O
n a Friday afternoon in October, I got off the Metro at Waterfront Station in Washington, D.C. As in many of the subway stations in the nation’s capital, one typically exits via a long escalator, and as I rose toward the daylight, a National Guard squad was waiting at the top. A sergeant signaled to me urgently.
“Sir, there’s an active shooter in the area,” the young man said, his languid Appalachian drawl only partly concealing his agitation. Pointing to a Safeway nearby, he said, “We advise you to shelter in place at that store until local law enforcement gives us the all-clear.”
After more than two decades of working in war zones, first as a Marine and then as a journalist, I’m not accustomed to running away from the sound of the guns. I asked the Guardsman how many shots he’d heard, and from which direction. He had not heard anything himself, he said; they had received a report of a shooting over the radio. So in what neighborhood, generally, was the shooting? The sergeant didn’t have any further details.
It’s a feature of American life that shootings are so common we have developed language to differentiate between regular shooters — those motivated by domestic violence or robbery, etc. — from “active shooters,” i.e. someone running around trying to kill strangers. Authorities have even added the modifier “extremely active” to describe shootings that involve ongoing gun battles with police.
That the Guard members received a report of a shooting, but hadn’t themselves heard any shots, indicated to me that whatever happened was probably not in the immediate area. There were nearly a dozen Guard members standing around, with no cops in sight. The absence of audible gunfire or a visible police response made it far more likely that whatever happened was garden variety gun crime, rather than some madman stalking the streets.
I thanked the sergeant and said I’d be fine, my destination was nearby. I was annoyed. Civil policing in the big city is just not the right job for soldiers.
I first encountered the National Guard on the streets of D.C. in September, after returning from a series of reporting trips to Ukraine and Syria. I joked with friends that I’d seen more soldiers in Washington than in either Kyiv or Damascus. It wasn’t an exaggeration.
Videos and photos of the Guard, accompanied by political commentary, flooded social media. Some people would film themselves mocking them, like the guy who followed a squad, blasting the “Imperial March” from Star Wars on his phone, until the Guard members eventually summoned D.C.’s Metropolitan Police. One night I encountered a group of protesters in Navy Yard, chanting and shouting slogans about fascism at the police and Guard members standing nearby.
I found that strange, distasteful, and counterproductive. Whatever one’s politics or views about the deployment, none of these cops or soldiers had any say in it. For my part, I often struck up conversations with the soldiers.
They were on the whole happy to talk to a friendly stranger. I asked if they were getting additional pay for the deployment. They were not. Complaints about being away from work, school, and family were common, but generally ended with a fatalistic shrug. Having served in the military myself — and having had the experience of getting recalled to active duty while on reserve status, upending my own life many years ago — I knew where they were coming from. It sucks. But it’s what it means to wear the uniform.
Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom
U.S. Attorney’s Office
U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe
Staff Sgt. Zoe Morris/U.S. Army National Guard
These conversations came to mind after the shooting of two Guard members at Farragut Square on Wednesday. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe of the West Virginia National Guard were no different from any of the other soldiers patrolling the streets.
Beckstrom is now dead, and Wolfe remains in the hospital, critically wounded.
The man who shot the two Guard members was an Afghan, a veteran of the war who came to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul in 2021. As reporters parse the shooter’s background in a “zero unit” working with the CIA, a lot of ugliness that Americans would rather forget about the war in Afghanistan will come to light.
You don’t escape 20 years of war without blowback. Certainly there’s a long history of U.S. policy abroad coming back to haunt Americans; Al Qaeda’s rise out of the remnants of Afghanistan’s 1980s mujahideen is a classic example. We didn’t make it out of Kabul clean in 2021, and we’re fools if we think we won’t be living with the consequences of that for years to come.
Officials say they’re looking into the shooter’s ties to extremism. Based on the details that have come out about the vetting that he underwent, it is unlikely there were meaningful links to terrorism prior to his immigration.
National Guard soldiers respond to shooting on Nov. 26 in D.C.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Radicalization can’t be ruled out. But given the characteristics of the crime — a revolver is a particularly odd weapon choice for a mass shooter, given the ready availability of firearms that are far more efficient at killing large numbers of people — it seems equally likely that mental health was a primary factor in this shooting.
It isn’t the first time an Afghan who fled the Taliban has had a violent encounter with police. Earlier this year, Jamal Wali, a former translator for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, pulled a gun and fired on police during a traffic stop, after an extended rant complaining about how he was treated in America. He was shot dead in the incident.
Whatever was broken in the Farragut Square shooter — whether he followed a murderous ideology, was undone by war trauma or efforts to survive in an alien society, or simply had longstanding psychological issues — it has now become secondary to the public discourse.
The president and his henchmen have decided, once again, to use this tragedy to set their sights on immigrants. That refugees have consistently been found to have lower rates of criminality than native-born Americans is a point that will surely be lost in the emotion-driven debate.
Of the more than 190,000 Afghans who have resettled in the U.S. since 2021, a sizable group has settled in Northern Virginia, and I know several who came over as part of the same program that brought the alleged D.C. shooter to America. It would be a lie to say that many find life here easy. Most are trying to preserve identities and communities shattered by the fall of Kabul, while figuring out a path forward in life.
