[continued from previous message]

“It was like a joke to me,” Hamasa Parsa, a 23-year-old Afghan army
captain who worked as an assistant in the defense minister’s office,
said. “I never thought that the Taliban would come to Kabul, even when
Joe Biden said that our war is finished.”

On hearing Biden’s speech in April, Parsa (whose name has been changed
for her safety) had cried and wondered whether the president felt any
regret. But she was sure that Kabul, where she had grown up under
American protection, was too big and modern to fall to the Taliban.
“Kabul is a city full of younger generations,” she said, “full of girls and boys who can talk, who can fight with their writing, with their speaking.” Parsa loved to read and write novels, and after work she
would meet three of her friends at a crowded coffee shop in downtown
Kabul called Nosh Book Café. “It was like a heaven for us,” she said. Young men and women sat together at tables, the girls’ scarves falling
back onto their shoulders, everyone talking, working at laptops, smoking cigarettes.

For such a city to fall would mean the end of the only life Afghans like
Parsa had ever known. The rest of the country might now belong to the Taliban—perhaps it always had—but not Kabul. This Afghan illusion, widespread until the very end, was nourished by American illusions—by
our refusal to face that we had neither the will nor the ability to
create something durable in Afghanistan, that one day we would abandon them.

In early august Najeeb Monawari was in Bangladesh, so focused on the
news from his homeland that he was unable to work. His foreign postings
with Doctors Without Borders had kept him safely out of Afghanistan as
the country descended into extreme violence, but he worried constantly
for his family back home. His wife begged him to get her and their three
small children out too, and he researched every possible way. The
$125,000 purchase price for citizenship in a Caribbean country was too expensive. He even looked into immigrating with his family to Sierra Leone.


As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan, Monawari read online that the Canadian government was setting up a new emergency immigration program
for Afghans with connections to Canada. Monawari immediately applied. On
August 7, he received an email from the Canadian government: “We
received your application and you are being invited to an appointment
for biometric collection (fingerprints).” Monawari had worked with the Americans for four years, then waited 10 years for a U.S. visa that was finally, unjustly denied. He had worked with the Canadians long ago for
a year, and they answered his prayers in a few weeks. “Hello dear Sir/Madam,” he wrote back, “thank you very much for saving my family and myself life.”

Monawari was now determined to get to Kabul. His mother told him that he
would be crazy to come back at this moment. So did his colleagues in Bangladesh, including one who warned him that the Kabul airport would
close before he could get his family out. So did a retired Green Beret
weapons sergeant in Texas named Larry Ryland, who got back in touch with
his former interpreter during the Taliban offensive and practically
ordered him to stay in Bangladesh. Even the Canadian government warned
him off. On the morning of August 8, a second email arrived: “Dear Sir, PLEASE DO NOT TRAVEL TO KABUL.”

Monawari disregarded all the advice. He was in the grip of a furious
monomania: He had to get to Kabul, be fingerprinted, and fly out with
his family. Maybe to Canada, maybe even to the U.S.—he hadn’t lost faith
in his second try for an SIV. He could summon intense optimism while
feeling intense pain. “I just put myself on fire,” he later told me. “When you want to survive, you get blind, you just struggle.”


Monawari arrived in Kabul on the night of Wednesday, August 11. First
thing the next morning, he and his wife brought their passports and the
email invitation to a Canadian military camp near the airport—the
embassy was now closed to visitors—and talked their way past an Afghan
guard. No one was on duty except one elderly Canadian, who took their fingerprints.

On Saturday, August 14, Monawari went to the bank where he kept his
savings. He had intended to withdraw only a little, but when he saw the
large and panicky crowd he thought the bank might shut its doors. He
took out almost all the money he had and left with his pockets bulging
with euros, sweating, tensed for someone in the crowd to pull a gun on him.

Khan, hiding with mina and their son in the center of Kabul, kept
refreshing a State Department website showing the status of his visa
every 20 or 30 minutes. At 3 p.m. on August 11, it suddenly went from “refused” to “administrative processing” and then “issued.” Two minutes
later, Mina’s and their son’s status also changed. But Khan waited the
next three days for a summons to pick up their passports at the embassy,
and his emails went unanswered. On August 14, unable to wait any longer,
he left the hotel where they were staying and ventured into Kabul’s
fortified green zone. Outside the U.S. embassy a guard couldn’t make
sense of the various emails with which Khan had armed himself. Another
guard told him to come back on a better day. Khan didn’t realize that,
inside the embassy, in preparation for evacuation to the airport,
diplomats were smashing up hard drives, destroying American flags and
other symbols that could be used for Taliban propaganda, and filling
sacks with documents for burning. Khan insisted that his case was
urgent, and he was finally allowed inside.


