Original subtitles

Downloaded @ subs4free.club

1 - We understand! Sit down!

Sit down!

Sit down! - Sit down!

- Sit down!

- 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.

- I don't think we understood the scale

and scope of what the evacuation

would eventually turn into.

- 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!

- It was a humanitarian catastrophe.

- That was a terrifying time, and it was a full chaos.

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.

- The first day I got to Kabul,

we were not expecting that Kabul

will fall down so quickly.

- 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.

- A lot of families

were carrying their travel bags

with theirselves and were going

toward the airport.

- 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."

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.

- There's this firefight that's happening

right in front of us now

while, you know, the numbers only continue to grow.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- Our mission was to not let anyone to leave the country.

- 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 started coming over fences,

coming through the airport.

- 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.

- Back up!

Back up! Back up! Back up!

Back up! - Back the fuck up!

- 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.

- We've got thousands of people panicked.

- 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.

- 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.

- Oh!

- 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."

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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 up!

Back the fuck up!

Back the fuck up! Back the fuck up!

- Get back!

Back up!

- 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!

- Back the fuck up.

- 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.

- 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.

- Daily life on those gates wasn't clean.

It was dirty.

It was stress-filled.

- Get him up.

Get up!

No, get back! Get back!

Get back! Get back!

- 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.

It was so crowded that you would say

there is no oxygen in the air.

- Hey!

Hey! Hey!

- Go! Get back! Go! Go!

Get back! Get back!

You need to go that way!

- 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?

- Rubber bullets fired from shotguns.

- Hey, hey!

We need flash-bangs. We need nonlethal grenades.

- Money.

- 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.

- If you have a passport, you got to go that way.

If you have a passport, go that way.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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?

- 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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- Get on line over here.

- Come on, let's go.

Over there, let's fucking go.

- Which car is it?

This is bad. This is very 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.

- Everybody had a backpack on them,

so it's very difficult, given a threat like that,

because everybody is a threat at that point.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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!

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.