After twenty years of grinding and nebulously defined combat, enough people in this town’s small and closely-knit foreign policy circles had rotated through Afghanistan—as soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, and journalists—and so the images of desperate Afghans rushing the tarmac and falling to their deaths from a plane’s wheels hit this town especially hard. “I think folks in D.C. are feeling this more than the American people,” said one Obama administration defense official. “A lot of us who served there, we have a real visceral connection to the country that a lot of people in America don’t have. This was not a great weekend for anybody’s mental health.”