At the consular office the family’s passports were waiting, miraculously stamped with the Special Immigrant Visas that had eluded Khan and
thousands of other Afghans for so long. They’d been ready since August
11. Khan and his family could have left Afghanistan by now, but the
embassy had neglected to summon him. It didn’t matter—Julie Kornfeld had booked three tickets to the U.S. via Istanbul and Brazil on Tuesday,
August 17, three days away. When Khan got back to the hotel room and
shared the news with Mina, now 34 weeks pregnant, their toddler twirled
across the floor in a celebratory Afghan dance.

They still needed COVID tests, and a doctor’s report that would allow
Mina to fly. Their hometown fell that day. Khan figured that Kabul had
another month.

On august 12, three U.S. infantry battalions in the region—one of them
staged there for this purpose—were ordered to secure the Kabul airport primarily for the evacuation of U.S. diplomats and American citizens.
Two days later another 1,000 troops followed.

Alice Spence wrote to Hawa: “USA is sending 4,000 soldiers to help with SIV.”

“Wow that’s great. For which peoples they will help?”

“For you and others who are waiting.”

On August 14, Spence told Hawa to have a bag packed and her visa
documents printed or stored on her phone. “I am very hopeful now. Maybe
this week. Do not tell anyone.” She added an American flag, a heart, and
an Afghan flag.


That night hamasa parsa, the Afghan captain who loved to read and write fiction, had a dream. Her best friend in the army appeared before her
dressed in clothes covered with flowers that she had gathered off the
ground where they’d fallen. “Do you know why I picked them up?” her friend asked. Parsa didn’t know. Her friend, with a face and voice of unbearable sadness, said, “Hamasa, they are all dead.” Then Parsa understood that the flowers on her friend’s dress were the Afghan
people. Her friend started to cry, and Parsa cried too, and when she
woke tears were streaming down her cheeks.

She called her friend at once, though it was the middle of the night.
“Are you okay?” Parsa asked. She reminded her that she’d seen her name
on a death list sent by the Taliban to the defense minister’s office.

“Hamasa, come on, stop crying, I’m okay,” her friend said. “Nothing’s going to happen. Go to sleep. We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

They had a plan to meet at the Nosh Book Café at 11 the next morning,
Sunday, August 15.

V.
THE AIRPORT
The next morning, most people in Kabul went to work as usual.

At the palace, Hamdullah Mohib, President Ghani’s national security adviser—who had sent his wife and children out of the country—attended
the regular 9 a.m. meeting of the president’s top advisers. For three
days Mohib had been talking with American diplomats in Kabul about
transferring power to an interim government and sparing the city the
urban warfare that had destroyed it in the 1990s. Ghani wanted to hold a
loya jirga—a conference of political leaders—in two weeks. It would essentially hand power to the Taliban, but by constitutional means.
Ghani wanted this to be part of his legacy. But he and Secretary Blinken hadn’t discussed the idea until the night before, when Blinken agreed to
send an envoy to Doha. At the Sunday-morning meeting, Ghani’s advisers decided on a team that would fly to Doha that evening. Taliban
representatives there had agreed that the insurgents would stay out of
Kabul during negotiations. But Afghan intelligence knew that factions
were competing to take the city, and that government forces would melt
away rather than die in a pointless fight. That morning, Khalil Haqqani,
whose Islamist network had inflicted numerous suicide bombings on Kabul,
called Mohib and told him to surrender.


Around 11 a.m., Ghani and Mohib were talking in a garden on the palace
grounds when they heard automatic-weapons fire. They later learned that
guards at a nearby bank were dispersing customers trying to withdraw
their money—but at the sound of gunfire everything fell apart. Staff
began to abandon the palace. Guards took off their uniforms and went
home in the civilian clothes they wore underneath. As Mohib prepared to
escort Ghani’s wife by helicopter to the airport for a flight to Dubai,
the pilot told him that Afghan troops had prevented one of the
presidential helicopters from leaving the airport and fired shots at
another that was going to pick up the defense minister. These troops
were not about to let their leaders save their own skins.

“When I heard that, I felt, We are done,” Mohib told me. He quickly returned from the helipad to the palace. “It’s time to leave,” he told the president.

