MATTOON — When 35-year-old Lindsey Figgins turned on the news Monday morning, she saw something she never wanted to see: people chasing a plane, desperate to leave Afghanistan.

Her heart sank for both the her fellow service members and the people left behind. Figgins, who lives in Toledo, served in Afghanistan from 2006-2011 in Kandahar with the U.S. Army as a human resources specialist.

“We lost so many servicemen and women in all branches, from all different countries — and some of those were my friends,” Figgins said. “For us to just completely withdraw, it just feels like we’ve been kicked-down, like it all happened for no reason.”

Leaving those the Army strived to protect was difficult for Figgins to witness. Figgins, a mother of four, remembers giving toys to children in Kandahar as part of a program with the armed services.

“Thinking now like, ‘OK, these kids are teenagers now. Are they still there? Are they dealing with this?’ It’s sickening,” Figgins said. “It really is.”

Figgins said she continues to worry for her former colleagues who were not part of the Army, but still played a vital role in their mission.

“We had interpreters that were in our building every day, amazing people, you know, and them interpreting for us was able to save lives,” Figgins said. “I don’t know if they got out. I know that one of them was trying to get his U.S. citizenship while I was there. That was 12 years ago.”

“We all went into the military with different political views, you know, from different walks of life,” Figgins said. “We’re just trying to figure out ‘Why?’ Why we went over there in the first place and lost so many people, if you’re just going to pull out and let it go back to square one.”

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Douglas Peterson, 54, said some of his fellow Afghanistan veterans may look at the rapid return of the Taliban and feel that their service there was futile. Peterson, who is now the JROTC instructor at Mattoon High School, said that perspective is “going to be very difficult” for those veterans to carry with them as they try to move forward in life.

“I think a healthier perspective is to understand that we volunteered to serve, we served with honor and we fought for the soldiers on our left and right,” Peterson said.

For Peterson, his service in Afghanistan was in 2003-2004 as an infantry platoon leader with the U.S. Army’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment in Khost Province near the border with Pakistan. He said their outpost occasionally took rocket fire from insurgents across the border.

Peterson said the U.S. would have been successful in Afghanistan if its mission simply had been to destroy the network of terrorists there that was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. However, he said the U.S. tried to establish a unified, democratic nation in a place where the local history did not support this.

“Afghanistan is less of a country than a collection of tribal territories,” Peterson said. “We tried to do nation building where there is no nation.”

Peterson said he hopes the U.S. government learns the lesson that it should not send its military into danger without first setting strategic goals that are realistic. He also said the increasingly divided American public should be wary of becoming proverbial tribes that vilify each other.

“As Americans, we will be stronger the more we can learn to sit and listen to each other and to disagree, but in conversation, not in shouting,” Peterson said.