens more, while also taking the lives of more than 170 Afghan civilians in one of the deadliest attacks of the entire two-decade war. The service members ranged in age from their late teens to their early thirties — many on their first or second deployments.

Sergeant Nicole L. Gee had posted a photograph holding an Afghan infant just days before she was killed — an image that circulated widely and came to define the human face of the evacuation. Corporal Hunter Lopez was the son of two California sheriff's deputies. Each name on the list carried a story; each story carried a family now marked forever by that afternoon.

A Withdrawal That Still Divides Washington

The Abbey Gate attack arrived at the tail end of Operation Allies Refuge, the US military's emergency airlift that evacuated more than 124,000 people in roughly two weeks. The operation was extraordinary in scale — and chaotic in execution. The Taliban's rapid seizure of Kabul on August 15, 2021, outpaced nearly every public projection, collapsing the Afghan government and triggering scenes of desperation at the airport that were broadcast across the world.

The policy decisions surrounding the withdrawal — the timeline, the intelligence failures, the fate of left-behind equipment — have been the subject of sustained congressional scrutiny. But on August 26 each year, official Washington sets that debate aside, at least publicly, to do what the White House post does today: say the names.

For military families and veterans' communities, the annual remembrance is more than ceremony. It is a demand that the cost of those final days not be absorbed into abstraction — that 13 specific people, with ranks and hometowns and photographs, remain visible in the national memory long after the policy arguments have moved on.