Ghani had been worried about the fate of his cherished library. He
didn’t even have his passport or a change of clothes. “I have to go upstairs and get some things,” he said.

“No, there’s no time,” Mohib insisted.

Ghani, having convinced the Americans to leave his endangered people in harm’s way, was flown by helicopter with his wife and a few advisers to safety in Uzbekistan.

Just before noon, Hawa was riding a bus to collect her uniform and
papers, so her identity wouldn’t be discovered if the base where she
kept them was attacked, when her mother called. The Taliban were in
their area of western Kabul, searching for military people, her mother
said. Hawa should not come home.


Not knowing what to do, Hawa texted Alice Spence in Hawaii, where it was
still Saturday night: “The Taliban come to our area. I am outside I
don’t know how should I go home ohhh.”

“Oh God Hawa,” Spence wrote back a minute later. “Ok where are you? You are not in Kabul?”

“Yes I am at Kabul. They came to Kabul.”

“Fuck.” Spence continued, “Ok it will be ok.” She advised Hawa to find a
safe way home and hide all her documents and anything suggesting
military affiliation.

“Thank you dear sorry about the bad news,” Hawa wrote.

“Don’t be sorry the Talib they will be sorry.”

“Okay dear. I really scared.”

“I know. Please be brave Hawa. I will not go to sleep until you are safe.”

Hawa was lucky to be wearing a long dress and a scarf that she’d put on
to avoid trouble with the Pashtun women outside the base. She later
heard that Talibs were ordering girls to cover themselves, and shot one
who refused. They also shot a military woman discovered in her house.
Hawa’s face was recognizable—she had appeared in army recruitment ads on social media. With nowhere else to go, she searched for a taxi home, but
no driver would take her, and she spent four hours trying to get there,
through streets thronged with people running. For two days she didn’t
leave her house.


From his hotel room that morning Khan saw smoke rising above the U.S.
embassy as the last burn bags were incinerated. They included the
passports of Afghan visa hopefuls, who would now have to try to escape
without them. It was protocol to destroy that kind of thing during a noncombatant-evacuation operation, and no one at the embassy was willing
to break the rules and bring the passports to the airport. The removal
of the embassy to the airport had been carefully planned at the
Pentagon, but with no discussion of how to bring out Afghans. Khan saw
Chinook transport helicopters taking off from the embassy grounds every
15 minutes and clattering low over city streets the short distance to
the airport.

“This is not Saigon,” Blinken insisted on a Sunday-morning news show.

Around noon, the hotel manager told Khan and the other interpreters
lodged there to leave. With the Taliban in Kabul, the interpreters were
now a security risk. Khan, Mina, and their son wept as they packed their
bags. There were no taxis and most hotels were closed, so they walked
for an hour and a half around central Kabul until they found a room in a
dirty hotel. Talibs could be seen in the streets outside.

Four men in front of tall concrete wall topped with concertina wire,
where three U.S. military personnel stand, one gesturing and aiming gun
Afghans wait outside an entrance to Kabul’s airport on August 22. In the background, U.S. Marines guard the wall. (Jim Huylebroek)
The day before, with visas and tickets finally in hand, Khan had felt
like one of the saved. Now the flight had been canceled and, because of
the Afghan government’s sudden demise, the airport was closed. “We came
to a bad fate,” Khan told Julie Kornfeld.

“I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said, “but I do still have a little.” She urged him to get some sleep until there was news of flights
out.

“I cannot sleep.”

“Can you listen to soothing music, or take deep breaths, or, we have a saying, ‘count sheep’? You need to do something to try and put your mind
at ease.”

“OK I will apply your prescription. But flights come and go in my mind.”

That day, Najeeb Monawari’s old Green Beret teammates flooded him with
emails from Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas. One of them urged him
to get to the airport immediately—the office of Senator Thom Tillis had
put his name on a list. It was nearly midnight. When Monawari looked out
the window he saw streets deserted of every living creature except stray
dogs. Thinking this might be his only chance, Monawari woke his three
children and prepared a backpack with food and printouts of SIV
correspondence. He had to ask his neighbors to move their cars so he
could get out. His mother told him that leaving the building at this
hour tipped the neighbors off that he was a “traitor.”

