After Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, 20, landed in Afghanistan with his Marine unit, his father, Jim, began checking his phone for a little green dot. McCollum had not been able to talk with his son, but the green dot next to Rylee’s name on a messaging app meant that he was online. That he was still OK.

When news came that a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members outside the airport in Kabul on Thursday, McCollum checked again for the dot. His son was on his first overseas deployment, had got married recently, and was about to become a father. McCollum messaged his son: “Hey man, you good?”

But the green dot was gone.

“In my heart yesterday afternoon, I knew,” McCollum said.

On Friday, Lance Corporal McCollum became one of the first American victims to be publicly identified in the attack that also killed at least 170 Afghans. It was the highest US death toll in a single incident in Afghanistan in 10 years. His death was confirmed by his father and by the governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon.

While the department of defence has not released an official accounting of the victims, their names began to emerge on Friday. They appeared in social media posts from family and friends and sombre announcements from the high schools where the young men had played football or wrestled just a few years earlier.

Some of them, like Lance Corporal McCollum, who was born in February 2001, were still babies when the US invaded Afghanistan. Others were not yet born. Now, they are among the last casualties of America’s longest war.

Lance Corporal McCollum’s unit had deployed from Jordan to Afghanistan to provide security and help with evacuations, his father said in a phone interview on Friday. He had been guarding a checkpoint when the explosion tore through the main gate where thousands of civilians have been clamouring to escape the country’s new Taliban rulers.

“He was a beautiful soul,” McCollum said from his home in Wyoming.

McCollum’s fears for his son’s fate were confirmed when two Marines knocked on the door of the family’s home at 3.30am to deliver the news. McCollum said becoming a Marine had been his son’s dream ever since he was 3 years old. That night other families in communities large and small were getting the same grim news.

In one small northern Ohio community where Maxton Soviak grew up playing football, his death left a “Maxton-sized hole” in the lives of the people who loved him, his sister Marilyn wrote in an Instagram post.

Soviak served as a Navy medic when he was killed, according to a statement from the Edison Local School District announcing his death. Soviak graduated from Edison High School in 2017, the district said.

“Everybody looked to Max in tough situations,” said Jim Hall, his high school football coach, who described Soviak as a deeply loyal friend. “He was energetic. He wore his emotions on his sleeve. He was a passionate kid. He didn’t hold anything back.”

Soviak’s social media profile showed an exuberant young man charging into the world — diving off a rocky precipice, rock-climbing, hiking the Grand Canyon. “If the world was coming to an end, I don’t wanna close my eyes without feeling like I lived,” he wrote in one post.

On Friday, Hall’s phone rang with people calling to mourn and share memories, and one image of Soviak kept returning to Hall’s mind. It was from a snowy regional playoff game a few years ago in which Soviak helped sack a quarterback to win the game.

Hall remembered watching Soviak celebrate on the field, exultant, snow swirling around him.

At least two of the slain service members were from California. They were identified by local law enforcement and a US congressman as Hunter Lopez, 22, a Marine who is the son of two officers of the Riverside county sheriff’s department, and Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, a young martial arts champion from Norco, according to his social media accounts.

New York Times News Service