[TV static drones]
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[bright tone]
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[dramatic music]
- We understand! Sit down!
[gunfire]
Sit down! - Sit down!
[people screaming]
♪ ♪
- We just signed an agreement
to bring our people back home.
We want to bring our people back home.
- We're ending America's longest war.
I will not send another generation of Americans
to war in Afghanistan.
♪ ♪
[gun cocking]
[indistinct chatter]
- I don't think we understood the scale
and scope of what the evacuation
would eventually turn into.
[indistinct chatter]
- Get back!
- They kind of made it sound like,
"Oh, it's gonna to be quick and simple.
We're gonna be in and out."
But that didn't happen here.
- Get up!
[child crying]
- It was a humanitarian catastrophe.
♪ ♪
[horn honks]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[engine revving]
- That was a terrifying time, and it was a full chaos.
[people clamoring]
Everyone was moving toward the airport
to get out of Afghanistan.
♪ ♪
We fear that a war may start.
We were all afraid.
It was about our families, about loved ones.
It was about the city that I was born in, I was raised in.
♪ ♪
- Yo, let's fucking go!
- I'm the commanding officer
for 1st battalion, 8th Marines.
Around August 12th of 2021,
that bell rang in the middle of the night
and things got quick very fast.
And by the 13th, we were
standing in Afghanistan.
- All right, you boys ready? - Yeah.
- Gonna head out.
- We went into Afghanistan
just with what was on our backs.
Came off the plane and immediately started working.
I only had 150 people
and didn't have much of the equipment that I needed
in those first several days.
- Here you go.
- We knew we were there to begin the mission,
which was evacuate the at-risk Afghans,
you know, the U.S. citizens.
We kind of thought that it would be
a relatively orderly process
because security would be maintained
at least around Kabul.
We didn't think this was gonna turn into what it did.
♪ ♪
Kabul airport is kind of in a bowl.
It's surrounded by mountainous terrain
on the northern side
that kind of wraps around to the west.
- It's just a large airfield.
It's a strategic location where
lots of supplies and troops
were brought in and out of country.
You know, it was a military and civilian airport
all at the same time.
The CIA, the Afghans,
and certainly some of our coalition partners
had large portions of that base.
There was kind of an outer perimeter wall.
Everyone kind of had their piece of that large pie,
if you will.
♪ ♪
So, you know, the first two days,
everyone's manning their positions.
Security's stable.
Just business as usual.
♪ ♪
So planes were taking people out
but not really Afghan civilians
that I saw at this point.
♪ ♪
- Planes that were coming in and out
were just taking the high-level Afghans,
diplomats out of our embassy.
You know, the civilian evacuation hadn't begun yet,
so we were getting out
the VIPs first.
♪ ♪
- Two days after we had gotten there--
you know, got there on the 13th,
and the 15th, all hell broke loose.
- On the 15th is when the Taliban entered Kabul.
♪ ♪
- [sighs]
- [whispering indistinctly]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[device clicks]
♪ ♪
- The first day I got to Kabul,
we were not expecting that Kabul
will fall down so quickly.
♪ ♪
[people speaking an Afghan language]
[siren wailing]
[horns honking]
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- I come to the joint operations center
where our general is.
That's when I learned that the government had collapsed,
the Afghan president was gone,
and the diplomatic mission
in Afghanistan was closed.
And we look up at the 10 or 20 TV screens,
and all it showed was the civilian airport,
the southern portion of the base,
and thousands of people just running.
And all I could do was drop the meal that I had picked up,
put down the bottle of water, put my kit back on,
lock and load my rifle, look at a couple people
and say, "You, with me," and we just ran,
and the mass sea of humanity who wanted to evacuate
was right there on our doorstep.
[people shouting]
♪ ♪
- A lot of families
were carrying their travel bags
with theirselves and were going
toward the airport.
[gunfire]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[gunfire]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[gunfire]
[gunshot]
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
[gunfire]
- The initial push was probably about 5,000 people.
- Civilians were already starting to come.
They were starting to come and basically knock on the door
and say, "I need to get out."
And they would say, you know, "I have papers.
"My husband was an interpreter and served with you guys.
I need to get out."
Women crying, showing up with all their kids
and extended family.
We weren't really open for evacuation operations just yet.
You know, we didn't have everyone there just yet.
♪ ♪
We have a large portion of civilians
that have finally gotten through the gate.
The base is completely breached.
The airfield's completely overrun.
Those aircraft to them meant freedom.
♪ ♪
They just planted right there to block everything,
you know, basically to say, "You will take me
"in that thing right there,
and I'm not moving until you do it."
[people yelling]
And at this point, we've rousted
the 150 marines that I have to open up the airfield.
We had planes, you know, flying in the air,
just loitering.
They could not land.
Anyone standing on that airfield,
a plane can't land and a plane can't take off.
So there's no way in or out right now.
♪ ♪
- We tried to push them back and keep them off
of the runway so we could continue to land
our additional forces, continue to land supplies.
'Cause that was our lifeline.
If we lost that airfield, I have no doubt
we would have all died.
♪ ♪
- So from midnight to about 5:00 in the morning,
we pushed them back.
And to try to put this into words,
that fight that night,
it was hand-to-hand.
It was using rifles as impact weapons.
Wasn't pleasant for them. It wasn't pleasant for us.
♪ ♪
- On, I guess, early morning on the 16th,
some Taliban infiltrators in the crowd,
and they started to engage the marines
that were on the airfield.
That's when things started to get...
a little crazy.
- Right about sunup, this Taliban fighter appeared,
firing his rifle in the air,
and one of our marines killed him.
One clean shot took his life.
And that's when I fired my weapon
and shot the second one in the chest.
We'd been fighting these people for 20 years.
So he was a target, he was a threat, and he had to go.
[indistinct chatter]
- There's this firefight that's happening
right in front of us now
while, you know, the numbers only continue to grow.
[indistinct chatter]
Now the number, I would say, is between 8,000 and 10,000.
♪ ♪
We had opened the airfield, so that was a huge win.
♪ ♪
- On the 16th of August when I woke up,
all I heard was that this family has left,
that family has left.
And there was a rumor that around 900 people
were evacuated from Afghanistan,
and people of different categories
could leave Afghanistan on that night.
♪ ♪
[horns honking]
♪ ♪
- It was very dark times we spent in Afghanistan
when Taliban took over.
Before Taliban took over, we have a simple life--
not perfect.
It was not perfect, but it was good.
[speaking an Afghan language]
- We are the main victims, like, women.
And I fear that the changes that Afghan women brought
to the Afghanistan--
like, they have fought and fought for years
for the ability to get educated,
for the ability to work, and on that day,
I felt like all their efforts will be ruined in one day.
♪ ♪
- The women were thinking of killing, brutality,
lashes, forced marriages.
That is what
all the women had in mind,
specifically the women
who were working,
because they knew what the reality was,
so that was a horror, insecurity,
uncertainty, and brutality.
♪ ♪
[people speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
[horn blaring]
[gunshots]
[people clamoring]
[gunfire]
- Our mission was to not let anyone to leave the country.
[siren wailing]
[horns honking]
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
[gunfire, people screaming]
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- Boy, that whole base was porous.
It really was.
There were a lot of weak points.
♪ ♪
We were certainly having breaches in security
all over the base, people just jumping the walls
and then trying to get in.
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
- People started coming over fences,
coming through the airport.
[indistinct chatter]
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
[gunfire]
♪ ♪
[gunfire]
[cell phone ringing]
[indistinct chatter]
- It's 10:00. I look over to my left.
Thousands just start pouring through another hole
in the wall that we didn't even know--
we didn't know that portion of the base.