One, a former commando who is so proud of his service and unit that he randomly sends me videos of speeches given by one of his former commanders, is now eking out a living for his family as a gig worker.
“We are all so angry at this man and his crime. Things are already hard enough,” Jash says, asking that his full name be withheld over concerns about his future immigration status. “I don’t know what will happen to us now.”
Many young Afghans like Jash, who held elite positions working with the U.S. military, are now adrift in America. They’ve been left to build a life on the margins of an uncaring society. They have no realistic plans of returning to Afghanistan but also find it difficult to achieve success in their new homeland. Jash drives for food delivery services and Amazon, barely making minimum wage with no set hours, and without benefits, as he tries to get a small business operating with his friends.
Cultivating roots that will support a middle-class life — developing trade skills or getting a college education, finding a decent job with reliable income and health care, and buying a home — is a dream, even more inaccessible to him than it is for many young people born in America.
The president believes immigrants are to blame for many of our nation’s problems, and that it was wrong to bring Afghans who served alongside Americans to the U.S. On Thanksgiving, he threatened to stop all migration from “third world countries” and “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” in a lengthy rant on social media. Many of his underlings — and the agencies they head — support his views, nativism and bigotry trumping any sense of moral responsibility for our country’s failures in Afghanistan.
It’s much easier to turn populist rage against an identifiable enemy — especially as the cost of living continues to go up and up, and quality of life decreases — than it is to build a better society. For years now, there’s been familiar discordant political messaging from D.C.: When Democrats run the ship, industries disappear as they point to economic growth, saying everything is great, inflation is slowing. When Republicans take control, they deregulate the industries that are left, give tax breaks to the wealthy, and impose pointless tariffs, saying they’re making America great. But anyone living hand-to-mouth knows that their bills are increasingly unbearable regardless of who is in charge.
National Guard soldiers salute during the dignified transfer of Spec. Sarah Beckstrom on Nov. 27 in D.C.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Not a lot of Americans will tell you life is getting better. But no one wants to take responsibility for our failures at home, either.
It will likely get lost in the noise, but the original rationale for deploying the Guard to D.C. was to fight crime. That the deployment was announced after a DOGE staffer was mugged simply reaffirmed what most Americans intuitively suspect: The powerful only care about a problem if it affects them directly.
Local media finds it telling that while the Trump administration was saying that the Guard deployment was necessary to fight crime, Congress was cutting funding to the city — which must have its budget approved by the federal government. The cuts include money allocated for public security, and about $1 billion from the overall city budget.
Overall, violent crime in the capital hit a 30-year low last year, according to the D.C. district attorney. But in many neighborhoods there, the Guard has been welcomed. Theft, carjackings, and youth crime plague the greater D.C. area, as with many large American cities. There were 274 murders in Washington in 2023, a peak since the 1990s. That rate has fallen steadily since then, but whether the needle is trending up or down, each data point is a life lost.
It’s too early to say whether or not the Guard deployment has had the impact intended; there’s no simple way to judge that, and the debate will likely go on for years. For now, there are about 2,200 National Guard members deployed in the city, with another 500 on the way after the shooting in Farragut Square. A federal court ruled the deployment was unlawful, but gave the White House until Dec. 11 to appeal — which they did, after the shooting on Wednesday.
There’s no indication that the Farragut Square shooting was anything other than an outlier, but all things are grist for the mills of partisan rage. Our civil discourse has coarsened, even our government agencies are indistinguishable from online trolls. Democrats blame Trump for deploying the soldiers in the first place. Trump’s statements have devolved into incoherent rants blaming Joe Biden, and immigrants at large.
A more rational mind will see that pulling on any thread of this story unravels evidence of collective failures stretching across administrations — in foreign and economic policy, with gun control and criminal justice, and with how we handle immigration. But this White House is far more interested in crushing dissent, punishing critics, and sowing division, than in trying to solve real problems. Many Democrats are keen to blame Trump for every terrible thing that happens in the world. If you’re hoping for a serious solution to any societal ill, you’ll get a scapegoat instead. “How can we blame our opponents?” is always the first question, not: “How can we solve this problem?”
Failures everywhere, and nary a party responsible to be found… except the other guy.
In October, as I prepared to leave the Waterfront Metro Station despite the warning of an “active shooter,” a young girl with her school backpack, perhaps 12 years old, approached us.
“I want to go home,” she said, visibly frightened by the soldiers telling everyone there was an active shooter in the area. “I live down the street. Can I go home? Please?”
The sergeant who had been talking to me turned to her in surprise, as if a sudden realization dawned about what he was doing there. He looked around for guidance. Seeing no obvious help, he came to the conclusion drilled into generations of non-commissioned officers. If ever you’re unsure who’s in charge, the answer is: “You are.” Gently, he said: “OK, don’t worry. We’ll take you.” He gestured for a handful of his compatriots to join him, and called the movement in over the radio.
I walked behind them as the young girl set off homeward, flanked by four Guard members carrying M4 carbines, watchful and alert. Any irritation I had felt at them faded. It didn’t matter why they were there, or if they had overreacted to the possible danger.
It mattered that if there was danger, they would keep her safe.
It matters that there are those who will raise their hand and say: “I take responsibility, let me solve this.”
At least someone will.
