On March 1, 2026, an Iranian drone struck a U.S. military facility in Kuwait, killing six American service members assigned to the Army Reserve’s 103rd Sustainment Command. This Veterans Day, their names are what matter: Cody Khork, Nicole Amor, Noah Tietjens, Declan Coady, Jeffrey O’Brien, and Robert Marzan — ages 20 to 54 — died during the early stages of the U.S. military campaign against Iran under President Trump’s administration.
Who They Were: Six Names the News Cycle Moved Past
Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, was from Winter Haven, Florida. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, came from White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, was from Bellevue, Nebraska. Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45, and Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20 — the youngest of the six — were both from Iowa, from Waukee and West Des Moines respectively. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M. Marzan, 54, the oldest, was from Sacramento, California. All six were part of the U.S. Army Reserve’s history of U.S. military deployments in the Middle East, a unit based in Des Moines that rarely makes front pages.
The range of ages — a 20-year-old just starting out and a 54-year-old with three decades of service between them — is part of what the abstraction of ‘military casualties’ tends to erase. These were not symbols. They were people from small and mid-size American cities with families who are spending this Veterans Day without them.
A Drone, a Facility in Kuwait, and the Cost of a War That Was Named Later
The strike happened during what the administration was still framing as a ‘campaign of maximum pressure’ against Iran — before the language of war fully caught up with the reality on the ground. An Iranian drone hit the U.S. facility in Kuwait, and six people who had shipped out from the American Midwest and West Coast did not come home.
Veterans Day exists, officially, to honor all who served — the living and the dead. But the occasion has a way of collapsing into ceremony and away from accountability. The six members of the 103rd Sustainment Command deserve more than a moment of silence on a federal holiday. They deserve the kind of remembrance that keeps asking why they were there and what, exactly, was decided on their behalf.