♪ ♪
I think the estimate was 24,000 Afghans
inside the airport
with untold numbers outside the airport.
♪ ♪
So now we have to split the already small force
that we have to run back across the airfield,
go get those people, corral them,
and just start pushing them back for several hours.
- The runway was the mission.
Keep the runway open at all costs.
[gunfire, people screaming]
[plane engine roaring]
♪ ♪
[gunshots]
[gunfire]
- Back up!
Back up! Back up! Back up!
Back up! - Back the fuck up!
[gunfire]
- That was the first moment
that I thought I was going to die.
The threat of a suicide bomber
or a lone wolf with a weapon--
I mean, none of these people were searched.
I don't know what they had on them.
Could have easily taken all of us out in an instant.
[gunfire]
♪ ♪
- We've got thousands of people panicked.
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- So to clear a path for the aircraft,
we had Apaches
essentially fly as low as they possibly could
to physically push the people out of the way.
♪ ♪
- Then a C-17 comes in,
'cause the airfield's open.
♪ ♪
There's just mass hysteria.
You could see in their eyes.
They just immediately overran us.
They just pushed us aside, ran over marines,
punching, clawing, screaming.
We shut the airfield down again.
[people yelling]
♪ ♪
- That's the beacon of hope and freedom to them.
They think they need to get on that to get out.
♪ ♪
And so now it's the long kilometer-and-a-half run back,
you know, as we're chasing everybody.
♪ ♪
My position at that point was,
get the people in front of me back.
And it was just a straight brawl.
♪ ♪
You know, I'm still getting radio calls now
from the operations center, saying,
"Hey, the airfield is not open anymore.
You need to get these people off."
I'm like, "I got it. We need to get the people off."
♪ ♪
The people are just all around it,
and I get up to where I know the pilot
would be able to see me if he looked over.
And he finally looked over like this,
and he makes eye contact with me, and I just--
I pointed at him, and I said, "You need to go now,"
and he very slowly started moving that C-17.
♪ ♪
- The people kind of climbed on the airplane.
Maybe they thought that was their way to get out
of Afghanistan was to ride on the outside
of a C-17 somewhere.
♪ ♪
- I see the C-17 gaining speed.
And as, you know, we're kind of at each other's throats--
it's one of this where we kind of stop and watch
as the C-17 captures the attention of the entire crowd
and everything just goes silent.
♪ ♪
[plane engine roaring]
- Oh!
- [speaking an Afghan language]
- That kind of deflated the entire situation.
C-17 was finally gone.
Those people had fallen.
Maybe some of the people on the ground there realized,
"Okay, there's got to be another way,
'cause they're not letting us out right now."
[indistinct chatter]
So now we're getting to the end of--
really, it would have been a day and a half
at this point,
and more people started to come.
The sun's starting to go down.
We've lost the airfield several more times.
For every commander,
you never want to tell your men you don't know what to do.
In that moment, I had no idea what to do.
[people clamoring]
I get a call on the radio.
They call and tell me that we're gonna partner
with an Afghan special forces unit
who's gonna come help us.
I'm thinking, "This is great.
"Okay, this is a host nation force
"that knows this culture, speaks this language.
They're gonna help out."
Really, at this point, I just need extra people.
I don't care who it is.
♪ ♪
The Afghan unit that was there,
the way they got the people off
to get the point was just running everyone over
and shooting them.
- They killed them.
- I watched from afar.
It was dark at this point,
so I could only see who was getting run over and shot
by a vehicle headlight.
That was a horrific, horrific scene.
[indistinct chatter]
[gunfire]
- There was people getting executed on the airfield,
and it was horrible to see that happen.
But it cleared out the airfield.
- And that Afghan unit,
their arrival's what quelled the airfield.
I don't know what would have happened on the airfield
if they wouldn't have come.
- That night and that next morning,
there were no more large crowds.
