The latest and moving post from Sergeant Nicole Gee, one of the American victims of the Kabul bombing

A captured Marine Corps sergeant in a photo cooing at a An Afghan baby has been identified as one of 13 U.S. servicemen killed in the Kabul terror attack on Thursday.

“I love my job”Sergeant Nicole Gee, 23, said next to the August 20 photo on her Instagram account, which showed her staring at the baby in her arms.

More than 170 people were killed and hundreds injured in the suicide bombing on Thursday at Kabul International Airport. Gee and 12 other U.S. service members, working on evacuation duties, were among those who were killed in the attack, claimed by the militant extremist group ISIS-K.

Just a week ago, 23-year-old Gee posted on her Instagram account a photo of her holding a baby in Kabul which quickly went viral.

On August 20, the Ministry of Defense included the photo of Gee holding a baby in a series of images posted on Twitter. With the post, the Pentagon account wrote: “US military service members comfort babies at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.”

In his latest photo, posted on August 22, Gee can be seen dressed in his military uniform and carrying a rifle, standing near a line of evacuees boarding a military plane to leave Afghanistan. “Escort the evacuees to the bird”, wrote.

Sergeant Mallory Harrison, who lived with Gee for three years and considered her a “forever sister” and best friend, wrote of her loss. “I can’t describe the feeling I get when I force myself to come back to reality and realize I’ll never see him again,” Harrison wrote on Facebook. “How he took his last breath doing what he loved: helping people … Then there was an explosion. So she left.”

Gee was from Roseville, California, and served as a maintenance technician in the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, according to AP. Her colleagues described her as a “model navy,” according to the military publication, and she reportedly had perfect fitness scores.

Gee’s Instagram account includes many selfies after working out at the gym, and alternating between North Carolina and “somewhere overseas”. The photographs show her in a camel in Saudi Arabia, wearing a bikini on a Greek island and holding a beer in Spain. One this month in Kuwait shows the beaming with his meritorious promotion to the rank of Sgt.

Harrison said his generation of Marines were used to hearing stories of war from veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they seem distant amid the boring deployments featuring them – until “The peaceful tank you were in becomes your friends who never come home.”

The ISIS-K attack, which pitted the United States against the Taliban, occurred in the midst of the chaos in the evacuation of Afghan Americans, allies and refugees from Afghanistan, since the Taliban quickly took power a week ago. The Taliban takeover came two weeks before the August 31 deadline set by President Joe Biden for the total withdrawal of US forces from the country.

On Saturday, the Pentagon announced that it had shot down “”two important goals“From the Islamic State group, an “organizer” and an “operator”, while another was injured in a drone attack.

Read on: