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On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth upgraded valor awards for three Marines who held the line at Abbey Gate, five years after the suicide bombing that killed 13 US service members during the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Getting into it: Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan Eby and Lance Cpl. Jordan Houston received the Bronze Star Medal with “V” device for valor while Cpl. Michael Gretzon received the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V” device. All three served with 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, which arrived at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 14, 2021, to run security for the evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies. Twelve days later, an ISIS-K suicide bomber hit Abbey Gate, killing 13 Americans and roughly 170 Afghan civilians.
The Pentagon’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel recommended the upgrades this year, finding the original awards did not reflect the danger at Abbey Gate or what the men actually did there. Hegseth said, “They stood in the direct blast zone with minimal cover, fully aware of an imminent suicide threat. Yet they stayed on that line because they knew that their brothers in arms and thousands of innocents depended on them.”
According to the Pentagon, Eby was a staff sergeant at the time, running refugee screening from an exposed spot when the bomb went off. His platoon commander and half his platoon were dead or wounded, so he stepped up, reestablished a security perimeter, gave lifesaving aid, and directed casualty evacuations. His citation says his actions “undoubtedly saved the lives of many.” Houston was working crowd control roughly 11 yards out when the blast knocked him unconscious. He came to with shrapnel in his hip, hid his injuries so he would not be pulled off the line, and kept treating Marines who were hurt worse, later pulling shrapnel out of himself before getting treatment.
Gretzon was on crowd control too when shrapnel from the blast tore into his arm. After medics patched him up, he went straight back to his squad, and he only left the line when Eby, his platoon sergeant, gave him a direct order to move to the casualty collection point.
Hegseth also used the ceremony to attack his predecessors. He said, “For half a decade, this building allowed bureaucratic caution, or maybe politics, to stand in the way of proper recognition. A military that downplays its frontline heroes to avoid uncomfortable political truths only projects weakness. For too long, leadership in this capital city failed to match that frontline courage with administrative backbone, inappropriately downgrading the original award submissions that these men rightfully deserved.”
Separately, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who chairs the review panel, said investigators recently found classified documents “stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found.” He would not describe the contents, saying only that they were “highly relevant” and “material that should have been disclosed,” and that after his team read them “it became clear why someone would try to hide them.” He added: “The deeper we look, the more there is to look at. We are finding things that we did not expect.” The Pentagon has not said who allegedly hid the documents.
This all comes as the Pentagon’s review into the withdrawal remains ongoing, with Hegseth saying his department should have the whole thing finished before January and a bipartisan commission Congress created to examine the war set to release its own findings within weeks.