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[indistinct chatter]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- I was the acting minister for women's affairs.
I was told that,
"If you do not leave
"in the coming three days,
you will be assassinated."
And that is when I decided to leave the country.
♪ ♪
- We're getting into the 17th.
The airfield's open.
More marines are starting to come in now.
We start establishing security at some of the outer gates
where we're gonna start processing operations,
i.e., pull in people
through these gates
and move them to the terminal
to process to then
put them on planes,
you know, to formally start the evacuation.
♪ ♪
And we were gonna have three processing points:
North Gate and East Gate,
and then Abbey Gate was the other one.
And there were many, many more people
trying to come through than we thought.
♪ ♪
- We started getting more forces in off the planes.
The sea of humans just started to appear outside the gates.
The other gates hadn't got bad yet.
[people shouting]
♪ ♪
- Push back. Push back.
Push back! You need to back up!
You need to stop asking the marines,
you need to back up,
and you need to get in order!
This is not going to work!
- Once we got to those gates,
we couldn't start accepting people in yet
because we didn't have the tactics available
to be able to work the gates.
We had to get people in place.
We had to get depth in place to protect the gate.
♪ ♪
We were checking on our positions,
dug in, in case we took fire from the Taliban again.
- It's crazy, yo.
- We're going out. - Good.
- Our higher echelons of command,
our generals and our admirals,
were interacting with the Taliban leadership
at that point.
They were setting conditions for us to get out on time.
"31st, you're out of here."
We're getting all sorts of requests coming down,
and this one's coming from the top.
I'm being told, "Hey, we're working with the Taliban now."
Working with the Taliban?
I just killed a bunch of Taliban.
What are you talking about?
- A deal with the Taliban had been struck.
So we had this weird quasi-peace with these guys.
- They're doing outer security.
We're doing inner security, holding the gate.
Taliban are there with the people.
The dynamic was changing right before our eyes.
- It blew my mind, you know.
They told us, you know,
they're gonna help us
with crowd control,
and we're like,
"What do you mean?
What do you mean we're working with the Taliban?"
Like, I couldn't believe it.
- I'll never forget standing shoulder to shoulder
with the Taliban
and the deep-seated feeling of hatred
I had as I looked at him in his eyes
and the tingly feeling going up and down my spine
and the instinct to want to fight.
You could tell it was in them as well.
They didn't look at us with any favor in their eyes.
[indistinct chatter]
♪ ♪
[indistinct chatter]
- My function was that of the American ambassador
to Afghanistan.
After I got to the airport, we were able to contemplate
the crowds outside now
and how to deal with them
and how to get those that we want to evacuate
out of the country, how to make that happen.
♪ ♪
- So the marines are just trying to figure out security,
and when I say that, I mean, like,
it's 30 marines there against 3,000 people pushing.
♪ ♪
- What we didn't anticipate
was the sheer desperation and fear
and willingness of the people
to put themselves
at tremendous risk
to get themselves
and their families
out of Afghanistan.
[people clamoring]
- What the fuck are we doing?
- Okay, number one!
- Let's go! Push back!
Push back! - Push back!
- It was a fight every minute of every single day.
'Cause if they broke through the gate
and got onto the airfield, like, we fail our mission.
- Back up! Back up!
Back the fuck up!
[gunfire]
- Get back!
Back up!
[people shouting]
- Let's go, let's go.
- Once we established the gates,
that's when the grind really began.
We had to figure out how to work these gates.
How can we open the gate,
let a few people in to get screened and processed,
and then shut the gate without losing it,
without the flood coming?
- Families stick together! Families stick together!
Back up! [grunts]
- [screaming]
♪ ♪
- Back the fuck up.
- [crying]
- Come on, get up. Come on, get up.
- So when we started working the gates,
that's when the human disaster
of this entire operation started.
When you have miles of people
shoulder to shoulder, on top of each other,
they're just sitting there waiting to get their turn
to go through the gate.
