Story highlights Veteran Kristen Rouse recalls multiple tours of duty in the longest US war

She says Americans need to listen to veterans' experiences in Afghanistan

(CNN) Kristen Rouse recalls sitting on a pile of gravel surrounded by her fellow soldiers at Bagram Airfield, the largest US base in Afghanistan. Smoke filled the air as her colleagues puffed cigars.

Rouse, then a supply sergeant, dragged on a Cuban; a friend had given it to her months earlier. It was the first cigar she'd ever smoked, and she'd been saving it for this day -- the day she would fly out of Afghanistan after spending a year in the country. It was late January 2007. She took stock of the scene, wanting to remember her last moments in the theater of war.

"That became my tradition -- to smoke a cigar on the day that I flew out," she says a decade later. "And every time I smoked that cigar, I thought it was for the last time."

Through her next two tours in 2010 and 2012, Rouse saw up close how the US strategy and priorities have evolved in Afghanistan under different administrations. And now, as President Donald Trump pledges to ramp up the American military effort, the strategy has shifted yet again.

Read More