ROA members:

By now, you have read much of the messaging that has resulted from the capitulation in Kabul.

The tragic outcome occurred not for want of skill, effort, heart, guts, blood, sweat, sacrifice, and tenacity on the part of America’s Reserve Components.

At home or abroad, you know what you did. You know what your buddies to the left and right of you did. Of that you must be proud. You must, we respectfully suggest, be thankful that the opportunity was ours to seize – to be of service to others. And that you seized that opportunity.

ROA will not try to tell you how to assess the strategic impact of our service in the war. History will have its say, and history takes its own time. We do know that we brought to oppressed peoples the light of freedom. We kept enemies of our nation at bay. We showed our fellow countrymen and women our mettle and our worth.

As ROA’s executive director and a retired soldier, my recommendation to you, fellow comrades, is to get ready for the next mission. It will come. For many of us who served in the pandemic response, that new mission has already come. Or fighting wildfires. Or floods.

Our job is to go where we are sent.

Among those of us in the Reserve and National Guard, we have been going to the sound of the guns, literally or figuratively, since before our nation’s birth.

We will continue to do so.

And may our fellow Americans thank God for that.

Jeffrey E. Phillips
Executive Director
Reserve Organization of America