[people clamoring]
- The situation on the ground is, like, something
like I've never experienced before
in any of my deployments.
And, you know, we just did the best
that we possibly could.
[gunshots]
[people clamoring]
- Daily life on those gates wasn't clean.
It was dirty.
It was stress-filled.
- Get him up.
[people yelling]
Get up!
♪ ♪
No, get back! Get back!
Get back! Get back!
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
[indistinct chatter]
- When we went to the airport, we came to Abbey Gate.
Taliban were standing there.
We were afraid of being targeted.
We came down, there was no electricity,
so it was good because it was dark.
No one could see us.
[indistinct chatter]
It was so crowded that you would say
there is no oxygen in the air.
[indistinct chatter]
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
[gunfire]
[people screaming]
- Hey!
Hey! Hey!
- Go! Get back! Go! Go!
Get back! Get back!
You need to go that way!
[gunfire]
[people clamoring]
- We were using nonlethal munitions,
riot control weapons.
- Get back!
- We were aggressive.
We took a very aggressive stance with our security.
- Get back! Go!
- CS gas.
- Rounds?
[people clamoring]
- Rubber bullets fired from shotguns.
[people speaking an Afghan language]
- Hey, hey!
We need flash-bangs. We need nonlethal grenades.
- Money.
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
[gunshots]
[gunfire]
[gunshots]
- [screaming in an Afghan language]
[gunfire]
♪ ♪
- I went to the airport,
and it was not sure whether you will be able
to get to the gate or not.
So we returned.
But that scene will
always remain in my mind.
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
- If you have a passport, you got to go that way.
If you have a passport, go that way.
[people screaming]
- No, wait. - Get up! Get back!
- Get back. Get back.
- You know, there was some letter
that the Department of State
was supposed to send out to people.
But we quickly realized that everyone
was just AirDropping that letter
or screenshotting a picture of that letter
and sending it to everyone,
'cause it didn't have, like, specific people's names on it.
[indistinct chatter]
- And you got people, and some of them are,
you know, yelling at us, "Help me. I have this paper.
I have this letter from the embassy."
Some of them are showing us ID but it's not the right ID.
Some of them are showing us ID that's right,
and we help them, like, "Come on.
Jump over."
But these other ones, who we have to make leave
because, you know, they don't have that requirement,
you know, what do we do?
We got to force them over that wall.
[people clamoring]
- [shrieking]
♪ ♪
- We've got women, children
pleading, crying, screaming,
"Please mister, you know, the Taliban will kill me."
- The stuff they went through,
like trying to get through those gates,
like, I can't imagine how they felt
on the other side of the gate.
You're dealing with people who,
you know, blood all over them.
They could have possibly, like, been shot or hurt,
or they've been standing out there for days
and they have no water, they have no food,
and they're-- you know, they're--
They're going on themselves,
like, there 'cause there's nowhere for them to go.
♪ ♪
- When you go to a gate, the heat and the smell
would just hit you.
- Every gate kind of smelled bad, but Abbey Gate,
it was definitely the worst.
And they're standing in--
I think it was a sewage canal, you know?
They're standing in shit and piss, you know?
And that's the stuff that if we did pull them in,
you know, that's what we pulled them out of, you know?
If we threw them out, that's what we threw them into.
♪ ♪
- It's every man for himself right now,
just trying to save themselves.
♪ ♪
- Seeing people come in, like, just, you know,
they didn't make it, they're dead, and,
you know, we dealt with everything.
♪ ♪
You know, children being pushed around, mushed
'cause they're just caught in the crowd.
♪ ♪
They come through us injured, hurt, dying, bleeding.
♪ ♪
- Some people had been there three, four, five days
as the operation continued, and yet they stayed there.
Women were having their babies right in front of us.
Families just handing their babies over,
you know, and giving up and walking--
you know, trying to walk away, trying to move back,
you know, "Just save this."
