'I cried': Afghanistan War veterans proud of service, angry over outcome as Taliban seize control

This story has been updated to clarify that Jay Blancas did not attend a family picnic Sunday in Mount Prospect. Blanca was interviewed by phone.

Having served as a Marine corporal in Afghanistan's Helmand province in 2008 and 2009-10, Jay Blancas first reaction to the events unfolding there this week were feelings of emptiness, disenfranchisement, anger and a sense that "my friends died for nothing."

"I cried," the Prospect Heights resident said Sunday. "I spent the next day and a half just crying involuntarily."

As the Taliban seized control of the capital city of Kabul on Sunday, Blancas said he's also proud of his service.

"What we did there was essentially protect each other and stay alive and fight to complete the mission," he said.

In the Garmsir and Marjah regions, Blancas saw some of the worst of the fighting of the nearly 20-year war. He said he was in two explosions, suffering a concussion and a lingering traumatic brain injury.

"My heart goes out to the veterans of the Vietnam War, because now we know how they felt," he said.

Other veterans gathered Sunday in Mount Prospect for a family picnic hosted by the Moose Lodge. Also there was Tim Delaney of Colona, Illinois, near the Quad Cities, who in 2009 served with the Army's 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Kandahar province.

He said there should have been a more phased approach to the pullout.

"We don't want our men and women over there for another 20 years," he said. "But there is probably something a little smarter we could have done as far as not just exiting so quickly.

"I think there definitely were successes," Delaney added. "They are a wonderful people (in Afghanistan). Most of the people that we dealt with village to village, they were people that didn't want the Taliban ruling their area. But in most cases, fear rules anything. Fear conquers. The Taliban made people fear for their life. I'm sure that's what they feel now."

Scott Paeth, a schoolteacher who lives in Mount Prospect and served in Afghanistan as an Air National Guard major in 2019, said he felt mixed emotions Sunday.

"I really just feel for the people of Afghanistan and really hope for the best outcome for the innocent bystanders, the people who had nothing to do with the violence over there," he said.

In Afghanistan, he said, "we were just focused on the job we had to do. We did the best job we could."

Blancas said he feels that it was a winnable war, but the rules changed in 2009 to the point where "we weren't able to fight the Taliban effectively."

"We had a lead, and I watched that lead dwindle," he added.

Ultimately, he said, the loss of public and financial support, as well as failures by Afghanistan's army and security forces, led to Sunday's events.

"They had everything necessary to beat the Taliban, except that fighting spirit," Blancas said. "I'm not going to say there was cowardice or anything like that. I'm just saying that they needed to be battle-tested a little bit more."

Still, he feels the seeds of meaningful change were planted in Afghanistan. The status of women in the culture has been elevated, and he hopes that will continue even within the context of Taliban rule.

And he hopes the Afghan people who served as American allies will regroup and defeat the Taliban.

"I think everybody that we trained over there, everybody that we helped over there, will remember the things that we did, and hopefully this Taliban occupancy is going to be short," he said.