Withdrawal

Sergeant First Class Javier Jaguar Gutierrez is buried in Grave 104B of Section 14A at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. The white marble headstone is shaded by a willowy oak and adorned with a miniature American flag and a fistful of red, white and blue flowers.

On Aug. 27, Sylvia and Javier Gutierrez make the 29-mile trip to their son’s grave site, just as they have done dozens of times since his death 18 months earlier. Time and again, they’ve come here carrying photographs and fresh bouquets and family gossip. They’ve also carried a burden inside, one no parent should have to bear: their son was one of the last two American soldiers to die fighting in Afghanistan.

Jaguar, 28, and an Army Ranger were shot and killed on Feb. 8, 2020. An Afghan service member turned his gun on them just three weeks before the U.S. signed a landmark peace deal with the Taliban. Despite the tragedy, the Gutierrez family managed to take a measure of solace in the fact that Jaguar would be one of the last soldiers to die in the nation’s longest war. The pain, they thought, would stop with them.

But now they were passing on their burden. The day before their visit to the cemetery, a suicide bomber had killed more than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members at the Kabul airport. The grief Sylvia and Javier had endured over the past year and a half would now be felt by yet another group of shattered U.S. families, a new set of bereaved parents.

Becoming a Gold Star family is an honor that