♪ ♪
- That was one instance of a hundred
of children getting passed over.
- And it's sad seeing these newborns, these kids just--
some of these women carrying their dead babies
because they died in their arms, you know,
with them trying to come through the gate.
And, you know, like,
they kind of hand us their baby,
and it's like, "What do you want me to do with this?"
You know, it became normal for us,
and that's kind of sad to say.
You know, some of the girls on my team, you know, they--
Like, you know, I highly doubt they would ever forget that.
- The orphans that would come through
whose parents died out in the crowd--
we had numerous men and women behind the gates
in the search tents just caring for infants,
caring for toddlers
that their parents would never make it through the gate.
♪ ♪
- Some of them had been dislocated
from their families.
They didn't know where their parents were
'cause their parents didn't make it through, you know?
♪ ♪
- [speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- The next few days, we started to get
the people through the gates.
- Go this way, please.
♪ ♪
- Let's go. You're good. You're good. You got it.
- Keep going this way, please.
- Let's go, come on, this way.
Let's go. You're good.
You're good. You got it. Let's go.
- So we had Department of State consulates
that were verifying papers for everybody that was
coming through at the start,
where we would try to get people in,
screen them, get them through, get them to the terminal
so they could fly out.
- Yo, ready?
- The gate would open up only a few feet
to allow people through.
- This way, please. [baby cries]
You're okay.
Thank you.
- Because I had the paper and the emails,
a soldier called.
He said, "Okay, you can come."
He said, "You are in safe hands."
♪ ♪
We made it.
♪ ♪
[plane engine roaring]
[indistinct chatter]
♪ ♪
- It was a very sad situation.
They're leaving their country, you know, with nothing.
I definitely empathized with them,
'cause I could never imagine having to, you know,
leave my entire life, everything that I've worked
so hard for, leave it behind and...
try to hope and freakin' pray that I get on a plane
to get out of the country.
♪ ♪
- The circumstances that I left,
it was a matter of life and death.
You leave a place where you never think you'll leave.
But you leave it because you can't live.
♪ ♪
- You've got the tracker.
You're in the operations center.
We're documenting how many citizens that we've helped.
It's a hundred-something thousand.
And threat reporting is starting
to increase at this point too.
We know that one of these gates is being targeted.
Suicide bomber, something.
Something's gonna happen.
[people shouting]
- ISIS threat reporting had become greater and greater
in volume, and so everybody is really on a trigger edge.
- Push down. - Fuck, man.
- Holy shit.
- North Gate and East Gate
were along roads directly exposed
to the worst thing that could have happened.
That was a vehicle,
improvised explosive device, you know,
where you can just pack so much explosive
into those things.
[gunshots]
- Get on line over here.
[people shouting]
- Come on, let's go.
Over there, let's fucking go.
- Which car is it?
This is bad. This is very bad.
- Get down.
- Get down! Get down!
- Get down! - You all get down!
Get down!
- I don't fucking like that truck.
- Huh? - I don't like how these trucks
are moving so slow.
♪ ♪
- We took stronger measures at North Gate and East Gate
that day, on the 26th,
because the reporting had started to increase.
♪ ♪
- I personally no longer felt comfortable,
so we kind of made the decision to stop bringing people in
through those gates.
- The North and the East Gate
stopped processing individuals.
I think more people started to inadvertently flow
to the Abbey Gate because they still realized
that that was open.
[people shouting]
♪ ♪
- Everybody had a backpack on them,
so it's very difficult, given a threat like that,
because everybody is a threat at that point.
[indistinct chatter]
- [speaking an Afghan language]
[people clamoring]
- They're saying there may be a potential IED.
A little while goes on and they clear us.
They're like, "Hey, we're gonna keep pushing people through."
And we're like, "What the fuck?"
We backed up a little bit, not much, you know,
because, you know, they're still sending people through.
I'm uncomfortable the whole time.