The airport was only 15 minutes away, but Monawari drove so fast that
his father, who came along, warned him that the police might shoot at
the car. But there were no police. Kabul was under no one’s control, and looting had broken out around the city. The Taliban were as unprepared
as everyone else for the speed of their conquest. That day their leader
in Doha, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, asked the head of U.S. Central
Command, General McKenzie, whether the Americans wanted control of the
city during the evacuation. McKenzie replied that his orders were to
secure the airport and nothing else. U.S. troops were not to venture
beyond its perimeter. “The Taliban were willing to let us do all that
was necessary to control the terrain to get out,” a former senior
military officer told me. “When you consciously choose that the terrain
you control is the fence line of the airport, you give up a lot of your prerogatives, and you permit yourself to be quite vulnerable to
infiltration by suicide bombers.” The exchange between Baradar and
McKenzie would contribute to making the evacuation the nightmare that it became.

Monawari parked on a side street and left his father with the car. Hamid
Karzai International Airport is small, with a cramped passenger terminal
and a single runway. On the north side of the runway were a series of
small bases belonging to NATO countries and the Afghan army. Civilians approaching from the city entered through the South Gate. The airport
was ringed by miles of fortifications—concrete blast walls, Hesco bags, concertina wire—with about eight public or unofficial entry points.

With a pair of scissors, he cut to shreds his cherished Green Beret
uniform and hat and patches. He put the remains in a garbage bag for his
father to take outside and bury deep in the trash.
That night thousands of Afghans converged on the terminal at the South
Gate. Monawari left his wife and children next to a wall for cover and
tried to get close enough to find someone who could bring them inside.
Four U.S. armored vehicles blocked the way, and Marines fired warning
shots. People were shouting and running back and forth based on rumors.
Some Afghans, mostly single men with no American connections, had gotten
inside the terminal and would eventually force their way, two with guns,
onto C-17s intended to transport U.S. personnel and matériel to Qatar. Monawari spent the night looking for some authority with a list of names
that included his. But there was no such authority. There was no list.
On that first night Monawari learned what everyone who dared to come to
the airport would have to find out for themselves during the next two
weeks: There was no system, no plan. They were on their own.

From the January 1958 issue: Afghanistan

Shortly before dawn, a report flew around that Talibs were arriving.
Afghan paramilitaries in civilian clothes suddenly disappeared. Monawari thought of running. Beyond the South Gate he saw a pickup with Taliban
gunmen sitting in the bed, their legs hanging over the sides. This first
sight of them in Kabul frightened him. He was their enemy, and they had
the upper hand.

After daybreak the entrance road swelled with new crowds trying to reach
the airport. Monawari and his family had spent nine hours outside the
terminal. They had exhausted their crackers and water, and the kids were
out of control. He decided to take the family home. “It is a big mess
right now,” he texted the Green Berets stateside.

At home he heard from a friend that Talibs would be searching houses
that night. He burned his military certificates and SIV documents. He
asked his mother if he could hide his Green Beret uniform, but she said
that their apartment was too small—it would be found. With a pair of scissors, he cut to shreds his cherished uniform and hat and unit
patches. He put the remains in a garbage bag for his father to take
outside and bury deep in the trash.

Around midnight on sunday, Sam Ayres, the former Ranger who’d sent the
letter about veterans to Biden-administration contacts, texted his
friend Alice Spence, whom he’d gone to college with. He was trying to
find a way to help Khan, whose case he’d heard about.

“My FTP was hanged last week,” Spence told him.

Mahjabin—the woman who, along with Hawa, was Spence’s closest friend
among the Afghans—had been killed in the bathroom of her in-laws’ house
a week before the fall of Kabul. It wasn’t clear whether Talibs had done
it, but Mahjabin’s picture had been circulating around their checkpoints outside the city.

“Oh Jesus,” Ayres wrote. “I’m so sorry.”

“She was a magnificent person. I loved her so much.” After a moment: “I refuse to let this happen to the rest of them.”

In those first hours and days after the fall of Kabul, thousands of
people in the U.S. and across the world began to live mentally in the
city and its airport. Most of them had a personal connection to
Afghanistan. More Americans cared about the country than the Biden administration had accounted for in its political calculations. Most of
these Americans were in their 30s or 40s—the generation that came of age
with the 9/11 wars, now reaching a calamitous end. Helping Afghans
escape would become a way to avoid succumbing to a sense of waste and
despair and helpless rage.

