Three years after Abbey Gate, Air Force nurse receives Bronze Star

Coming home proved difficult. Sharp said he felt irrevocably changed. Large crowds were suddenly intolerable. Each day was spent living on a short fuse.

It wasn’t just the chaos and lives lost, he said, but fearing for his own life as well.

“What bothered me the most was the emotional part of [thinking] this could be the end,” Sharp said.

The threat level was so high on the day of the Abbey Gate bombing that at one point Sharp’s superior walked by and told everyone, “If you’re not right with the lord, you need to get right,” he recalled.

Air Force Nurse, Lt. Col. Jayde Sharp photo

Air Force Lt. Col. Jayde Sharp, right, saved Marine lives and medically evacuated 38 individuals after the Kabul airport attack on Aug. 26, 2021. (Airman 1st Class Dawson Carter/U.S. Air National Guard)

In those moments, Sharp wondered how his family would be able to deal with his passing. How would his wife, kids and grandkids handle life without him?  Such thoughts had to be set aside at times, like when he treated an Afghan boy he said must have been his grandson’s age.

“I have a grandson that’s four years old now and when that baby came up it reminded me so much of my grandson,” he said. “Just the haircut and the size.”  Sharp and his team performed CPR on the child, resuscitated him and put him on a ventilator. The boy was evacuated but later died of a brain bleed, Sharp said.

It’s an image that still haunts him. Service members make decisions to put themselves in harm’s way, he said, but the child did not have a choice. The boy’s parents were desperately trying to get him to a country where he could live a better life. In that process, the child lost his life.

The events surrounding the attack feel like yesterday for Sharp. It’s been three years, but he says he is only just now returning to some semblance of normality.  There was no way to train for that experience, he said. It was just something those on the ground had to find a way to deal with.

Sharp credits his family and friends — including his fellow personnel — for helping him through the tough times.  “I don’t know how to thank the 183rd and 172nd enough,” Sharp said.

During the aftermath of the attack, Sharp received a box with 50 units of blood. His team was critically low on supply. It was delivered from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, he said, and the chief nurse there was a forward-deployed member he knew from the 183rd.

Sharp, who is a lover of Mexican food, opened the box to find a Mexican food MRE sitting on top with his name written across it in Sharpie.  The small gesture amid the horror brought a smile to his face. Curious colleagues inquired about the package.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said.  And they went back to work.