♪ ♪
[people clamoring]
♪ ♪
[explosion booms]
♪ ♪
- It was carnage,
something like I had never seen before.
- You see marines that are torn up.
You know, you see multiple people doing this,
and you know they're working on them.
They're doing the gauze.
♪ ♪
- I was within the blast zone of the IED.
I saw the flash and felt the heat.
It knocked me down,
and I received a piece of shrapnel in my right side.
♪ ♪
A lot of the marines and sailors
that were directly in front of me
were my marines and sailors that were killed.
♪ ♪
In the immediate aftermath,
there was gunfire that erupted.
- I heard rounds going off.
That was some of the marines on the gate firing out,
because an IED never comes alone.
That comes with a ground attack.
That comes with a sniper attack.
There's always something coming with it.
You harden your position. You make yourself hard to kill.
[people speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
- The gates are closed.
We're no longer taking any more people in.
So the people that are on the base that we've processed in,
our job then becomes them,
to get them on a plane to get them out.
[indistinct chatter]
- Hello, hello.
- Thanks for your help, man.
- Thank you for being cooperative.
- Thank you. - Thank you. Thank you.
That's it, finito.
We did it.
- We're rapidly approaching 31 August.
The chaos was kind of really over.
Certainly you got the feeling we weren't welcome anymore.
It was time to get out,
you know, as the Taliban were on the doorstep saying,
"31st, you're out of here."
The destruction plan went into full effect
those last couple days.
- We were destroying any sensitive equipment,
trying to render all the military equipment
unusable for the Taliban.
♪ ♪
- It kind of turned into a free-for-all a little bit,
the smashing out windows,
breaking vehicles, breaking furniture.
♪ ♪
- Hey!
[glass shatters]
♪ ♪
- We're getting ready to get on the flight,
and it's just so surreal.
I don't know why I'm crying.
♪ ♪
And I'm just hoping, like,
"Man, please let us, like, just get out of here."
And, you know, we did, and once that plane took off,
I'm just like, "Oh, my God, it's over."
It was the best feeling.
It was great.
♪ ♪
- It was the last day.
You know, my unit was the last
marine security unit in Afghanistan.
This is an end of an era, and in my opinion, I think,
you know, we did a lot of good for a lot of people
and certainly brought a lot of things to that country.
But to have the Taliban take it over again, that's--
that's always gonna be hard, always.
We were packed in just like evacuees,
so it wasn't very comfortable.
But we just tried to not let your mind wander too much.
So you clean your weapon.
Get back and reflect on what we had just done.
♪ ♪
- My fellow Americans,
the war in Afghanistan is now over.
The extraordinary success of this mission
was due to the incredible skill, bravery,
and selfless courage of the United States military
and our diplomats and intelligence professionals.
- 20 years.
It's obviously not a success.
But we have to live with what we were not able to get done.
♪ ♪
The plan had been that I would be on the last flight out.
We took off around midnight.
I was pretty quiet and pretty somber.
I was very sad.
Big loss.
♪ ♪
[people shouting]
♪ ♪
[gunfire]
[fireworks popping]
[people shouting]
[gunfire]
- I saw a very, very brutal war.
Thousands of people were killed.
As an Afghan, it was a very proud moment for me.
And I knew that my friends
will not need to conduct a suicide attack.
♪ ♪
[people speaking an Afghan language]
♪ ♪
[indistinct PA announcements]
♪ ♪
- There were many people who were at high risk.
They are still in Afghanistan.
I know many examples, and they are still stuck.
♪ ♪
So the situation is still disastrous.
♪ ♪
- Life in Afghanistan has changed
a lot of things for women.
It's a very terrible feeling
when you don't know about your future.
You don't have the slightest clue
what my next year
or what my next day in Afghanistan will be.
The only option that we have is to be strong
and to accept what will the future bring for us.
♪ ♪
[bright tone]