Slain Marine who cradled baby at Kabul airport loved her job
A week before she was killed, Sgt. Nicole Gee cradled a baby in her arms at the Kabul airport. She and wrote, “I love my job.”
Gee, 23, of Sacramento, California, was a maintenance technician with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Brig. Gen. Forrest C. Poole III, commanding general of 2nd Marine Logistics Group, said his unit mourned “the immense loss of Sgt. Gee,” and the others.
Sgt. Mallory Harrison, who lived with Gee for three years, wrote about how hard the death hit her.
“I can’t quite describe the feeling I get when I force myself to come back to reality & think about how I’m never going to see her again,” . “How her last breath was taken doing what she loved — helping people. … Then there was an explosion. And just like that, she’s gone.”
Gee’s Instagram page shows another photo of her in fatigues, holding a rifle next to a line of people walking into the belly of a large transport plane. She wrote: “escorting evacuees onto the bird.”
Photos show her on a camel in Saudi Arabia, in a bikini on a Greek isle and holding a beer in Spain. One from this month in Kuwait shows her beaming with her meritorious promotion to sergeant.
Harrison said her generation of Marines hears war stories from veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, but they seem distant until “the peaceful float you were on turns into … your friends never coming home.”
Gee’s car was still parked in a lot at Camp Lejeune, and Harrison mused about all the Marines who walked past it while she was overseas.
“Some of them knew her. Some of them didn’t.” she said. “They all walked past it. The war stories, the losses, the flag-draped coffins, the KIA bracelets & the heartbreak. It’s not so distant anymore.”