In Memoriam of Sgt. James G. Johnston

An especially poignant story of a young man killed in action on June 25, 2019.

Yesterday I spent couple of hours reviewing vignettes of fallen soldiers that are posted on a walking trail near my apartment in Dallas. I found the narrative of Sgt. James G. Johnston from Tyler, Texas—killed in action on June 25, 2019—especially poignant.

It’s hard for me to fathom that such a young and apparently amiable man was killed in an attempt to defuse explosive ordinance in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan on June 25, 2019.

By then the writing was on the wall that the U.S. was not going to achieve its political objectives in Afghanistan, as was noted in a confidential memo dated December 2019 and later called the Afghanistan Papers. This memo revealed that high-ranking military and government officials were generally of the opinion that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable, but kept their assessment hidden from the public.

Students of history are aware that politicians and senior military commanders often keep the meat grinder going long after they’ve concluded that the probability of winning a war is low. The German veteran and author, Erich Maria Remarque, dramatized this in his 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, when the protagonist, Paul, is killed in October 1918, a month before the armistice is announced. By then, he and his comrades knew that the outcome (Germany’s defeat) is inevitable, and that they were fighting merely to delay it a few more weeks.

That was 1918. One would have thought that, during the century that has passed since then, the guys who run the U.S. Department of Defense would have learned to be less wanton, but I suppose that nothing in this line of work ever changes.

James G. Johnston loved Hawaiian shirts and left behind his wife Krista and their child Jamie Avery Grace Johnston, born on Veterans Day, Nov. 11 2019.

Rest in Peace young man.