Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, was assigned to help with evacuation efforts in Kabul, specifically with civilian women and children as they fled the Taliban takeover. On Aug. 20 Gee shared a photo on Instagram of her cradling an infant in her arms with the caption, “I love my job.” She was killed six days later in the ISIS-K bombing attack at Kabul airport.
The Department of Defense shared the same photo days before the attack, tweeting “U.S. military service members comfort infants at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.”
U.S. military service members comfort infants at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. #HKIA pic.twitter.com/8utbOwtcsF
— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) August 20, 2021
From Roseville, California, Gee was a maintenance technician stationed in North Carolina in the Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 24. Less than a month ago, she was promoted to Sergeant.
Gee shared another photo of herself in Kabul “escorting evacuees onto the bird” on her Instagram last week.
View this post on Instagram
“How her last breath was taken doing what she loved—helping people—at HKIA in Afghanistan. Then there was an explosion. And just like that, she’s gone,” wrote Sgt. Mallory Harrison, a fellow Marine and Gee’s roommate, in a Facebook post:
You know it can happen. And you train to be ready if/when it does. You’re ready. Gung-Ho. You raise your hand for all of the deployments, you put in the work. But it’s hard to truly relate to those stories when most of the deployments nowadays involve a trip to Oki or a boring 6 months on ship. Then bad people do bad things, and all of a sudden, the peaceful float you were on turns into you going to Afghanistan & for some, never coming back. It turns into your friends never coming home.
Nicole was married to another U.S. Marine, Jarod Gee. Nicole’s sister, Misty Fuoco, described the couple’s bond as “unmatched” and “a bond like nothing I’ve ever see,” on a GoFundMe page for the family.
“She gave the ultimate sacrifice. We will forever be changed and forever hurt with her absences but I know she wouldn’t have had it any other way, she absolutely loved the work she was doing in Afghanistan and was excited to tell me more about it once she was back home,” Fuoco wrote.
