The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

30 MARCH 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A scene of the chaos around the HKIA gates. Taliban can be seen in white on top of the wall. JAMESDEHART KABUL, AFGHANISTAN The Apocalyptic Airport Scene James P. DeHart In Kabul, our challenge was getting the people we wanted into the airport. The scenes at the gates were apocalyptic. Getting to the front of the crowd, close enough to grab the attention of our Marines, took a full day of shoving through a mosh pit of roaming Taliban while gunfire rang overhead. The lucky few who made it arrived sunburned, bleeding, often in tears. Random young men who got inside were often tossed right back out. Our Marines hadn’t signed up for this sort of crowd control, but they adjusted to the task, as Marines always do. A few meters back, our consular officers conducted a more thorough screening of the new arrivals and decided who could proceed to the C-17s. I was in awe of their stamina and their courage, working side by side with the Marines in this hellscape with so little between them and the suicide bombers we all knew might come soon. There wasn’t much shelter from the sun, just whatever garbage people could string between the concrete barriers. Never had I seen so much plastic: water bottles by the millions, trampled and smooshed into one gigantic carpet. The Marines had a whiteboard on which they scribbled the latest numbers at the airport. Our population was swelling uncontrollably. So we pushed hard for every seat on every out- bound flight to be filled. I didn’t care who got on which plane, where they flew or how they landed. Those were other people’s problems. Let them sort it out elsewhere. Calls and emails poured in. People didn’t understand why we couldn’t provide simple directions to at-risk Afghans on where to enter the airport. They couldn’t imagine what the gates were like—how dangerous it was for the people there and how cata- strophic it would be for all of us if a gate was overrun. We couldn’t bring in thousands of our citizens or embassy employees through the mobs, so we came up with alternatives. We organized careful movements to lesser-known gates and made sure we knew exactly who was showing up when. We kept them out of sight of the crowds and avoided creating any new mosh pits. Our Afghan employees did some impressive self-organizing and helped us help them. Through these orderly operations, we evacuated many thousands. CHADBLEVINS/FSJ