The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

36 MARCH 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Exhausted Department of State personnel and U.S. Marines begin their ride home via Kuwait City on a C-17 on Aug. 30, 2021. The last flag standing. The United States was the last coalition partner to leave the Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021. ARLEENGRACER.GENUINO thanked me, later—in the shock of the moment, they hadn’t thought to reassure loved ones. A senior military officer addressed his team at the command center; his words gave me strength. “This is a tragedy,” he said, and paused. “We do need to mourn, and that time will come. But how we honor them right now is by carrying out our mission.” Two hours after the bombing, flight operations resumed. We went back to work. Jean Akers is the consular section chief in Montreal. She has previ- ously served overseas in Kabul, Phnom Penh and Curacao, and in Washington, D.C., in the Bureau of Consular Affairs Executive Office, at the Foreign Service Institute, in Consular Affairs’ 1CA and as a career development and assignments officer in the Bureau of Global Talent Management. The Last Consular Officers at the Gate Arleen Grace R. Genuino Kabul. Time’s up. After arriving at post end of July began a rapid succession of deadlines that passed, and all of us at the embassy had to quickly shift and move on from one to the next. Overlap with my predecessor ended. Time’s up. About four days after that, we were in the midst of hurried final destruction sessions, shredding or destroying anything with contacts or our personal names or the embassy printed on it (yes, it felt just like that opening scene of Embassy Saigon in “Argo”). Time’s up. A day and a half later, we boarded helicopters fully armored, saw the embassy for the last time and headed for Hamid Karzai International Airport. Time’s up again. Days took on a strange routine as we trudged all over that garbage-strewn airport. The security situation was tenuous those first days at HKIA. Afghans breaching the airport’s security perim- eters prompted our tense sheltering in place. Despite those moments, many of us were determined to stay until our embassy’s locally employed staff and their families could depart, and passed up leadership’s offers to evacuate further to safety. Thank God for our military! With security improved, dozens of us began 12-hour day and night shifts to screen Afghans desperately trying to evacuate at HKIA’s entry points. Everyone dusted off their consular titles. Consular reinforcements also arrived from other posts and from ARLEENGRACER.GENUINO Washington, D.C. I split my time on shift between screening Afghans and working on protection issues. We got strangely used to hearing and seeing tracer fire light up the night sky. The suicide attack at Abbey Gate on Aug. 26 that claimed so many U.S. and Afghan lives reminded us how real the danger