Veterans approached friends to offer or seek help for interpreters they
knew, and these informal networks grew to a dozen or 50 people on Signal
and WhatsApp, with smaller side groups connecting to military and
political contacts and refugee organizations. Members of Congress with
high profiles on the SIV issue received hundreds of texts on their
personal phones from complete strangers, some of them Americans looking
for help, others desperate Afghans reaching for any name they could
find. Jason Crow got a voicemail from a man who was barely audible, as
if he was hiding somewhere: “I’m sorry if I bother you, but as you know better than me that the situation getting worse and worse in
Afghanistan, especially for my people and my family. And this morning, they’ve killed one of the young boys.” Congressional offices became
24-hour operations centers.

Some groups—West Point alums, retired Special Forces operators, women’s-rights advocates—grew to several hundred and acquired names like Task Force Dunkirk and Task Force Pineapple. They spanned time zones and continents. Other groups consisted of three or four friends working
their contacts. Mary Beth Goodman, the official who leads the State Department’s global pandemic response, took two weeks off to spend every
hour on evacuations, except the two or three at night when she slept,
and even those hours were interrupted by phone calls, including one from
an Afghan man in a convoy bound for the airport, whispering that ISIS terrorists had just boarded the bus, before the line went dead.

Using digital devices, foreigners tried to navigate Afghans thousands of
miles away through the needle eyes of Kabul’s airport gates. This global effort emerged spontaneously to fill the gaping void left by the U.S. government.

View out the front windshield of a bus facing military aircraft on an
airfield, with the rear-view mirror showing the faces of people waiting
inside it
Afghans at Hamid Karzai International Airport prepare to be evacuated on
August 22, 2021. Some from their bus convoy will wait on the tarmac for
48 hours. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
In spite of three deployments, Sam Ayres had no close personal ties in Afghanistan. He wanted to help Afghans escape as a moral imperative, and
out of loyalty to Alice Spence. Spence was propelled by the memory of
her dead friend, whom she now had no time to grieve, and the distress
calls of friends like Hawa who were still alive.

Several hours before dawn on Wednesday, August 18, Hawa got a message
from Spence: She should be at the airport by sunrise. Spence instructed
Hawa not to bring a suitcase, to wear a full face covering, and to hide
her smartphone, keeping a simple Nokia in hand, in case she ran into
Taliban checkpoints. The smartphone would have everything she needed to communicate with Spence and others and for them to share locations, as
well as important documents—but it could also give her away.

Spence and her colleagues were trying to bring a group of 16 FTPs and 10 dependents—husbands and children—into the airport. The SIV applications submitted in July had gone nowhere, but at least they provided the
paperwork for identity packets to be sent to State Department inboxes,
set up after the fall of Kabul as a clearinghouse for potential
evacuees. The inboxes were soon overwhelmed, and the government asked
people to stop sending names. What mattered most, Spence discovered—and
this would be the key to all successful evacuation efforts—was having a contact inside the airport. “The people with the most power at that time
were low-ranking gate guards,” she told me. “They had more power than
any general in D.C., hands down.” Representative Tom Malinowski, a New
Jersey Democrat, put it this way: “This was a situation where knowing
the secretary of state and the national security adviser personally was
vastly less valuable than knowing a Marine major on the airfield.”

Hawa packed a small bag with a change of clothes and her passport. She
set out with her teenage sister for the North Gate, on the military side
of the airport. At the gate—a barrier of concertina wire between
sections of 16-foot blast walls—was a crush of human beings, including families with small children, all trying to push forward under the
blinding sun until they could speak to a soldier. On the outer perimeter
of security were Taliban guards, using whips, gun stocks, and bullets to intimidate the crowd. The middle layer consisted of a paramilitary force
from the Afghan intelligence agency, which was under the command of
overseas CIA agents via WhatsApp, and which was liberal with warning
shots. Inside the gate, and often outside, were American troops, who
sometimes used tear gas and flash-bangs for crowd control.

Spence put Hawa in charge of keeping track of the other 15 FTPs, who
arrived separately from around the city. “Can you please count how many
FTPs are there,” Spence texted. There was no answer for 20 minutes.
“Hawa I need your help.”

“They bring a lot of their families,” Hawa finally replied. There were
at least a dozen family members—parents, siblings—who had not been on
the original list and had to be counted one by one in the crowd.

Spence encouraged her: “Yes I know but you are soldier.” Keeping track
of the families while pushing toward the gate was like a mission—the
hardest Hawa had taken part in. She sent a head count and then asked if
she could call her two other sisters to join them. Spence told her to
hurry. It was eight in the morning and the group was 150 feet from the gate.

