Last exit from Afghanistan
At Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate, one company of Marines made life-and-death decisions about who could evacuate, said Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times. Then a suicide bomber struck.
THE MARINES AT Abbey Gate were racing against time. The crowd at the gate didn’t know it, but the Marines had been told to close it at 6 p.m.
That left just 30 minutes for Capt. Geoff Ball, 33, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines’ Ghost Company, to pluck out a few more people with that elusive combination of affiliation and luck that would get them onto a plane out of Afghanistan. Just 30 more minutes for Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, to grab another child out of the sewage canal where hundreds jostled. Just 30 minutes for Capt. Andres Rodriguez, 31, to scan the crowd for men who fit the descriptions in dozens of text messages from people in the United States trying to save their interpreters.
The plan for the final “retrograde” of the American war in Afghanistan was clear: On Aug. 26, the British troops stationed at the nearby Baron Hotel would fall back. A few hours later, the 82nd Airborne would take up the Marines’ forward positions, allowing Ghost Company to fold into the terminal. And, finally, the 82nd Airborne would fall back to the airport, to waiting planes, ending America’s longest war.
The Afghans, who had been on their feet for hours, were passing out in the heat from dehydration. They had been coming by bus, car, and foot for 10 straight days, assembling near the jersey barriers, or standing knee-deep in the foul-smelling canal near Abbey Gate, a main entryway to the airport.
Lopez saw a little girl getting crushed and plunged into the mass of people to get her. About 5:45 p.m., Ghost Company’s Maxton “Doc” Soviak, a 22-year-old Navy corpsman, got a call that someone had fainted next to the jersey barrier; he and another medic went to help.
As it turned out, the Marines at Abbey Gate didn’t have 30 minutes left; they had 18. A suicide bomber detonated at 5:48 p.m.
CAPT. GEOFF BALL, call sign “Ghost Six,” joined the Marine Corps because, he says, “it didn’t feel right having other guys go out and fight, while earlier, when people surged onto an American warplane’s wings and fell from the sky after it took off. The tarmac in the middle of the night was “intense, but controlled,”
Ball recalled in an interview with The New York Times at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where Ghost Company and 2/1 are based. There was rifle fire just outside the airport, and tracers and flares were going up. This was the first time in Afghanistan for Ball, and he would not see the country beyond the airport.
The next day, Ghost Company received orders to open Abbey Gate. The Marines hadn’t brought any transportation to get around the airport complex, so they hot-wired a blue bus nearby. They called it Big Blue. They also took a motorized baggage cart and called it Casper, because...Ghost Company. Altogether, Ghost Company commandeered 10 vehicles to use at the airport.
Arriving at Abbey Gate around midday, the Marines saw thousands of desperate people pressed together. Many had been there for days, under the stern watch of Taliban fighters standing on cars, rifles in their arms. People were yelling and holding up whatever documentation they thought would help get them through: yellowed letters of appreciation from an Army colonel in Kandahar, completion certificates for courses taken with American troops.
But before the Marines could start looking at any of this documentation, they had to impose some kind of order. That meant working with British forces and other troops to clear a path from Abbey Gate all the way to the Baron Hotel, where the Afghans were backed up. “It was layers—civilians, then Marines, then another layer of civilians, then Marines,” Ball said. “And we’re just pushing each other; it’s like we don’t know what to do.”
Ball started wading into the crowd, and
Cpl. Wyatt Wilson, 23, pulled him back. “No you don’t, Six,” he said, before moving into the crowd himself. Ball climbed atop a vehicle to see. There was no pressure release for the crowd, he realized. To impose order,
the Marines needed to let some people into Abbey Gate.
Once the British troops and the Marines let in around 300 Afghans, corralling them to one side, there was a little space to maneuver. But thousands of people remained, pushing and crying, while the Marines tried to hold their lines. By 5 p.m., as the sun was starting to dip, it became clear that there still was no pathway to the gate that wasn’t thronged with people.
Gunnery Sgt. Brett Tate, a Marine with
2/1’s Fox Company, came up with a plan: Just talk to the Afghans. Ball sent the order down the ranks, then asked an interpreter to relay the message to the Afghans. But the interpreter told him that “you have to talk. They have to hear you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I need you to move backwards,” Ball yelled. “Then we can start processing you tomorrow.” But people had been guarding their precious spots at the gate for days. A few of them shifted. Ball kept talking. A few more moved. As Ball walked into the crowd, still talking, Lopez put his hand on his flak jacket. “Grab the Six,” he said. Soon two other Marines were holding onto Ball as well. “I was pretty nervous to be walking into that crowd,” Ball said. “But once they grabbed me, the fear left.” Slowly, the Marines walked the crowd backward.
