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David Ortiz fl ies a helicopter during his time in the Army.

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David Ortiz during his rehabilitation at Craig Hospital in Englewood after a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

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Members of the military stationed at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora and Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs also were killed in America’s longest war.

The Sun spoke with three veterans of the Afghanistan wars last week to get their perspective on the country’s collapse:

‘It absolutely was worth it’

In June 2012, David Ortiz was an Army helicopter pilot fl ying a mission in eastern Afghanistan. He was tasked with checking out a report that the Taliban had deployed a Russian heavy machine gun.

During the trip, the aircraft’s engine exploded and the Kiowa Warrior he was fl ying crashed.

“My memory cuts out at about 20 feet from the ground,” said Ortiz, who is 39 and lives in Littleton. “I woke up three to fi ve minutes later, dust in the air. I was feeling hot. I was covered in metal.”

Ortiz quickly realized that he had a spinal cord injury. He also had a fractured cheekbone and ribs, a laceration to his skull and a collapsed right lung. “I knew I was in bad shape,” he said.

Ortiz spent months in the hospital as he recovered from his injuries. He lacks sensation and muscle control below his waist because of the crash. In 2020, he was elected as a Democratic state representative in Colorado, representing parts of Littleton and Centennial.

Ortiz is feeling frustrated with the Biden administration and how it handled the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

“I was optimistic,” he said. “We’ve been there for 20 years. I believed that we had done what we had needed to do to train the Afghan National Army. I believed that leadership wouldn’t be making this decision unless we could leave Afghanistan a stable country that could fi ght against the Taliban. Clearly that was not the case.”

Ortiz doesn’t buy that the war in Afghanistan had to end this way, or that the U.S. had to pull out at all. He pointed to Japan and Germany, where the U.S. has had troops since World War II. The American