They waited all day. As they ran out of food and water, some of the FTPs
began to faint. When Talibs found military papers on one woman, they set
on her with fists and feet, leaving a swollen eye and a large purple
bruise on her cheek. A round of gunfire nearly struck the baby of one of
the women, who decided to go home. Hawa’s teenage sister cried that she wanted to go home too. “If the Taliban come to our house you won’t be
able to go to school,” Hawa told her; they had no future here.

One FTP reached the gate and showed an American guard a picture on her
phone of an “emergency visa” that read: “Present this visa to security checkpoints and Consular Officers to access flights departing for the
United States.” It was a PDF that the State Department had created and emailed to SIV applicants. Now everyone in Kabul seemed to have a copy.
The guard turned her away.

Spence was three degrees removed from a Defense Department civilian at
the airport. At sunset she sent his photo to Hawa and told her to look
for him. Hours went by. Then, after midnight, he emerged from the gate—a middle-aged American in civilian clothes, with salt-and-pepper hair and
a black mustache. The women shouted, “FTPs! FTPs!”

Two-thirds of the group made it inside, including Hawa and her sister.
But when the crowd saw so many women getting through, it grew angry and
blocked the others, including the ones with small children farther back.

It was 2:30 a.m. on August 19. The ordeal had lasted almost 24 hours.
“Came in very hard,” Hawa reported to Spence.

They had come in hard, and the others would have to be brought in later.
But the operation had been a success. Spence would try to repeat it for
other military women in the coming week and meet nothing but failure
after failure.

VI.
THE DAMNED AND THE SAVED
“By and large, what we have found is that people have been able to get
to the airport,” Jake Sullivan told the White House press corps a few
hours before Hawa left her house. “In fact, very large numbers of people
have been able to get to the airport and present themselves.” Sullivan acknowledged that the Afghan government had fallen in spite of the Biden administration’s decision to show support by refusing calls for early evacuations. He blamed the decision on bad advice from the Afghan
government. “What you can do is plan for all contingencies,” he said.
“We did that.”

Biden also pointed a finger at the Afghans. In a televised speech the
day after Kabul fell, he blamed the lack of early evacuations on the
Ghani government and SIVs who “did not want to leave earlier.” He blamed Afghan troops for failing to defend their country, even though the
monthly toll of those killed in action reached its highest level in
years after his withdrawal announcement. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will
to fight for that future.” His words, spoken at the very moment when
Afghans were trying to escape with their lives, were chilling.

Biden had revised the deadline for the troop withdrawal to August 31,
and he imposed the same deadline on the evacuation. Now the
administration acted with the urgency that it had failed to show since
April. A total of 5,000 troops were sent to Kabul, along with two dozen
State Department consular officers. The U.S. government’s priority was
to evacuate American citizens and green-card holders first, then SIVs
and other “at-risk Afghans.” But the government, having failed to plan
for an evacuation on this scale, didn’t know who those Afghans were,
where to find them, or how to get them into the airport.

Events were moving so fast that a paratrooper I talked with who arrived
the weekend Kabul fell expected to go straight into a firefight with
Talibs, while a Marine who landed two or three days later considered the Taliban “an adjacent friendly unit.” The paratrooper soon realized that
the most important tool of the mission was his phone. Texts poured in
from friends back home, all asking for help getting Afghans they knew
into the airport. In the first few days the paratrooper thought that a prioritized system of entry for each category of evacuees would soon be
in place at assigned gates. He heard of plans to create safe areas
around Kabul where U.S. forces could collect people and ferry them to
the airport. But such a system was never created. With each day the
chaos at the gates only grew. He learned details of the madness on the
other side of the wall from people thousands of miles away who were in minute-by-minute contact with Afghans trying to get in.

“It’s an absolute gut wrenching shit show,” the paratrooper texted his friend Sam Ayres. Ayres connected the paratrooper with Julie Kornfeld,
who sought information for Khan and her other clients about flights,
paperwork, and gates. But there was no consistent information to give. Everything depended on an Afghan getting to a gate, a guard being in the
right place at the right time, the gate staying open long enough for the
Afghan to be pulled through. And it never worked the same way twice.

The paratrooper’s official job was to get U.S. matériel and personnel
out of Afghanistan. He and other troops spent every spare waking
hour—and they barely slept—fielding texts and working on what they
called “recoveries.” To help them identify certain Afghans in the mob,
the troops asked for photos, or identifying garments such as red
scarves, or call-and-response passwords: “Detroit”–“Red Wings”; “What do

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