For 12 more hours, the Marines worked to clear the path. Late into the night, a British major told Ball that they had to tell the Taliban what they were doing. Before he knew it, Ball was walking to a dark alley behind the Baron Hotel to meet Taliban fighters. “I realize I need to look confident,” he said. He tried his best and let the British major do the talking. Soon, the Taliban fighters were moving cars out of the way to help the Marines and the British. They worked through the night.
At dawn on Aug. 20, Abbey Gate opened. It had been the most intense 20 hours most of the Ghost Company Marines had ever experienced. And it was only the first day.
THE MARINES WERE under orders: Anyone in the crowd with one of four golden tickets—American passport, green card, special immigrant visa, yellow badge from the American Embassy—or who fit some special nebulous exception that the Biden administration was calling “vulnerable Afghans” could be allowed into the airport. But those criteria didn’t cover most of the people clamoring to get in, and there were so many people that the Marines often couldn’t find the ones who had golden tickets anyway. On top of that, the Marines were inundated with phone calls and text messages from senators in Washington, D.C.; Afghan War veterans in California; news organizations; and nonprofit groups, all trying to get vulnerable Afghans through the gate.
Lopez had joined the Marine Corps just three months after he graduated from La Quinta High School in Westminster, Calif., in 2017. Both of his parents worked for the Riverside County sheriff’s office, and when he got through basic training, he joined an elite Marine anti-terrorism team before ending up in Ghost Company. At the Kabul airport, Lopez was all over the place, especially when children were involved.
At one point, he made it his mission to get an orphaned boy to safety. But the airport orphanage that was being run by the Norwegians was 2½ miles away, and Lopez couldn’t find a vehicle. So, he put the boy on his shoulders and walked. The boy didn’t have shoes when they started out. By the time the two arrived, Lopez had found him a pair.
But for every success, there were 10 failures, people who didn’t make the State Department criteria and were sent back out. And most of the people who were rejected were sent back out through Abbey Gate, where it was often left to Ghost Company to deliver the bad news. “It is very hard to look at a family that doesn’t have the proper documentation, and then put them back into a sewage canal,” Ball said. “You’re looking at someone who believes that if they don’t get out through this airport that they will be killed by the Taliban.”
At first, Ball tried to spend time with the rejected families. But as the withdrawal deadline drew nearer, Ball realized he didn’t have time to talk to each person who was turned away. “I saw everything from calm acceptance to hysteria,” he said. One woman, in particular, is still on his mind: She was miming, for him, the Taliban cutting off her nose and her ears. And there was nothing he could do.
IT HAD BEEN quietly decided that the gate would close on Aug. 26. The Afghans knew they were up against a deadline, although they didn’t know the date. “The closer we get to the 31st, the more agitated the crowd is,” Ball said.
All day on Aug. 26, he was walking along the jersey barrier. Ghost Company’s entire
1st platoon was out there, standing next to the canal or backed up against the wall or fetching people from the crowd. Hundreds of people, all day, were getting crushed against the jersey barrier. But they kept coming. All day, they kept coming.
As he spoke of the moments leading up to 5:48 p.m. when the bomb went off, Ball started using present and future tenses, as if to create some emotional distance for himself. “The suicide bomber will set up along the canal, directly across from us,” Ball said. “He’s got a bomb that produces fragmentation ball bearings; it’s directional in the sense that he’s able to spray directly into my Marines.”
He never saw the bomber. Around 75 feet away, he just saw the flash and heard the boom. He probably passed out, because the next thing he remembered is yelling, “Get security! Get security!” He couldn’t focus, and then a CS gas canister carried by a downed Marine was punctured by shrapnel and exploded, and he couldn’t breathe. Some of Ball’s Marines dragged him back to Abbey Gate, and he cleared the tear gas from his lungs and eyes and ran back to help.
Nine of Ball’s Ghost Company troops were killed, including Lopez, who had snatched the little girl from the sewage canal just before the bombing; and Soviak, the Navy corpsman who was treating someone who had fainted near the gate. Wilson and 13 more injured were flown out for treatment.
After the bombing, the surviving members of Ghost Company tried to get through each day. They found jobs for themselves in the passenger terminal at the airport—anything to stay occupied. They flew out of Kabul on Aug. 28, short 23 people. At a company memorial on Sept. 8, Ball spoke.
“The whole world was watching,” the Marine captain told his troops. “But the Marines at Abbey Gate, we pulled in 33,000 people, more than any other gate. We stayed open when other gates closed. We should take pride in that.”
A version of this story originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.