Today, six flag-draped transfer cases came home to Dover Air Force Base. Their names were Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska. Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa. Maj. Jeffrey R. O’Brien, 45, of Indianola, Iowa. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M. Marzan, 54, of Sacramento, California.
Say them again. Don’t skim them. They are not a statistic.
All six were Army Reserve soldiers assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command out of Des Moines, Iowa — a logistics unit, the people who keep troops fed and fueled and supplied. Not front-line combatants. Supply chain soldiers. The people who make everything else possible, working from a makeshift operations center in a triple-wide trailer at a civilian port in Kuwait. When the drone came, there were no warning sirens. No time to run for a bunker. The T-walls surrounding them were built to stop car bombs. There is nothing above a T-wall.
Declan Coady was 20 years old. He was the youngest in his class, trained to troubleshoot military computer systems. His family called him “a rock in all of our lives” and “the most amazing brother and son.” He had just been recommended for promotion from specialist to sergeant — a rank he received posthumously. He had been checking in with his family every hour or two from Kuwait, right up until the messages stopped. “Your gut starts to get a feeling,” his father, Andrew, told the Associated Press.
Nicole Amor was days away from coming home to her husband and two children. Her unit had been moved off-base to smaller groups in separate buildings because commanders feared an attack on the main facility. Joey Amor, her husband, described the thinking: they felt it would be safer in smaller groups, dispersed. They were wrong, in the way that people in the path of an unstoppable thing are sometimes just wrong, through no failure of their own.
Cody Khork had deployed to Saudi Arabia, Guantánamo, Poland. Robert Marzan — 54 years old, described by the people who knew him as blunt, honest, down to earth — is believed to have been at the scene of the strike and to have perished there; final identification by a medical examiner was still pending this week. Four of these six soldiers had served together before, in Kuwait in 2019. They chose to come back, to the same unit, to each other. “It goes to show the camaraderie in the unit,” a retired colonel who served with them told CNN.
They are gone now. They are not going to respawn. They are not going to get up when the match ends. There is no reset button, no extra life, no sequel where they come back. The men who talk about this war the way they talk about a video game need to understand what that means — but they won’t, because they’ve never had to.
Before heading to Dover today, President Trump hosted the “Shield of the Americas” summit at his Doral golf resort in Florida. At the summit, he told the assembled heads of state that the fallen soldiers were heroes “coming home in a different manner than they thought they’d be coming home.” He called it “a very sad situation” and pledged to keep American war deaths “to a minimum.” He also promised the war would continue. “Today Iran will be hit very hard,” he posted on Truth Social this morning.
Although Commander Bone Spurs went so far as to promise to keep the deaths of our military members “to a minimum”, it’s worth noting that A veteran-owned contracting company is hiring for part-time personal effects specialists at Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base. They are offering $15.66/hr to wash the blood off of soldiers’ personal effects. See the photo for all the details of the great new jobs he’s creating.
Earlier in the week, he rated the war. Someone asked him to score it from zero to ten. “I’d give it a 12 to a 15,” he said.
Pete Hegseth — Secretary of War, since that’s now the official name, and yes, that is the official, disgusting name — spent the week insisting everything was fine and the press was lying. “We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground,” he posted on social media, after the six were killed. “We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen it’s front page news. I get it, the press only wants to make the president look bad.” Six of our people died, and the Secretary of War called them a “few drones getting through” that the press was exploiting to embarrass his boss.
This is Operation Epic Fury. That is its actual name. Not a leak. Not a joke. The name chosen by grown men in positions of power for the operation that has now killed over 1,300 people in Iran — among them, according to UNICEF, 181 children. The deadliest single incident of the war so far was a strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, on the opening day of the conflict. Roughly 180 pupils and staff were killed. The White House press secretary said last week she had “no updates” on the Pentagon’s investigation into whether U.S. forces struck that school. KKKaroline hasn’t quite gotten the rhythm of trumpshitting her way through the casualties of the Trumpstein War yet.
There will be no deal, Hair Führer announced on Friday, except Iran’s unconditional surrender. Not a ceasefire. Not negotiated terms. Surrender. When pressed by Axios to define what that means, he clarified that it “could be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.” Iran’s president has responded that they will take the dream of Iran’s surrender “to the grave.” Marco Rubio has told Arab allies the war is expected to last several more weeks. The administration has said the U.S. goal is not regime change — while simultaneously confirming that U.S. intelligence agencies are actively considering acceptable replacements for the late Supreme Leader Khamenei. “We are watching them,” Trump said, when asked if the people on his shortlist were being kept safe.
The families of Cody Khork, Nicole Amor, Noah Tietjens, Declan Coady, Jeffrey O’Brien, and Robert Marzan are not watching shortlists for Iran’s next ruler. They are watching flag-draped transfer cases come off a C-17 at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and trying to hold themselves together in front of cameras while the commander in chief who launched this war looms nearby. Not keeping an eye on any of their comrades, just the shortlist for someone that will please him.
He rated it a fucking 12.
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